Resumes, Resumes, Resumes! And a Killer Template

If you are new to the professional world, engaged in a career shift, or just want to be sure that you are on target, you might want to execute a little research to ensure your resume has the proper focus.

If you want clarification on a target job, analyze job postings, and visit the Occupational Outlook Handbook pages at bls.gov, which gives you detailed analysis of hundreds of jobs. Following that, talk to people who are actually doing the work and have them deconstruct the job for you. If you already work in the field think about the best people you have known doing this job and analyze what they did, and how they did it. Then apply the same analysis to people who have failed in the job, and why. This kind of strategic thinking will give you the focus you need.

As the years pass and you gain more experience, this process becomes increasingly important as a tool to keep you on track. The reason being that after just five years in the professional world, there are usually two or three jobs you can do; and when you get fifteen and twenty years down the road you could have twice that many professional options. Often resumes that attempt to reflect great breadth of experience can seem unfocused.

Experienced professionals have to be fully conscious that employers are not looking for Swiss Army knives, they are looking for someone with critical "must have" skills to apply in a specific area, those additional "nice-to-have" skills are just that, and they don't need to be in a resume (beyond presence in a keyword section, see accompanying column How To Get Your Electronic Resume In Front of Human Eyes, and the book Resumes that Knock 'em Dead) because they will take focus away from your primary thrust.

For any employer, the resume screening process is one of the most mind-numbing steps of the interview cycle. Typically, resumes get a first time screening that spans no more than 30-45 seconds with the majority of that time spent on the first page; remember that the reader is looking solely for people with specific experience related to the needs of a carefully defined position.

This means that the first page of your resume needs to pack a knockout punch, and the best odds for achieving that is with a clear focus on a target job. Only with that focus can you demonstrate your understanding of a job's deliverables, along with your experience and achievements in each of the deliverable areas.

To illustrate our discussion, take a look at the accompanying combination style resume overview page. I recently created this resume to help a client transition from a teaching job to a target job as the curatorial director of a chain of eight art galleries. One carefully focused resume, one mailing, one call back within 36 hours, one forty five minute interview, one job offer. As you will see the resume made crystal clear that the candidate had a thorough grasp of the job, using exactly the techniques we have discussed here. What you should also know, but can't see, is that the format I used enabled the client to include considerable skills that came from avocational activities. Resumes, resumes, resumes, to be effective they first and foremost need focus.

View the combination style resume overview.

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