Why your career center resume may not get you a job

Perhaps you are one of the lucky students who attend one of the few high schools and colleges with well-trained career centers who proactively sent their staff to learn professional resume writing from one of the premier career marketing organizations. If you are attending school at one of them, you will most likely be on top of your career marketing strategies.

This is how they told us to do it in school

Unfortunately, many schools do not bother with this critical part of education. In 25+ years of resume writing, I would run out of fingers and toes if I tried to count the number of times someone told me, this is how they told us to do it in school.

What is your success rate with the resume?

I then look at the resume or cover letter and ask them about their success rate. Very often, resumes taught either in English class or perhaps in a social studies class and the resume format is the same old boring format taught for generations, duty-focused, and there is no selling point to the resume.

What’s wrong with how classrooms teach resumes?

As I said here, duties are boring! Books and teachers tend to tell you that you need to stick to one page. Occasionally, that can work for a student but not for most people with some experience under their belt. And most importantly, the resume has to be Power-packed to work.

Outdated career marketing strategies and resume writing formats

When a job seeker comes to me to explore how working together might solve their career search, I analyze their current resume first. I often find that they are using outdated career marketing strategies and resume writing formats. I have mentioned the word marketing more than once in this post because once you understand that you are selling a product – the product is YOU, you will have a new focus for the resume.

Your resume must have stories about your successes honed into crisp, detailed statements in resume-speak, a language of its own.

Strategies you are using to find a job

When the resume, the foundation of a successful job search is created, we can move on to explore what strategies you are using to find a job. Are you relying solely on online applications, solely on social networking, or worse, solely, on newspaper advertisements? A healthy job search has a diversified marketing plan that incorporates a multi-pronged strategy with real life networking coupled with online applications, social networking, and a targeted job search.

If you are struggling with your career search, try changing your strategy, improving your career marketing materials, and implementing some of the suggestions above. It’s the reason my clients find success in the most challenging economic conditions in 80 years.

To get your job search launched with an outstanding resume, simply click here!

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