by Justin Bartz

Created on: May 02, 2010

Whether this is your first try at writing your resume, or whether it is your 19th re-write, crafting a solid, effective resume can be very time-consuming, tedious, and stressful.  There are so many questions to consider.  What format does it need to be in?  What order do I put everything in?  How long should it be?  What font should I use?  What size type should I use?

Have you ever wondered who created the first resume or where it originated?  You may think you have it bad, but think back to a time before computers.  How did people write resumes then?  What did the first resumes look like?

Since all of us who have ever searched and applied for a job have created and submitted our own resume, it might be fascinating to learn how the process began.  While legend has it that Leonardo Da Vinci created the first professional resume in 1482, today's resume began in feudal England (back in the Middle Ages) as a letter of introduction from a lord or head of the local guild when a man traveled to another part of the kingdom.

As history would march forward, new discoveries and innovations changed the way people looked for work.  From the telephone in 1876 to television in 1927 to the first programmable computer in 1936, technology slowly began to progress toward the evolution of the resume.  According to Beverly Ryle, a career counselor and business consultant, in the 1950's through the early 1970's, a resume was more or less a formality, or something that was kept on file with personnel.  Many people wrote their first resumes on scraps of paper over lunch with an interested employer.

Over time, resumes slowly began to become more formal and organized than a scrap of paper.  Online background checking tools became available in 1985, and by the early to mid 1990's, the creation of Monster and CareerBuilder would serve as the first public job searches on the Internet and the first public resume databases in the world.

Just a few short years later, the rise of social media and online networking would create another opportunity for the prospective job seeker with the advent of sites like SixDegrees.com (1997), SkillSurvey (2001), LinkedIn (2003), and YouTube (2005).  In fact, the first video resume would be posted to YouTube in 2007.

While initially, human resource departments of larger corporations refused to view or use any type of video resume (out of fear of potential discrimination claims by those who were not selected based on something in their video), today 89% of employers reveal that they would watch a video resume if it was submitted to them, according to the 2007 Video Resume Survey by Vault.com.

From Da Vinci in 1482 to the fast paced multimedia phenomenon that we live in today, the pace of evolution when it comes to the resume has increased rapidly in the last few years.  Who knows what the future holds?  By the turn of the next century, maybe résumés will be submitted by telepathy.

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