Do you keep your resume up to date?
February 15, 2013 in Freelancing
I’ve not seemed to have a need for a ‘traditional’ resume in a number of years, but every year or so I go and update it some. I’ve only updated the ‘plain text’ version on my site over the last couple years – I’ve not updated the ‘MS Word’ version in probably 3 or 4 years.
A traditional resume just doesn’t seem to be of much assistance in the freelancing/consulting world – my website, blog and word of mouth referrals seem to serve the purpose of providing credentials and trust, and is easier for people to see find what they’re looking for. That said, I do think having traditionally formatted resumes on my site doesn’t hurt from a search-engine standpoint – I get a lot of referral traffic from Google for certain phrases. At one point, I was on the front page of google for the phrase “senior php developer resume”. That translated in to a lot of email from tech recruiters, but precious little in the way of actual paying work (I’m not sure I’ve ever taken a contract from a recruiter contacted via my website).
I used to advocate keeping a resume up to date on a regular basis, and probably still would recommend that if part of your ‘independent’ game plan involved using tech recruiters in your contract search. If so, keep it up to date. If not, it may possibly hurt your image as a freelancer. I suspect having a traditional resume may give some people the impression that I’m just freelancing until I can find a ‘real’ job, and may remove it because of that (or at least not link to it so prominently on my site).
Do you keep your resume up to date? Do you keep it on your “company” or personal website? Do you think it’s helped or hurt?
Michael Ross said on February 16, 2013
I agree. Traditional résumés seem to be valuable only for those seeking conventional employment — and even that may be diminishing as more people use their LinkedIn profiles as dynamic online résumés kept more up-to-date.
As a freelance website developer, my prospects never ask for a résumé, but instead review my own website, especially the portfolio section. Of course, that would be insufficient if I were doing contract software development.
Michael Kimsal said on February 16, 2013
Well put Michael.
I’ve told a story where I contrast ‘job’ interviews with ‘client’ interviews – I’m normally grilled over some weird arcane technical trivia in job interviews, but with clients, they’re far more concerned about trusting whether or not I can handle the project at hand.
Rich Harrison said on February 26, 2013
I don’t have a resume that I keep up-to-date per se, but I do have a document that contains a chronologically ordered Work/Project history in it. I try to keep this reasonably up-to-date with the projects or work that I’ve been doing including the client(s), the relevant key technologies, etc. Should I ever have a need to a more traditional resume this document would be my starting point.
I also have a monthly calendar reminder to review and update this document so I don’t go to long between updates. That’s also a reminder to me that if I don’t have anything to add or update every month or so, there’s probably a bigger problem that needs my attention.