Writing a résumé is an often unpleasant, head scratching tactical exercise as one tries to capture one’s educational and professional achievements in two to three pages. I found some actual excerpts from résumés that were submitted to employers and pulled out what I believe are the top ten résumé bloopers:
Number 10: Note: Please don’t misconstrue my 14 jobs as ‘job-hopping.’ I have never quit a job. Number 9: The Company made me a scapegoat, just like my three previous employers. Number 8: I am extremely loyal to my present firm, so please don’t let them know of my immediate availability. Number 7: My goal is to be meteorologist. But since I possess no training in Meteorology, I suppose I should try stock brokerage. Number 6: Reason for leaving last job: They insisted that all employees get to work by 8:45 every morning. Could not work under those conditions. Number 5: Wholly responsible for two failed financial institutions. Number 4: Terminated after saying, ‘It would be a blessing to be fired’. Number 3: References: None. I’ve left a path of destruction behind me. Number 2: It’s best for employers that I not work with people. And the Number 1 résumé blooper: Marital status: Often. Children: various.

Look, let’s call a spade a spade. We all have our black and white Times New Roman Font 12 single-spaced living eulogies saved on our respective desk/lap tops and ready to be printed or emailed at the slightest whiff of upward career mobility. [If you don’t have your current résumé saved on your computer and updated at least once every 6 months, you need to get with the program] While undertaking my master’s degree, the university had a special session with the students to go through what an ideal resume should look like. The rule of thumb then was that a resume should not exceed one page as HR managers rarely have time to get to the second page if they are already bored by the first. The focus was on making your resume short, punchy and informative all at one go. Bless the Americans with their less-is-more minimalist mentality. Résumés that went beyond the one page rule were reserved for academics that had to put in their publications as par for the course. Being a non-academic with more than one page was, well, aspiring to a level beyond one’s reasonably educated capacity.

So you can imagine my sheer delight when someone sent me an email with a link to the “14 coolest résumés ever” from the Business Insider website. People from the design and internet industries creatively put their education and professional background in one page that is both an illusionary and informative snapshot of their achievements. The result is that it grabs the attention of the recipients and gets them through the door for a first interview. Some of the creative writers have gotten jobs more senior than what they were pitching for largely due to what interviewers see as potential for thinking out of the box.

Now did this make me go back to the drawing board for my own résumé? Hardly. This is because I’m pretty sure that if I sent one of those creative to a potential employer here it would most likely be met with an “Eh?” emitted by a very puzzled employer. But it did get me thinking about why our Kenyan résumés are staid, boring and completely unreflective of the vibrancy, creativity and energetic capacity of job seekers. The most daring of résumés that I have ever seen had a bit of color where the job seeker’s name was, while the rest of the print was in black type face and went on and on into four pages of unnecessary noise. Truth be told, your work experience need not be broken down into each sordid detail of your thoroughly mundane workday. But our recruitment culture has defined this space. Our recruiters would rather sift through pages and pages of work history to see if the candidates pass muster warranting to be included in the short list. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that someone in the very stiff financial services or insurance industry should put all manner of graphic design on their résumé to capture the attention of an employer. But there should be a level of creativity permitted that would not raise eyebrows and get that document tossed into the nearest garbage can as being “psycho-nonsense”. If the candidate’s information is well articulated, cogent and precise, it merits further investigation through an interview. Something tells me, however, that we will remain in the black font 12 single spaced categories for years to come. Enough said.

In other completely unrelated news, Yahoo has just announced that it has appointed 37 year old Marissa Mayer to be their new CEO. Marissa was a vice president, the company’s 20th employee and the first female engineer at Google credited with leading the development of Gmail, Google Maps and the Google search engine. Business Insider reports that the Yahoo board hired her for three reasons: Her product focus and focus on the user experience, secondly: her mentoring talent – Marissa created a program at Google to train product managers on executive leadership which has seen a number of those employees leave to head up other internet companies and, thirdly: the board believes that she will be able to recruit very well and re-stock Yahoo with talent. How is that for a recruitment policy: product and employee focus. Not numbers, numbers, numbers as is wont with many corporates today. Good products and great employees will produce those numbers that boards are seeking. Not the other way around. Sadly, that is not obvious to everyone. By the way, Yahoo’s last full time CEO, Scott Thompson, was apparently fired after it was revealed that he had lied about his credentials earlier in his career. If you’re going to have a creative résumé, let it be the graphics and not the content that are a figment of your imagination.

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Twitter:@carolmusyoka