ResumeWrite

Most people receive the same instruction on how to write a resume, leading to mediocrity. Resumes should go beyond work experience and education, and focus on promoting attributes that will benefit the employer. Resumes should be sales documents that define the product (you), emphasize benefits, provide testimonials, and ask for the interview. Resumes should highlight goals, skills, and past accomplishments that have made a positive impact on previous employers' bottom line. Resumes should be adaptable to different media platforms. Most everyone has had some sort of formal or informal instruction on how to write a resume. Perhaps you took a class in college or have been coached by some outplacement firm, and many of you deal with resumes on a daily basis and know how tiringly similar they can be. Perhaps you've purchased one of the many books on the subject and have tailored your resume after one of the examples. The problem with all of these sources is that there are many thousands of people that receive the same instruction, a self-duplicating process that gives people the impression that mediocrity is the best that can be achieved. All the above sources take into consideration only a narrow point of view of what a resume should contain. There is no amount of logic that can be applied to the construction of a resume that can guarantee that any particular person will respond to it on any given day. Given the dynamic nature of human personality, a human resources manager might like your resume this morning but think it is boring and unmoving this afternoon. Most people think of a resume as a summary of work experience, education, and training, a historical document full of facts that cannot be changed. True, you can't change history. What you have done is unalterable. You can dress it up and emphasize the positive, but you can't change it. Most resumes you see contain the same information you'd find on an employment application, but the hiring decision is an emotional decision. Given the several applicants with essentially the same qualifications, humans tend to choose humans they like, who they think they will work best with. Employers hire those people who seem to be most committed to helping their business make or save money in a way that is compatible with how the prospective employer believes business should be done. If you can promote those attributes in a resume, in addition to your basic qualifications, you have a much greater chance of securing an interview. After all, that is what a resume should accomplish, getting the interview. When you write a resume, approach it from the standpoint of it being a sales document. You must define the product, emphasize benefits of owning that product, provide testimonials of how that product has performed for others in the past, and ask for the order, the interview, in the case of a resume. Where most resumes fall short is in the fact that they only contain the testimonial part of the sale. It would be like my trying to sell you resume writing services by only saying, well, I've written resumes for over 10,000 clients, I'm sure I can do one for you too. But think about it. That's not enough. You want to know what I can do for you relative to your needs. So the same thing should be true in your resume in order for it to have maximum effectiveness. You need to define what it is you intend to do for the prospective employer, tell him what benefits he can expect to derive from having you do it, and provide examples of how you have done those things for employers in the past that have made a positive impact on the employer's bottom line, and then ask for the interview. All of these things and more should be achieved in your resume. Focus on your goals and identify exactly what it is you hope to do for your next employer, what skill sets you wish to use, and define how those skills will have a positive effect on your prospective employer's bottom line. Dig into your previous employment to find those little nuggets of accomplishment that can be quantified to show how you made previous employers more profit. And put it all together in a format that will accommodate the variety of media available for you to use in getting the word out about your availability in today's diversified world.