The resume of tomorrow won’t be paper. Heck, it won’t even look like a digital version of today’s resume. It will be a demonstration of your skills, a sales piece that tells the reader, “You have to talk to this guy. He’s that good.” And, it won’t be just for job seekers. The resume of tomorrow will be an integral part of selling any person online as a job seeker, a consultant, a contractor, or a business owner.
Putting together tomorrow’s resume will take more than the weekend’s worth of effort you put in now when you think to yourself, “I need to get a job. Guess it’s time to update my resume.” It’ll take years of work to assemble, and you’ll need the buy-in and backing of those around you.
The keys to the resume of tomorrow are…
1. A hook – The resume of tomorrow needs to catch someone’s attention. With the economy being not the best it’s ever been. Many people are back in school, working on their skills, and they have plenty of time to figure out how to catch someone’s attention. At the same time, hiring managers and company executives have to do the work of two because their staffs have been cut, and they’re getting hundreds of resumes and proposals for every job opening and RFP, so they don’t have time to hunt you down and stop you for a chat. You must put yourself in front of them and catch their attention, whether you’re the student with all of the free time or the single, working dad with a 60+ hour per week job.
2. An online sales sheet – Today, that’s Linkedin. Tomorrow, it might be something different. Having worked in recruiting, I can tell you this. Linkedin is big. If I can’t find you on there, you’re sunk. If I can find you on there and your profile is out-of-date or incomplete or maybe worse, you’re sunk. You still need something that looks like a resume, and it has to be in the most convenient place for someone to find it. This goes for job seekers and for business managers at companies that might want to sell to, partner with, or otherwise work with and for others.
3. Your outpost – Before you interview with a company or ask for their help on a project, when someone tells you, “You should apply here,” or, “You should ask them to do your social media strategy,” or even just when you’re curious, you go to a company’s website and read about them, right? You read their About page, check out their services, see if their Twitter account is worth following or their Facebook Page is worth liking. Hiring managers and company executives are humans too, and when you’ve caught their attention and shown in at least one place that you might be what they’re looking for, they go looking. They want to find out what you’re about, if you have examples of what you claimed in your sales sheet, and if there are any glaring flaws that tell them not to bother with you.
If you can’t alleviate all of their concerns and support their hopes (for you) with your website, you’re sunk.
4. Numbers – This has always worked and will always work. Everywhere you are online, give people numbers to associate with your name. “Oh, Bob? Yeah, isn’t that the guy, who increased the email open rates at Company XYZ 5% right after he started?” Even better, if you can give me a graph, a table, or anything else showing a positive effect your work has had on a business, I’m sold. Did you increase efficiency, cut costs, take on the work of two people and do it in half the time, grow inbound leads?
5. Engaging content – The resume of tomorrow reaches beyond what you’ve done at work and tells me how you think and how you act. If you have a public Facebook profile picture with you holding a beer, that’s not horrible (unless you want a job with MADD), but it still tells me you’re less formal and polished than other candidates. Have a blog where you talk about the latest pickup artist techniques? Again, that demonstrates to me how you think and whether you might fit in.
Activities extraneous to work are fine to show in your online presence. In fact, they are important for the hiring manager and potential clients to see, but what they really want is exposure to how you think about work. This is where you must have a blog, a podcast, or videos. With a blog, someone can easily skim the content and see if you’re advanced, beginner, or something else…assuming that you talk about work-related topics, which you most definitely should. They can also see if you would fit in with the type of approach their company takes toward work. The same goes with podcasts and video, but honestly, take my advice here. Do yourself a favor and create a few videos of you talking to your webcam about some serious issues related to your industry. Keep it short and sweet, and hiring managers and potential clients can get the richest exposure to you they can find online…all without having to pick up the phone, which they’ll love 😉
6. Community support – The final part of the resume of tomorrow is community support. On Linkedin profiles, you can get recommendations, do it. On your blog or website, you can have testimonials, do it. Even better though is to have people create 30-second videos pitching you as a great hire. I do this now and then. It allows the people I’m recommending to embed the videos on their sites and is a quick exposure for the hiring manager to what you might be about. You don’t need a lot of these. 2 or 3 are fine, but the power of someone actually taking the time to record a video recommendation for you and then posting it online is incontrovertible. And, the power of it only increases as the stature of that person increases as well.
So, what’s stopping you from putting the keys to your resume of tomorrow in place, showing everyone how great of a hire you are, and putting out there how lucky they would be to have you on board?
Guest Bio: Eric Pratum is the social marketing strategist at his nonprofit marketing agency.
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