Re: Average Length of TW Resume

["Lindsay Burrell" <lburrell -at- telus -dot- net>]

I know that for the "ordinary person", conventional wisdom says that a
resume should be no longer than 3 pages.  But it's hard to see how a
contractor can capture all of the information needed in three pages.  My
husband's department is frequently involved in hiring, and he and his buds
see a lot of resumes.  His view is that no-one thinks about a third page in
a really interesting (read: on-task, well-targeted) resume, because it's all
really the stuff they want to know. This seems right to me.

When you have a lot of contracts to represent, here's what I do.

I keep a set of files, each of which contains the "resume-ready" description
of a single contract. (That's my level of "granularity" :-)  ) In my resume,
I have a paragraph describing my experience <in general>, and then a section
called "Selected Contracts".  I select exactly four descriptions of
contracts from my files.

I choose them with respect to the company or job for which I'm applying
(e.g., knowledge of online help, knowledge of networking, knowledge of
software drivers, or whatever).  If it's general, I feature ones that cover
a lot of ground and title them, like: "Online Help", then "System
Documentation", then "Web Pages", or whatever, to demonstrate that I have
both the breadth and the depth that they need.

So each resume is custom, and targeted to the opportunity.  But the content
is waiting in files for me to re-use at any time.

It's kind of a tiny version of single-sourcing :-).

Lindsay

PS Then I take copies of reference letters for each of the contracts listed
on the resume.

My house is a mess, but my file systems are shiny and clean.