Crafting Your Resume For The Era Of Inattention

Despite all of the futuristic ways there are to land a job, you still have to have a resume--even if nobody cares about it. The people who are in a position to hire you often give your resume about six seconds, or toss it mercilessly through a corporate keyword scanner. But it's still easier than heading to every applicant's personal website or LinkedIn profile, and a resume shows how serious your intent is. So we're all stuck writing documents for people who definitely don't want to read all of them. It's time we started writing them that way. To help you deal with unexcited readers and indifferent machines, we sought advice from experienced resume writers, search-firm owners, human resources pros, and others who deal with these one-or-two-page sales pitches that mean earning a living or not. You'll learn about white space, dumb algorithms, smart shortcuts, and the other tools we must master to get get our foot in the door for an interview. Thanks to all our Facebook fans who offered suggestions for this article.

FAST CompanyDraft a resume from your existing LinkedIn profile.

If you're already employed, the odds are good that you've built up a LinkedIn profile, with at least the basics of where you worked and when, how to contact you, and probably a whole lot more. Save yourself the trouble of duplicating all that information and wording with LinkedIn's Resume Builder. It's a "labs" experiment that offers quite a few stylish, space-savvy templates.MightyCV is another third-party option with LinkedIn import support.

Flickr user LaggedOnUserThink of your resume as lingerie.

How do you balance showing off your depth of knowledge and wide array of skills, against the knowledge that you have maybe a second or two to catch a potential employer's attention? David Perry, executive recruiter...