"A resume is an excuse to reject you. Once you send me your resume, I can say, "oh, they're missing this or they're missing that," and boom, you're out."
I can find companies that only hire programmers that know cobol, but that doesn't mean that all companies do, and that you should emphasize your cobol experience in your resume.
He's not talking about average jobs OR average people:
Some say, "well, that's fine, but I don't have those."
Yeah, that's my point. If you don't have those, why do you think you are remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular? It sounds to me like if you don't have those, you've been brainwashed into acting like you're sort of ordinary.
I think that depends on the company. I'd say, especially in the software industry, that if a company rejects you simply because you don't have a traditional resume, then they probably aren't looking for exceptional people.
A "traditional" resume is simply a track record in a concise format. If you're exceptional enough to not need one the company will probably be approaching you. If you're too pretentious to bother making one because you think you're exceptional I would expect it to be rejected.
Give me a break. If Godin's argument is that the places that demand resumes are places that you don't want to work, the rest of his argument falls apart: what good is a defense mechanism that keeps you from getting screened out of a company lame enough to keyword-screen resumes? If Godin's premise is valid, then the conclusion should be exactly the opposite --- resumes are early-warning signals, attracting valuable early rejections from companies that would otherwise be a waste of your time.
All I can add is, refusing to provide a resume will make you sound like a douche. CEOs have resumes.
Good point, but not necessarily a defeater. Maybe that's because they are competing with other CEOs, whereas an uber hacker is already the top of their competition.
For what it's worth, I agree that mailing resumes is a dumb way to try to get a job. But then, you can read that same advice in "What Color Is Your Parachute?", which outdates Seth Godin by about eight hundred years.
It depends on the company and the applicants career maturity though.
Someone just coming out of college probably needs a resume to list the basic stats, because they're still 1 of 1,000,000 people out there. But once you've been around a bit and have contributed something to the area in which you're looking to be employed, letting "others" speak for you is highly efficient. By "others", I mean blogs, the web, colleagues, professional profiles, etc.
You can put almost anything you want on a resume and it's hard to really know how accurate it is. Saying "Google my_name + some_project" is way more "real", as is saying "check out my blog on scaling fortran applications running on TI-83's configured as webservers", or saying "check out my project on _foo.com, which implements a fully-compliant webserver on a PCjr."
I guess it doesn't even work if you are applying somewhere. Rather, to get by without a resume, you have to be so great that people approach you, instead of you approaching them.
Why bother wearing pants? By wearing pants you just communicate to the rest of the world that you're a B-player who needs to wear pants to be taken seriously. Look at Einstein. He always wore pants, but if he didn't, do you think they would have fired him? Hell no, he was Einstein.
Great people shouldn't wear pants. If you go around wearing pants, it sounds to me like you've been brainwashed into thinking you're kind of ordinary.
>Great people shouldn't wear pants. If you go around wearing pants, it sounds to me like you've been brainwashed into thinking you're kind of ordinary.
In the 4-Hour Work Week, the author says it is good to be different only when it makes you more productive or effective. If it's just to be different, then you might look silly
I go around not wearing pants, but that isn't to really make any kind of statement. It's usually just because I forgot to wear them. Maybe that means I'm a genius though.
I got out of college at the worst possible time, early 200x. Knowing that the job market was tight, I came up with some sample applications that I put on a webpage, in order to have a "programming portfolio". Well, the professors seemed to think it was a good idea. So, I wrote the URL prominently on my resume and sent out a bunch of copies to companies. I'd estimate that about 2 or 3 percent of employers actually went to my "portfolio."
I didn't understand it then, and I still don't. When I look at other people's resumes, the first thing I look for is a website. Oddly, it seems pretty rare.
I would venture that most people reading this site are looking to join companies that haven't had to create an HE department yet. (side note: one of my personal factors for determining when a company is no longer worth joining is when HR becomes a specific department/person, there are exceptions to this, but they are few).
I agree with the spirit of what Seth is saying here. My last several jobs found ME, based more on the reputation factor than on the "read my blog" or "look at my portfolio" factor, but they weren't from sending a resume into a black hole.
Maybe it would be possible to turn this around to your own advantage:
I agree that I wouldn't want to work for a company that doesn't bother to look at the links that you provide in an application or a CV - it shows they are not engaged in what they do.
Now suppose you put up your projects (or whatever you want your potential new employer to see) and monitor who is looking. With large companies it should be possible to trace the IP adresses so that you will know exactly which companies have enough interest to actually click the links and look at what you have done.
I created my webpage precisely for that reason: to leave a public record of who I am and what I do. So far so fun, I love the feedback -particularly on the "find me" section.
Well, I can't really speak to the facts about a resume being there to offer an excuse for rejection; but I can speak anecdotally about resumes over the course of my career.
For the past 5 years or so, I haven't had to touch a resume or even interview for any of the gigs I've worked at. At a certain point in a hacker's career, your reputation should precede you enough that people either know you, or know someone you know. At least, that's how I've found things.
The development field is a fairly small community due to the amount of job-changing people do.
That being said, until people know who you are, you'd better have an amazing resume ;)
Not a bad idea. Resumes are mostly for HR. I have interviewed a lot of people for both junior and senior positions on my company. You can't believe the amount of people, with "good looking" resumes, that can't frickin code. Not even simple problems.
There are many, many people that put things in their resume that shouldn't be there. Too many people inflate their resumes so much, that they almost become irrevelant, b/c there is so much noise out there. I am afraid, our HR recruiters are filtering out good people people with honest resumes.
Hence the resume is more becoming a tool to game the HR. Honestly, I always read a resume before interviewing the person, but don't put too much weight on them. Actually I mostly use them to ask questions on skills/languages the interviewee claims to know.
Sometimes it it is a good story, and the person actually knows their stuff, but too often it is not.
I can agree with the spirit of what he's saying. Resumes just make things easier for the bigger companies with HR departments. Most companies wouldn't waste time reading through your blog or looking up your contributions to some open source project. If they end up making a bad hire, that's no big deal to them. Chances are they'll still end up making money by having you as an extra person to bill for.
In a startup / smaller company, making the right hire can be critical to the company's success. I'd expect the hiring process to be more thorough in that environment.
While there's no way getting around the limitations of the traditional paper resume, online resumes could be a good middle ground. VisualCV is working on this. http://www.visualcv.com
LinkedIn is also a good supplement. I know a lot of people who make use of the recommendation system on there.
That's certainly what I took away from it. I think some commenters here are focusing too much on the "don't make a resume" instead of focusing on the "do something that distinguishes you from the rest".
I think that's his point... He's NOT going to review 800 people by hand. He's going to review 50 people that actually put forth the time and effort to apply via a non-traditional channel.
Total bullshit.
Resume is not even about HR.
Resume has value itself.
"Genius is a man knowing limits of self" Albert Camut
(read in russian, originally in french and now translated by me in english! =)
Yeah! I know my English is terrible!)
because there are a lot more average, well-paid positions that require resumes than there are "Great jobs, world class jobs, jobs people kill for" that don't.
Seth has created a pretty sweet reality for himself which I'm sure he enjoys quite a bit. Being a bestselling author, successful serial entrepreneur, and industry icon sounds like a reality most people would enjoy.
Is there something so wrong with showing people how they, too, can embark upon the path to "live there"? He said, "Great jobs, world class jobs, jobs people kill for... those jobs don't get filled by people emailing in resumes. Ever."
Clearly, he's trying to give people the right advice, the advice that can get them the same kind of job satisfaction that he has.
He's not giving advice on how to get to his world. He's telling people that they don't need a resume to get a job. Under rare circumstances, that might be true. But as general advice, it's both bad and unrealistic.
If we apply for a job, this means we are in competition. Competition may have two outcomes: either we win the competition or we lose. If we lose, we have to be fair and respect that someone else has done better (whatever this means). As the loser (or second winner ;o) you may think about how to improve, but what does killing mean in this context? If someone has the notion to kill he is not smart enough to win a competition and he knows it. Who wants to identify with this?
In his post Seth Godin misses some points imho. In most jobs, and especially in most developer jobs, work means being added to a team. Team - this has to do with fairness again. Now, who wants a self proclaimed superstar in his team? What you need is a smart contributor who does not have to be the best and most shining everytime.
If you talked yourself into a situation where you think you are so great that you don't even need a resume, you are definitely out of the team game.
If, on the other hand, you have a cool working business, website or any reference and companies approach you, you may not want to work for companies any more.
"A resume is an excuse to reject you. Once you send me your resume, I can say, "oh, they're missing this or they're missing that," and boom, you're out."
How things are in the real world:
"No resume attached? Boom, you're out."