The Resume

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What is a Resume?

The resume is a description of your work history and career. But more than this, it is a marketing tool. It represents you in a selected way to get employers to invite you to a job interview. Your resume is a showcase of who you are and it needs to make you shine and stand out over competing candidates. The resume is the first impression an employer has of you. Employers are looking at your resume in a way that it says something to them, and it should look differently and yet attractive enough to separate you from the pack, and still give them the information as to who you are.

Contrary to many resume book titles, there is no “perfect resume” or even “best resume.” Why? The resume is as subjective as the resumes’ screener’s personal taste. For instance, should you put “Job Objective” on your resume? Experts are split on this. About 50% say yes it is very important and 50% say it’s a waste of valuable space and can get you quickly screened out because of the job objective’s specificity.

How Many Pages?

Should you limit your resume to one page? Again, many experts say “yes”, but the trend today is “no.” You should have as many pages as it is necessary to tell your story and yet keep it relevant and interesting.

The one page resume used to be popular when having two jobs in five years was considered being a job-hopper and you could fit your entire career on a one-page summary. Today, however, with the economy as it is and occupations being created and vanishing so quickly, having several jobs in five years is not considered job-hopping, it is common. If you have been working 15-20 years and have had several jobs, the one page resume may not convey essential information because the one page resume doesn’t allow you enough space to get it in.

You don’t want to cram a lot of information in such a small amount of space. If your resume can’t be read easily, it won’t be.

The average job hunter not only doesn’t know much about what a resume is or should be; it is difficult for them to put one together because there are so many resume books giving out contrary or conflicting information.

Understanding the Screening Process

For a moment, pretend you are the person reviewing and screening resumes. There you are looking at a stack of 100 or more resumes. The first question is, do you go through all resumes in detail? If you have never screened resumes before and you took the detail approach, you’d find out within 10 or so resumes this would not only be tedious and fatiguing, but you can also get lost or confused as to what is important.

So, you alter your screening process and make a list of criteria that each resume must have and if it doesn’t it gets tossed. For instance, you may say that if there is an error or misspelling on the envelope, you won’t open it because you think if the applicant is this careless, you don’t want them working for you.

Then you tell yourself, the resume at first glance has to have eye appeal to you. You say, if the resume doesn’t look interesting and attractive, how creative is the applicant?

It doesn’t take you long to understand that you need to get the resume stack to a reasonable size so you can scrutinize the resumes in more detail and make your choices for who you invite to the interview.

You want to pare down the 100 resumes to 10-15. You will then scrutinize these resumes and further pare it down to 6-8 people you will invite to the interview.

What your resume needs

Ok, now you are the resume writer again. Being that you wore the resume screener’s hat, momentarily, you now understand that your resume has to have a look to it that grabs the attention of the screener.

Again, there is no “perfect” resume, but you must decide what the resume is going to look like regardless of the content.

How do you go about this? The first thing you need to do is to look at many examples of resumes and see what appeals to you. If you looked at 300 resume samples from resume books, flag the resumes that grab your attention by its appearance.

There are three types of resumes:

1. Chronological—all your work experience is in chronological order according to dates.

2. Functional—there are no dates and it emphasizes skill and accomplishments and hides employment gaps

3. Combination—this is combination of both chronological and functional.

The one you want to use is the one that will make you look good. If you have employment gaps, or something to hide, then the functional and combination is the best.

After selecting the ones that appeal to you, ask yourself why does it?

You’d probably say, “I don’t know, I just like it.” Chances are the resume has attractive headings, lots of white space, bullets, underlining and bolded words or phrases. It also has a balanced look.

The Resume Must Be Powerful

The resume has to say a lot about you in a few, but powerful, impacting or impressive words.

Although the look and what a resume says that attracts an employer are subjective, let’s consider this approach. Your resume is two pages in length.

The first page is the attention-grabber. It has eye appeal and quickly shows who you are.

The second page is details. You list a few of your jobs, the occupation, its responsibilities and some of what you did with an emphasis of accomplishments.

You want to choose words and phrases that best depict what you want to say. The easiest things to do is look at resume books and find resumes for your occupation.

Look for phrases written by someone else that comes closest to describing you or your activities, responsibilities or experience. Copy it verbatim if it fits; otherwise, change the wording around until it suites you.

Accomplishments

The most important part of your resume is “accomplishments.” An employer wants to know more about you than your tasks and responsibilities. Listing your accomplishments shows the prospective employer you are an achiever, a problem solver and it’s an indicator that you can accomplish something for them in the future.

Most people have accomplishments but don’t realize it. Basically an accomplishment is anything you can say or claim that improved your job or somebody else’s job, or the company as a whole. Accomplishments are things like:

¨ Increased performance

¨ Decreased costs

¨ Reduced time

¨ Increased efficiency

¨ Improved employee relations

¨ Improved reliability

¨ Streamlined operations

¨ Improved strategic planning

¨ Turn around losing operations

¨ Eliminated waste

¨ Improved working conditions or efficiency

¨ Solved problems

¨ Contributed new ideas

When listing accomplishments, give your accomplishment a percentage amount, dollar amount or some type of number. You can use bullets, bolding or underlining to emphasize something in particular that you want the employer to notice and will sell you.

How Do You Begin?

The first thing to keep in mind is: the resume is a work in progress and you will not get it done in a short period of time. You will more than likely revise it many times. What you want to do is gather information about you, such as: your employment history, skills, achievements, awards, etc. The point is to get it written down on paper or computer and don’t worry about anything for now. Once you get your information, you will look for words and phrases that will best say what you want it to so it will make your resume look and sound good.

As suggested earlier, spend time looking at many resumes to get ideas on how you want to format your resume in how it will look.

Put together several styles of resume and once done, have some friends look at them and see which one they like. If you have four resume styles for example, don’t show your friends all four at once. Show them two of them and ask them to choose which one they like. Once they selected it, put the other one aside and then have them compare another resume against the one they have just selected. Do this to each resume you have.

Bullets, bolding, and underlining

Bullets, bolding, and underlining should be used carefully and sparingly. Bolding and underlining is to point out something grand, special, unusual or different. If you bullet everything, you lose its emphasis. When using many bullets, vary the style of the bullet and where you place and space them.

It is important to use bolding and underlining only on selected words or phrases that you specifically want the reader to notice and make them say “wow” or some other positive comment that makes them think you are “special.”

More than one resume

Too often job seekers try to make a resume do all things and one resume cannot do this. You will want to create several resumes. Each resume should have a different look, emphasizing different words, skills, achievements and other areas that can be changed so you have more flexibility to market yourself to employers.

Job seekers who can qualify for several different occupations such as customer service, administrative assistant and general clerical needs to change the resume to reflect the skills, experience etc. that best supports the occupational title. If you don’t and only have one resume, it will be noticed by the employer that it doesn’t specifically address the job that is being advertised. The employer will probably reject your resume as being too general.

Your resume needs to meet the employer’s needs. Therefore, each resume must be tailored in such a way that best represents you for the employer’s needs and the position you are seeking.

Your Resume Changes You

A resume is not just a document that represents you. In a very special way it will also change you. We live with our self everyday, and yet, we don’t always know who we are. By putting a resume together we have to dig deep inside to get information about our skills, desires, motivation, strengths and weaknesses.

We will put in time, effort, and energy into this advertisement of who we are and by doing so we will more than likely discover or remember things we either didn’t know about or have long forgotten A resume is putting our best “foot” forward and telling the employment world we are able, confident, competent, and a winner.

We often do not realize our own capabilities and how good we are. By putting together our positive characteristics, it can make us not only see our self in a better light, but we will also want to live up to our own billing. Therefore, the resume has a positive and changing effect on who we are and who we can be.

In Summary

The resume announces you to the work world as to who you are, what you have done, what you can do and where you are trying to go. It sets the tone and is the foundation to getting interviews and eventually another job.

Your resume is a short work biography of you. It’s your “Best Selling Biography” that tells the work world you exist and you have something they want and need and they will pay you for what you have to offer. It is very important to spend the time, energy and creativity required to make a first-class advertisement of what you have to offer employers.

The resume is also a document that employers use as a screening device to discard you, therefore, you need to make this document one of the most important pieces of paper p\of your life. The resume is often the key to your career future, and eventually your job satisfaction, earnings and lifestyle.

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