Resumes (at the job fair)

Every Business major at CMU has to take a class called Business Communications (aka bizcom), which teaches them basic fundamentals of business writing including resumes and cover letters. In my bizcom class, I learned appropriate times to use different fonts and sizes, different paper weights and colors, as well as proper word choices to maximize the impact of my resume when handing it to recruiters.

Fun fact: I lost 5 points on my first resume because I had a bad email address; my school assigned email address contained the letter "L" followed by the number "1", which looked confusing on paper. I changed my email so fast.

After the section on resumes, I remember walking into the job fair thinking I was hot stuff with my resume on 32 pound Ivory 100% cotton with 3 different fonts and 4 different sizes. Being a prospective Finance track at the time with the typical CMU Business mindset of money = success, I lined up at all the big name banks waiting to for chance to be one of the lucky sophomores to be plucked up and pour coffee for the investment bankers who were too busy to get their own coffee.

I got torn up. No one really cares how heavy your paper is, or how many fonts you used on your resume. Yeah, it looks nice, but it doesn't show your capabilities as a Business major (or whatever major) in anyway whatsoever. You can put a bag of crap in a gift box and wrap it nicely with a bow, but in the end it's still a bag of crap. Congrats, you are good at wrapping gifts. I still have my 100-pack of resume paper that I bought two years ago. I haven't touched it in one and a half years.

If a recruiter has been at a job fair looking at resume after resume after resume, they'll eventually stop caring about what's on your resume. In the end, everyone who walks up to them has basically the same credentials. Everyone is a Carnegie Mellon student, most are studying majors related to the industry they want to work for. Most have taken the same classes and done the same extra curricular activities.

Resumes are definitely good to have, but don't put too much weight on it. If you're at a job fair, and a recruiter spends the entire time reading your resume, you've failed right there. You've missed out on the opportunity to let them know who you really are and what you've really done. At the end of the day, the only thing on your resume that really matters is that the recruiter wrote down how amazing you are, and how they'll move you on to the next round.

EB