Your Resume Is Your Calling Card

When you think of the job-search "tools" available to you, chances are, you think first of a resume. It has to be the most important selling document for the vast majority of job-seekers. Considering its importance, the ways job-seekers go about writing resumes is enough to make you cringe: all too frequently, a job-seeker borrows a resume from a friend who is conducting a search and uses it for style. Or he pulls his old resume (from five or ten years ago) out of a file, adds a paragraph to bring things up to date and has it typed up without looking critically at the resume's previous portions. Or, worse still, he reaches into an office desk drawer, pulls out his job description, and plagiarizes it to create a description of himself. Saddest of all is the time frame in which countless resumes are written: the job-seeker is fired in the morning and feels compelled to "get something out" in response to ads that night. So the document that serves as the backbone for a job-search campaign is whipped out in a matter of hours. As you might expect, it inevitably suffers from a too-short period of gestation.

Your resume is too important to you not to be the most effective personal selling document you have ever created. It is a tool that can turn on executive recruiters-get them to recommend you to their clients-or turn them off. It is often, though by no means always, the only document available to present your case to prospective employers who receive literally hundreds of responses to their blind newspaper ads. The two or three pages you write about yourself have got to help you survive the "cut" as the hundreds of resumes are reduced to perhaps a dozen "worthy" individuals who will be granted personal interviews.

Your resume can be valuable in other ways: it is the best document any job-seeker has to "guide" interviews; it is the only practical "leave-behind" for the person who interviews you to use in selling you to his superiors. In short, your resume has to be the most compelling summation of your worth that you can possibly provide.



Fortunately, effective resumes-those that get you in the door and sell you up the line-are not difficult to write. But there are two things you must keep in mind:

1. That your resume represents you. The way it is written and the way it looks are a reflection of you as a writer and executive. The style and format of your resume create an image of a professional in your field or something less than that. The impression you create with your personal document is as important as the impression you create with the suit or dress you wear to your interview-if you get one!
   
2. The content of your resume has to convey quickly and convincingly that you are not "just" qualified for the job-after all, as suggested earlier, almost everyone applying for a job will be to some extent qualified for it-but that you are better qualified than the other candidates with similar backgrounds. In short, your resume has to be able to communicate your real worth in writing in a way that will be both read and understood by your prospective boss.