Conversations I am having with clients and Twitter contacts alike are all about how different writing resumes and job search is today than 30 or 20 or 10 or even 5 years ago. Tough market, changing technology, and the Great Recession have all impacted resume writing and career marketing.
Still, for many, it is hard to think about investing your money with a career marketing service when even if you are employed, there are so many priorities for your money.
Often I speak with someone who is thinking that they really could just do it themselves or perhaps I could just look at it for them and fix a few things. I always tell them that there are few resumes that I cannot improve on. If you had another professional resume writer of the caliber of many of my colleagues, I very well might not be able to do any better. But if you wrote it yourself, almost always there are things that you don’t know.
It’s OK though. I can’t do your job either – most likely.
- But my job is to make your resume remarkable, chock full of accomplishments, keywords, strategies, and void of dinosaur phrases like “responsible for”.
- My job is to know industry-specific terms for your industry or the industry you want to transition to for your next position.
- My job is to sift through stories that you tell me, rewrite them in the funny language of “resume-speak” so that you will wow the hiring manager in your interview.
- That’s my job. That’s why I go to conferences, attend webinars, read books, peruse career websites, and interact with the best and the brightest in the career community daily. That’s my job.
Hardest job on the face of the earth! Well, maybe not the hardest but darn hard!
Kimba Green recently posted..What gorilla
Thanks,Kimba, and I am clueless about writing business plans and the thousand other projects you have done in your lifetime!
Great read and so true, Julie! You offer that blend of objectivity, empathy and sharpened writing/listening talents to gather volumes of information, sift through to dig out the best morsels, and to make your clients truly shine–remarkable is indeed marketable! Very insightful!
Thank you, Barb, and after our e-mail exchange this afternoon about the choices some job seekers make to keep on doing whatever they were doing even when they are not getting results, being remarkable is even more critical. I know how tough it is for job seekers everywhere but if they are not working as hard as we do to understand the job search process and all of its nuances, it is no wonder they don’t get calls.
The free resources that we all have available to job seekers if they would look, makes it difficult to look at very poor resumes and hear people say I don’t know what I am doing wrong. Read the resume writer’s samples, compare notes, read blogs, understand the process… and then if you cannot do it yourself get help. Sorry… venting…