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What is a Resume?

Your resume is a marketing piece, not just a fact sheet. Like other marketing pieces, your resume can be thought of as a commercial that advertises a product. Like television commercials, your resume must be persuasive, eye catching, attractive, concise, and informative, and it must present its message in 20-30 seconds. Unlike other commercials, however, the product being sold is YOU. Therefore, your resume should contain information about you and why the reader should interview you.

Your resume also serves as an example of your ability to organize and effectively communicate a message. It should convey one very important message to a potential employer-“This is what I can do for you!” Employers are looking out for their own best interests. They will only interview and/or hire people who will accomplish things that contribute to the success of their organization and, in the process, to their own personal success.

How do I Get Started?

Writing a resume is a difficult task for many people. Oftentimes, job seekers get so caught up in worrying about the mechanics of putting a resume together that they render themselves helpless and unable to even begin. Below are listed very specific steps and techniques you can use to make the process easier.

Step 1: Determine Your Job Objective

Writing a resume is somewhat like building a house – you need to build it on a firm foundation. A resume’s foundation is its job objective. A job objective tells the reader of your resume what position you are interested in. It should be specific, short, and concise. Job objectives also tell an employer that you have specific career goals and are focused on the type of position you want.

Generic job objectives such as “A challenging position with a growth-oriented company” serve only to irritate employers and make the writer appear unsure of what they want to do. Remember that employers are looking to hire people to fill professional positions who have specific career goals and objectives, not people who will take any position “just to pay the bills.”

To help with this step, you may want to do some research to learn about the job market and the types of jobs you are eligible for and interested in. Reference materials such as the Occupational Outlook Handbook , government publications found on-line or in your local public library, are good places to begin. The OOH defines common job titles, indicates education requirements, and outlines standard duties, salary information, and future outlook for each job type. Other good sources of information are trade journals, newspapers, and other business-related magazines.

The best way to gain career information, however, is not through any printed materials, but by talking to people currently performing jobs of interest to you.

Getting information from people is done through a process known as Informational Interviewing, which will be discussed in detail later.

Once you have determined your job objective, it is time to move on to step 2.

Step 2: Define Your Selling Points and Examples

This is the most important and vital step to writing a good resume, and will determine how you present the information appearing on your resume.

Your job objective determines what information appears on your resume, your selling points determine how you organize and present this information.

Imagine you are a copy machine salesperson, and your boss has charged you with the task of designing a sales flyer for the latest model of copy machine you are selling. Before you worry about how the flyer will look, what clip art you will include, and what type of paper you will print it on, you need to determine what it will say.

Most likely, your first step will be to define the features of the copy machine you want to highlight in this flyer. While your copy machine is a state-of-the-art piece of office equipment with lots of good points, your goal is to develop a short, concise marketing piece that customers can quickly read and absorb. Hopefully, upon reading this flyer, your customers will call you to find out more.

This is exactly what your resume needs to do. Before you can write an effective resume, you must determine your own “selling points,” or those things about you that will attract an employer’s attention. Unfortunately, while it is necessary to take the step first, most people find it very difficult to determine their selling points. To assist you with this sometimes difficult process, use one of the techniques listed below.

Selling points can be defined and illustrated by all of your life experiences, not just paid work.

Your ability to handle multiple tasks effectively can be illustrated just as clearly in your role as president of the accounting club (or Cub Scout Den Mother) as it can in your job as an office manager. Just because you didn’t get paid for something doesn’t mean it wasn’t a valuable experience that can illustrate a particular characteristic.

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