Given what recruiters want out of resumes is so compartmentalised and cookiecutter, it does make it relatively straightforward to tailor your resume to what they want.

And if you have lots of different experience/knowledge/skills/interests, as most of the readers of this blog would probably be, you need to think along the lines of multiple and very different resumes; instead of the one catch-all.

A resume is about telling the recruiter what they want to hear, to help them box you neatly and exactly into the specific cog-role they advertised for, and to salve their need to hear the right things (eg innovative, creative, different, committed etc).

A resume must not make the recruiters think. Their job is often not to understand who you are nor to place you in the best possible role to fully utilise your talents. They have x minutes to find a precise cog that will fit a predefined slot. That’s it. They often wont bother with anything they have to decipher and understand.

Counter-intuitively, they tend not to care about anything else you have done outside of the specific experience required for the role. Sometimes, the more you have done, the more rounded and diverse you are as a person, the less attractive you are to these people. Such is the “system” set up to funnel talent into corporate factories…

Brutal? Cynical? All from actual experience. That’s why I work for myself :)