It is difficult to judge whether a resume is good on its face. You need to know the direction in which the job hunter is trying to go, and which areas of his background should be emphasized to get him there.
People show me resumes all the time and ask me to tell them quickly if the resumes are good or bad. Usually, the ones that have no summary statement are not very good. And those written with lots of large block paragraphs are difficult to read (the messages get lost in the middle of those paragraphs). But other than that, I frankly cannot tell if a resume is good or bad. I need to know more about the person and his or her goals in writing the resume. How did this person want to position himself? The resume positions him the way he wants to be positioned, if it's a good resume. If it doesn't, it's not.
Case Study: Wally
OK for kids
The approach Wally used in his resume used to be OK for someone just getting out of school: he stated a career objective, which was followed by his education and then a historical listing of his work experience. Today we live in an age of sound bites and resume overload. It would have taken the reader too long to figure out what level Wally was at, the important things he had done, and where he might fit in.
Wally's "after" resume has a summary, which makes it easy for the reader to figure out exactly what Wally does and his level. What's more, the reader gets a feel for Wally's personality: "an innovator with people, processes, and equipment." Wally's old resume told us nothing about his work style. Finally, the resume is scannable. It is now two pages, but the reader is more likely to notice the things Wally thinks are important.
Case Study: Jeffrey
Starting over
Jeffrey had spent seventeen years selling a certain product. His entire career was based on it. Now that product no longer existed, and the clients he had developed over the years were worthless. Jeffrey would have to start from scratch in another area.
When Jeffrey did his Seven Stories exercise, a number of things became clear:
- He liked to sell rather than simply manage salespeople. He wanted to be a "producing manager" in his next position.
- Repeatedly, he had taken businesses from zero and developed them into something substantial; Jeffrey was going to have to do this again but in a field very different from the one he had been in. We decided to make this the theme in his new resume. To make it stand out even more, we underlined it in the summary and emphasized it throughout: Proven record of building customer relations and business revenues in a short time frame.
One other consideration was that in Jeffrey's industry, there were many unsavory people. Jeffrey wanted to work for someone who was ethical. Therefore, the last line of his summary statement lets employers know which side of the fence he is on. Furthermore, the personal information at the end lets them know that he is a good family man, retired from the Marines, and so on.
Jeffrey had actually never job hunted before, and therefore his resume had never been tested. At first he was resistant to having a resume that was longer than one page. On Wall Street, "everyone's resume was one page long."
I explained that a one page resume worked just fine on Wall Street in good times, when people were looking to hire. But when times were tough, a person has to do everything he can to separate himself from his competitors. If everyone else had a certain kind of resume, that was argument enough to have something that was better.
Jeffrey found himself a new job that not only paid the high base he had made before, but he also got an equity position in the new company. What's more, his search took him only two months. A resume that positioned him properly helped his search along, and his background was no longer a handicap.
Case Study: Alberto
Changing careers
In the chapter on positioning yourself, Alberto made a doubly successful career move: he went from the for profit to the not for profit sector, which is a major industry switch, and he changed the kind of work he was doing as well, going from relationship management to administration. This is exactly what he wanted and is exactly the way his resume positioned him.
The thought process Alberto used is exactly the same thought process you will have to use every time you want to change careers. You will decide what your target is, pull from your background everything that makes you look appropriate to that target market, and then write a summary that positions you for that target. Here are the two resumes used for his search, one aimed at staying as a relationship manager in banking, and one aimed at administrative work in the not for profit sector.
