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The 10 Worst Resume Suggestions You Ever Received

Here are ten pieces of really bad resume advice that will definitely undermine your job search:

  1. If you have been a stay-at-home parent for several years, give yourself a promotion: Call yourself a “household engineer.” Then hope the hiring managers do not fall on the floor laughing.
  2. If you have changed jobs a lot, simply omit most of the jobs and close up the gaps by adding a couple of years to the jobs that remain. Then hope no one checks references.
  3. If you left a job because your boss was an impossible jerk, be sure to explain that on your resume. Because everyone wants to hire a complainer, right?
  4. If you are not certain that your resume is worth sending out, ask twenty or thirty people for their opinions. Then spend months trying to incorporate all their advice at once.
  5. If the company asks for skills or experience you do not have, claim you have them anyway. Then hope no one asks you a question you cannot answer during the interview.
  6. If you will take any job that anyone offers, ignore the skills, experience, and education in job postings and advertisements; apply for everything. After all, you might get an interview—you might also be elected President of Morovia.
  7. If you are changing jobs after decades at one company, do not bother describing your achievements; everything you ever accomplished was part of your job description and nothing special. Then hope the companies you contact appreciate people with a long career of accomplishing nothing.
  8. If you are a recent college graduate, do not write a resume at all; four years of education, some volunteer or summer work, and a few campus club memberships do not qualify you for a job. Just throw yourself on a recruiter’s mercy.
  9. Don’t bother checking and rechecking your resume for errors or typos; you don’t want to work for any company that is nitpicky.
  10. If you have decided to take any of this bad advice, refuse to see a professional resume writer. What do professionals know, after all?

At Robin’s Resumes®, we are dedicated to keeping job hunters away from bad advice; we write strong resumes that clearly show each individual’s value to potential employers. Please contact us.

What Makes a Resume Writer a Professional?

You have seen those online sites that promise a “free” review of your resume. If you take advantage of that offer, they then suggest that you let them rewrite your resume. But you never meet the actual writer; all you get at the end is a file with your information rearranged.

Professional resume writers have credentials, examples of their work, references, an actual process (number of conversations, number of drafts, timeliness of reviews), and a history of working with people in your field or industry.

Professional resume writers let you know at the beginning about costs, including the procedure for refunds. At the end of the process, they give you a file that you can update, rather than returning to them again and again for even the slightest modification (such as a change in email address).

Professional resume writers have the respect of peers, as indicated by invitations to speak, teach, lead committees, and participate in forums.

But above all a professional resume writer has a name and a face: Someone who works with you one-on-one; a real person who asks questions and involves you in the process. I am proud to be a professional resume writer, and I look forward to working with you.

 

 

Do You Need a Professional Resume Writer?

It costs money to hire a professional resume writer; is the money worth it? Here are a few reasons why you might consider hiring a professional.

  1. You hate bragging or talking about yourself and have nothing in your career to brag about anyway. A resume is more than a list of facts about where and when you worked and what you did. It describes your accomplishments and highlights the value of your work to past and future employers. This is not bragging; it is a factual description of your ability to contribute. A professional resume writer can help you see the value in your work—and convince recruiters and hiring managers, too.
  2. You prefer talking to writing; you can sell yourself to anyone if they will just give you an interview.  Almost all companies require a resume before they will give you an interview; the resume has to come first. But just as critical, a professionally written resume will help you at the interview itself. Professional resume writers help clients remember facts and accomplishments they may have forgotten or too quickly dismissed as unimportant.
  3. You are sure that no one can understand your career the way you do. You are not the only one who needs to understand your career.  Your resume has to be understood by and interesting to hiring managers and recruiters who may lack the technical or industry background you have. A professional resume writer can help you bridge that communications gap.

At Robin’s Resumes®, we take pride in giving our clients the resume help they need most. Contact us today.

Short-Term Jobs on Your Resume

Many job seekers have periods when they have worked at a company or a series of companies for a short time. On a resume, those short-term jobs can come across as job hopping or worse. Here are three approaches to handling those situations on your resume.

First, keep in mind that the standard for length of employment has changed. Employers now expect their employees to change jobs frequently over the course of a career, and some employers in some industries may be leery about hiring someone who has spent 20 or 30 years at the same company.

Second, if you have worked on multiple jobs that are in the same field and that naturally have a time limit (for example, as a freelancer, consultant or temporary hire), group all those jobs under one Freelance or Consultant title. The individual jobs become bullets under the main title, rather than separate positions. A long period of short-term freelance, contract or temporary work in one field (for example, construction, sales, software development, or substitute teaching) is very acceptable.

Third, if you alternated between employment in your field and employment outside your field, create a section called Career Highlights for your most relevant experience. Then list all your other experience briefly at the end of your resume under Other Experience. That way the gaps are filled but the jobs that matter are given the emphasis they deserve on your resume.

Finally, if none of those approaches seems appropriate, please contact me. The help of a professional resume writer can make all the difference.

Resumes for College Students

Sometimes a college student comes to me with a very clear set of restrictions: “I know my resume is good because my college professor [or best friend/spouse/parent] helped me with it, so all I need is a cover letter.”

More times than I like to admit, I look at the resume and/or cover letter and realize that this is a job seeker who has been led astray by well-meaning people. Resume writing is a profession, and I am credentialed and certified in that profession. Plus, I make it my business to know what hiring managers are looking for right now in resume content and format.

Let’s take the example of a college student helped by a professor. The professor is likely thinking in terms of the college career services agency. Resumes that from career services have a standard format: they don’t have the resources to individualize resumes and the standard format lets an interviewer easily work through and compare dozens of student resumes sent by the agency at the same time.

Outside the college career services agency, the purpose of a resume is different. You want your resume to get an interview for you—and you alone. This is not a reflection on the career services agencies, which provide a very helpful service. However, your agency resume is not the resume you should be sending out to companies where you will be competing with people from different schools and with different educational background, experience, and their own professionally written resumes.

When a job seeker comes to me with a poor quality resume, I am always polite but I am always honest. Sometimes they entrust me with the cover letter and then realize the big gap between the quality of the cover letter and the quality of the sub-par resume. Sometimes they visit the civilian resumes and federal resumes on my website and see the difference between what they have and what they could have.

Before you send out your resume, contact me. If it doesn’t need improvement, I’ll let you know. But if it does, you definitely want a professional resume writer to help.