How to Write a Devastatingly Good Resume

Resumes are the first thing an employer sees that is your work product. Rest assured, that if you send in a resume filled with errors, what you’re saying is “Hire me—I make mistakes!” Today, at a time of record unemployment in the US and around the Western world, employers are in the buyer’s seat. According to latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, currently there are 14 million Americans out for work. The overall unemployment rate is 9.1%. An additional 9.3 million of us are “underemployed”—working part-time while seeking full-time employment.

Now, more than ever, you have to approach each job possibility as a precious opportunity. For white collar jobs, you can safely assume that almost all of the applicants are submitting resumes at the same time as you are. That's a virtual river of resumes. How do you make your resume stand out? What is the best approach to writing a resume? How can you make your resume more impressive? And, if you have a great background, how can you craft a resume that is devastatingly good?

The Job of Your Resume

Your resume has 2 simple jobs. Job One is to get itself read. Job Two is to get you pass the first cut-off and into the interview round.

Here are 8 Rules that can help you build a resume that aces both these jobs:

1. Perform, Don’t Just Write

Not all resumes are right for every situation. Tailor your resume for each job. Resumes are a stage, and you are the performer. As anyone who has ever been to a concert knows, it’s not just what they sing that’s makes a concert “good”, it’s when they sing it—and how they sing it.

If you have paid to attend a rock concert and the performer starts singing country music, you’re going to be disappointed. The same holds true with resumes.

If the job calls for a specialist with a graduate degree in economics, and you start off by telling them all about your work history, then you’ve already lost your audience. Game over.

They will tune you out —or worse, they will just stop reading. People need what they need, when they need it. Give it to them.

Take your clues from the job description. If the job description starts off by emphasizing the requirement for a specific type of education, then you must start your resume off by emphasizing your education background. Give the audience what it wants. Deliver the songs they expect.

2. Never Save the Best for Last

But in one important respect, resumes are not like concerts. In a concert, performers often order their songs by saving the best for last. That’s the opposite of what you should do in a resume.

In a resume, hit them with your best song at the beginning. Concerts build up to a climax. Resumes should start off with the climax.

Why? Because the job of your resume is to get read. If you don’t grab your prospective employer’s attention by the first or second sentence, the concert is over. Your potential “fan” will just get up and leave. And you will be left singing to an empty concert hall.

3. Sing in the Right Key. Jobs and industries have different styles that are right for them. A highly technical industry like chemical engineering requires a different style of resume than a creative industry like fashion design. One requires flair. In the other, showing flair will mark you as an oddball.

4. Spell Check. Then spell check again. Then spell check again. Then check your spelling.

5. Use Parallelism. What is parallelism? Simply put, the way each section is organized should match the way all other sections are organized. If the first job you list shows the years you worked for that job, then all other jobs you list have to also show the years you worked there. No exceptions. Sections and subsections that just don’t match in format to other sections or subsections shouts “I am disorganized” or “I don’t think in an orderly way”. You won’t get the job.

The basic rules are

· Match sections style to section styles.

· Match subsection styles to subsection styles.

6. Decide on Punctuation and Stick to One Style. Use periods or not? Whatever you decide, be consistent. Each resume section and subsection should end the same. If you end section 1 with a period, then end all other sections with a period. If you end them with semicolons, then match that style throughout. Most word programs can help you do this.

Put yourself in the shoes of the employer/human resources professional who is assigned to read dozens if not hundreds of resumes for a single job. Over time, you start to get efficient at zeroing in on what you see first in a resume, what you see second etc. If you encounter a resume with mismatched styles, you are just that much more likely to dump it. You just don’t have time to seek out the “inner quality person” hidden beneath all that disorganized presentation.

7. Use verbs. Compare these 2 sentences.

“My responsibilities included conducting the first level of interviews for applicants who were then evaluation by senior staff architects.”

“Screened applicants for later evaluation by senior staff architects.”

The second one gets you into the action quicker. It has more velocity.

8. Use Details. You know the old saying ”the devil is in the details.” Well, it’s not just the devil in those details. Your life is in there too. Detail matters. In fact, details are almost all that matters. Don’t assume that you will have time to explain this or that important fact at the interview. As you know, if the resume doesn’t “catch the imagination” of the employer, you won’t get to the interview. As you tell the story of what you did in each job, use detail.

Don’t say: “ analyzed chemical compositions”.

Say instead: ”completed 89 assays of synthetic polymers including silicone, polyethylene and nylon”.

Don’t say : “organized plans for work projects in Europe”.

Say instead:“completed on the ground field work for 15 companies in France, Germany and Portugal”.

What do you think of these resume rules?