Why Do I Still Need a Resume (in This Age of Social Media)?

Do I still need a resume?  Can’t I do all the career work I need to do with social media, LinkedIn and Facebook?  Why should I put time into having a better (optimized) resume?

You would think today, with so much communication dominated by social media, resumes might be a thing of the past.  I find that’s not true based on the number of people that meet me to optimize their resumes.  They want to have a resume that presents the best of themselves organized in a way that makes it easy to absorb the information quickly. This enables them to compete for the best opportunities, get hired at the great companies they aspire to work for or have their resumes pulled from the pile for the opportunities they seek. 

I’ve never had someone say, “What’s more important—spending time on my resume or focusing on my social media profiles instead?”  Or, “Maybe I should skip putting time in on my resume and just focus on career development using Facebook and LinkedIn.”

In fairness, being an effective communicator and promoter of your talent today requires using all media, cleverly.  Social media provides access to more contacts—at scale—than ever before.  Use it well!  But its returns from a job-hunting standpoint, relative to your time and results, can be meager. 

So, yes--generate opportunities from as many sources as possible.  But focus the most time on the most fruitful job-hunting methods. 

If you have access to a university career center that has relationships with corporations that come to campus to interview and hire students—use it!  If you don’t, or if you’re an established professional well beyond university interviewing, networking will be the most effective job-hunting method.

For either on-campus or networking-sourced interviewing exceptional resumes attract the most attention, lead to the most interviews and, ultimately, to the best jobs, more professional influence and higher compensation.

Resumes are one of the most important resources relied upon by hiring leaders in organizations.  The average candidate is limiting their opportunity for success when they use a typical resume without awareness or application of Resume Optimization techniques.