18/04/2021 Opinion | I Have Read Thousands of Résumés, and I Have Some Advice - The New York Times

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I Have Read Thousands of Résumés, and I Have Some

Advice
The history of this strange document can tell job seekers what works and what doesnʼt.
By A-J Aronstein
Mr. Aronstein is the dean of Barnard Collegeʼs Career Center.

April 17, 2021

In the last decade, I have revised 3,000 résumés while working as a college career adviser.
Here is my advice: The strongest will fit on a single page. Exceptions are few. An 8.5 by 11
inch sheet of letter paper fits about 700 words. So be efficient. Recruiters often say they
spend six seconds reviewing the average candidate. Are you worth seven?

I would lose my mind if all I did was revise résumés, and so I got curious about their history.

The internet says Leonardo da Vinci wrote the first résumé in the late-15th century. He
pitched his weaponry chops — not his artistic services — to Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of
Milan. It seems right that da Vinci would have “Invented résumé” on his résumé, but wrong
that he met the future patron of The Last Supper by applying for the job of Entry-Level
Warmaker. A Renaissance man and a career changer.

Da Vinci knew his audience: “Most Illustrious Lord,” he opens. I can’t help imagining the
eye roll of the Milanese Department of Military Affairs HR Analyst on whose desk this thing
landed, unsolicited, with a thunk. “I shall endeavor, without prejudice to anyone else, to
explain myself to your Excellency.” It goes on like that for a little while. Geniuses need
résumé advice, too, and if da Vinci were my advisee, I’d start by telling him to limit the
sycophantic window dressing.

Still, there are real strengths. He writes, “I have kinds of mortars; most convenient and easy
to carry; and with these I can fling small stones almost resembling a storm; and with the
smoke of these cause great terror to the enemy, to his great detriment and confusion.” One
could do worse than to imitate the specificity of his enumeration of relevant experience,
though I wince at his description of death facilitation as a career skill.

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18/04/2021 Opinion | I Have Read Thousands of Résumés, and I Have Some Advice - The New York Times

I wanted to push back against this too-neat and much-blogged history (da Vinci, really?),
and try to square what I found with my experience of advising job seekers anxious to
capture the attention of today’s Dukes of Milan. They all work in tech. I discovered a
surprising (to me) number of scholarly essays about these maligned documents and their
rise to prominence in the 20th century.

They make peer-reviewed arguments about how résumés convey meaning — and what
happens when we feed people with rich histories and full identities into the labor market’s
meat grinder. The conclusions are not encouraging. Even strong résumés hardly ever
predict an applicant’s real capacity to do a job. When presented with a slate of candidates,
hiring managers — even the robots — exhibit sundry biases related to race, gender,
ethnicity and education. No one seems to know how, precisely, experience molds people to fit
labor slots.

Yet the résumé’s demise (promised since the 1980s, when VHS profiles figured to replace
paper) seems always to recede beyond the horizon.

Before his death in 2005, Randall Popken taught English and writing at Tarleton State
University, Texas. His account of the résumé’s rise (by far the most engaging — though the
competition is, let us say, not stiff) tracks their early presence in business writing textbooks
in the 1920s. In “The Pedagogical Dissemination of a Genre: The Résumé in American
Business Textbooks, 1914-1939,” Popken argued that mass pedagogy popularized and
standardized résumés as we know them. “I do not mean to suggest that the authors of these
textbooks exactly invented the résumé,” he writes, “this is the site where — for the small but
influential audience of future businesspeople — the résumé entered and became stabilized in
American professional culture.”

I found a few things in my own efforts to track the first references to résumés in the
American press. The earliest request for a résumé in a classified ad that I could find comes
from The New York Times in November 1917. An advertisement for “Sales Correspondent”
asks applicants to “bring résumé of experience.”

Here, résumé means summary or recapitulation. In loads of American newspapers, the word
résumé appears in theater and book reviews well before it shows up in classifieds. So while
this might be the first time someone deployed résumé to refer to a professional summary, it
predates the evolution of the word into a stand-alone term.

I care less about French meanings and false cognates than about the word résumé in the
United States’ distinctive usage. When describing the “Chiefly North American” use of
résumé (most of the world prefers “CVs”), the Oxford English Dictionary points to The
Hartford Courant on April 3, 1938. An ad for a “Casualty Claim Examiner” encourages
candidates to “send complete résumé with snapshot.”
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18/04/2021 Opinion | I Have Read Thousands of Résumés, and I Have Some Advice - The New York Times

I found an even earlier example. In The New York Herald Tribune, on December 27, 1931, the
“Executive Service Corporation” on East 42nd Street posted the following ad: “Acct &
statistical exp.; bring written résumé.” It felt like finding the first sonnet written on a 15th-
century bar napkin.

Popken argues in “A Theoretical Study of Indirect Speech Acts in Résumés” that the act of
reading a résumé can entail “an aggressive manufacture of meanings beyond those assumed
by the literal text.” Herein lies a clear linguistic challenge.

To the floor of my rag and bone shop fall all superfluous meanings and innuendo. I tell
advisees to describe previous work in bullet points. Use only strong verbs: led, managed,
created, built, sold, exceeded, presented, collaborated, implemented and succeeded. Do this
even if you think different words better describe your achievements during these grueling
years: endured, survived, marched, overcame, wept, fought, broke, failed, blundered,
relapsed, loved. This will improve the impression that you make on the reader!

I didn’t know I would have this career. I don’t remember applying. Sure, résumés are one
way to ply craft. To obsess over word counts, syllables and meanings.

But lately, I keep imagining myself as the protagonist in some maudlin campus novel. The
protagonist works at an unnamed New England college. He spends his life in quiet service to
future captains of finance, technology, medicine and law. He never rises above the rank of
Associate Dean, da Vinci Center for Career Advancement. In the end, word spreads
throughout LinkedIn that he lies on his deathbed, and his former students flock to campus
for a tearful thank you, and one final revision.

He never realizes the résumés constitute his magnum opus.

Want some real advice? Résumés do violence to language. They are poetry, inverted. You
must dry the joy from the bones of words; drain the human sauce; leave a labored husk
printed on eggshell. Only then can you guilelessly communicate that you were on the dean’s
list at your university for five of eight total semesters. And hope it matters.

Don’t add languages you haven’t mastered. Everyone will know you don’t speak
“conversational” Spanish. And no one cares that you once went to France.

Good luck in your search.

A-J Aronstein is the dean of Barnard Collegeʼs Career Center and is not writing a novel about it.

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