A brief history of resume writing

Resumes have been a part of working culture for as long as many of you reading this have been born. A well-written resume is the difference between getting hired by your dream company, or being rejected and being forced back into the soul-sucking procedure of job hunting once again. 

First off, at one point in time, the CV and the resume were two different entities. With the resume being the simple practice we see today, and the CV consisting of multiple pages of information pertaining to the potential employee. Obviously, today the classic version of the CV has ceased to exist with it being impossible to screen hundred's of applicants at once all providing 20-page essays to employers.

It is difficult to pinpoint who actually created the idea of a resume and is usually credited towards Leonardo Da Vinci, proposing the idea it was started in France, but you can assume it was created as a necessity in order to weed the bad from good for potential employers. Furthermore, resume is a word taken from the French Language and means "to summarize".

Nonetheless, the resume has had a number of pioneers such as Ralph Agas who introduced the idea to 1500's England, and forward into the future. The modern resume began gaining traction during the 1930's and has continued to evolve with it culminating through to the age of computers, wherein which we can now view resumes online through digital means.

Simply, resumes nowadays are used to help organise potential employees, especially when a large amount of them have applied at once. Resumes are glanced over for a very short period of time (10-15 seconds even) and either given a simple yes or no. Those who manage to go through are then usually looked at more intensively at a later time. 

A wise man once said, "First impressions are everything". This statement could not be truer and applies to both social and working cultures. Hopefully, the previous points stated can help you understand on a deeper than surface level why resumes are so important to employers.

• Category Resume Content