Rewriting the resume.

A few posts back I promised a review of my resume critiques.  If you are very proud of, or attached to your resume, then you had better grow some thick skin when you present your resume for a critique.  The common, initial review that you can expect: "You're resume fails to sell your most important qualities."  (Wow! That person on the other end of the email in that city 2,000 miles away REALLY knows you!).  Of course they feel it fails to sell you, they're in business to convince you that your resume is weak and that you need their services to clean it up and make it marketable.  Regardless what decision you make, remember that you are dealing with sales people and a little research on your own first may be helpful.  If you've read my previous posts, you may now be calling me on the fact that I recently paid for a resume rewrite.  Yes, I did.  I stated my reasons clearly and I chose the service that I felt offered the best results.

My experiences with resumes is limited to the Operations/Logistics field.  Other fields certainly have a different audience and resumes targeting those fields would have their own style demands.  But one guiding point is constant across all of the fields: You must sell yourself.  In today's market, a resume that simply tells an employer what you were responsible for doing doesn't do the trick.  Your resume must demonstrate what you did that helped the bottom line for your company.  I wrote about quantifying your results previously and this is where all of that comes into play.

Styles vary and their effectiveness varies as well.  A general point, keep the overall style simple, if a resume is too busy it may be received negatively; though a Marketing type may appreciate the extra effort.  A standard rule of thumb for style nowadays is as follows.  Three sections: an executive summary of who you are and what you can do; a key skills section listing areas of expertise (this is primarily for the computer scanner's benefit); and the employment summary section.

Finally, be careful of headings in boxes within your resume (title sections, etc). These can often cause formatting issues when uploading on a company's website.