CM Access

I hear this question from friends, family, friends-of-friends, and a lot from candidates seeking career transitions or new professional opportunities. So I wanted to include some thoughts for those who already know the “make sure there aren’t typos” rules.

A lot of professionals with more than 10 years of experience struggle with keeping a resume fresh, relevant and concise. “Should I keep it to one page in total length?”

I say no. The resume needs to tell a story. If you need more than one page to do it (and a smaller-than-legible font doesn’t help either!) then so be it. Each position you’ve had should be tailored to add to the ultimate goal you’re trying to reach. Bullets are helpful for an outline, but make it easy to fall into the trap of using phrases and fragments, which lead to talking about daily tasks instead of your actual contribution to the company or position. Each piece of your work history should include a problem you were faced with, your solution, and the results based on your efforts. However, the information included needs to be relevant to your objective and to the field within which you’re hoping to be hired.

The truth is, each person you ask for advice about your resume is going to give you a different opinion. How does one deal with such wide-reaching variations of the same end-goal (i.e. creating the resume that will get you noticed)? RESEARCH. Books, blogs, magazines, experts, the information is out there!

This short post from the Wall Street Journal had some good suggestions:

Talk to professionals in your field. Look for successful people in your chosen career field and human resources managers in that area. They’ll be able to tell you what employers want to see. … Search for résumés in your field. Teachers’, tech workers’, journalists’ and stockbrokers’ résumés will vary widely — what’s included and in what order, how many pages, references included or not, and so on. Look for a “best résumés” book for your field. You might check out “2500 Keywords to Get You Hired,” by Jay A. Block and Michael Betrus. It offers keywords to bolster your résumé, no matter what field you’d like to enter.

To be a successful job seeker, you have to know your competition, and your target. What is the hiring manager going to be looking for? Your resume has to mirror that of the person currently in the role you seek, and you have to far exceed them! The best way to get this information is by being involved with leaders in your field, through associations or volunteer organizations, and by asking for help from people who know: recruiters, mentors, authors.

I found a great book about improving a resume. It offers tons of before and after versions of resumes for a variety of industries, and explains how to integrate more information into the standard format most employers expect to see. The World’s Greatest Resumes by Robert Wm. Meier might seem like some to be a very presumptuous title from a relatively unknown guy. But he’s been in career consulting for a long time, presents the information very objectively, and makes it accessible to all levels of experience. The more knowledge you accumulate, the more opportunity to form your own, informed, opinion.

I’m definitely a grey-area person and don’t believe there are hard and fast rules about a stellar resume. But simple guidelines are always helpful and appropriate and can be found in so many places now-a-days. You just have to do the work.

Technorati Tags: Resumes, How to improve a resume, research, resume advice, resume answers

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 8:15 am and is filed under Resume, FYI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.