More Resumé Overhaul

Adam reached out to me through the recommendation of a common friend. Adam is 20-something and a few months ago finished a Nuclear Medicine degree at a local college. But he was having dismal success in even getting interviews. When we connected by email I asked Adam to send me his resumé so I could get some idea of his education and work background before we talked.

Adam's resumé was pretty much straight out of the 1970s. I do not fault him at all. He is just entering the job market. What absolutely stunned me was he told me one of his instructors had helped construct his resumé. Here are the mistakes I found:

1. The first section was "Objective"  As I discuss at length in Hired! you should not list an "Objective" section. Let your cover letter address your objective for each job to which you submit a resumé.
2. The second section was "Qualifications" and listed his Nuclear Medicine Certificate and other certifications. My concern here is that the reader now has two ancillary sections to look at and skip over to get to the meat of Adam's education and work experience.
3. The third section listed Adam's work experience: primarily the clinical rotations he went through in his degree program, followed by his other jobs over the past few years. Good stuff here but three structural issues jumped out at me. First, the structure of this section was obviously the product of an academic mindset because the content was arranged in outline format [1, a), (1)..]. Recommendation: use simple or even bulleted sentences, but never outline format. Second, there was little mention of responsibilities and accomplishments in his degree activities. Recommendation: tell the reader what you accomplished in each significant activity. Third, his work experience was in a mixed time order. Recommendation: list all work experience in reverse chronological order (most recent to least recent). 
4. The last section of the resumé was "References." Today, readers do not want to see references on a resumé, and do not write "references available upon request." Everyone expects you to be able to provide references if asked.

Adam and I spent quite a bit of time going over these concerns. I provided him the sample chapter on "The Resumé" in Hired! If you would like to read it, you can download the PDF from my Hired! website.

A few days later Adam sent me his revised resumé. Wow! A total overhaul and much more effective. Looking at this new resumé I could see Adam's responsibilities and what he accomplished in each of his job positions. The layout was dramatically more attractive with just enough white space on the page to let the text "breathe" - the words were not too dense and not too sparse.

I suggested one small change to make the content more efficient for the reader, but what Adam put together was terrific, and just in time for him to attend a job fair in Charlotte. With this new resumé he should be creating some interest in potential employers.

The bottom line is that a resumé is a marketing tool and that means it has to create interest about you. If you have been discouraged that you are not getting the response you want, ruthlessly evaluate the first thing you are putting forward to represent you - your resumé.