How to Find Resume Writing Help

Finding resume writing help is an easy task with thousands of so-called ‘experts’ offering their services. Finding a high quality writer on the other hand is a task that takes more patience and cash. It is not uncommon for a professional jobseeker to hire a resume writing service for up to $500 only to find that they are left waiting months for the final result. In many cases, the resume is not up to scratch because the writer failed to interview the jobseeker and as a result, was not able to accurately describe the individual’s accomplishments.

An Increasing Trend
During the recession which many suggest we are still in the midst of, resume writing services were preparing tens of thousands of resumes each year with those looking for executive jobs willing to pay over $2,000. This may seem like an exorbitant cost but if the resume helps you land a job worth $100,000 a year, it is certainly worth it. For example, members of the financial service industry have been laid off en-masse and as a consequence, each financial job that comes available is contested by hundreds of highly qualified professionals.

Making the Right Choice
Choose the wrong resume writing service and you lose money and time, neither of which is acceptable in the existing job market. You need to carefully review the work of each resume writer you come across but the gap in quality on the market is profound. The samples you see should look customized and not the cookie-cutter garbage you often find online. It is also necessary to contact previous customers and find out more about the service they received and whether they were happy with the results. As most resume writing services ask for money up-front, this level of investigation is crucial.

It is also important to note that while several American associations certify resume writers, some bodies have more rigorous standards than others. Career Management Alliance are deemed to be one of the more reputable associations as they only confer the title ‘master resume writer’ on those who can prove they have a minimum of five year’s paid resume writing experience. This includes showing a wide range of completed works in a portfolio and successfully passing an exam. Re-certification takes place on a bi-annual basis and the writer needs to submit five resumes from clients in the previous two years as well as writing a two-page essay.

Below, we have six quick tips to help you find a professional resume writing service:
1.    Look for names of local certified writers from the websites of trade associations.
2.    Search for additional recommendations from colleagues/recruiters.
3.    Contact previous customers.
4.    Review all sample work with a fine-tooth comb.
5.    Find out the interview success rate of previous clients.
6.    Discover if the fee includes a guarantee of multiple revisions, phone consultations and safe storage of the document.

Bear in mind that some resume writing services will not be able to produce a writer that has enough of a grasp of your industry to create an attention-seeking resume. Nonetheless, if you find a high quality service, it will be worth every cent because a resume represents who you are to hiring companies and will ultimately be the difference between employment and the welfare line.

Proofread Your Resume, Please!

Before you send out your resume, you must proofread it. The task of proofreading a resume includes not only a spell or grammar check, but also a check on its visual presentation, readability, and rationality. A resume is a business document. It is sort of a business proposal. In a resume, you are proposing that the employer should interview you because you would be a good employee. When your resume has language, a presentation or rational errors, you are only hurting the case you are making for your employment value.

At this time of year, a lot of hiring and job searching occurs. So, I am getting a flurry of resumes to review. Lately, the results have not been great. With a sigh, I can only suggest to all job seekers, proofread your resume, please. Let me go through several real examples to illustrate the lack of proofreading that is occurring.

1. BULLET FORMATTING

•        Education

o        Times High School 2001-2003

o        State Area Technical Center

§         Multimedia Program 2002-2003

o        Central High School 2003-2004

o        Williams High School 2004-2005

§         Graduated May 21, 2005

o        Gary Technical College 2007-2008 

What's wrong with the above resume section? There are three layers of bullets and the section has too many lines. The owner of this resume used this bullet technique for the entire resume. There are about 100 bullets over the entire resume! Too many bullets make a resume hard to read. If you are unsure of a resume style, pass your resume around to teachers, family or friends. You may get some valuable feedback prior to sending your resume to a recruite.

2. PARAGRAPH FORMATTING

Whenever I receive a resume that is 6 pages long, I know someone hasn't taken a hard look at it. Six pages is not a rational length for a resume. Most resumes are 1 or 2 pages long. For a few people, it goes up to 3 pages, which is common for technical people who have equipment lists or project descriptions that are included in a resume. For this example, I saw the following:

James Wilson

10008 Main St. #362

Rialto, CA 90034

311-903-0000

name@name.com

The large spacing was a red flag for not setting the paragraph formatting on the menu bar of most word processing programs. In this case, the paragraph was set to leave a 16 point space after a line. No wonder the resume was 6 pages long! Single space everything on a resume. If you need a space between job entries, then insert a page return. 

3. BLOCKS OF TEXT

A resume should be presented in a manner such that a recruiter can skim the information quickly. Using lists, bullets, and textual emphases help a recruiter digest your career information quickly.  But, in this example, the resume owner did not give a thought to the readability of the resume:

Acme Tool Company, Dixon, IL

Assistant Pricing Coordinator - July 2010 to Present

Duties: Complete all price changes with use of hand held pricing tools and computerized scanners. Operations of store point of sale computer system, handle customer transactions while following company policies; procedures as associated to each transaction. Presentation of company Extended Service Plans on each qualifying product sold and benefits of HFT Club Membership to all customers. Assist in the replenishment and filling of merchandise on sales floor, set-up and replacement of displays, advertised items, missing labels, signs, and ad tags issued by outs program manager. Work in all new merchandise on a weekly basis, complete and post PC log. Detail each store section and perform POG verification while maintaining store appearance and cleanliness of displays and merchandise, shelving and display areas. Assist in training of new hires (management, cashiers, sales floor and warehouse personal). Other duties as assigned.

No one is going to read much less skim this block of text. You have to proofread your resume for readability. This person did not. So, she risks being passed over for another candidate who ensured her resume was easy to read.

4. PROOFREAD OUR RESUME FOR COMMON SENSE

A resume should be proofread for common sense. Re-read your resume statements. Do they make sense? Do they have meaning to the recruiter who will review your resume. Here's a recent example of an Objective that illustrates this problem:

Objective
To help everyone with anything they may need; also to work with all associates as a team member.

I surely will not fault the resume owner for highlighting the importance of team work. But, team work is not a resume objective.  As I cited above, a resume is a business proposal of sorts. This business proposal has a goal. The goal is to persuade an employer to hire you for a specific position. So, the objective must include some reference to a job that the employer is trying to fill. So, the objective as written is nice nonsense. Take some time to re-read what you have written. Does it make sense or nonsense? If the latter is the case, it's time to rework the language.

Can I Trust An Online Résumé Writer?

Finding an online résumé writer you can trust can be a difficult and frustrating process. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of services available and only a fraction of them can truly be relied upon. One of the main issues is the fact that the résumé writing industry is unregulated so just about anyone can refer to themselves as a professional résumé writer and set up a website. To make things even more difficult, even the most reputable companies work in a different manner to one another so a service that works for your friend may not be right for you. Read on for some tips to help you find an online résumé writer you can trust.

•    Samples: The most trustworthy résumé writing services tend to have ‘before’ and ‘after’ examples of their work on their official website. Your mission is to analyze their corrections and see if there is variety. You don’t want a service that only creates résumés using one single format and structure.

•    Marketing: As you know, a résumé is essentially your very own personal marketing tool. This means you need to choose a provider that knows who to market themselves. Does their website seem modern and well-maintained? Does their brand resonate with you and are you impressed by their marketing efforts? It’s a good idea to look at the social media presence of these businesses. If the résumé writing service is not using up to date techniques to market their own brand, they are clearly not good enough to help you market your skills.

•    Guarantees: Companies at the very top of the tree tend to offer 100% satisfaction guarantees because they have such faith in their ability. At the very least, you should choose a company that provides unlimited revisions to your résumé. Remember, there are so many companies in competition that it really is a buyer’s market.

•    Cost: We believe that cost should actually be one of the last considerations. While you want to pay less for more, beware résumé writing services that offer remarkably cheap services. In many cases, you get what you pay for which is not much! Writing a killer résumé takes a great deal of skill and experience so it really is a specialist vocation. At the end of the day, your résumé is supposed to represent you so paying a little extra for high quality should not be a problem.

•    Qualifications: While certifications and qualifications are not always an accurate representation of a service’s quality, they do increase the chances of finding a trustworthy provider. Some qualifications are more relevant than others so bear this in mind before being wowed by companies with a few letters after their name.

Follow the above tips to find a reliable résumé writing service online. If all else fails, check out customer reviews as these tend to paint a reasonable portrait of the company in question. One thing you must do is compare and contrast 4-5 different résumé writing services to get a reasonable comparison.

How To Handle Old Job Experience on a Resume

Today's NY Times published a news story about the difficulties older workers face in obtaining employment after a layoff. Older workers fear age discrimination, a loss of their homes from medical expenses and, most importantly, a loss of their personal self-esteem. I work with this age group in my job consulting service and they do face roadblocks, especially if they do not have high-demand skills (e.g., tech skills in the cloud, mobile and IT security sectors). But older workers get hired if they learn some inside tricks of the trade.

One of the issues older workers debate about is how to handle their job experience. They ask, if I place all my experience on my resume, employers will think I am too old, right? It's a valid concern. I have studied recruiter/employer sourcing behavior. It's like clock work: they look at the skills, the education and only the most current job; they never contact anyone for an interview for a job where the candidate's experience is not current unless it is in an area where there are no other job candidates. But this is a rare occurrence. 

So, how should a job seeker handle his/her job experience greater than 10+ years ago? Should you list all of it? Should you truncate your resume to only 10 years? And, if you shorten the time span of the resume, doesn't that amount to eliminating valuable job experience you developed over the years?

It's a tough question to answer. Let me go through a recent example to see how one job seeker handle the "age problem." After that, I will outline my recommendation on this topic.

This job seeker has more than 15 years of experience on this resume. He earned a Master's Degree in 2009 and was laid off in June 2012. Here is the basic outline of his job experience on his resume:
 
Operations Manager, ABC PROPERTIES, INC., Milwaukee, WI. (January 2005 – June 2012)

• Independently manage day-to-day business operations at Wisconsin Self Storage facility 
  Manage customer accounts, leasing, accounts receivables, delinquent accounts/collections, maintenance supervision, and security monitoring

Retail Manager, HORIZON CORPORATION, Gary, IN. (May 2001- January 2005)

• Assist with day-to-day business operations, collaborate with ownership to improve sales/service 
• Supervise and manage part-time employees; including selection, training, scheduling and accountability processes 

Assistant Testing Administrator, ILLINOIS STATE UNIVERSITY, Peoria, IL  (August 1998- May 2003)

• Mentor and advise undergraduate Psychology students for testing/exam purposes
• Supervise exams, assist students during exams, implement testing policies, ensured lab security 

OTHER EMPLOYMENT: Team Leader (AGC), Sales (Bill Owens VOLKSWAGEN), Shift Foreman (Caterpillar), Loading Supervisor (UPS)

This job seeker only mentioned his old experience (beyond 15 years ago). He clearly wanted a recruiter to focus on his most recent management experience. This is fine. But what got him to his most current position? Look at his early positions. They were all supervisory in nature. So, they support his career path and tell his career story. But look at the last position he detailed: Assistant Testing Coordinator. This looks like a low-level, administrative job that he was overqualified for. Why does this job merit a description yet a job as a Shift Foreman at Caterpillar does not?

In essence, he has chosen to strangle his most relevant and supporting experience because he wanted to highlight only his most recent jobs. I see this as the manifestation of his concern over his age. But has it served him well? At this moment in time he is still unemployed and interviewing. He's been passed over for jobs several times. I guess his approach isn't working that well.

All resumes have compromises. One cannot mention everything. If you did it would be a career manifesto instead of a resume! But, my recommendation is a compromise: choose the most relevant experience to detail on your resume for the specific position you are seeking. Everything else should be deleted. Experience older than 10 years is fine if it is relevant to the job application because it builds credibility. Here's how I would have done this job seeker's resume if he was seeking some type of operations management position:

Operations Manager, ABC PROPERTIES, INC., Milwaukee, WI. (January 2005 – June 2012)

• Independently manage day-to-day business operations at Wisconsin Self Storage facility 
  Manage customer accounts, leasing, accounts receivables, delinquent accounts/collections, maintenance supervision, and security monitoring

Retail Business Manager, HORIZON CORPORATION, Gary, IN. (May 2001- January 2005)

• Assist with day-to-day business operations, collaborate with ownership to improve sales/service 
• Supervise and manage part-time employees; including selection, training, scheduling and accountability processes

Team Leader, AGC, Hawkins, MO. (May 1995- January 2003)

• Provide leadership to team; communicate results and issues to adjacent shifts, complete manpower plans, conduct daily quality and productivity start-up meetings.  
• Train associates and temporaries, audit training and identify future training needs. 

 Shift Foreman, CATERPILLAR, Peoria, IL (May 1990- Jan 1995)

• Oversee safety and security procedures, implements organizational policies and goals, measures performance to budget.
• Supports the general supervisor in budget analysis and adherence, assists in production control projects, manages work pack in accordance with production control plan, plans overtime and schedules resources as required.

 This version has more impact despite the employment gaps, which can be explained if asked. It demonstrates a defined career path in the operations/production area and gives credibility for his being a good candidate for an operations management position. I deleted the least relevant and earliest jobs because they didn't add value to his hiring appeal.

What Resume Inconsistences Tell A Potential Employer

I have been reviewing a lot of resumes lately. It's that time of year where new graduates are launching their job searches and older job seekers are returning to the hunt after the holiday break. In the last week or so I have reviewed perhaps 150 resumes. The owners of the resumes appear to be intelligent and educated. But the one thing that all the resumes have in common is some kind of formatting inconsistency such as:

• Multiple font types and sizes
• Different bullet sizes and indent widths
• Varying number of spaces between resume sections
• Non-parallel structure of job duty statements
• Irregular order of employment information (job title, employer, location and dates)
• Missing information such as dates of graduation or employment

Granted, I was sent the resume because the owner felt it needed an objective eye. But, some of these inconsistencies and flaws are so basic that a sophomore in high school could catch them. This experience has made me pause and reflect: What do these inconsistencies tell a potential employer about the resume owner?

As the owner of a flawed resume, are you sending the message that you are not proficient in the use of a word processor or basic proofreading? When a college graduate uses bullets of different sizes and indent widths, I don't buy s/he can't use a word processor. After all, in four years of college, they probably wrote many term papers that contained bullets and surely their professor(s) would have pointed out such a basic error!

I think the problem goes much deeper and is at the heart of their employment value. Inconsistencies in formatting don't suggest a lack of proficiency to me. Rather, the inconsistencies I've cited above paint a picture of a person who does not check his work, who doesn't seem bothered by submitting flawed work, who can't tell if his work is flawed, and who may want someone else to do the 'heavy lifting.' This is not an attractive portrait, for sure.

You may feel I am being much too tough. After all, they contacted me for help, so aren't they doing the things that I imply they should being doing? That's a fair argument. But, let me broaden the example. The people who sent me their resume to review are asking for help. But, are there others who do not and think what they send out is just fine? Well, I have the perspective of being 56 years old -- a life time of work experiences behind me -- and 11 years in the job search assistance business. My perspective has told me that most people are not asking for help. Many people send out sloppy resumes and they don't understand why they are not being called for job interviews.

Today's job market can be unforgiving. For many jobs, employers can source 100 resumes or more. And, only a handful of those candidates will be called in for an interview. The rest of the group may get a rejection letter, but many will get nothing at all. How does one correct this problem? It comes back to my lead question in this blog article: What do resume inconsistencies tell a potential employer about you?

A resume is much more than a record of your employment and an inventory of your skills. Resumes tell a story about your career. How you succeeded (and failed). How you "built" the house of your career. But, on a deeper level, a resume tells a potential employer about you as a person and human being. You may be a crackerjack computer whiz but if you don't check your work, do I really want to hire you? You may have rare skills that I need but if you do not go the extra mile, so to speak, and do not do the best  job possible, will hiring you be more trouble than it is worth? If you are the most talented person I have interviewed in years, yet you do not have that "sixth sense" that tells you something isn't right and you need to find some help to correct the problem, aren't you wasting your talent because you don't know how to follow up?

You may say that I am being too picky. After all, resumes are uploaded into databases so formatting doesn't matter. You may even add that many employers want un-formatted resumes. If this is your defense for a error-ridden resume, you are missing my greater point as well as the purpose of a resume: to persuade. I am not persuaded by a resume owner who uses 3 different fonts on his resume and has a mish-mash of irregularities within it. The only thing I am persuaded of is the owner of the resume is disorganized.

How to Handle Virtual, Contract and Self Employment on a Resume

Many years ago, I owned a business and, after selling it, looked for a regular, full time job. I found out very quickly, self-employment was not always an asset; sometimes it was considered a threat to those who never started something new. I never got the job. About five years ago, on  a lark, I interviewed for full-time job that required a technical writing portfolio. While I was not looking for a job per se, I decided to go on the interview. When I interviewed with the boss, I was told that they had hired contract writers before (for this full time position) and it wasn't a good experience because they had a tendency to leave after 6 months because they wanted to "be free." I didn't get the job on that one, either.

I won't say all self-employed or contract workers experience difficulties in obtaining full-time employment, but as non-traditional work is growing, and people form S-corporations to run out of their homes, it becomes more important in how you handle this employment on your resume to prevent being screened out early in the hiring process or pose a threat to an insecure boss.

Early Career
How you handle this employment depends on your career level. If you are a new graduate and have taken a 3-month contract job to get some experience, you should consider the contract job as regular employment. Use the  same format you would for a regular full-time job. Sometimes job seekers will place "via ABC Staffing Agency" beside the name of the company you worked for. This technique clarifies the employment relationship. But, I have found this technique is unnecessary. Potential employers are more concerned about what you did and what you can do for them than what temp agency you worked for. In any event, the actual "employer" in your contract gig will come out in the first job interview. Just so everything can be documented, you will be fine.

Virtual employment is the newest kind of contract work. This type of work is done online via a bidding network such as elance.com, odesk.com, or vworker.com. Since the virtual worker doesn't work for these websites, and sometimes their actual "employer" is an individual or a business outside of the U.S., it becomes a more of a challenge in how this contract employment is treated on a resume. How you treat it would depend on who you work for and how long. If you had worked virtually for a business and provided remote tech support services, I would not mention the websites I cited above; rather, I would use the name of the client and explain on the resume that it is a "remote position." If you work for the company on a regular basis, you will have a supervisor or a project manager, so it is essentially like full-time employment.

However, if your virtual contract work consists of many employers over very short term periods (i.e., 1 day to 1 week), then I would use the website as the "employer" and describe five projects you worked on as bullet points. The challenge here is identifying your supervisor at the website because there is none. The website is simply a job task marketplace and a payment processor. You will then have to select one or more of the employers you worked for as your boss. Nonetheless, this is an imperfect solution, and that's why it is very important that you provide very rich detail about your virtual or non-traditional employment because the detail gives it a higher degree of credibility.

Mid Career
The way you handle contract or virtual employment on a resume changes when you have 5 to 10 years of experience. With this amount of experience, if you simply list your contract jobs as if they are regular, full-time jobs, you may inadvertently be labeled as "a job jumper," which has always had a negative connotation in the hiring process. Some hiring managers think job jumpers have problems holding a job or getting along with people and that makes them unreliable and someone to avoid hiring. But, even this is changing as the job creation of contract work is increasing at a more rapid pace than regular, full-time jobs. So, mid-career people should shorten the time span of their resume while deepening the information for each contract job. For example, instead of listing 10 contract jobs over the past 10 years, just list the last 6 you've had over the past 6 years. With the 6 contract jobs listed on your resume, double the information you use to discuss each job. List the skills you used on the job, the duties, the responsibilities, training completed, and the achievements.

Late Career
Consulting and contract jobs used to be the norm for late career professionals, not early- or mid-career people. After all, by the time you get 15 or more years of experience you have contacts, inside connections and a deep knowledge of products and services such that you run a job search in the hidden job market and your asking price would be above and beyond most pay scales. The problem created with contract work at this time is that with a long career, you have a greater chance of having employment gaps, career changes and other employment inconsistencies. So, a contract work entry on the resume becomes a common way to cover up these "red flags."

The solution is to provide incontrovertible evidence of what you do and who you did it for. This is a modification of the approach I described for the mid-career person. Let me illustrate this with an example:

I was working with a 50-year old job seeker who had a career of helping new ventures market their products. As is the nature of start up companies, the employment is short-term and contract-oriented. As we went over his resume, he first called himself a Business Development Consultant and did not identify an employer. The first red flag. Then he described his duties as: Preparation of business development plans with a view to securing venture capital for start-up businesses. Sounds somewhat vague, doesn't it? The second red flag. His goal was to find a steady, regular job as a Director of Marketing.

At face value, I thought, "good luck." But, there is a way to deal it. It's all about the detail. Even though he had a non-traditional employment, he could leverage it to his advantage by increasing the amount of detail and quantifying the achievements. So, he changed things around on his resume in the following way:

B2B-Contract and Consulting Business Service Provider
SUMMARY: Provided Business Development and Marketing Communication support for Start-up, Venture Capital and Emerging Industry Sectors.

• Consulted with the following companies: incom, inc., 4tobe.com, vanguardone.com, New Materials LLC, Nanotechnology Manufacturing, Inc.
• Interpreted market intelligence data enabling the overview and development of B2B business models, platforms, strategies, and market placement for $50-500K start-up projects
• Managed a $300K marketing budget resulting in $4 million in product sales
• Implemented business process development with a new operating procedures and IT platform resulting in an enrollment increase of 38% and a revenue increase of 22%

When a recruiter reads this entry, she does not see red flags because the detail is rich, objective and quantified. She has the name of the companies and can go research them or contact them for references.

How To Target a Resume to a Career Objective

An essential resume writing skill today is the ability to target a resume to a specific job ad or a career objective. The verb "target" is used in a special way in this context so let me define it. Years ago, job seekers would write a resume based upon their education and experience. It would have a standard format and functioned as an employment history record. Job seekers would take their resume, print out a 100 copies and send them out to employers. So, all the employers would receive the same resume, no matter what the job entailed. This is an example of an untargeted resume. These resumes were good enough to get interviews for their owners because employers had a small talent pool to choose from. But, in subsequent years, as technology has created a very large, documented and data-warehoused talent pool (via resume databases), the nature of how employers select resumes has changed. These changes drove changes in how resumes are written and the "targeted" resume was born.

A targeted resume is really a resume that emphasizes not simply a job seeker's skills and experience, but the relevant skills and experience for a specific job and a specific employer. So, a targeted resume is flexible and variable depending on what the employer says it needs in the job ad. So, the phrase "targeting a resume" describes the process by which a resume is closely adapted to the requirements delineated in a specific job ad.

A targeted resume is more than an employment history record. While it contains all your job experience, it also includes additional information that weights that information to what is relevant for a specific job application. It also contains more summary information that helps to focus the reader's focus on the relevant details. So, in a targeted resume, you will often see information repeated. This usually means that a targeted resume is longer than an untargeted resume. The length is not a problem since most targeted resumes today are transmitted electronically.

Let me work through an example. I had a client who asked me to rewrite his resume. He was a technology consultant and wanted to have his resume targeted to three different positions:

• Digital Media and Analytics
• Business Development/Client Service
• Start Up Operations/ New Ventures

His original resume was in the following format:

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, San Francisco, CA (2007 – Present)
Technology Consultant - Enterprise Intelligence (Analytics)

• Created SOWs and managed relationships that led to over $2M of work
• Managed 15 person team to integrate Salesforce.com with client’s core business system, which helped the sales/marketing process
• Tracked a global remediation for one of the largest banks in the world by working with teams of over 200 people in Poland and India

JP Morgan Chase Bank, Chicago, IL (2003 - 2007)                                    
Portfolio Analyst

• Optimized portfolios exceeding $2B in assets using internal platforms, Excel models and monthly reporting
• Won new business through developing high-profile relationships with portfolio managers
• Led a three person deal team over six months to resolve discrepancies in the group’s largest portfolio resulting in the recovery of $1.5M+ in funds

EDUCATION   

• University of Minnesota, B.S. Economics, May 2003

SKILLS

• Stradegy, AdBuyer, Microsoft Power Point and Excel, MySQL, Bloomberg, Adobe Photoshop, HTML, Certified Information Systems Security Professional/CISSP, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce.com     

(end of original resume)

The resume looks pretty good, doesn't it? He seems to be a highly skilled and experienced professional. But he wants this resume to be used for the three different objectives  I cited above. The reason this version of the resume would not achieve his goals is that it is an untargeted resume. Had a recruiter seen his resume in a database, she would call him for a technology consultant or a portfolio analyst position. That's all she has to go on -- his previous job titles or job skills. Nothing in this resume hints towards his interest in working for a new venture or his qualifications for a digital media job (What kind?) The resume reader (recruiter) doesn't have a reference to understand his interests or objective. When I asked him why he started with his experience and didn't even include an objective, he said,

"I have never had text at the top of my resume. However, having reviewed resumes in the past, I think that the less text, the better."

Clearly, he has a preference for an untargeted resume. But after a few email exchanges with him, I convinced him that to make his resume more appealing to a recruiter, he needed to target the resume. This process began with a little research. We reviewed a number of job ads and the stated requirements. I wanted him to learn what the employer wanted. In other words, I wanted him to think about his resume from the point of view of the employer. Then, for each position we expanded upon the skills and achievements he did that would be of interest or have relevance to the employer. But the actual targeting of the resume occurs in what I call the "header section." This section contains an objective, summary and key skills. The header section is drawn from the job ad, employer research, and the key attributes the job seeker wants to "market" to the employer.

The rewritten resume turned into the following:

Managing Consultant and Technology Entrepreneur 

Performance Improvement | Start Up Ventures | Digital Media

Entrepreneurial, collaborative, and versatile consulting professional with 7 years of progressive experience spanning project management, and process improvement across Business Development, Media, and Technology. Proficient at managing large, global client teams, creating strong relationships with client executives, and organizing activities across multiple business units to achieve aggressive project timelines. Able to leverage entrepreneurial skills as well as technical experience to foster an environment of mutual trust, high productivity, and accountability.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, San Francisco, CA (2007 – Present)
Sr. Technology Consultant  (2008 -- Present).

• Created SOWs and managed relationships that led to over $2M of work
• Managed 15 person team to integrate Salesforce.com with client’s core business system, which helped the sales/marketing process
• Interfaced with top executives and planned client and team outings, which led to stronger client relationships and more sales opportunities  

Consultant (2007 -- 2008)

• Tracked a high-profile global remediation for one of the largest banks in the world by working with teams of over 200 people in Poland and India under very short deadlines
• Gained hundreds of man hours by acting as project manager and taking the initiative to move 300+ resources to a faster share drive
• Used MySQL and visual analytics to display the data quality of every data element at one of the largest banks in the country

(end of rewritten resume)


While there are no hard-and-fast rules of creating both the header section and the targeted resume, you will know that you have properly targeted your resume when someone can quickly skim the resume and determine what you are seeking in a few seconds. The targeted resume has the additional benefit of a higher keyword density. This attribute usually will improve the resume's visibility and ranking in a resume database.