Laboring under the delusion that one’s resume must, at all costs, be contained to a single page, too many applicants make the mistake of boiling their accomplishments down to succinct, trite phases.  While it’s still perfectly acceptable to present yourself as “an avid team player,” “bottom-line oriented,” and “embraces challenge,” it’s far more effective to expand upon those concepts in the text of the resume.

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Given the plethora of often conflicting advice emerging from self-professed career specialists, one would assume that the answer to this pressing question is “Yes.”  Thankfully, in accessing this site, you benefit from our thirty years of experience in crafting career-advancement documents, including our expertise in monitoring and implementing the resume writing trends that make sense.  Therefore, our answer to this question is, “No!”

Think about it.  If you were to totally customize your resume for every single job in which you are interested and qualified, you would never get a moment’s sleep.  All you can honestly do is highlight your skills and accomplishments to fullest advantage.  If you invent proficiencies or lie about your successes, how will you support these fallacies during an interview?  More importantly, how will you support them if you ace the interview and land the job?

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If we liken the job search to a game of Monopoly, and compare job applicants to the playing pieces moving around the board in search of prosperity, know this.  Without keywords as well as their proper placement in their resumes, job seekers will not advance past Go.  They will remain in holding patterns while their competition sails on, en route to securing choice jobs.

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“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” wrote Shakespeare, but remember, the Bard lived in a world more than four centuries ago.  In today’s cutthroat job search arena, the presentation of your name could very well be the make or break factor in securing employment.

Employers confronting thousands of resumes do not have the time or patience to struggle with the pronunciation of a candidate’s name.  If your name is lengthy, intricate, or exotic, consider altering it to something easier to pronounce.  We are not suggesting that you legally change your name; we are advising you to modify it as it appears on your resume and cover letter.  Arpin Chanawalla, for instance, can be abbreviated to Art Chana.

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Every rational job applicant wants to put his best foot forward with his resume, and this includes the addition of formal awards and honors.  But, before you take up the valuable limited space on your resume with these, think about what you will include.

As God is our witness, we have seen grown men (a number of them, in fact) insist that we add high school awards from many years before to their resumes, and women bent on including their standing in local beauty pageants (who’ve applied for positions in which physical appearance was a non-factor).

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Just as doctors normally make the worst patients, writers are often ineffective in conveying their skills and accomplishments on documents intended to create career opportunities.  And while core competencies may be apparent, the achievements of writers can appear elusive, at least, on a resume.

Unless one is a successful novelist or author of short stories, most writers hammer out and edit material in order to promote a product or a service, or persuade audiences to agree with a specific point of view.   The aspiration linked to this goal is usually the generation of revenue.  And while it can appear difficult to quantify revenue generation in terms of writing expertise, consider that “squeeze pages” have been known to spawn Internet campaigns netting hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars in sales volume, and that other forms of marketing material, at their most effective, have done the same.  If you can connect your abilities with similar feats, you will have identified your accomplishments for potential employers. Read the rest of this entry »