The Thrilling World of Resume Writing for Recruiters
By Walter Sonyi, Jr.
Writing a resume for the executive path to corporate America
Objective Statement
It is reasonable to assume that the last time you thought about how to write a resume you were a senior in college. You spent hours and a whole lot of creativity thinking up action verbs and playing around with the margins and fonts just to fill up that compulsory one page. Yet now, decades later, you are still working off your original single page template. Every time you get a promotion or change jobs, you reduce the font a little more, prune relevant career details, but still have room to include an objective statement that is reiterated in your cover letter, and, through it all, you have become a master of resume haiku.
Unless you plan to make a career in Japanese poetry, we suggest you trash your work in progress and completely rethink your resume. The first mistake is thinking that one page is enough space to tell your career story. Most executive resumes need at least two pages.
The second mistake is overcompensating for the first mistake and writing your life story. You can do that after you become CEO or the victim of some salacious scandal. Otherwise, try to keep your resume under four pages, and refrain from sending unsolicited samples of your work and using colored paper.
Finally, skip the redundant Objective Statement altogether and go straight to the stuff that really matters – your experience.
Experience
Arrange in Chronological Order
The whole point of a resume is to help would -be-employers understand what you have been doing with yourself for the past five, ten, twenty years, with the least amount of effort, on their part. Most people reading resumes want to see your career progress chronologically, beginning with the most recent post and working back. This may seem obvious to most of you, but for those of you who use what is called a functional resume – please stop.
Practice Humble Self-Promotion
There is a reason why it has become standard practice to use many action verbs and no subjects in resumes. (“Managed XYZ department…” “Advised XYZ client.”) It eliminates the word “I.” While you should take full credit for what you have accomplished, be careful not to take full credit for where credit is only partly due. After all, everyone loves teamwork, at least in theory.
Be Specific, not Redundant
The biggest challenge you will face in writing a resume is to explain exactly what you did at each job in a way that is rich in detail, yet clear, concise, and free of jargon and obscure acronyms. Other than reading Hemingway, our best advice for doing this well is to write and rewrite each section until every bullet point says something different. Even if you had two of the exact same jobs, you should never make the same point more than once on your resume. Tweaking words and sentence structure does not count as a different point.
You will want to dedicate the most space to your most recent jobs and take care to emphasize the skills relevant to the job you're seeking. Feel free to list every employer since college, but don't go into any great detail about the year you spent working at a coffee shop and an independent video store. That is, of course, unless you want to be a brand manager at Starbucks or Blockbuster.
Take the Mommy Test
When you have finished the Experience section of your resume, ask yourself this: "If I handed this to my mother, would she understand what I've been doing all these years?"
Education
In addition to information about your undergraduate and graduate education, you should also point out any additional training or certification you have received. Don't go into great detail, but do list your majors and organizations or awards. You can mention your GPA, but you don't have to, especially if it wasn't very impressive.
Here is where we tell you how important it is to be truthful about everything on your resume. Even embellishment can work against you. Many employers and recruiters sometimes go as far as to check that a candidate's version of the story matches the school records or company.
Other
Early in your career, you probably relied heavily on this murky area at the bottom of your resume. Here you could go into great detail about such "skills" as using a word processor or speaking Latin cum proficio. You could transform one day of volunteer work into a life-changing experience and demonstrate how being president of your fraternity taught you leadership. Best of all, you could compile a list of "Hobbies and Interests" that were sure to help you bond with any interviewer who was a skier, a runner or avid reader.
When you get on in your career, it will be assumed that you have certain skills. While you should point out if you speak other languages, it is ridiculous to point out that you know how to use both a personal computer and a MAC. You also should be discriminate when you list organizations. Include professional organizations, but think twice about personal causes. If you choose to include your hobbies and interests, limit them to activities about which you are extremely passionate or are especially relevant to the job. An outdoor retailer might be very happy to know that you turn every weekend and vacation into an extreme adventure, while a life insurance company may hold that against you.
Staff Review by: Joseph (Joe) Kran, Lawrence (Larry) Maglin, Walter
Sonyi, Jr. and Rick Spann
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