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Resume
Writing
What you must do before you start
CV / resume writing
A few good resume writing habits
starting NOW, will hold you in great stead for the rest of your
career...
Preparation is critical; the best builder in the world would not build
a house without a blueprint and land survey, not if they wanted to stay
in
business.
Your Resume is a vital career building document that done well will
reward your upfront effort to the tune of many, many,
hundreds of
thousand of pounds or dollars over the coarse of your
career.
The intention of this page is to help your resume writing
by embedding some simple good habits
and discipline that will pay you back BIG!
These break down into some very simple organisational plans that will
make it simple for you to tailor your resume, quickly, and effectively.
You may think that you will skip resume writing completely and simply
hire a pro resume writer to do it for you.
But you will still need to provide them the basic information, from
which they can weave their magic.
So let's get this organised, once it's done you will continue to add
information into it throughout your career, but the basic
organisation is done FOREVER.
CV / Resume Writing - Get Organised
What you want to do is build a simple folder and file structure on your
PC, if you don't have a PC borrow a friend's and keep your resume
folder on a
disk, which you can then use on any PC anywhere.
- Create a folder and name it My Resume
or CV or whatever reminds you.
- Then add a page for each of the headings listed
below
- Address and preferred contact details (phone
and email).
- Personal Information, gender, nationality,
driver license, marriage status
- Education / Qualification
- Training and certification details.
- Career history covering the
companies, roles / title, dates and roles and responsibilities,
achievements.
- Any other areas of responsibility, for example
voluntary work, or team captain, head boy or girl at university or
college.
- Any thought leadership examples, articles
published, public speaking.
- Any honors or achievements.
- Hobbies and interests
- Positive personality and behavioral traits you
have, get friends, family or colleagues to help if needed.
- Membership / Associations
- Testimonials
Note: You may feel that you will never need a page for Other
Responsibilities, Awards, Published Article or Testimonials, but I urge
you to keep them, and add content to one or more of these pages as it WILL set you apart
from your competitors.
I would particularly draw your attention to testimonials. It's very
easy to get a testimonial form somebody you have done a good job for.
Clearly you must have done a better than average job for them.
Confirm with them that they liked your work and ask them to drop you an
email or letter to that effect.
This is a GREAT
habit to get into. I cannot stress this strongly enough, and if you get
into the habit of asking, it's really easy to do.
CV / Resume Writing - Why
bother adding testimonials?
When resume writing you can add testimonials to both your resume and
also cover letters.
Imagine you have done your research and you are applying for your dream
role.
For example a project management role.
You've got a good resume, and you have identified through your research
that the role demands previous experience in a high pressured customer
focused project environments.
You start your resume writing with a punchy profile statement or summary
statement (it doesn't matter what you call it), for example, "Ambitious , successful, project
manager, delivers against time, commercial and client
relationship objectives; proven within complex and
challenging projects ".
You have just given your reader exactly what they
are looking for immediately on starting your resume.
Will they carry on
reading... you bet they will....
However they may harbor thoughts along the lines of "It's all very well writing it on
a resume, can this person really
prove these statements".
Now imagine the same scenario this time after
your profile statement you have a concise testimonial, in the example
given this would be very powerful coming form your boss, but maybe even more powerful
coming from the customer?
"Jane was a
pleasure to work with, not only delivering the project to strict
targets, but keeping us informed throughout - An outstanding
achievement." signed with the customers full name, company
and position (this will need to be refrencable).
Wow!
Now even the most skeptical of readers would be hard pressed not to
pick up the phone and invite
you to interview right then and there.
This is a really powerful and very rarely used tacticin CV / resume writing, that achieves
fantastic results.
A few cautionary words over it's use.
- Don't over fill your Resume / CV with
Testimonial's, my view is that up to 5 is maximum, dependent on how
much experience you have.
- Only use them to emphasize points which are
critical to the reader.
- They must be refrencable - Don't make them up.
CV / Resume Writing - Record your experience and achievement in
business terms
I suggest using the STAR
Method for answering tough interview questions, use the same
formula to record your experience in business terms.
What I mean here is that whatever role you had was in some way vital to
the business, no matter how junior. They would not have employed you
otherwise.
Therefore record your work experience in terms of the objectives of the
role and how these objectives supported the overall business strategy,
any measurements used, what skills or methodology you used to perform
your role, what you learnt and achieved.
Use tangible
precise values wherever possible. For example in sales
it's about number of sales, targets, pipeline, key customers, for
customer service it may be around customer satisfaction figures.
If you can convey through your resume that whatever role you undertake
you never loose sight of the overall
business objective of the company, no matter how minor
your role, you will be in a very,
very small percentage.
Embed these good habits now, and I promise you, you will never look
back.
Review
STAR Method for answering tough interview questions
Return to Resume Writing
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