Resume Help Blog

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.