Resume Help Blog

Archive for the ‘Write A Resume’ Category

Here is a brief list:

1. How would you describe yourself?
2. To be successful in this career, what do you think it takes?
3. Do you have the qualifications and personal characteristics necessary for success in your chosen career?
4. Why should we hire you?
5. What are your long-term goals and objectives?
6. What major problem have you handled recently? Did you resolve it? How?
7. What characteristics do you think make a manager successful?
8. Why did you apply to our company?
9. How do you approach critical assignments?
10. If you had to think on your feet to solve a difficult situation, what would you do?
11. Why were you fired?
12. What steps do you take before making an important decision?
13. Name the most difficult assignment you had and how you finished it.
14. What kind of supervisor do you prefer?

As you can see, the questions are open-ended, not allowing for a simple yes or no answer. The more you talk, the more the hiring authority learns about you. That’s why you need to be prepared before you utter one word. Each answer must be crafted carefully to maximize your chances of being hired.

Your Resume is the one step in your job search over which you have total control. It is your personal career marketing document. Based upon the strength of that one or two pages of information, you will either be selected for an interview from among potentially hundreds of other candidates – or passed over.

The Resumes Function

The purpose of a Resume is not to get a job! Its purpose is to get an interview. And the competition is stiff, get used to it.

Put yourself in a Human Resource Director’s shoes. The morning’s mail has just arrived and a stack of 100 or 200 Resumes have been dropped on your desk. Your first goal is going to be narrowing down that stack to perhaps 10 or 20 candidates. So the first function a Resume serves is to eliminate most candidates from consideration.

Job recruiters spend approximately 15 seconds looking at each Resume. In that short time, they make a decision to place you in the “yes” pile or in the “no” pile. Is this fair, I don’t know but that’s the real world. Your job is to make your resume “stand out” from all the rest. If you have never written a resume before then it probably is a good idea to get professional help. Isn’t that expensive? You have already spent approximately $40 – $60,000 getting the college education you need but that is only the beginning. Now it’s time to go into the real world and going it alone isn’t the best idea.

Remember, this entire process happens solely on the strength of your Resume.

Should You Write Your Own Resume?

Probably not- unless you are a skilled professional writer who can also honestly look at your own strengths and weaknesses objectively. While there are dozens of “do-it-yourself” Resume books on the market, the truth is that if you do your own Resume, it is being prepared by an amateur.

Does it make sense to spend four years and $40,000 to earn a college degree and then market that investment to employers with a do-it-yourself Resume? Or to have solid credentials and a salary level of $30,000, $60,000 or $100,000… and use a less than professional Resume to represent you?

Think of a company like Coca-Cola. The executives who work for Coca-Cola probably know that product better than anyone else. Yet Coca-Cola uses a professional advertising agency to create the messages that are designed to sell us on buying Coca-Cola.

The Professional Resume Writer

Hiring a professional resume writer serves the same purpose in selling you to a potential employer as Coca-Cola’s advertising agency in selling their products to consumers. You’re getting the benefit of an expert who writes resumes every day and who knows how to present a client’s background and credentials to best advantage.

For example, there are three standard Resume formats: The Chronological, Functional and Modified (which is a combination of Chronological and Functional). Deciding which format will best present your career history is a critical strategic decision before the first word is ever written on paper.

Most job candidates also fall into one of three categories that are detrimental to the success of a do-it-yourself Resume:

1. Those who are reluctant to “brag” about their past accomplishments and successes and tend to underplay the specific information an employer wants to see in the Resume. Sometimes a candidate simply doesn’t realize how important some detail of his/her past performance would be to a future employer.

2. Sometimes the candidate says too much. Even though the candidate would be perfectly qualified for the available position, she/he can appear to be over-qualified, or a threat to the hiring manager, or too narrowly focused in one aspect of the job instead of being a generalist.

3. Finally, there may be some aspect of a candidate’s past that can be difficult to present on the Resume: frequent job changes, a long period of unemployment, lack of a college degree normally required for a particular position or the lack of any actual work experience in this particular field (career change, graduating students, military personnel returning to civilian job market), etc.

A professional Resume writer is an objective third party with the expertise to draw out relevant information from your work history, tone down the extent of your achievements, if necessary, and provide strategies for overcoming any difficult or negative aspects in your job search.

I know that parts of this aretilce are so basic that it will appear to some of you as third grade curriculum. To others who may not have been in the work force for awhile it will be necessary reading. So with that said let’s begin.

What exactly is a resume and the purpose?

Simply put a resume is a review of your work history. This article is about “How To Write a Resume.”  It only explains the purpose of having one. If you have never written one then you need to do it right. Consider hiring a professional service to get you started.

If you have a long work history going back 20+ years it’s not necessary to review your whole life. Just the last four to five jobs you have held, the position, responsibilities, acknowledgments etc. It should be well written (we will show you how to do that further down). The purpose – is to get an interview! Like anything, you have about 15 – 20 seconds to grab the readers attention. Fail to do that and your resume goes in the trash.

Who needs a resume?

Anyone who needs a job, whether it is to change careers, or stay within the same type of job needs a resume. If you are new to the work force, whether just out of college or a stay at home mom/dad this gives you the opportunity to display your abilities and skills. Even if you are going to an interview through the referral of a friend you need a well written resume. If it is well written it will answer many questions the interviewer may have. Now if the position is making hamburgers at McDonalds or tacos at Taco Bell this won’t necessarily apply. For any other type of employment (manufacturing etc.) it is an absolute necessity, and it must be done right!

Can I write it myself or is it complex?

Anyone can write a resume themselves but will the person you want to impress read it? Well, that’s another story. Our goal is to offer help with this to make sure you have the best chance of gaining the interview. Even a first time job seeker needs the best resume they can have, and we don’t mean on fancy, watermarked paper. If your content doesn’t grab their attention your fancy paper won’t either.

Why might I need to have my resume professionally written?

If the job you are applying for pays minimum wage, then you don’t need to spend a lot of money for this service. A quality Resume Template is what you need. However, that doesn’t mean that you can sit down and in 15 minutes crank one out. The idea that you can successfully do this is a myth.

Over the years the type of resume required to obtain a quality job has changed. If you have never written a resume then you do need guidance in what the corporate world is looking for. You will only have 15 to 20 seconds to get the readers attention so quality counts.