writing | Robin's Resumes (r)

5 Top Reasons for Hiring a Resume Writer

Mar 12 2017

Professional Writing: Unless you yourself are a professional resume writer, you probably have not kept up with the latest in resume expectations by hiring managers and recruiters. As an award winning Certified Master Resume Writer, Certified Professional Resume Writer, and invited speaker on careers and resumes, I am proud to present my clients with well-written, well-designed resumes that meet the latest criteria and expectations.
Professional Advice: As a Job and Career Transition Coach and a Certified Electronic Career Coach, I have worked with job seekers in many industries, at all levels. I can advise you on how to position your resume for a transition in career, industry, or location. As a graduate of MIT with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering, I can also advise you on how to present technical information in a way that recruiters and hiring managers will understand.
Advocacy: When you are in the midst of a job hunt, you may feel beaten down. You may disparage your achievements or forget important milestones entirely. You may feel that everything you do is something “anyone” could do or that you have issues (for example, a gap in employment) that are hard to overlook. I’m here to draw out the achievements, hard and soft skills, and contributions which identify you as a candidate worth interviewing. Then I write up that information to highlight your potential value to future employers.
Restraint: You may feel that your best chance for being hired is to throw everything into your resume, from your first job walking the neighbor’s dog to an itemized list of your everyday tasks. You may apply for jobs that do not match your skills or career path. As a professional resume writer, I target your resume for the position you truly want and deserve. Companies have specific requirements for each opening they advertise. My job is to write a resume that shows how well you meet and can meet those requirements, positioning you as a strong candidate.
Confidence: Over and over again, I have sent a client a draft resume and heard their confidence levels rise as they realize how much they have accomplished over the years and how much they have to offer. A strong resume is a document you are proud to hand to your network, post online, send to a company, and talk about in an interview. It provides a foundation for your profile on LinkedIn or other social media sites.

If writing is not your primary skill, if you are confused about your career path or how to present it, if you are not getting interviews, if your are confused about how much or how little to say in a resume, and if you need a boost of confidence, please contact Robin’s Resumes® today. We can help with a resume that reflects professional writing, professional advice, advocacy, restraint, and confidence.

What Is Full-Service Resume Writing? Part II

Aug 21 2016

As a full-service professional resume writer, my job is to make sure that your resume accurately, concisely, and clearly describes the value you bring to a company. A resume company that takes your old resume and merely updates or reformats it is not providing full-service resume writing.

I am often surprised by differences between a job seeker’s old resumes, answers to the questionnaires I send, and the job seeker’s sample of advertisements and postings for preferred jobs. Here are some less obvious ways my full-service resume writing helps everything line up correctly in a powerful resume:

By showing you the value of your contribution. During a company downsizing, a secretary had taken on the responsibilities of an administrative assistant who was let go. The secretary said that she had not been “officially promoted” to administrative assistant, and therefore she couldn’t use that job title. I only found out about her extra duties when I matched the current job description she supplied to the job duties she listed on the questionnaire I gave her. On her resume, I made it perfectly clear what a superb asset she was by describing her position as: Secretary with Administrative Assistant Responsibility. That is what full-service resume writing means: helping you brand and sell yourself to your next employer.
By clarifying the job posting or advertisement. An IT professional felt he could handle a CIT position at a major company but no one was responding to his current resume with requests for interviews. When I compared the sample job postings he sent me to his resume, I found very few of the qualifications matched up. He needed to take interim steps before he could apply for interviews: perhaps he should look for a CIT position at a smaller company or become the CIT’s next in command at a major company. He researched job postings for a direct report to the CIT and I re-wrote his resume to show off his value for those positions. Full-service resume writing also means that I give professional advice based on decades of experience.
By streamlining your information. Recruiters and hiring managers readily admit that they do not spend a lot of time with individual resumes. They want the important facts up front and easy to locate; they will not hunt through your resume for contact information, skills, accomplishments, education, and experience. I often help job applicants who either bury important facts too far down in their resume or do not know when to stop writing. Sometimes they spend paragraphs describing their experience with outdated technologies or first-time jobs that they left decades ago or a particular accomplishment that has no relationship to the job posting or advertisement. As a professional full-service resume writer, my job is to focus resumes to match the expectations of recruiters and hiring managers.

I am proud that Robin’s Resumes® is a full-service resume writing company, and I look forward to helping you.

What Is Full Service Resume Writing? Part I

Aug 14 2016

As you may have noticed from the home page of my website, Robin’s Resumes® offers a complete line of resume writing services. These include not only writing your resume, but writing your LinkedIn profile and cover letters. It is important that your resume, LinkedIn profile, and cover letters support each other in content, tone, and style.

Are you somehow cheating if you hire a full service resume writer? Because I write resumes for executives who lead the same companies where you are applying, I can tell you that no one considers professional resume writing a “cheat.” Companies are hiring you for your professional skills; they are not hiring you because you wrote your own resume! My professional skill is making sure your skills, accomplishments, education, and experience stand out in a concise, well-written resume that is suitable for applicant tracking systems and for review by hiring managers and recruiters.

I work from your existing resume and a sample of the job postings and advertisements that attract you, in order to determine what type of package would best suit you and whether I can help in you win interviews in your particular field or area of expertise. Once we agree on what your expectations, I send you a questionnaire to gather the most information possible. I may follow up with a personal phone interview afterwards to clarify or expand upon the information in the questionnaire.

Over the years, Robin’s Resumes® has assisted job seekers at every level, from C-level to recent college graduate, and in both technical and nontechnical fields, including engineering, research, Human Resources, medicine and healthcare, social work, supply chain management, and law among many others. In addition, I have mentored other resume writers, given resume advice to job seekers both on online and during events, and achieved the highest certifications in the resume writing field.

So in my case, “full service” includes the knowledge, skills and experience to write a resume that attracts the attention of hiring managers and recruiters. I will never guarantee an interview—no one can do that, given the many circumstances that have to come together before an interview can take place (including timing, competition from internal candidates, and the company’s commitment to filling the job).

But I can guarantee that, as a professional and full service resume writer, I will expend every effort to give you the best possible resume, LinkedIn profile, and cover letters. Contact me today.

Three Preventable Mistakes on Resumes

May 15 2016

Resume clients often give me a copy of an outdated resume to serve as a starting point for creating a new, more powerful resume targeted to their current job search. Lately, some preventable writing and proofreading mistakes have been cropping up in those old resumes crop over and over again.

For example, Marine Corps has appeared in more than one resume without the “s” in Corps. The word “corp.” is an abbreviation for “corporation” and the word “corpse” refers to a dead body but the word “corps” refers to a military organization. It is the word you need in a sentence like the following:

Worked closely with the Marine Corps and the Army Corps of Engineers.

A second mistake that appears frequently is putting a period after “LLC” in a company name. You need a period in the abbreviation for corporation (ABC Corp.) and in the abbreviation for incorporated (ABC Inc.) but not for LLC (ABC LLC). By the way, if an abbreviation occurs at the end of a sentence, the same period serves for both the end of the abbreviation and the end of the sentence. You don’t need two periods. The following punctuation is correct:

Promoted to lead HR in 2005 after improving morale at ABC Inc. Was assigned to head HR at ABC Inc. and Foghorn LLC as part of a joint venture.

A third preventable writing mistake involves the word “including.” The correct punctuation is a comma before and no punctuation after the word—but more and more I’m seeing a semi-colon before “including” and a colon after. A colon after “including” is appropriate before a bullet list but generally not in a sentence. The correct punctuation in a sentence is:

Led all marketing efforts, including print, customer-facing, social media, and billboard.

At Robin’s Resumes™, we specifically look for common and uncommon mistakes when writing and proofreading your resume. We approach every resume with a fresh eye so that it represents you in the most professional manner. Contact us today.

Writing Advice from Robin’s Resumes®

Nov 29 2015

Sometimes I see a resume in which the job seeker has followed every piece of advice I ever gave on writing a resume and it is still not ready to send out.

The contact information is clear and professional, the opening profile explains the job applicant’s value to the company and the resume is targeted for the companies and industry the job seeker is interested in.

So what’s wrong?

Unfortunately, the one item that sinks many resumes is poor writing. At Robin’s Resumes®, you have a skilled, certified, professional resume writer working on your resume. While all my skills, certifications, and years of experience are important, the word “writer” is the one word that we are focusing on today.

You cannot make spelling and grammatical mistakes on your resume. Hiring managers and recruiters will often cast a resume aside for those mistakes without ever looking at an applicant’s actual qualifications. Those mistakes include the misuse of commas and apostrophes; misspellings (“complementary” instead of “complimentary” or “advise” instead of “advice”); subjects and verbs that do not agree (online grammar checkers are notorious for making mistakes with plural and singular verbs); and similar errors. Two letter words (of, at, to, in) are often missing and easily overlooked because you expect to see them when you read. Over-capitalization is a bad habit that I mostly blame on technology, where every new product or service (Cloud vs. cloud; Web site vs. website) starts out life with a capital letter.

Beyond grammar and spelling—involving rule you probably have not thought about since fifth grade—good writing also means using interesting verbs to capture attention; explaining difficult concepts in a way that hiring managers and recruiters can understand even if they lack the needed financial, technical, or business background; emphasizing the right accomplishments and skills; creating flow; and on and on. Good writing means communicating your value concisely, accurately, and passionately, when “concise” often means “in one sentence or less.”

If writing is not your strong suit, take heart—you have Robin’s Resumes® in your corner. Contact us today.