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Since when is resume writing a high-society experience? It all depends on the beneficiary of the resume writing and on the resume writer.
Guest post by Paul Freiberger, President of Shimmering Resumes, a professional resume writing service.
Even Celebrities Need Strong Resumes
I recently offered to write a professional resume for Paris Hilton. The socialite’s grandfather had just decided to give 97% of his fortune to charity.The poor thing clearly needed help with resumes.
Pity for Paris, our high society debutante? Perhaps. But her situation illustrates an important point about professional resumes.
Paris Hilton has high aspirations, but her lifestyle and career planning actions don’t always seem to support her goals.
That’s nothing a little professional resume writing couldn’t cure. Surely she wouldn’t just look over my resume samples and compose her own all by herself. She needed a professional resume writer of her own.
This is what I said at the time:
Freiberger said he is not seeking Hilton’s endorsement for a line of resumes or CVs. Should she offer one, Freiberger has not decided what he would do.
“But if I can help Paris Hilton with career planning and get her a real job, that will be good for society. And for her,” Freiberger said.
The Case for Professional Assistance in Writing Resumes
Amazingly, some job applicants pay scant attention to their resumes and never consult a professional resume writing service. Perhaps they believe that employers will deduce their merits in the absence of evidence, or think the competition will be weak. Or perhaps they just dislike the effort of creating one.
Almost always, they haven’t thought the process out, for they are flying into heavy weather in a rickety biplane.
A professional resume is important even if you think you don’t need it and can get interviews through your connections. Certainly Paris Hilton has connections.
So why create a professional resume? You can’t be sure when you might require one, and you don’t want to toss it together overnight. A resume also helps you organize yourself and see the full picture of your accomplishments and abilities. Most people take these for granted and may not have them uppermost in their mind at an interview.
Resume Tips From a Pro
Think about the purpose of your resume
Your resume is a marketing device. It’s a biography, but a very special one: brief and almost all highlights.
Think of it as a persuasive argument. Your point is: I am the person you want to hire. I’ll give you the best payoff. The entire nature of the resume flows from that.
Tailor it to the audience
Don’t develop your professional resume and cover letter by simply adding new jobs and achievements on top of old, as trees add layers. Instead, shape the resume to the position you are applying for.
Highlight your accomplishments, not your titles and duties
Why? Anyone can warm a chair. And many people can carry out a job in a perfectly respectable way. But you are competing and you must stand above others.
Think of the resume—and everything in the job search—from the employer’s perspective. Your most important accomplishments can have a dramatic quality: problem, action, resolution. You can describe the difficulty, what you did, why, how your action helped, and what it meant.
It’s one thing simply to say you increased operating profit 35%. It’s another to say that the company was facing a crisis, revenues weren’t increasing, and you solved the problem. You underscore the impact.
Don’t overdo it.
If you describe your accomplishments in excessive detail, the resume can become unpleasant to read. Ironically, it can imply that you are not effective.
Stress your abilities
Think about what you are good at, and emphasize it.
If you want to stress intellectual problem-solving skills, think of a knotty problem that arose and spell out how you resolved it.
If you are strong on leadership, show how you provided a vision or developed and motivated a team to make unusual accomplishments.
Emphasize recent accomplishments
Omit or briefly mention achievements from longer than 15 years ago, and focus most intensely on your most recent work. A resume is not a curriculum vitae, which lists everything you’ve ever done. It’s a summary and a pitch.
Don’t omit accomplishments
Surprisingly, you may not recall all your achievements at first. You probably take them for granted. You may also have made significant contributions to company goals without the sense that they were your own.
Yet if you omit important achievements, such as your role in increasing EBITDA, the employer will naturally assume they never occurred.
So spend time accumulating the full roster of what you have done.
Be sure the key points jump out at a glance.
A glance may be all you’ll get. But even if you get more, highlighting the most important points makes it easier for the screener. Those points will sink in deeper.
Make sure the resume is well-written.
A clumsily-worded resume suggests you are a bad communicator. It also fails to make the points you want and overall suggests you operate at a lower level.
This conclusion can be unfair, since many great executives are not great writers, but your resume is your speaking voice here.
Avoid jargon
Resist the temptation to flash expertise by using terms the reader may not understand. You risk beclouding your argument and turning off the resume screener.
Of course, unfamiliar terms are sometimes essential, especially in science or high tech. “EBITDA,” mentioned above, is jargon to some, yet no substitute exists.
Ultimately, the test is necessity: Do you really have to use a potentially unclear word?
Avoid cliches
Screeners’ eyes glaze over when they see terms like “self-starter” and “team player.” They are so common that the mind grows numb to them.
Convey the same idea in other words and you can make the point freshly and effectively.
Avoid egotism.
Bragging can sabotage your case. Describe yourself as a “genuine visionary” or “born leader,” and you raise questions about your character.
After all, what true leader goes around boasting about it?
If you really possess these qualities, you can show them in your past achievements, to much greater effect.
Show your care for detail.
Both you and the employer know how important the resume is to you. If it has careless errors, the screener will reasonably assume the rest of your work is sloppy too.
Try to avoid thinking about content as you proof. When the mind seeks meaning, as usual in reading, it is liable to skip over typos. We just don’t see them.
Focus letter-by-letter and word-by-word, and the invisible yields up. The process will feel unnatural, but the resume is short and this effort can make the difference in you getting the job.
Make it attractive.
This is one area where you can really gain on competitors, since so many resumes look flat and glum, making the task of poring through them unappealing.
Why do so many resumes have that battleship gray appearance? One reason is that many people assume it’s standard for resumes. This is simple nonsense that comes from ignorance, from the fear that some authority may have ordained it.
It’s all about impression here, and a good-looking resume will convey the right subliminal cues to the reader. If you think design doesn’t matter much commercially, look what Steve Jobs has done with it.
Be brief.
The less you say, the less chance you give the screener to reject you. And that’s the key goal.
Moreover, the person reading the resume will likely form an impression of you that is an average of everything you state in the document.
If you mention just your highlights, that average will be high. Mention everything and the average swoons. Be succinct.
Paul Freiberger is President of Shimmering Resumes, a professional resume writing service and career counseling service with its website at www.ShimmeringResumes.com.
On this site, you will find excellent before-and-after resume samples showing the quality resume writing service provided by Shimmering Resumes.
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[...] - bookmarked by 2 members originally found by VenetianPrincess on 2008-08-20 Professional Resumes and the Debutante http://www.employmentblawg.com/2008/professional-resumes-and-the-debutante/ - bookmarked by 6 [...]
Paul, Great advice on resume writing. In addition to saying “I am the person you want to hire,” a resume should really say “I actually want to work for *this* company.” When I used to read resumes, I used to always think, “does this person want a job *here* or do they just want any job?” To that end, if an applicant can demonstrate a commitment to the company through relevant experience, achievements and activities, I think an employer will really be able to see that the applicant is a real fit, not just someone to fill a chair. This is especially true in today’s grim market.