Re: Job market and potential age discrimination?

Subject: Re: Job market and potential age discrimination?
From: Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 12:20:07 -0700


Wilcox, Rose (ZB5646) wrote:


My resume is certainly not poorly organized

Please don't think that I was implying that. My suggestion was that, seeing a long resume with many entries, a hiring manager might dismiss it as poorly organized on the grounds that the owner hasn't taken time to edit it and is presuming to take up extra time.

The resume may actually be highly organized, but that may not be how it is perceived.

>At that time almost all the jobs I was going for came through contracting houses. They were interested in complete information. The shorter version left out too much experience that might have been pertinent for a specific job.

In this case, perhaps maintaining one resume for the contracting houses and one to send out to potential clients would be a good idea?

In the past I didn't have time to customize my resume for each job that I applied for. It used to be that there were so many jobs, one resume had to suffice. Since I am still on contract I am working full time and don't have time to customize for each job, but if I were out, with the jobs as scarce as they are, that would be my first priority!

I think that this is an important point. When jobs are scarcer, a really outstanding resume, rather than a merely good one, becomes much more important.

However, on the job history part, I have also had hiring managers wanting to know my complete job history for various reasons. The fact that I've been a consultant more than a permanent employee can be a pro or a con. Some hiring managers think that functional resumes hide terrible secrets (in my case my consulting history and my age would be the terrible secrets!) Some hiring managers think that short term assignments equate unreliability, etc.

Good point. As discussions on this list have shown in the past,there's probably no way to please every hiring manager with a single resume. I think that we need to decide what is most effective in most cases in getting us to the interview stage, and have extra documentation of our experience ready to satisfy other demands.

it does encompass 19 years of technical writing experience, showing all facets. I think this discussion has been very helpful to me. For the nonce, my mind is churning away at some way of creating a functional resume for permanent jobs to focus the "door opening" to help highlight my skills and downplay from my age and my contracting history, keeping my full long comprehensive chronological history for the consulting houses and to bring into interviews, but also having an easily customizable shorter resume of the last 10 years or so to target for specific jobs. (With the ability to lengthen it say some pertinent experience have taken place 12 years ago... sigh...)

I'm in the midst of a major resume overall right now (as you can probably tell from the amount of thinking I'm doing about the form of it).

In trying to make my resume more effective (and to keep it from becoming long enough that I need to send it out for binding), I'm introducing a "Proofs of Effectiveness" section (AKA Qualifications and Background) in which I list five or six accomplishments that highlight my skills. I have a library of about 50 accomplishments, so I can quickly copy and paste to customize the resume for a particular job.

The actual work history is now "Selected Experience" - a choice of words meant to indicate that it isn't complete. It now lists only five or six of the twenty-five or so contracts that I've done. And, again, I've got a library of other positions so that I can quickly customize.

--
Bruce Byfield bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com 604.421.7177
http://members.axion.net/~bbyfield

"We are not beginners, we will not be fooled,
Time has been our teacher, and it keeps an iron rule:
We do our best work in the dark, we do our thinking on the run,
We will stay together till the longest day is done."
- OysterBand, "A Fire Is Burning"



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RE: Job market and potential age discrimination?: From: Wilcox, Rose (ZB5646)

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