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Archive for March 17th, 2008

Seth Godin has a typically brilliant post on his blog today entitled Why bother having a resume? in which he makes a very good case for not having a resume or curriculum vitae.

Seth makes some very good points in his post, among them:

A resume is an excuse to reject you. Once you send me your resume, I can say, “oh, they’re missing this or they’re missing that,” and boom, you’re out.

I think if you’re remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a resume at all.

How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects? Or a sophisticated project they can see or touch? Or a reputation that precedes you? Or a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up?

The first point is absolutely right; as somebody who has recently been through the process of recruiting a team I recognised Seth’s description right away. Whether you like it or not or intend to or not this is how you end up when presented with a pile of CVs. This isn’t helped by the shocking quality of many of these CVs.

I love the remaining points. It’s a ballsy move but if somebody won’t consider you without a CV maybe you don’t want to be working for them…

What do you think? To CV or not to CV?

A week has passed since I started my RSS diet which brings the experiment “phase” to an end.

“Will you be going back to RSS?” I hear you ask; and the answer is no, I will not.

I really expected to find not using RSS difficult, that I would be spending more time on websites trying to keep up and that I would miss important news. In fact, the opposite has been the case.

I’ve found that I spend less time online consuming content and the time that I do spend is more productive and of more value to me. I haven’t felt that I have missed any news or information and have actually found and read more articles in full.

The only development that may see me return to RSS, although with a more refined set of feeds, is fav.or.it but I am still unable to extract an invitation to their Beta.

So I won’t be returning to RSS and my daily routine already feels less complex.