Résumé Fashion Tip – What Are You?
Fashion? I thought this was a career blog? And doesn’t your wife dress you anyway? They answer is yes on both counts, but I sometimes I do pick my outfits in the morning! But seriously, my experience is that résumés are a lot like fashion, there are a lot of opinions and style are always changing. For example, if you have not got the memo, functional résumés are out and unlike retro style, they are unlikely to come back around!
Thankfully for me, the changing styles in résumés keep me in a job, unfortunately for many job hunters, this can keep them from a job (or at least make them look outdated). If your résumé does not look good or sound good, it will come across to an employer like tye dye at a funeral. Enough said…
Here is the Résumé fashion tip of the day: Tell the employer what you are! Sometimes the most simple change can make a world of difference. I am amazed at the number of unfocused résumé that are cluttering the employment gutters. This can be as simple as a nice, bold tagline stating a few key skills or your most likely job titles when you land. Another option is to call out what you are at the beginning of your “Summary” Section.
Examples:
“Technology Director | CTO | Technology Leadership”
“Anesthesiologist & CRNA”
“ Proven Sales Leader who…”
“Research Analyst with…”
The point is to immediately alert the reviewer that you are what they are looking for. Tell them who you you are! Unless of course you want to stay unemployed.
If you want something to lighted your job search (for about 5 minutes at least), check out unemploymentability. Keep up the old styles of resume writing and you too might be able to stay on someone elses couch! But at least then no one would classify you according to the way you dress…
