Are all resume formats created equal?

It would be easier for you to look at that jumble of of responsibilities in a chronological format than it would be for you to have my experience grouped by task? That's what the cover letter is for. Resumes are for showing your more-or-less complete history, while your cover letter tells why a particular line of it should matter more to the HR person.

If you've only had 3 jobs then yeah, let me look at it in the same way I am looking at the rest, present your data the way my brain is already in gear for. I (probably) won't change gear for you, because there's another hundred just like you. Full disclosure, I don't hire, but I work with helping people create their jobseek documents. The way I explain it is like this. Think of Law and Order or something. Your CV is like your rapsheet, it's just the facts, the where, why, when, whats. No analysis there. In your letter, you make your opening arguments, with your supporting document (cv) as exhibit 1. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, as you will soon hear, I am uniquely qualified for this position. I have always been very interested in basketweaving (see exhibit 1), and was very glad to return to work with it for the past 3 years, having first picked up some valuable client-facing skills in the restaurant sector, and strengthening my fine motor skills as a glazier (see exhibit 1). This has made me a force to be reckoned with in the basket weaving community, and I strongly believe the diversity of my work history gives me a unique skillset that will provde your customers with X, Y and Z. Anyone can say "yea, I am really stress tolerant" or "I am a socially adept", you want to be using your letter, backed up by the facts of your cv, to make the indesputable argument that a person who has managed a client retention rate of 87% in the first year is an unbreakable people person (or whatever your equivelant). You can claim what you like in your letter, but I will want to be able to probabilty-check it against your cv.

It sucks that people tend to look at resumes suspiciously just because they look different - surely that's what the interview is for, to air concerns? There are dozens, if not hundreds, of applicants for most positions these days. HR people are desperate for reasons to whittle that pile down to three or four interviews. If there are concerns with one person, there's no sense in adding him or her to the interview stack when you have so many others that presented themselves in ways that didn't concern you.

It's a little weird, and many fewer people will upgrade you for using it than will downgrade you. Use the cover letter to serve the purpose of highlighting your diverse work history, and stick to the boring old chronoformat.

I feel like I should follow up on this, so here's the update. Several very nice Mefites offered to help with my resume, and I'm sorry if I missed replying to someone to thank them. It turns out, just after I posted my question, I was asked to participate in three interviews, and then two more. Of those five, I got two offers and one company that is glacially slow in their process but who indicated they wanted to move me to the next round. I accepted a position today. It's not really the greatest job in the world, but it's one that pays the bills and after four months of unemployment that's important. In all of this, I've realized that I need to do some things to refocus on the career I really want to pursue, and those things are bigger than rewriting my resume. But I will absolutely take all your helpful advice to heart when the time comes to renew my resume again.

I just did a search, and resumes were all over the place. Once applicant didn't list education at all, even though there was a degree requirement. One person didn't send a resume, but asked to get a phone call so he could describe his capability. Several applicants didn't send cover letters at all. There were also some really great cover letters and resumes. We interviewed a number of people by phone, and several in person, and hired a terrific person. Make it easy. I work for a publicly-funded institution, so we have rigorous requirements for assessing candidates equally. There was a search committee. A functional resume makes it more difficult to rank that resume in the same way other resumes are ranked. Multiply that inconvenience by the number of people doing the ranking. I didn't mind when applicants used hackneyed, overused terms, because it made it really easy to identify the skills we wanted. One of our finalists had some skills we need a couple jobs back; we saw the skills with no trouble. It didn't hurt that he pointed them out in his cover letter. One applicant used a narrow column on the right-hand to highlight specific skills. Not customized to our requirements, which would have been better, but still quite helpful and got good attention. More than a few agencies and companies use software to assess resumes. The easier you make your resume to scan, the better. I once got resume help after a layoff and a functional resume was recommended. But everyone I know who does hiring dislikes them. As much time as you've put into your resume, a re-do can actually help you find fresh phrasing, and I do think a chronological resume is preferred. I am angry, and very very frustrated Job searching is a constant assault on your psyche. Rejection is constant, especially when the economy is so bad, and hiring is rare. You have madd skillz, but maybe your talents aren't typical, so you want to present them in a way that has worked for you before. I know from ask.me that you are really smart and really capable. I sympathize with the huge soul-crushing suckiness of job-hunting. Keep in mind that you are one of the star answerers of Ask.me. Be really pissed off for a couple days, then do whatever it takes to keep your self-image totally positive and confident, as is well-deserved. If you need somebody to help you review, shoot me an email.

As someone else recently changing fields, I want to add weight to some of the excellent recommendations - Kadin's point in particular: there's a certain amount of flexibility in the chronological section; staying relevant to the position you're applying for overrides all other rules. E.g., if you spent ten years doing x, and then 18 months doing y, and now you're applying for a job doing x, I'd make sure that x was at the top of the work experience section, even if that meant dropping y completely or breaking the chronology.Talk to people in your industry to see if there are particulars you need to address. Get some of them to offer feedback - for me that was, bar none, the most helpful thing I did in creating a resume to represent me in my new field - asking seasoned pros and colleagues to give me candid feedback. Originally, I had talked with our career services, but they didn't know my program or my field, and almost convinced me not to use a sidebar listing key skills and tools that sounds a bit like crazy canuck's. But when I showed a draft version around to people in my field, it got a much more positive reaction. Just goes to emphasis that the people you want to impress are not generic - you need to target your field, and that means getting some help. Don't use an objective statement at the top of the resume, but what I've seen increasingly replace it is a value statement - this is a sentence or two about who you are, what awesomeness you bring to the table and how. Then make sure the bulleted stuff in your varied jobs backs it up. I also had a fairly varied previous set of careers... but when I really looked at them, I realized there were reasons so many people from those disparate fields went into my new field. Don't waste much ink describing responsibilities - unless the title of your job was esoteric, HR will be able to tell the basics. Instead, highlight accomplishments and things you were recognized for that relate to the job you're applying for. * THING I DID that QUANTIFY IF POSSIBLE achieved RESULT HERE. * By arming the bears, I ensured a 150% increase in butthurt plaid-wearing hunters You might create a master resume document - a purely for your eyes only brain dump of all the noteworthy stuff you can think of. Then you can create streamlined tailored copies for particular types of positions, removing irrelevant bulleted stuff to let the relevant info shine through. Yes, it sucks to have to re-do your resume. But if it gets you a job, it will be worth it.

"It would be easier for you to look at that jumble of of responsibilities in a chronological format than it would be for you to have my experience grouped by task? Why is that?" Ugh, functional is confusing. I only look at resumes for higher-level executive positions and only after HR has vetted them (so, generally just the finalists), but I prefer chronological. First, I'm familiar with most of the job titles in the industry, so when I see "XM5572 Specialist" I know that that person was managing XM5572 workers, interfacing with a difficult government agency, managing significant workflow, overseeing a fairly large budget while complying with federal reporting rules, etc. I'm not confused by your job descriptions; I understand they come with diverse experience. Whereas when you put "Oversaw budgets and met federal reporting rules" by itself, and I have to go hunting for the jobs in which you did that? CONFUSING. When I see that you've got a job on there that's NOT from my industry, and I'm not very familiar with, I say, "Hm, what's that?" and slow down to more carefully read the bullet points. So either I'm familiar with your job titles, so I'm aware they come with diverse experience, or I'm reading carefully about the unfamiliar ones. Also, when someone has been doing a job that wasn't a close fit to what we do most recently, most successful applicants just de-emphasize that in terms of putting just a couple of bullet points, while emphasizing their more relevant work by putting many more bullet points. That works fine, I'm not stupid, I understand that their digression into Basket Weaving for a year provided them with good experience but that skills from their older position in Dolphin Training are more relevant. And the chronological sequence helps me see how their career choices went; it's not unusual at a certain point as people come into management in my industry to see them move in a couple of different directions for short periods before settling into a role (perhaps the one we're interviewing for) ... some of it is "breaking in" to management, some of it is trying some different things to see what the individual is good at, some of it is what jobs are available at the time the person is looking.

I think you could do something of a hybrid; you could begin with the functional style stuff and then have an experience or employment history section where you go through reverse-chronologically. Then you wouldn't have to scrap everything that you have, and you'd have the opportunity to set the message a bit before you jump into the chronology. (Although that's assuming that anything above the chronology gets read, which is... not assured.) (Personally I detest "objective" sections, as does basically everyone I know; you might be able to save space by ditching that, if you have one. A lot of functional resumes seem to have that on there. Save it for the cover letter.) I do think there's a certain amount of flexibility in the chronological section; staying relevant to the position you're applying for overrides all other rules. E.g., if you spent ten years doing x, and then 18 months doing y, and now you're applying for a job doing x, I'd make sure that x was at the top of the work experience section, even if that meant dropping y completely or breaking the chronology. But definitely make sure there are dates associated with everything, so that it doesn't look like you're being sneaky. The use of 'Functional' resumes by people transitioning from the military to civilian employment strikes me as something of a special case. I can see it working there, because to a civilian recruiter, the details of an applicant's military career progression may not be terribly relevant or interesting, depending on how it's presented. So in that case it might make sense to emphasize the functional stuff. But the reason it works is because the recruiter already knows all they care to about the applicant's work history (that they were employed, specifically in the military), so it's safe to jump into the drilling-down-to-skills part. That's very much not safe if you're a regular applicant, since it leaves open the question of exactly what you were doing to get the experience you're claiming. And I'm not even sure it's even a great solution for a military career, versus just making the chronology easier to understand to a civilian. But I do agree that you should sanity-check whatever advice you're getting against people who actually work in your industry.