Too Long
“Your resume is too long!” one expert said, peering at my magnum opus of work experience. “No one has time to read a novel.” Okay, fair point. I trimmed it down, cutting out the fluff, the font embellishments, and, unfortunately, the joke about my award for “Best Office Coffee Brewer 2018.” What was left was a streamlined masterpiece… or so I thought.
Too Short
Enter Resume Guru #2: “This is way too short. You’re selling yourself short!” Wait, what? Wasn’t I supposed to keep it concise? Apparently, now I’m supposed to highlight every little detail. Did I mention I once organized the supply closet? No? Well, now it’s front and center!
Too Much Detail
By the time Resume Guru #3 showed up, my two-page resume (packed with every accomplishment since kindergarten) was starting to feel a little… excessive. “There’s too much information here. Nobody needs to know about your role as fifth-grade Line Leader.” Fair enough. I scaled back again.
Not Enough Detail
But then came the dreaded words from Guru #4: “You’re not telling them enough about yourself.” What? Did I accidentally stumble into a dating profile seminar? Apparently, hiring managers want to know more about my “passion for teamwork” and less about my “exceptional ability to locate the good stapler.”
The Formatting Fiasco
And let’s not forget the formatting wars. One person insisted I stick to Times New Roman, size 12, while another demanded modern fonts like Calibri. Bullet points? Essential! Unless you ask the anti-bullet-point brigade, in which case I was advised to write in flowing prose. I even had someone tell me that “colorful headers will make you stand out!” Spoiler: they made me look like I was applying for a job at a carnival.
How Do You Please Them All?
So here I am, drowning in resume advice and wondering if the real answer is to just attach my resume to a carrier pigeon and hope for the best. With every iteration, it seems less like a document and more like a choose-your-own-adventure book where every choice is wrong.
Maybe the lesson here isn’t about crafting the “perfect” resume. Maybe it’s about learning that you can’t please everyone. After all, if I’ve learned anything from this process, it’s that resume advice is like pizza toppings—everyone has their own opinion, and some of them are downright weird.
The Final Draft
For now, my resume sits in a state of limbo: a single page of Calibri-font text with just enough detail to make me look interesting but not desperate. Will it impress the hiring managers? Who knows. But at least I can confidently say it’s 100% me—and that’s the only thing I’ve managed to get everyone to agree on.
And if this one doesn’t work? There’s always the carrier pigeon option.
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