There are some things that are worth spending money on to get the right professional. For me, hiring a colourist is clearly one of them. For a jobseeker, hiring a professional resume writer may be another.

Why Hiring a Professional to Write Your Resume May Make Sense for You

• Having worked with hundreds, if not thousands of clients, an experienced resume pro will have a good idea of who your competition is likely to be. This means that we have unique insights on what it will take to make you – specifically – stand out from the crowd. We can be objective about what to include or exclude from your resume, and can create a profile that grabs the right kind of attention from the right target audience.

• Our skill isn’t just in the writing, its in the questioning. Good resume pros know what questions to ask you in order to get the gems to put in your resume. We have honed the art of interviewing, probing, pulling out the details that can be used to create a compelling career story.

• Good resume pros dedicate hours each week on researching the job market. We know what skills are in-demand, what keywords are becoming passe, which employers use which job boards, which employers don’t use job boards at all. These insights mean that we can fast-track the time you would otherwise have to invest in getting ready for your job search.

• While we typically work arms-length from recruiters in order to be a neutral advocate for our clients, good resume pros take the time to nurture strong networking relationships with recruiters. This means that we can get a heads-up on hiring trends. We can tell you why calling yourself a Farmer instead of Hunter right now will leave you dead in the water if you are looking for a sales position, for example, or why using “Public Relations” instead of “Public Affairs” could result in greater hits on your resume.

• By leveraging our recruiter and HR network, good resume pros are able to get independent feedback on our product, in order to make sure that it’s going to work for our target audience. After all, it doesn’t matter if you are tickled pink about your new resume, if recruiters aren’t impressed.

Just like off-the-shelf colour kits, there are many books on how to write your resume. You can find tons of samples, many of them submitted by resume professionals. You should be aware though that we rarely submit our best work for publication. Why? Part of it has to do with protecting competitive intelligence. An edgy format, a unique design, really meaty content, loses its edge if its copied by 10,000 other jobseekers. Mostly, it has to do with the target audience for the book – in order to appeal to as broad a range of jobseekers as possible, the samples tend to be fairly generic and bland. Jobseekers who copy them end up looking fairly generic and bland too. And jobseekers? Bland is not a good look for you.

• Make sure that you remain a superstar in your current position. Without being a total sycophant, demonstrate through your performance how you add value to the company, and how you contribute to the big picture.
• Take advantage of opportunities to participate in special projects, especially projects involving other departments. The more people in the company who know you and can attest to your strengths, the easier it will be for you to remain gainfully employed, regardless of which side of the retain/layoff tallysheet you end up.
• Psychologically and emotionally prepare for the worst (or for some of you the best) case scenario, that you will be let go.
• Get your home front in order, which includes preparing and sticking to a tight budget.
• If you haven’t been doing it all along, start putting together a portfolio of your success stories, the projects you’ve worked on, copies of your performance reviews, any emails or letters that you’ve received with positive feedback on your performance.
• Take an inventory of the strengths and expertise you have to offer – your value proposition in today’s job market. What kinds of problems are you good at solving, and who currently has those problems? This will help narrow down the target for your job search for your next career move.
• Get your networking tools up to date – names, titles & contact numbers of suppliers, clients, industry associates, company colleagues. This is easier to do while you are still in your job.
• Implement a networking plan that should include online-connecting with at least a couple of new people per week and warm-connecting with people in your current network.
• Start researching companies that you would be interested in moving to, and see who in your network of contacts might have leads into these organizations. Consider current suppliers, clients, consultants and competitors as likely candidate companies.
• Find niche job boards in your field/industry. Set up alerts to let you know when new jobs are posted that fit your target criteria.
• Identify reputable recruiters who specialize in your field.
• Once you have a target for your job search and know what and to whom you are marketing yourself, prepare your resume and LinkedIn profile. For the investment of less than a few day’s salary, you can enlist the services of professional who can help you create a distinctive, targeted career marketing package.

The more you take control of your career now – before you receive notice – the less likely you are to feel paralysed with fear about layoff decisions over which you have no control.

Objective Statement

• “Instead of using an objective statement, use the title of your target job. It’s okay to change it each time you send your resume out, but if you aren’t sure about the target yet, its premature to write your resume.”

Profile/Summary

• “Consider your resume as a marketing document, you have to write with a particular audience in mind, and you have to know what it is you are selling them.”
• “What is your ideal next company? Is it a mid-sized firm who is looking to take their enterprise infrastructure to the next level of integration and needs a Business Analyst who can bridge the language and thinking of business and technology? Is it a consulting company who helps other firms? What are you particularly good at, and who could use those skills? What ever it is, take the time to define your audience (if you have more than one, you may need different versions), and get really clear on their pain points. Then, write a summary that speaks to their pain points and demonstrates why your background and experience makes you the ideal candidate to solve their problems. In total it should take you less resume real estate to say than it did for me to explain it.”
• “It can be tempting to try to keep your resume general so that you can use it for several different positions, but this strategy will work against you. If you have several different interests or opportunities, then tailor a different profile for each of them.”
• “In today’s job market, everybody is describing themselves as a dynamic, problem-solving team player. It’s the equivalent of ‘new and improved’ in product marketing – nobody buys it.”

Skills

• “Your list of skills should only include things that are directly relevant to the target job.”
• “Put together a list of ten or twelve terms and phrases that describe your expertise – look at sample job ads to make sure you are hitting to top keywords”
• “Make the skills focused on your target job only – somebody who is hiring an IT sales guy doesn’t care that you are good at desktop publishing unless their product or target client is related to desktop publishing.
• You have 26 skills here, and the important stuff is getting lost. See if you can get it down to the top ten. Start by skipping the fluff, because your reader almost certainly will”

Education

• “Since you did a master’s degree, I’m guessing that there was a master’s project, this would be a good place to describe it (one or two bullets at most)”
• “The fact that you are a certified reflexologist is of no relevance to your career goal as an accountant. No, it doesn’t demonstrate your commitment to continuous learning, and no, it doesn’t show that you have a lot of interests other than accounting. Get it out there.”
• “Have your credentials, degrees and professional development in the same section, or at least close together, or a hiring manager may not notice that you have your PMP, MBA and CGA”
• The important part here is the degree that you obtained, not the school you went to. Make sure *that’s* the thing that jumps out.

Experience (New Graduate)

• “Instead of dividing your experience between volunteer and professional, divide it between Relevant Experience, Additional Professional Experience, and Community Involvement. For the items that fit under relevant experience, indicate whether you volunteered or were paid”

Experience (Seasoned Pro)

• “You’ve committed a lot of resume real estate to laying out your responsibilities, but there is nothing attention-grabbing here. Your resume should tell a good story of your career. What was your mandate when you came on board, and how did it change over time? What was happening in the company when you came on board, what challenges did you have to face, what kinds of problems did you help solved. Who did you help, and why did it matter?
• “As you consider what to write here, keep the target in mind, and ask yourself so what, because they certainly will.”
• “No idea what this means, and that’s a bad thing. Give a brief description of what you were actually doing, emphasis on brief. All these ten bullets can be consolidated into one tightly written description – leaves room to focus on accomplishments”
• “You held two different positions with *****. Was this a promotion? If so, its worth showcasing this point – why did they pick you?”
• “This is not a five-verb accomplishment. By over describing it this way, you are diluting it’s impact”
• “Read your resume out loud. Does it sound stilted when you say it? That’s the way it will be perceived by somebody else. Too many adjectives, adverbs and four-syllable power words makes it hard to read, and can come across as ostentatious. Remember, your goal is to make the reader’s job as easy as possible. “

Dated/Non-Relevant Experience

• “This takes up a lot of resume real estate, and unless this is an area you want to get back into, you can cut the details out and summarize this into “previous experience includes four years as a ***********. This will make room for more information/accomplishments on your more recent jobs.”

IT Skills

• “It’s going to be the rare hiring manager who cares that you’ve used Windows 95.”
• “Go through this list with a ruthless editing pen and leave in only the software, hardware, middleware, and methodologies that are in demand for your target job – unless your target company is one with out-dated systems, in which case, leave it in.”

Associations

• “Separate out the professional associations from the philanthropic ones.
• “For the professional associations, did you just pay the annual membership fee, or were you actively involved. If involved, briefly describe how.”

Other Interests

• Knitting reading gardening walks on the beach stamp collecting photography
• “International travel: Asia, South Africa, Brazil, Eastern Europe *** this is good to keep in if your target job could require business dealings with other countries”
• “Three-time Ironman competitor (2nd place and 4th place finishes) *** I like this. It demonstrates your drive to succeed and ability to set and achieve goals”

I will continue to provide free critiques, and I will continue to do them one by one, in detail, no template statements. But chances are that if the candidate wasn’t thinking like a marketer when they wrote their resume, my feedback will include some of the points above.

The issue came up for me again when I came across a recent advice column in which the president of a large Canadian resume writing and career coaching firm provided advice on how to dumb down one’s resume. Wow, I thought, has it really come to this, that even the professionals in our industry are offering recommendations on this approach? So I decided to dig a little deeper to determine whether job seekers were finding success with their “dumbed down” resumes. I posted a discussion on LinkedIn, issued a “Help a Reporter” request, and scanned the internet for anecdotal evidence. Not surprisingly, given the state of the economy and rising unemployment rates, there has been a lot of cyber-ink dedicated to the issue. Here’s what I found.

Dumbing Down Your Resume – The Job Seeker’s Perspective

The vast majority of job seekers that I talked to who tried using a dumbed-down resume did get more interviews, but still weren’t landing the job. One HARO respondent told me, “I nearly always dumb down the resume but I haven’t had much luck– rarely the interviewer would like to have more info so I end up sending more. But I haven’t been hired one way or the other.” Another said, “I wasn’t getting any calls for interviews before, and now I am, but so far, I’m still looking.” A consistent pattern seems to be that these job seekers are coming in as second or third candidate of choice, but they can’t hide their knowledge, experience or age when it comes time for the interview.

Of the job seekers who were successful in getting work with a dumbed-down resume, many expressed, “off the record”, that they hated their new job. A former Marketing Manager who re-branded herself to Marketing Coordinator in order to find gainful employment told me, “It’s a balancing act, I have to tell you. I really thought I could do it. I was sure that I could step back, do my job with dignity and professionalism. But I have to admit, it’s harder than I thought. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about your work when you are reporting to somebody in flip flops who is comfortable using ‘icky’ in her business  conversations. And frankly, I’m BORED!!!! All those advice columns were true. I try to keep my energy up, to find ways of making the job more interesting, but… I guess the worse thing is, now that I’m working full time, I don’t have as much time to look for the job I really want. But at least I have a paycheque, right?”

Another contact who dumbed down his resume during the last recession said that his career never recovered. “I didn’t really think about it at the time, because I really, really needed to start earning some money, but I wasn’t just dumbing down my resume, I was dumbing down my career. When the economy recovered, I couldn’t get back into my old career stream, because now I was trying to market myself with a lower level job on my resume.”

I did come across people who were both successful and happy that they opted to undersell themselves. “I was having trouble getting a job and so began leaving off my MA thinking that employers would think I’m too young to have one (I was 23). Long story short, after doing so I received 5 offers for interviews and got a job. Few months later I told my boss about that casually and he laughed and told me I never would have been hired if he knew because he would have thought I’d want too much money. Unfortunately our society punishes very educated individuals sometimes.”

Dumbing Down Your Resume – Recruiters’ Perspectives

Hiring managers who discover that candidates are dumbing down their resumes told me that they are instantly suspicious. As one recruiter described it, “I have access to tens of thousands of resumes through job boards, and I occasionally come across alternative versions for the same candidate. If they have Director in one version, Manager in a second, and Analyst in a third, I have to wonder what the heck is going on. Same thing if the titles on their resume don’t match what comes up on their LinkedIn profile. I can’t afford to recommend a candidate to a client unless I have complete confidence in their integrity – I can’t afford to let them make me look bad. And somebody who is prepared to be less than truthful on their resume is a high risk for making me look bad.”

In our LinkedIn debate, Mike Muyal, Director of Marketing at Levelor, had similar sentiments, “If ‘dumbing down’ means making one’s achievements seem less important, or eliminating some of them entirely…hmm..not too sure about that. If it means making an over-qualified candidate look more appropriate for a junior job so they can ‘get their foot in the door’…well, I wouldn’t like that either. Especially since I could have a star performer in a lower-level job, who in turn becomes more difficult to keep motivated and engaged…and I’ve got nothing to offer her.”

Mike’s concerns are not unfounded. I talked to one business owner who discovered during the interview that a candidate for a mid-level operations position was presenting himself as less qualified than he really was. “He admitted it in the interview that he had an MBA, and used to be a Director in a different industry. I was worried that he would be bored. Our company is small, so I knew that I couldn’t provide him with a lot of variety. But he was very persuasive, and I thought what the heck, I’m getting really good value for my money. I was wrong. He started with oomph, but within two months he was questioning every decision I made and trying to completely rebuild my company. Some of his ideas were good, I’ll admit, but I don’t have time to implement every new-ass MBA idea, I have a business to run. I could see that he was frustrated, and it started showing in his attitude. In less than a year, he quit for something better, and I had to start all over again.”

Dumbing Down Your Resume – Perspectives from Career Services Professionals

Many of the career services experts who have waded in on the issue come down on side of “don’t dumb down”. In fact Sharon Graham, founder of Graham Management and Executive Director of Career Professionals of Canada, was stimulated by our LinkedIn discussion to devote a podcast on the matter.

Others, such as Megan Pittsley, Job Center Manager at City of Livermore, are more pragmatic. “I personally have always found job titles flexible (both as a resume writer and a recruiter), since they vary so greatly from organization to organization. A Director at a small company is similar to a Manager at a large one, government job titles are terribly unfocused, etc. As long as a point is made during an interview to state why you chose to use a functional title versus an in-house formal title no one really cares (if you can sell it). Instead of putting “Director of Marketing”, just put “Marketing” and allow them to see what you accomplished without a discriminating title attached to it.

I don’t feel it shows a lack of integrity whatsoever; just being smart on how you mold your professional image so that people clearly understand what you did.  Sometimes people do actually need to tone down or dumb down their resumes if they genuinely seek a lower position because there aren’t any at their level available and they need a paycheck (I love to be idealistic but now is a time for reality), or because of personal reasons (want less responsibility, job is close to home, etc.) Recruiters can and will toss out resumes for overly experienced or educated applicants before even speaking to them.”

Dumbing Down Your Resume – Some Final Thoughts from a Certified Resume Strategist

I have empathy for job seekers who are desperate to find a job, any job, and think that dumbing down their resume is their only chance. However, I think it is short-sighted, and further, I think that in the very near future it won’t even be an option. With new tools like Applicant Explorer, recruiters are going to be able to build a comprehensive picture of you based on your tweets, your Facebook content, your contributions to discussion forums, your blog posts, and any other web source in which your name appears.

In today’s internet-driven job market, jobseekers are going to find it very hard to try and market themselves under multiple “brands” with conflicting data. Many job boards already sell their candidate lists, and some corporations have agreements to pool candidate submissions (after, of course, they have already on-boarded their top candidate). Jobseekers will no longer be able to assume that a resume submitted for a position with one company won’t end up on the desk of a totally different firm or recruiter, which means that discrepancies between resumes are going to turn up.

If the basic facts of your resume aren’t consistent from one version to the next – the dates, the company names, the job titles, and the academic credentials – then, as the Cuban band leader liked to say, “Lucy, you’ve got some ‘splaining to do.” And chances are that a recruiter or hiring manager is never going to give you the chance to do that.

In the face of touch-of-the-button convergence of web data about you, it will be career wise to ensure that you are presenting a consistent and compelling personal brand across your entire web footprint. This doesn’t mean that you should use the exact same resume for every position you apply to. That isn’t strategic, and it won’t work. It is strategic to tailor your profile and selected accomplishments to the target job – recruiters expect this, and welcome it. As Mike Muyal said, “As a hiring manager, the easier it is for me to focus and get to the gist of a candidate’s qualifications, the better.”  It is strategic to focus on your past ten years – five if you are in IT.

Finally, it is strategic to use your resume as part of a well-thought out job search plan, rather than in scatter-gun approach. This means making the extra effort to thoroughly understand the motivating factors of the target company so that you know how to pitch your qualifications. I’ll close my contributions to the discussion with a terrific example of a strategic resume in action, brought to me by Edward Chance: “The best resume I ever read began like this: ‘My father was in charge of the men’s lavatory at the Ritz Hotel. My mother was a chambermaid at the same hotel. I was educated at the London School of Economics.’ Ray Taylor got the job as a copywriter at Ogilvy and Mather. He had a glorious career. Taylor knew who scrutinized resumes at O&M – agency founder David Ogilvy, who took great pride in raising himself to fame and fortune from the genteel poverty of his English childhood.”

With the proliferation of the “software as service” delivery model, this no longer holds true. Even fairly small companies can afford to adopt some kind of résumé extraction, screening and management software, either directly or through a full-service hiring solutions firm such as Staffback Inc. This means that job seekers have to be much more savvy about the technology if they want to ensure that their résumé gets noticed.

How Résumé Screening Software Works

First of all, lets get the “Optical Character Recognition” issues off the table. There are only a few companies who still scan paper versions of résumés, so if you are holding on to concerns about using italics, underlining, bolding and colour in your résumé, you can let them go.

Today’s résumé management tools are substantially more sophisticated than the OCR versions of old, and have the capacity to neatly handle a wide range of text-based formats and content. They typically include a module that extracts data from résumés, and an HR or talent management system that uses the extracted data to evaluate and rank qualified candidates.

The résumé extraction tool uses advanced algorithms to “read” your résumé, identify text information, and categorize it using the rules of standard résumé formatting. Data such as your name, address, telephone number, education, professional experience, years with each job, and keywords will be extracted and fed into an HR database such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, or SAP, or into a candidate tracking system such as Hire Desk.

The talent management database is the foundation tool for the candidate evaluation and qualification process, not your actual résumé. Based on the criteria identified by the recruiter or hiring manager, each candidate that makes it into the talent management database is ranked in terms of how closely they match the parameters of the job. Factors that will go into this ranking include where the candidate lives, their years of experience, and most importantly, the appearance of specific keywords – the more keywords, the better the ranking.

In older versions of extraction and talent management tools, the keyword match had to be exact, and many candidates were inadvertently screened out because of spelling variations (AS400 versus AS/400, for example). Moreover, the software was fairly simplistic in its parsing capabilities – the keyword was either present or not present, there was no ability to judge the context in which the word was used. This meant that unqualified candidates were able to “trick the system” by loading their résumé with keywords. Today’s advanced tools, such as Talent Technology’s Resume Mirror and HireDesk, have the capacity to parse and interpret meaning from entire sentences and phrases, which allows hiring manages to conduct contextual and parametric candidate searches.

Soon after the job is posted and applications begin to roll in, the hiring manager will generate a report with a list of applicants who meet a minimum ranking – the more applicants there are for a job, the more restrictive the hiring manager can be in setting the threshold for qualification. The report may contain small excerpts such as the summary from your original résumé, but your actual résumé may not get looked at in its entirety unless it makes it to the top of the ranking pool.

The Resumator, a new software suite launched early in ‘09, cuts across the grain in this regard. Designed to meet the hiring needs of small to mid-sized companies, Resumator’s built-in logic mimics the way that résumés are read in ‘real life’, and the software has the ability to display the résumé in its entirety. But it still uses data parsing and keyword recognition logic to identify qualified candidates.

What Job Seekers Can Do to Maximize Their Success with Resume Screening Software

Before I start this section, I want to state for the record that I am not an advocate of trying to “beat the system.” If you are applying for positions for which you are patently unqualified, I believe that you are doing a disservice both to your own job search strategy and to the people who are managing the hiring process. In fact it is largely because unqualified candidates keep applying in great numbers that companies of all sizes have been forced to resort to résumé screening software.

Now, that being said, there are specific measures that qualified candidates should take to ensure that their résumé gets scanned properly and makes it to the top of the candidate pool.

How to Make It Past the Résumé Extraction Process

1. Submit your résumé in a text format. A surprising number of candidates use graphics-based pdf files, which are viewed by the scanning software as nothing more than pretty pictures. Ken Winters, CEO of Staffback Inc., goes one step further. He recommends that you stick to MS Word, because its very universality means that it is least likely to cause reading and parsing problems for resume extraction software.
2. Don’t use graphics at all on résumés that are being electronically submitted. Extraction tools work on the basis of text recognition, so graphics are “white noise” that not only don’t get scanned, but can actually mess up the parsing process for the surrounding text.
3. Don’t forget your address. Some candidates think that by excluding their address they won’t be geographically limited, but in fact the opposite is true. One of the first screening parameters that hiring managers use is often the postal code or zip code, and if it isn’t present on your résumé, you fall to the bottom of the candidate pool.
4. Don’t put key data such as contact information in a header or footer. These are outside of the scanned areas, and won’t get parsed.
5. Use conventional formatting for things like your telephone number, no spaces between the numbers, no fancy characters as separators.
6. Stick to standard layouts. While résumé extraction software has greatly improved over the years in terms of the ability to recognize and parse a variety of formatting conventions, if you are too creative, the software may not parse your résumé properly. Unless the response to the advertised job has been low, the recruiter or hiring manager is probably not going to take the time to fix the errors, and you will be dismissed as a P.I.T.A. candidate.
7. Use reverse chronological formatting rather than functional – it tends to parse with fewer extraction errors.

How to Stand Out in the Candidate Ranking Process

1. Tailor each résumé submission to the specific requirements of the job – one size most certainly does not fit all in today’s job market.
2. Read the job posting carefully, and look for the keywords that are used to describe the job and the qualifications – these are an indication of the company’s thinking and will most likely be used to rank candidates. In fact some candidate-ranking tools will do a direct comparison of the entire job ad against the candidate’s résumé.
3. A hint from a recruiter insider – many companies that are currently in recruitment mode are looking for candidates who can cover multiple skill sets – almost to be point of being unrealistic in their expectations. When faced with a long list of qualifications, know that some of them are “must haves”, and many of them are “nice to haves”. The higher up in the list of qualifications a keyword occurs, the stronger it is weighted in importance in candidate rankings, and the more likely it is to be a “must have.”
4. As much as possible, incorporate keywords directly into the body of your résumé, so that a context is provided for the word. Keywords that cannot easily be used this way can be listed in a separate table. Be aware however, that some recruiters frown on the use of a lengthy keyword table, and regard it as an attempt by unqualified candidates to trick the system. Keep your keyword list short (10 to 12 items), relevant to the job, and accurate in terms of being a key strength you have to offer.
5. Understand the principle of résumé fatigue. Keep your résumé easy to scan visually when it finally does get seen by a recruiter or hiring manager, and avoid “look alike” formatting that you get from off-the-shelf and online résumé templates. As one recruiter I spoke to noted, “I’ve had virtually identical résumés come in from multiple applicants for a single job. Not a good way to stand out, and shows a distinct lack of initiative.”
6. Get your résumé in early. In fact the earlier you are in the submission process (provided that you are qualified), the more likely you are to become the gold standard by which the qualification threshold is set for all subsequent applicants.

A Final Word on Job Search Strategy – Advice from Industry Insiders

While knowledge of résumé extraction and candidate management software can give you a leg up, motivated job seekers should not rely exclusively on electronic submission of their résumé to land their next great job. The laws of the hidden job market still apply, and candidates should be using a multi-pronged job search plan that includes direct applications, networking, cold calling, and relationship building.

Ken Winters advises candidates to make use of resources such as LinkedIn to create a network of contacts and referrals. Use your network to solicit recommendations where appropriate, it’s a great way of establishing credibility and letting people know that you are available for new opportunities.

Don Charlton, Founder & CEO of The Resumator describes a great job search strategy as one that uses best practices in relationship building and solution selling. “A good salesman knows that it’s a fine balance between being pushy and annoying, and creating positive connections. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, to seek out the person who you will be making the final hiring decision. But be respectful of their time.” You are offering a solution. Look, sound and most of all act like somebody who is solution-minded.

Executive recruiter Paula Marks points out, however, that there are legitimate times to use an objective statement. For example, if you are a medical specialist who is seeking a position in a large teaching hospital where you can contribute to cutting edge research on lung cancer, it is okay to say so. Likewise, a successful (emphasis on successful) business entrepreneur could get away with advertising that s/he is looking for opportunities to help a start-up company take its business to the next level.

So what do you use instead of an objective statement? A specific job title. “One mistake I see frequently, in the effort to not close off any options, is not putting a specific job title on the résumé, so that it’s not clear for what position an applicant is applying or qualified,” says Sharon Rich, founder of Layoff Bounce Back. “If the résumé doesn’t tell a clear ’story’ at first glance, it may not get a second look.”

Profile / Summary – The Only Thing that Gets Read? or, The new ‘Objective Statement’ in Earning Recruiter Disdain
With twenty years of corporate experience in the pharmaceutical sector, Clint Cora has had the opportunity to review hundreds of résumés from people who are interested in entering the pharmaceutical sales field. “One of the biggest mistakes I see is that people say right at the beginning that they are organized, smart, hard working, good communicator, etc. They have to realize that everyone else is going to be making the same claims about themselves so very quickly, all résumés start to look the same.”

In fact, Clint admitted that when he was actively involved in recruiting salespeople, he stopped reading the summary section altogether and jumped straight down to the career details. He could tell within a few seconds if a candidate is qualified, and only then would he give the rest of the résumé a more serious read.

A well-crafted summary statement or professional profile is, nevertheless, still regarded by recruiters as an essential part of a good résumé, and may be the only thing that gets looked at in the first stage of candidate screening by “live” recruiters. Why the emphasis on “live”? Because some large companies and recruiting firms still scan and store candidate résumés in a database, and use specialized software to select résumés based on specific keywords. If you haven’t used the right keywords, you will be out of luck.

Paula Marks advises dedicating about 20% of your résumé to a well thought out summary. What are the key elements of a good summary? It is job-specific, it is experience-specific, it is accomplishments-specific, it is keyword rich, and it is TRUE!!!. Anything you claim in your summary needs to be backed up by clear evidence in your job chronology.

Job Chronology and Accomplishments – The Meat and Potatoes
Be aware that many recruiters and employers are suspicious of functional formats because they too often get used to hide issues such as career gaps or job hopping. Many recruiters that I spoke to had a clear preference for reverse chronological formats, because it requires the least amount of time and effort on their part to see what a candidate has done with their lives.

Sharon Rich is seeing much more savvy on the part of jobseekers in terms of résumés that quantify accomplishments and focus on transferable skills. HR Consultant and author Sharon Armstrong agrees. “Executives, senior managers and professionals are really spending time highlighting their major achievements on their resumes. Not everything they ever did…just a few targeted ones…which they can quantify.“

However, there are still too many job seekers who haven’t gotten the message. “Uncertain of what will catch someone’s eye or what to include, they are trying to cover all bases,” observed Sharon Blaivas, a former recruiter with Goldman Sachs. “I think that people who have been successful in their field and are now looking for work, feel that all they need to do is document what they do (at length and in any format!) and people will be knocking their door down.”

“The chronology needs to be fact based and focused on results,” says Paula Marks. David Lewis advises that each responsibility be accompanied by a correlating accomplishment. “Don’t say ‘I sold advertising.’ Instead, tell me how much you sold and how good you were!”

For senior-level executives, Paula suggests taking it one step further. “Eliminate all ‘responsible for’ kinds of statements unless it isn’t obvious from your job title what you do. Concentrate instead on what you delivered.” Be strategic in what you include. Ask yourself why the next employer would even care about each statement in your chronology – stay focused on the achievements that are relevant for your next job. If you’ve had the same job title over a number of different companies, don’t repeat yourself. Instead, show how your knowledge and skills have progressed over those years.

Don’t Waste Valuable Résumé Real Estate
“If the top half of the first page is the most critical section, do you really think its wise to waste an inch and a half of space with your name in really BIG letters?” Keep your identification bar concise, and limit your identifying information to your name, address, telephone number and email address, recruiters advise. Keep in mind that if you are going to be using a recruiter, they will be submitting your résumé under their letterhead. Make their job easier and leave enough margin room for them to do so without having to completely reformat your document.

You don’t need to include your LinkedIn address on your résumé. “It’s the equivalent of a high schooler listing their MySpace page on a job application – somewhat tasteless and unprofessional,” according to career advisor and columnist Megan Pittsley. “If someone wants to find you online, they will.”

Likewise, you don’t need to include References are available upon request. Of course they are! Who other than Mary Poppins is going to tell a potential employer that they will not be providing references?

There has been an oft-repeated rule among professional résumé writers that your interests and hobbies have no place on a résumé, but recruiters are split on this. If your pastimes are reading and walking on the beach, then save it for your Personals Ad.

However, if you have “interesting” pastimes and non-work accomplishments, these can help to distinguish you from other candidates. If you have travelled extensively in other countries and are comfortable in cross-cultural environments, this can be an important “plus” to an employer who is looking to develop global business relationships. A candidate who has participated in Ironman competitions has obviously got the tenacity and self-discipline needed to set and achieve ambitious goals. Somebody who is extensively involved in the arts, charitable organizations or philanthropic activities will have a diverse network of contacts beyond work, which can be of great value to a company that relies on relationship selling to build their client base. It’s all about understanding the requirements of the target company.

Résumé Format & Structure
Give careful thought to layout. The most important information should be frontpage news, and there is no “one size fits all” solution here. Approach your résumé design in terms of what the recruiter / employer really wants and needs to know.

If you legitimately have a lot of information that is frontpage newsworthy, consider using side panels where data like credentials or production credits can be listed without distracting the reader from your chronology (thank you to Mitch Drew for sharing his successes with this format).

Be aware, however, that too much innovation in design can work against you. “I saw something that was supposed to be a résumé recently but it looked like a seismic graph – all colours and lines”, one recruiter told me. “I don’t have time to interpret something like that – all it says to me is, this guy has too much time on his hands.” Paula Marks agrees, and recommends sticking to conventional formats. “Our brains have been trained to read résumés in a certain way. It’s a visual tool, it needs to be laid out that way.”

Keep in mind that your résumé may be viewed in print, on a desktop, a laptop, a Blackberry. It may also be scanned using Optical Character Recognition software. Steer clear of fancy fonts in favour of those that are easy on the eye. The easier it is to read (by both humans and computers), the more likely it is that your résumé will be read and remembered. And be aware of the typesetter’s conundrum – sans serif fonts, which are easy to ready on the computer, can look boring on the written page, while serif fonts, which are common in books and magazines, can be extremely hard on the eye if looked at on a computer screen.

Great Résumé – Great Start. Now What?
Go back and look at it again. Make sure that every single word, sentence and structure is relevant and adds to the picture of who you are. Think short and sweet. “I don’t have time to read long paragraphs, so cut out the fluff.” But unless you are a new graduate, a one-pager probably won’t do. “One page résumés have gone the way of the dinosaur. If you are experienced, there is no way you are going to be able to cover everything I need to know about you in a single page.”

Customize your résumé for each target job, is Paula Mark’s recommendation, but don’t reinvent the wheel. You may need to create a list of 10 or 12 different summary bullets, so that you can pull out the six or seven that are most relevant for the specific job.

Finally, Caroline Ceniza-Levine, who has recruited for corporations such as Accenture, Citibank and Disney ABC, notes that “too many candidates are still dropping off hundreds of résumés and thinking this is a comprehensive search.” It isn’t even close. The job market is saturated with highly accomplished and highly qualified candidates, and the people who are succeeding in this environment are the ones who know how to network strategically.

Not sure how to network for a new job without feeling like a snake oil salesman? Have a look at Sharon Graham’s case study of what executive-level networking looks like in today’s job market. It’s all about harnessing information, building connections, and taking advantage of available resources to “position yourself above the competition and remain at the top.”