Sprinkle Squirrels 🐿️ On Your Resume

Signal Over Noise

Reviewing resumes to determine the competency of candidates is like reviewing restaurant business cards to assess the quality of food served.

To get past the silly resume stage the three most important things are:

1. Make yourself look great on paper.

2. Make yourself look great on paper.

3. Write your resume like Dug from the movie Up will read it.

No, I'm not joking. I'm dead serious.

If you haven't seen the movie Up, Dug is a dog that's constantly distracted, scanning and rarely paying full attention.

When Dug sees a squirrel he immediately pays attention to the squirrel. If a balloon pops up, he pays attention to the balloon. Dug is in a perpetual state of distraction.

Write your resume to take into account Dug is incapable of reading the whole damn thing. You must make your resume pop with squirrels, as otherwise Dug tunes out.

Putting a big fancy word salad with abstract terms on your resume most likely means we've already lost Dug to a Slack notication or a YouTube recommendation.

Write your resume like it never will be read and someone only glances at it and scans a few sections.

The difficult part is that if you do get lucky and someone does read the whole thing, it still has to be great.

Does that sound tricky to you?

Yes, because it is.

Squirrel! 🐿️