Jananas

During my job search earlier this year, I kept getting frustrated by how limiting my resume was. It shows my (corporate) education and my corporate work experience. It tells you about business cases and analysis and planning and excel.

It doesn’t tell you anything about who I am. What my breadth of experience is. What I’ve learned outside of work or school. What my personal skill set is. What I’ve grown up doing.

I was looking at a job posting recently and they are asking for someone with my range of corporate experience but who is also tech savvy and is curious about our digital future. Sounds awesome right? Not so much, because my resume only tells you about my corporate experience.

We’re a strange hybrid generation. We have the corporate education and experience. We also have the knowledge of technology and the experience with things like Twitter and Facebook and WordPress. We’re both, but we’re judged solely based on what is written about us on a piece of paper.

For many of us, we haven’t had the opportunity to marry those two together. To legitimize a skill set that we’ve built and validly have. To do so would require big corporations to have us do analysis on results via Twitter or to come up with a strategic plan that involves reaching out to communities where they are today instead of pushing mass marketing. And most big companies aren’t there yet. Through no fault of our own, we’re stuck in a cycle where we can’t officially prove that we can do what we’ve grown up doing.

Add one more layer which is that we’re been taught to value our privacy. Our facebook accounts are locked down. We use different email addresses to apply for jobs than we would for everything else. We’ve created separation so much so that we may not want to use those personal accounts as proof that we’re competent.

How can I prove to an potential employer that I have a skill set when the only way to show them is to allow them into my personal life? Where is the boundary?

Are resumes still relevant when they stop  capturing what employers care about?

What I want to say is, please give me a half hour of time to allow me to make my case. My resume isn’t going to reflect what you’re looking for but that’s because its capturing only a small portion of what I have to offer. In our new world, are you going to continue to judge based on old world rules (and frames of reference)?

What’s a girl to do?

More from jananas

• Introducing Lila, the dog we found at the side of the road
• The Dilemmas of Working
• An Update on Lila