How’s your resume? Can you find it? Is it accessible?
When I got laid off I spent a week looking for my old resume, which was 6 years old.
I didn’t find it, I just wasted five days looking for it.
Of course, if you are in a job search, you’ll have it ready, right? Here are three tips for your resume:
- Ask five or ten friends to review it. Don’t just give it to them, specifically ask them to review it to see if it reads well and presents you strongly. Ask them to critically analyze it. I get a lot of resumes from people who just give it to me, for no specific reason. I am not a resume database, but if we have a relationship, and you ask me to do something specific with your resume, I usually help.
- Ask for a professional resume review. Career Resumes will give a no-cost resume review and let you know what you need to do to improve. Of course, they’ll let you know how they can help, but if you don’t want to pay, at least have one (or more) professionals review the document. This is not any old document – the resume is a personal marketing document. You can try to do it but it won’t come out like the final product a professional resume writer would deliver.
- Read and internalize it. I remember an embarrassing situation where an interviewer asked me to clarify something from my resume. I didn’t even remember that thing was on there, and I when he showed it to me I couldn’t tell him why it was there. How dumb that was! (How did it get there? I took my dad’s resume, which was done professionally, and changed it to be mine. I didn’t fabricate anything, but I left things on that seemed like they applied… but I couldn’t remember why I had left that particular thing on my resume. Oops.)
Use your resume as a tool. If you don’t have a strong resume, and you don’t know when to give it and how to use it, you are at a great disadvantage to your fellow job seekers.
