You want feedback on your new resume before starting your job search. But who gives the best resume advice? Who among your family, friends or colleagues should you turn to to get constructive feedback? Probably none of them. Occasionally when I’m working with a client, they report feedback from “my brother-in-law,” “my manager,” or “the…
When clients send me their resumes in a template that they downloaded from the Internet, I immediately copy and paste the information into a Word document, and work on the resume in Word. Sometimes, when we’re done with the content, the client asks when I’m going to make it look “nice,” or “more professional.” I’m…
You have to stop sending out meaningless resumes. Hard stop. What makes a resume meaningless? Listing responsibilities without context. A section devoted to keywords (I see you, ATS slaves) without context. Details so outdated that they do you more harm than good. Let me explain, one point at a time. Listing responsibilities without context. Perform…
If you want to connect with your target employers, stop thinking of your resume as a history of your work life. It’s not. You are the product, the employer is the consumer, and your resume is how you market yourself. So when the occasional client is perplexed as to why I removed portions of her…
Your resume isn’t an autobiography of your career. Resumes are marketing tools intended to take job candidates to the next step in the hiring process, which is to get interviewed by the hiring manager. To market yourself strategically requires presenting potential employers with a value proposition that aligns with the position they need to fill.…
Don’t get me wrong; college degrees are wonderful for a variety of reasons, but college degrees aren’t good predictors of employee success. Your college degree tells employers absolutely nothing about how well you’ll do on the job. When I was running human resources in financial services, telecommunications and a SaaS company, I routinely skirted hiring…
Allowing the headline for your profile to default to your title and the name of your employer is the biggest mistake you’re making on LinkedIn, and it’s one made by the majority of people on the site. Why is it a mistake? Well, LinkedIn is, in its own words, ” a business and employment-oriented online…
If you are a government employee about to retire and enter the private sector, be prepared for radical changes to your resume. The biggest – and potentially upsetting – change will be that most of what’s on your resume is irrelevant to companies that you’re interested in. Resumes for government employees entering the private sector…