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Four Common Resume Disasters


A lot of people ask me if the resume they wrote stinks. It often does. Not only that, but many resumes that people have paid a pretty penny to produce also stink. Even though your best friend says it’s the world’s best resume, you MAY need to burn it, delete it, get rid of it before anyone sees it.

Here are some common resume disasters that kill people’s chances of getting hired:

The Life Story Resume (aka Bore 'em To Death Resume)
You can’t bear to part with anything from your career history. That job you left back in 1982 is utterly fascinating and needs to be on the resume. That three-month temp job was interesting and can’t be omitted. Consequently, your resume goes on and on and on and on and on and on.

The other day, someone sent me a seven-page resume! That’s five pages too long.






The Compost Bin Resume
This is a cousin of the life story. You wrote your resume way back when—and you got hired with it. So every time you change jobs, you haul it out, add your latest job to the top and send it out. This is the compost bin approach: today’s banana peels, orange rinds, and coffee grounds go on top of yesterday’s rotten lettuce and broccoli stems.

It is critical to reevaluate yourself, being sure to ask important questions like these:
  1. Who am I today?
  2. How have I changed since I wrote my last resume?
  3. How have the markets changed?
  4. What skills am I selling today?
  5. How image/brand do I want to convey? 
  6. What part of my experience is most relevant?
The Chair Warmer Resume
Some folks can’t seem to articulate their accomplishments or how they’ve made a difference. Consequently, the boss is left thinking you’ve just been warming a chair.
I’ve seen very accomplished people whose resumes are just dry histories of companies, titles, and duties. Remember, your resume is a sales document. If it fails to make the boss think, “I’ve got to talk to this guy/woman!” it’s not doing its job.

You’ve got to speak the boss’s language. The boss craves people who get results!  He (or she) has tough issues to resolve to accomplish company goals and advance his career.

Remember, it’s great if those results are quantifiable, but many people’s work isn’t easily translated into numbers.  It just takes more work to find the right words to express your achievements with power.

Even sales and marketing professionals often struggle to identify their accomplishments, let alone express them powerfully. It’s hard to market yourself. You’re too close to yourself and can’t get an outsider’s perspective.

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Want to do your resume right? Do you want to discuss your career situation? Call me.  No obligation.  847-673-0339.
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The Lost In Space Resume
If you haven’t properly prepared the resume for the Applicant tracking systems, it won’t be found. [NOTE: Just submitting to online postings is a huge mistake in itself. You’re competing with everyone else for jobs that usually aren’t the best jobs]. It’s important to plan which keywords to use and to reflect the way they are expressed in the job description. More on this in an upcoming blog post!In a tough job market, all your job search tools:  resume, verbal  presentation, strategy, and job interview preparation must be top notch  and working together. Often, a poor resume is a reflection of a  poorly-run campaign.

All right, this is a bit of a commercial, but  career professionals can be a big help. Many successful executives get professional help with their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and their entire job searches. After all, they hire professionals for less critical things: plumbers, painters, tour guides, vacation planners, and so on. Not to trivialize the contributions of people in those professions, but your career PAYS for all those things.

When their professional future rides on the outcome of a job campaign, a lot of successful execs decide their job search is too important to do alone.

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