The Great Resume Challenge

The Great Resume Challenge 

Writing a resume is one of the most difficult things you will do in your professional career.  Not only do you have to remember what it is you have done over the course of employment at a company, you also have to express this to someone you’ve never met.  Though that doesn’t seem like an easy task, there are some freedoms inherent in this situation of which you can take advantage.

While at work you are usually responding to immediate needs and not thinking about how your particular cog fits into the larger machine.  Imagine being a small part of a car, such as a venturi in the carburetor of a Facel Vega.  You might not realize that your contribution, though seemingly small, is critical in making this whole car move down the road.

Having a comprehensive view of where you fit in can be challenging, especially when you’re that carburetor part and can’t see everything else that’s happening.  

So I have a few of my own personal tips for writing a resume that may help with gaining perspective and enticing your future to look at you with more interest:

• Write your resume from your future employer’s perspective.  They don’t want to know what you do now, they want to know what you will do for them.  Even though you might not know where the next job is, you can take a good guess at what they want from you.
• Demonstrate the fruits of your labor, not just what you have done.  Employers know that most people do a fair bit of routine work.  But they also want to see someone who has a head for their business and can bring unique skills.  Illustrate how you have met your business’ challenges and benefited your current and past employers.  Separating routine work from your results will help make it easier to avoid giving details on boring stuff.
• Focus your resume on the job you want.  It’s easy to list everything you’ve done at work, but some of that must have been unenjoyable.  Drop the stuff that you don’t want to do again and detail the work you found engaging.
• You are a product – sell yourself.  Think of the times you’ve wanted to purchase something expensive like a car.  Odds are you didn’t just go out and buy the first thing you saw, but rather comparison shopped.  The informed consumer tries to find the product that best suits their needs.  A company trying to find a new employee does the same thing.
• Presentation matters.  A resume is your own marketing material, so make it as attractive as possible.
• Two-pages or more.  That’s right.  I think the old one-page rule only applies to people fresh out of college or moving onto their second job.  If you don’t have enough content to spill onto a second page then you might not be the right person for the job.  Aim for a minimum of a page and a half.

The above rules have a few specifics that derive from them:

• Make it look like you put some effort into creating your resume.  As your first introduction to a company you don’t want to communicate that you are lazy and do slap-dash work – even if that’s fundamentally true.
• If you perform repeated tasks then describe the function you are doing and not the actual task.  E.g., completing a daily report could be written as “kept management informed of daily progress through standardized reporting.”
• Don’t make references to products or tools unless they are commonly known.  You can reference your mad Excel skillz but don’t mention that you are an expert at your company’s proprietary Florbco 9000 system.
• Write your resume in Word.  Even though this is marketing materials, using desktop publishing applications will just cause problems down the road.  Recruiters want the document in Word, and online job sites like CareerBuilder want a text version.  Word converts more easily to text than InDesign.
• Use color.  Color can draw the eye to specific content.  Delineate different sections of the page with subtle color use, or with small amounts of overt color.  Focus the reader on content you think is important.  Make your future employer want to go through the effort of using their color printer down the hall.
• Use columns.  A full page spread is very challenging to read.  You want this to be readable, and scanning across 7″ of text is tiring on the eye.  Word’s tables are better for creating the variously sized columns you will need to describe your work.
• If you really can’t fill more than a page and a half due to a lack of experience, try changing your layout to something that increases white space.  You can also adjust the kerning of your text.  Conversely, you can drop everything down to just one complete page that appears denser.
• Send a PDF copy at first.  The stability of PDF on various platforms along with the control over printing means that this is the preferable way of presenting yourself to a prospective employer.  Send a Word or text version only at someone’s request.

The overarching concept is that your resume should show your ass-kickingness through text, visuals, and readability.

To see a copy of my resume (with my address and phone number removed) click here.

If you look at my resume you will see how I have broken out the routine work from my results.  I personally believe that a skills section is very important because it allows you to reference all of your technical assets in one place.  Then you can leave those out of your successes.

Additionally, I have dropped nearly all of the work I don’t want to do again.  A good example is that at Time Warner Cable I developed a lot of Captivate training for our products.  It was a laborious and dreadful task.  But I’d love to tell other people to do it and guide them in making it right.

I hope these tips are valuable to you.  

Yr Fthfl Bddy,
Mike