Professional Resume
The daunting prospect of creating the perfect resume is the first hurdle along the road to your dream job. A well written professional resume that communicates a clear message to the employer about who you are and what you offer is the key to getting an interview for the job you want.
When writing a resume, the central point to constantly be aware of is this: your resume is a piece of advertising. The product is you, and you are selling this product to an employer. You must always be conscious of what you have to offer and how that matches an employer’s needs. Many resume writers stumble at this stage. Focused too much on themselves, they cram their resumes with far too much information about all their achievements, job responsibilities, grades and everything else that, while feeding the ego of the applicant, does nothing to address the needs of the employer. Don’t fall into this trap. Your professional resume doesn’t need to say everything about you. It simply must say what you can offer them.
A resume must be easy to read. This goes with the point made earlier about not cluttering the resume with every single fact about yourself. A professional resume is concise, with short, bullet-pointed lists of only the relevant past job duties, education details, certifications and accomplishments listed. This is the point of following a format. Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” This is especially true in resume writing. Get in, say your piece, and get out. When you keep your resume short and targeted, it does more than convey the salient points in an effective manner. It conveys to the employer a sense that you are an efficient, no-nonsense professional.
The next major point, touched on here previously, is that a resume absolutely must be targeted. Never use a one size fits all resume that you send out for every single job you see. We can’t stress this point enough. You must rewrite your professional resume and tailor it to the job and the company you are applying for. Read the job posting carefully and examine your past job responsibilities, education and achievements. Find the ones that match the best and be sure to list them. We have already mentioned how your resume tells employers something about you as a worker. This is true here as well. If you have a catch-all, generic resume, they can tell. It shows them you can’t be bothered with attention to detail and don’t see the importance of giving coworkers, customers and even superiors the time and attention required. In short, it makes you look lazy. Show employers you are not that type of worker with a targeted resume.
A final word about who is reading your resume. Busy professionals probably won’t even read the whole thing. They just don’t have that kind of time. Make it easy on them. When using the short, bulleted lists we told you about, list the key pieces of information that are relevant specifically to them first. They may not even get through the whole list, so this makes absolutely certain they see what you can do to meet their particular needs right away.
The key to a professional resume that will get you the interview is to remember you are selling yourself, and then write accordingly. TV commercials aren’t 10 minutes long with exhaustive filibustering about every single thing a product does. They’re short, clear and targeted to a specific customer. Your resume needs to be the same if you want to move on to the next level.
