Chapter One

You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today. – Abraham Lincoln

If you call failures experiments, you can put them in your resume and claim them as achievements. – Mason Cooley

The Modern Resume

LEGEND HAS IT THAT Leonardo da Vinci created the first professional resume back in the late fifteenth century. However, the more likely historical antecedent to the modern resume is the traditional practice of using letters of introduction, which dates back to feudal England and the Middle Ages.

Over the centuries, letters of introduction have slowly evolved into what is now considered the American-style resume. The modern resume is simply a short summary (one or two pages) of a person's relevant professional experiences, education, and abilities. In recent decades, improved technology has helped resumes become highly useful tools on both sides of the job search process. Resumes now help companies find and compare qualified candidates with each other and with specific job-related criteria. They also help candidates to demonstrate their interest in and qualifications for any open positions. Today, every professional job applicant must have an up-to-date professional resume in order to be marketable and successful, and every employer requires candidates to submit a resume at the beginning of the hiring process.

One reason why the resume submission process is so widely used is that it is simple