Turn Down the Volume

Alvin has been involved in a lot of different engineering projects throughout his career. His original résumé mentioned quite a few of them in various levels of detail across four pages. The bulk of the detail captured his involvement with international projects that happened earlier in his career.

More recently, Alvin has been in consulting roles and wants to continue along those same lines. Reverse chronology is definitely in play…infinite chronology is not. 

In essence, he’s saying “I’ve done a lot of stuff all over the world, and because of that I have a lot to offer a stateside company who needs someone who knows how to walk that line between hands-on project management and strategic consulting.” 

The nature of project work gives the writer two distinct considerations to navigate:

Redundant types of assignments can be implied to the client’s advantage. Simply provide enough content for the reader to think through…then stop. As if to say “And I did similar work with this company and with this company and with this company.” The power lies in what you don’t say.

In Alvin’s case, this decision was pretty simple. If you want the reader to focus on “2015 to Present” or whatever time frame you choose, then the supporting material — or in this case, the lack thereof — needs to reflect that. You can help the reader focus on RIGHT NOW by taking away the kind of job-by-job analysis that comes with traditional handling of the reverse-chronological format.

Projects are researchable. You can go into detail about each one if you want to, or you can even provide a link on the page that allows the reader to opt for any deep-dive background information. But each one of the Notable Projects listed is a Google-able entity, with details that would let the reader know everything they wanted to know about its size and scope.

His project list spans a wide range of companies and countries. Is it essential for the reader to know his job title and the year he worked on each of them? Perhaps at some point, those details will become more relevant. But to do the kind of work he wants to do now, and to present all that in an easily digestible form without getting lost in the details…the answer is “no”.

A client who walks in the door with pride, experience, a solid reputation, and pages and pages of source information is often shocked by taking this kind of approach. I get that. It doesn’t have to be done my way to be effective. 

But I think where we sometimes go astray is when we assume that a second or even third page — by sheer volume alone — will carry the value we hope to convey. Given the shrinking nature of an average reader’s attention span, that can be a dangerous assumption to make.

Can implied value be equal to or greater than value that is overtly stated? Co-creating value in the mind of a résumé reader is a collaborative mental process, facilitated by a written process, that relies on a delicate balance between the known and the unknown. 

Keep in mind that, in this case, the decision to go with a one-page format was NOT pre-meditated. The goal was to showcase the most recent 10-year period, and then ask “Does the remaining content support or distract from seeing the client as a solution to the reader’s problem?” 

If I really wanted to drive that message home, would saying it louder help? If you believe it would, keep writing. If you believe the volume is sufficient, stop. Trust the process. Based on the quality of the content you present — as opposed to the amount of content you choose NOT to present — did you get the volume right?