Sell your skills while telling your tale chronologically
By Douglas B. Richardson
Functional resumes appear to make a lot of sense for certain types of job hunters. The functional format eschews the conventional, reverse-chronological emphasis on a prior career path, and instead breaks a person’s strength into functional categories, such as sales or managerial skills. This approach has its greatest fans among job hunters who don’t have nice, linear career paths to sell. Career changers and new college graduates are prime candidates to sell their skills, rather than past experiences.
But there’s a problem with functional resumes. A lot of resume readers — recruiters, headhunters, human resources folks and other agents of employers — just hate ‘em. I mean hate ‘em enough to throw them away unread. They mistrust them, scoff at them, even feel insulted by them. An absolute, automatic dismissal of any and all functional resumes isn’t unusual, no matter how succinctly written and clearly formatted.
What’s going on here? Why this almost phobic reaction to a format that would seem to make sense? Apparently, there are two major concerns, one inherent in the functional resume format, the other in how people tend to use or abuse it.
How Candidates are Measured -
Start with a bit of human nature: When you’re sizing someone up, you want to drive, not be driven. You want to measure people by your standards, rely on your intuition and form your own judgements. Give away this control, the thinking goes, and suddenly you have to worry about being conned, hyped or led around by the nose.
The content of a conventional, reverse-chronological resume may contain all sorts of exaggerations, puffery, alluring alliterative adverbs and adjectives. But the context — the sequence and setting in which all this content occurs — is pretty hard to fudge.
The job seeker’s career path usually answers some crucial questions: Who trusted him before? How long did they trust him? What level of responsibility and title did they see fit to trust him with? Where did he go, when did he go there, and when did his accomplishments take place?
If you use a conventional resume, skilled resume readers use a bit of intuition to make some pretty educated guesses about you accomplishments and motivations. They look at where you chose to start your career, the kinds of roles you decided to accept, how quickly you appeared to advance, how various employers saw fit to use you, the kinds of jobs you liked, why you made the moves you did and whether you were promoted or sent out to pasture.
Of course, all interpretation requires a lot of mental gymnastics and reading between the lines, and it’s true that the art of skillful resume reading can be hard work. Common sense might even suggest that functional resumes are more appealing, because they offer effortless reading. They may appear to serve as a menu that reads, in effect, “Relax. Sit back. I’ll make it easy for you. I’ll make the judgements about what’s important and lay it all out for you. All you have to do is decide what to order from the menu.”
Yet, this is exactly the problem. Functional resumes are inherently manipulative. That is, they arrange information in a way the writer feels the writer feels will display his strengths to best effect, not in the sequence they occurred out there in the dog-eat-dog working world. Whether or not the goal is to deceive or distort, the reader is apprehensive that the entree he’s ordering from the menu may look better in black and white than it will on the plate.
Sadly, it isn’t unusual for job hunters using functional resumes to completely omit all listings of their work histories, a tactic I regard as patently disastrous. It immediately creates the inference that something is being hidden: The six years in Leavenworth, maybe? The fact that you’re 63 years old? Resume readers are instantly primed to hunt for other tricks and anomalies.
A more common tactic among candidates is to consign their career histories to the tail end of the second page...after they’ve forced the reader to wade through the information they want to highlight.
This approach is passable, since the career path has to be in there somewhere, even if it’s weird and controversial. At least it’s off the front page. But still there’s some resistance among readers who feel like they’re being told what to think, rather than being allowed to form their own conclusions.
Look at Ina Funque’s adjacent resume, for example (which by the way is a heavily disguised example of an actual resume and a decent example of the genre). On page one, ina lays out the bona fides she hopes will qualify her as a solid, private-sector chief financial officer. There are some solid, objective-looking “proofs” of her expertise and experience.
Then, back on page two, we see that, for the past 24 years – her entire career – she’s worked in various financial positions for a not-for-profit foundation. “Ah-ha!” the reader thinks. “Now, I know why she used a functional format: She wants to get into the big bucks of the private sector, and she wanted to downplay her current setting for fear she’d be pigeonholed as a non-profit type and be screened out.”
Ina’s taking a risk here. Will the reader react more negatively to her non-profit background or to her attempt to soft-pedal the issue?
To extend the restaurant metaphor a bit further, another problem with presenting the reader with a bunch of mundane selections is that the format doesn’t suggest any priorities. A “senior financial executive,” such as Ina, may list a variety of skill categories (management, cash management, financial planning and analysis, accounting and audits, etc.) without suggesting her strongest suit.
Auditing is a staff function; management is a line function. Should I use Ina in a staff or line capacity? Which is she better at? Which is she more motivated to do?
The chronological resume addresses theses questions simply by suggesting that the job seeker’s most recent position represents his highest level of competency, greatest level of experience and current career direction.
Many functional resumes also are plagued by the style in which they’re written, which often seems to be vague, coy or downright obfuscatory. We’ve all seen truly grim examples of lily-gilding. My favorite came years ago from the fellow who claimed “extensive marketing expertise on behalf of a major multi-national manufacturer of transportation-related products.” The interview revealed that he sold snow tires at the local firestone outlet one winter.
Troubles arise even when there isn’t an intent to deceive. For example, look at the first item in Ina’s resume and listen in on our parenthetical gut reactions:
“Management: Within significant budgetary restraints (How significant? How big was the budget?) met the financial operations challenges (What challenges?) to accommodate the company’s growth (What company? When? In what capacity were you doing this?)....”
The reader is crying out for a frame of reference, a sense of context and historical perspective that the format just doesn’t provide. So, what’s the answer? Should candidates bag functional resumes altogether and rely solely on formats that emphasize prior career paths? Proponents of this conventional wisdom say stuff like. “A person’s career path is never irrelevant, even if they’re making a major career change. In fact, it may help me decide if the career changer is running from something or toward something.
While I don’t quite go that far, I feel strongly that every bit of bragging in interviews should contain a frame of reference (What level? What role? What setting?) that anchors it to reality. I would have preferred Ina’s first bullet to read something like this:
“Management” As vice president – finance of the Crewe Foundation, a provider of services for the mentally handicapped, was responsible for all financial planning/analysis, auditing, accounting, cash management and treasury functions during it’s growth over two decades from $8 million in assets to 73 million, from 480 employees to 2,650, and from four branches in three states to 17 branches in nine states.
See the difference? Now the information, still expressed in terms of nice, objective numbers, is framed in an operative context. My guard goes down, my trust goes up, and we’re all a lot better off.
If you’re afraid that a functional format will draw negative style points from the Russian judge, you may want to try a hybrid format that can work well. It looks like a reverse chronological resume, but works like a functional format.
Suppose, for example, that you can’t boast a nice linear career path in one industry or setting. Maybe you’ve changed jobs often enough to suggest a lack of staying power or career focus. Perhaps some of your biggest successes came early in your career and your recent achievement curve is flat.
The hypothetical resume of Rick O’Shay illustrates how you might work around some career-path glitches. It’s pretty self explanatory. The profiled at the top provides a frame of reference – level, roles/ functions, settings – so the reader gets a global view of the product. The main formatting device is to create a second section, called, “ Selected Career Accomplishments” or “Relevant Achievements” That highlights the strengths you want the reader to focus on first. These can be written in any order, but bear in mind that human nature usually operates on a “biggest first, least last” principle.
Each of the bullets you include in this section (no more than five or six) should suggest what you did and where and in what capacity you did it. It’s important that at least the first item of a chronological history – your most recent job – appears on the first page, so the reader doesn’t worry that he’s being asked to read a functional resume.
In the selected career accomplishments section, your job descriptions should be more descriptive than on the following page, where jobs are outlined chronologically. You could even limit your page two listings to employer, title and dates if it doesn’t make the page look too sparse.
You might notice that the profile and selected career accomplishments sections or Rick’s resume, taken together, are nothing more than a mini-functional resume. And that’s exactly the point. You can use this format to persuade readers to see the product you want to sell without rousing their suspicions. All parties stay calmer, and you have a better chance of eliciting the comment, “ You know, we really should be able to find a way to make use of your diverse background.”
This article is reprinted by permission from the National Business Employment Weekly, © 1993, Dow Jones & Co. Inc. All rights reserved. For subscription information, call (800)Job-Hunt. |
