Summary of tips. It’s everywhere lately. Honestly, there is so much of it that a job seeker would have to work hard not to be bombarded by it. Do this. Do not do that. Make sure you have this. Make sure you don’t have that.
Not only is the amount of advice overwhelming, but it is also often contradictory. In fact, I met a job seeker last week whose first comments were, “Please don’t give me any more resume advice!”
Can’t say I blame him. I’m not sure I’ve ever known a profession like ours where we try so hard to make people our equals. Do the attorneys explain all aspects of the law to you when they work with you? Do accountants teach you all the nuances of the tax code? No, they tell you what you need to know and answer your questions, but they don’t teach you to be lawyers and accountants.
For some reason, we career professionals seem to feel the need to turn everyone else into us.
And it seems that we feel the need to do so in such a general way that we often raise contradiction after contradiction. My job seeker above was mostly frustrated because blog after blog relayed different advice on how long your resume should be, how the summary/profile section should be organized, and how much to rely on bullet points. Every “career professional” who reviewed her resume had something different to say and, yes, often contradictory. Not only that, but recruiters said one thing, hiring managers said another, and resume writers said another.
No wonder so many job seekers are skeptical about paying for resume services! It seems we don’t know what we’re talking about!
And they walk away without appreciating us, but stick to all these edicts (“resumes can ONLY be 1 page long”, “resumes should ONLY use bullet points, “resumes should ONLY have 10 years of work history) that sometimes they may need to be adjusted to meet the specific needs of that customer’s audience.
Instead of bogging job seekers down to the nitty-gritty details (and I’m as guilty as the next professional) of resume details and so-called “rules,” maybe we should take a different approach and explain all the factors that go into the development of a resume. strategy, which then determines the length, number of bullets, etc.
Hey, maybe we should market our “value”, which is not that we know how to organize things on a page in a nice format, but that we actually know how to “sell” a client on paper to the audience he or she is dealing with. reaching.
And maybe before we give advice on what the resume looks like and whether they met all of our edicts, we can remind clients that writing a resume, like any form of marketing, isn’t an exact science, that you’re playing a game of probabilities. . it all depends on how well you can anticipate not only the needs of the reader(s) but also their preferences.
