Up until the advent of the Web, the r�sum� had consolidated itself into what Randall Popken (1999, p. 105) characterized as a �resume formula� that produced an �exclusionary� discourse that bars all but a restricted set of institutionalized representations. Lester Faigley (1992) characterized the resume as �a highly stylized genre� in which experiences tend to be transformed into abstract qualities, thereby producing a dehumanizing frame in which �the resume writer [is] locate[d] within the discourse of the institution� (pp. 141-42). Faigley, drawing on Marxist theorist Louis Althusser�s conception of the human subject, concludes, �[The resume writer] is subsumed by rather than the shaper of his language. In Althusser�s terms, he has voluntarily assented to his subjectivity within the dominant ideology and thus has reaffirmed relations of power, . . . presenting himself as a commodity rather than as a person . . .� (p. 142).

Randall Popken (again), commenting on Faigley�s argument, notes the irony in how the resume situates outsiders, such as the unemployed, �within the discourse of the institution.� Popken goes on to explain how the �properties and contextual circumstances� of the resume �further limit the ways that one can construct self in a resume. For instance, the superstructure expected in resumes is relentlessly invariable: the self can only fit into categories such as career objectives; work experience; or education. . . . Forbidden topics include almost anything about the candidate�s home life, non-work interests, or philosophy of life. . . .� Popken concludes by stating that �the resume has few properties that permit the writer to reveal �presence� . . . a sense of an individual human being who produced the document� (p. 93). In sum, the print version of the genre circumscribes the subjecthood of its author.

With the advent of the Web, however, researchers such as Popken, as well as Hutchinson and Brefka (1997), have called for research on how the r�sum� genre, rooted in print media, might break out of its formula. In the new environment of the Web, the r�sum� might evolve from what Faigley (1992) critiques, in its print form, as a commodified, institutional genre (pp. 141-142) to a discourse that Popken envisions as potentially �creative� and �humane� (p. 109) and that Tim Krause (1997) recognizes as much more expansive, dynamic, and flexible. As yet, however, despite resumes� familiar appearance on personal homepages, little systematic research has been focused on Web r�sum�s.

Motivated by this research question�i.e., How is the old genre being used in its new technological environment to construct subjecthood, or not?�my paper reports on a survey of one hundred authors of Web r�sum�s, selected from an international sample, together with an analysis of their r�sum�s and adjoining Web pages. I�ll brief describe the study�s methodology and then discuss the results, which reveal shifts in the resume�s function and form. These results suggest a transformation from what Popken characterizes as an �exclusionary� genre into a more holistic, idiosyncratic range of discourses, and thereby a more expanded repertoire for the discursive construction of contemporary subjecthood.

Christopher Weare and Wan-Ying Lin (2000) have identified one of the challenges of empirical methodology that is exacerbated in Web content analysis research to be the selection of a representative sample (p. 273). The Web is massive and unorganized, and the total population of Web resumes and their authors eludes any practicable census. To collect my sample of Web resumes, I conducted searches on the word �resume� using the AltaVista search engine. Alta Vista was selected over the more popular engines like Google for a number of reasons, including the fact that AltaVista does not quite emulate Google�s well-known priority rankings, which push the most linked-to sites to the top, a result which would otherwise render a representative sample more problematic. (Despite the common experience of searches resulting in millions of finds, most engines report only the top thousand, thereby frustrating the efforts of social scientists to secure a sample from the full range of popular-to-obscure sites.) As AltaVista returned what seemed to be a disproportionately high number of resumes backed by digitalizable cultural capital--that is, the resumes of professors, artists, computer specialists, entrepreneurs�I also searched on the free servers geocities and tripod for a somewhat more �proletarian� population of resumes.

Prospective participants receive an e-mail solicitation requesting that they complete a 10-minute Web-based survey. (See http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~jkillora/resume_survey.html for the survey). The survey instrument asks about

• the Web resume publishing schedule and purpose
• content comparisons with print resume
• Web resume�s design influences and aims
• publicity of and reception to the Web resume
• the Web resume�s perceived usefulness
• demographic information

Exactly one hundred people responded to the survey. Response rates ran a bit less than 20%, at first glance a surprisingly low rate, but one which might be explained by pointing to the increasing prevalence of spam (and hence the reluctance of prospective respondents to even open the survey�s e-mail solicitation, let alone participate in the survey) and the significant portion of seemingly abandoned resumes that populate the Web (For instance, in closely examining the Web resumes of a subset of my sample of prospective participants, I found that about one-third showed no clear activity during the preceding two years). Such modest response rates of course reduce the validity of generalizations about the Web resume, as the respondents tend to be among the subpopulation most devoted to their resumes. For instance, the majority of respondents report that their Web resumes are reasonably up to date and hence the population of respondents may under represent the more disaffected segment of Web resume publishers.

My initial analyses of participants� survey responses and Web resumes suggest that the Web version of the genre is much more flexible and idiosyncratic than its print antecedent, exceeding that well-established �resume formula� both in function and in form. The greater agility of the Web version of the genre points to a greater scope for the assertion of subjecthood by the way Web authors play against . . .

1. the traditional function of the resume, adopting the genre for an expanded repertoire of purposes;
2. the traditional form of the resume, using the new medium�s design features and functionality to adapt the genre.

Whereas the print resume emerged for a rather dedicated purpose, its Web descendant is adopting an expanded role, serving not just to get its author a job but also to enhance other dimensions of a career as well as functions beyond one�s career. Indeed, in their survey responses, only slightly more than half of respondents had ever used their Web resume for the purpose of seeking new employment. Instead, almost half had posted their Web resume for such ethos-building goals as enhancing their profile among colleagues within their field of employment, a task that has less precedent with print resumes since print resumes of course have tended not to circulate as widely. One respondent wrote:

I can put things on my Web resume that I would not have put on a traditional academic resume. To some degree I can make critical remarks about my own profession and others through this medium. This capability gives me a certain amount of personal pleasure.

• To inform visitors to the rest of their Web site about who made this site
• To make themselves part of the new medium of the World Wide Web
• To showcase their Web design skills
• To practice how to make a Web page

The Web, the first publishing channel to permit widespread production access by ordinary people, has fostered few of its own populist native genres (cf. blogs) by which ordinary people can present themselves legitimately (Killoran, 2003). In the absence of competing genres, and perhaps by default because the resume is conveniently a readily available genre, and a fairly credible and �official� one at that, it has become adopted on personal homepages as a credible way of presenting oneself for a variety of these functions. Unlike the print resume, a document with a short shelf-life that usually gets hauled out and updated only on the unhappy occasion when we need to find a new job, the well-maintained Web resume, by virtue of its constant exposure year after year, is indeed driven to adopt an expanded repertoire of functions to justify its unprecedented endurance.

In an application of the modernist dictum that form follows function, let�s now turn to the Web resume�s form, its format, architecture, and design, to see how its expanded repertoire of functions may manifest itself in an expanded repertoire of forms.

Whereas the print resume�s ideal is to be well targeted to a specific audience and a specific position, a personal Web site cannot anticipate who its audience would be (Miller), except for the reasonably safe assumption that a resume�s audience may be rather diverse: potential employers, colleagues in one�s field, site visitors curious about the site�s author, etc. In response, some participants orient their Web resume to such diversity through a broader offering of resume forms, a diversity of self-presenting styles similar to what Eleanor Wynn and James Katz (1997) have observed on personal homepages:

The page creator is transposing domains, whereas in life they would differentiate between information conveyed in different domains. . . . [W]e perceive unresolved boundary issues in home page presentation, especially in the areas of personal disclosure and privacy and security awareness. Although we have asserted that the home page is a pulled-together presentation of self, this does not mean that the self-presentation must be totally consistent. It is less audience selective than everyday life. . . . Alternatively the home page may remain a unique venue for the more architectural metaphor of postmodernism: the mixing of styles and features from multiple conventions.

Such a mixing of styles and features can also be observed, to a degree, in Web resumes. About a third of participants in my sample have posted their resume in more than one format, such as an HTML version, an Microsoft Word version, a plain text version, a PDF version, and so forth. More strikingly, over 20% of Web authors represented themselves through two or more Web resumes in different languages or with different content or of different scope, such as short and long versions of their resume. Most intriguing among these 20% were those with two different resumes representing two different career tracks, sometimes uncommonly different career tracks, such as the participant who posted both his photography resume and his military resume, or another who posted both his information technology resume and his fine arts resume.

The influence of the standard paper size in circumscribing the familiar one-page or two-page paper resume has, not surprisingly, become diluted in the new paperless medium. Almost all respondents report having a print resume, yet despite the ease of simply transcribing that print resume into Web form, respondents report that the design of the rest of their sites exerted almost as much influence on their Web resume�s design as did the original design of their print resume. Through such influence, a much greater degree of experimentation in architecture, navigation, and scope seems to be occurring. For instance, in over 20% of the Web resumes in my sample, the familiar categories such as skills, education, and experience, rather than being stacked one upon the other in a linear top-to-bottom sequence, are instead distributed across different files. As well, almost 40% of survey respondents report adding material to their Web resumes that is not included in their print resumes, such as links to portfolios or samples of their work as well as links to other sites that are related to their career. Indeed, sometime the print version is not the source for the Web version but rather the reverse. One respondent explained how his Web resume is now the source for his print resume:

[A Web resume] also helped me get all information about myself down in one place. I did not have to leave anything out but rather could link the pages in the order of priority. This gave me a lot of clarity about myself and subsequently whenever i have required a print resume i have picked my webresume and cut and pasted the info relevant and added more and made one.

Unlike the print resume, just one or two pages long and perhaps accompanied by an employment letter, the Web version of the genre is typically embedded in a larger personal or business site, often without clear boundaries around the resume per se. Most resumes include links to other pages on their author�s site, and these sites in my sample average a hefty 240+ files each, including HTML files, graphics files, and so forth. These files range over a seemingly endless diversity of what Popken characterized as �forbidden topics,� many unrelated to the employment or career of the resume�s author.

In sum, I have illustrated how the genre of the resume, hitherto a genre that functioned in part by circumscribing its author�s subjecthood, is emerging on the Web with an expanded repertoire of functions and forms that, to varying degrees, better express its author�s subjecthood.

Superficially, it may appear that the two different media channels�paper and Web�have a role in determining the different functions and forms of their resumes. For instance, once freed from its traditional medium of paper, the resume appears not to bring along such print baggage as the stereotypical injunction that resumes be no longer than one page. Moreover, the resume�s new Web environment may legitimize the addition of such intrinsic Web features as hyperlinks, multimedia, and other non-traditional discourses.

More important than media channel, however, may be the different power relations presupposed of print and Web resumes. As I mentioned in the Introduction, for Faigley, resumes reaffirm relations of power. In print, after all, the resume must go to the audience. On the Web, however, the audience is presumed to go to the resume, a social frame that shifts the power balance from the resume�s receiver to its producer. More importantly, some Web producers�and the sample seemed weighed disproportionately to those who have the cultural capital to command an audience, such as professors, artists, computer specialists, entrepreneurs, and not factory workers or service workers�have the cultural capital or ethos to exercise such power. No longer �commodities� (Faigley�s term), Web resume authors are better able to imbue their resume with their �presence� (Popken�s term) through the context of their entire site. As producers, resume authors can thereby re-orient themselves from objects of their print resume to subjects of their Web resume.

Faigley, Lester. (1992). Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburg, PA: U. of Pittsburg Press.

Hutchinson, Kevin L., and Diane S. Brefka. (June 1997). Personnel Administrators� Preferences for Resume Content: Ten Years After. Business Communication Quarterly 60.2, 67-75.

Killoran, John B. (Winter 2003). The Gnome in the Front Yard and other Public Figurations: Genres of Self-Presentation on Personal Home Pages. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Journal 26.1, 86-103.

Krause, Tim. (March 1997). Preparing an Online Resume. Business Communication Quarterly 60.1, 159-161.

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Weare, Christopher, and Wan-Ying Lin. (2000). Content analysis of the World Wide Web: Opportunities and challenges. Social Science Computer Review 18.3, 272-292.

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