By J.M. Auron Quantum Tech Resumes

The job market is tough these days. That's not news to anyone in tech. But, too often, an IT job search can be made even tougher by following the resume misinformation that's everywhere on the internet these days.

Resume misinformation - like much else on the internet - often gets recycled until it seems true. It's a rare day that I don't see resume advice that just isn't accurate - and may be destructive. Unfortunately, lots of very solid tech pros follow this internet chatter in good faith - and that slows down their job search significantly. So in this article, I'd like to take a few minutes to start to address a few very common IT resume myths.

Resume Advice and myth busting

1) The All-Bulleted Resume

I'd thought all-bulleted resumes had become extinct. I was pretty happy in that thought. But now? Not only are they everywhere again, they are being presented as the only way to write an IT resume.

That's not a good piece of advice. Here's why.

All-bulleted resumes are unclear, unstructured, and hard to read. Bullets, in any document, exist to visually highlight specific, important information. To make something stand out. To bring something from the background to the foreground. So if everything is bulleted? Nothing is bulleted. In an all-bulleted IT resume, absolutely every piece of information - from a major accomplishment to a necessary but uninteresting job task - looks exactly the same and is given the same visual weight. Nothing stands out, so there's no way to scan a resume and see what's most important or impactful. That means the hiring authority has to get out a magnifying glass and go through every bullet to see what's actually important. That's time consuming, and hiring authorities don't have a lot of time.

What do I suggest and use in my IT resume writing service?

I make a very clear distinction between duties or actions, and results. I write actions - whether a client's day-to-day job mandate or the actions supporting an initiative - in a paragraph format. I then save the bullets for the hard, clear accomplishments. This approach creates an IT resume that's clear and scannable while providing a distinct visual indicator of your biggest accomplishments.

Bottom line? Use bullets on your IT resume - but only for the things that really stand out.

2) One-Page Resumes

This is another one that makes the rounds periodically. It's back now - and may be even more destructive than an all-bulleted format.

People are drawn to a one-page IT resume for what seems to be a good reason. We've all heard that hiring authorities do an initial resume scan in 0.0000000003 nanoseconds, right? So we need to keep the resume short to make sure they can read it!

Well, hiring authorities do go over a resume pretty quickly - the first time they read it - though with nothing like the speed one sees online.

That's not a reason to cram a career into one page. Here are two reasons why.

First, no matter how fast the initial read may be, the hiring authority has to see something of value in your IT resume to merit scheduling an interview. If you've cut your 5-, 10-, or 20-year career to fit in maybe 400 words on one page? There's a really good chance you've cut out some - or all - of the reasons you might get a call.

Second, while we hear a lot about that lightning-fast initial scan, what's generally not talked about is that the first quick read is just that - the first. If a hiring authority does see something of interest, if something stands out in a candidate's career (because it's not buried in a million bullets), the hiring authority will want to know more before scheduling a call.

Because an interview takes time and the hiring authority wants to know that that time will be well spent. To do that, the hiring authority needs to have enough content to determine what a candidate can offer in a new opportunity. That requires more depth of content than is possible in one page.

As a professional IT resume wri...