Choosing the Correct Resume is an Imperative Decision

You're ready to make the next step. With the advertisement flickering on screen, you've decided you're going to send in your cover letter and resume. You're sure you have a draft you started some time back on your hard drive - maybe you wrote one for your business writing class, or maybe when you finally decided you were going to quit when your last pay review didn't quite go as planned. At any rate, you don't have a completed resume.

Quite frankly, under these circumstances, you're more than a little distant from actually sending something in. The first task of any job seeker is building a quality resume. In fact, it really is the job of any true professional to maintain a working folder in which to record accomplishments and other similar data, if not an active, living, breathing resume.

There are serious considerations to make while you're building the architecture of your resume. Depending where you do your reading you will see there are either three or four types of resumes. For my purposes here, I will say there are clearly at least two types of resumes: Chronological, and skills-based resumes. Some resources will call a "combination," or hybrid, of the skills-based and chronological it's own "type." There is also the option of a "targeted" resume, which can take on the mutated form of any one of these. Since the discussion of whether or not a particular format fits a "type" is perhaps an interesting one, but not within the scope of the article, my preference is not to get into it here. Ultimately the decision comes down to what you personally consider your best chance of framing your relevant knowledge, skills and abilities (or "KSA's" in the vernacular) in such a way as to elicit a positive response from a perspective employer.

A chronological resume is probably the most common sort of resume, and is generally the one employers tend to prefer. A chronological resume will list one's experience in a chronological fashion and refer to the KSA's used/gained in each position. Employers will generally find this preferable for several reasons and for many positions because it gives a sense of where you, the job seeker, are in your professional development, where your work history has taken you, and what those positions have looked like. This format should more properly be called "a reverse chronological" resume in that your most recent information is presented first.

This is an important feature of this type of resume because as an employer, I want to know what you've done most recently, where your current skills are, what you've been doing. Unless your current work history shows me something, your previous work history is less likely to do so.

This is where the skills based resume comes in. Rather than presenting information in a chronologically linear fashion, this format will have the candidate spelling KSA's in a specific fashion. This could take many forms, but where the chronological resume tracks ones history and spelling out the KSA's used at a particular job, this format tracks development of the KSA's and focuses less on where those skills were used. There can be many reasons for using a skills based resume - career changes, gaps in employment, for instance - but my recommendation would to be very specific as to your reasons for doing so. Stepping outside norms can sometimes be a winning gamble, but it is a gamble. Depending on the position for which you're applying and depending on your own KSA's and experience, a skills based resume could be a very powerful tool, but it could raise more questions than it answers, specifically what are the circumstances/reasons for choosing this format. You should have good reasons spelled out as best you can in your cover letter.

A combination or hybrid resume will take on the form of both the chronological and the skills based. Using this type will answer some of the questions the skills based resume will generate, and will deliver the information framed in a way such that your skills are immediately evident, without the difficulty of explaining why your employment history is seemingly covered. The drawback, though, is that this would have the tendency to create a much longer document than that which you would otherwise prefer to be sending out. It may be beneficial depending on industry or position, but length can be a draw back. If building a scannable resume, this could be a very useful way to present information in that by it's nature it would force you to discuss in very specific terms your previous work experience and skills in a way that a database query would be likely to find.

Last, the targeted resume can provide an additional edge. The Curriculum Vitae (or CV) is a specific type of targeted resume, most commonly found among academic professionals, and isn't really part of this discussion although it is a legitimate format for resumes. The targeted resume will be time consuming to execute, but can have great advantage. It demonstrates knowledge of the organization and or position or both to the hiring manager. It is targeted specifically to that organization and or the specific position for which you are applying. It specifically speaks to the position as described. Unless you're applying for a position in an organization for which you already work, this would seem to be dependent on the level of detail provided in an advertisement. However, given a strong understanding of the position itself, it will demonstrate that understanding through speaking directly to those traits important to the position and it will speak to a particular focus on your desire for a specific position in line with your own goals.