The Top 4 Rsum MythsBusted – Forbes

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When clients first contact me for rsum help, they often say things like I heard that you should never or I was told to always Most of these rules are just plain wrong, because they contradict the one Golden Rule of Rsum Writing: your why you should hire me message needs to jump off the page in the 15 seconds or less that your rsum is being reviewed (one study says your rsum is looked at for only 7.4 seconds).

Keeping the Golden Rule in mind, lets look at the top four rsum myths that Ive come across in my work with clients.

Your rsum should not be a literal list of all the things you did in your career. Instead, make it a document that quickly tells an employer how you can help them by using selective emphasis and inclusion. That is, keep the Golden Rule in mind. For example:

If you are too literal in describing your experiences, both you and your prospective employer might lose out, the latter because they wont truly understand your value.

Most rsum reviewers are not thinking oh this rsum is on two pages (or three pages), forget it. What they are thinking instead is I only have a few seconds to look at this and figure out if a conversation is worthwhile. You therefore need to prioritize ensuring that your rsum can be quickly scanned for value over having your rsum conform to a predefined length.

I too often see rsums with fonts that are too small, margins that are too narrow or space between jobs or experiences that is almost nonexistent all to make the rsum shorter. The result looks like a wall of tiny text thats difficult to quickly scan. Address these issues if present in your rsum, and make use of white space so that the reader can quickly skim through your rsum and pick out the key points.

Similarly, too many rsum writers leave out highly resonant accomplishments for the sake of one or two-pages, which is counterproductive. Dont hurt your case in service of a rule that most rsum reviewers arent thinking about!

The benefits of de-prioritizing page length in favor of these other factors have been evident in the results from my work with over a thousand clients, where their one page, two page or even three or four page rsums have landed them interviews. My career-coach colleagues longer yet concise rsums are similarly being selected for interviews and high praise as well. To take one of many examples, my work with universities enables me to see which undergrad rsums recruiters select out of a pile. Very often, they select the rsum that goes onto two pages out of a bunch of one-page rsums.

That said, ensure your rsum is as concise as possible (remember the Golden Rule). Make every word count. For example, when I see that a rsum is just over two pages, Im usually able to find and remove unnecessary words or phrases to get it onto two.

This myth violates the spirit of the Golden Rule, as you can see in these examples.

The bottom line: add experience to your rsum if it helps, take out or deemphasize experience if it doesnt.

Some jobseekers feel they need to use a different rsum format to hide issues with their experience. These issues include long gaps in employment, relevant experience that is old, or perceived experience gaps resulting from an attempt at a career or industry change.

Look, Im all for breaking convention when doing so will help you to get across your why hire me message more effectively. But dispensing with the reverse chronological format will have the opposite effect. The rsum reviewer will get confused by a different format than the reverse-chronological one that they see on 99% of rsums; they either wont take the time to figure out what youre doing, or they will think youre hiding something.

Theres a better way to handle problems, and its called a Summary Section. Place it at the top of your rsum (the first thing the reader sees), and think of it as your elevator speech or pitch.

Include: 1) your target position, i.e. what box you would fall into within an organization chart, 2) what differentiates you from your competition, and 3) your summarized greatest hits hard hitting bulleted accomplishments so they dont have to go searching on page two to find that amazing accomplishment you want them to see (you may repeat these accomplishments later in the rsum if appropriate).

By the way, the analysis of myths one and three applies equally to your LinkedIn profile.

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The Top 4 Rsum MythsBusted - Forbes