Resume

Off Topic
21

DIESEL: Not to toot a different horn once again, here is what I found to be the best (and short) advice so far in my experience (book source available on request):

Winning Resumes

Forget everything youve been taught about resume writing. That includes using active verbs, full sentences, and specific employment dates for past jobs. This is a new era. Your resume is a press release whose purpose is to publicize a hot new product: you. Like a magazine designed to fly off the stands, todays resume grabs the reader with enticing headlines, currency figures, and percentages.

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The person youre trying to influence doesnt care about your objectives, he cares about his own needs. Instead, substitute two or three flash words defining your expertise. These qualifiers focus the reader`s attention on your attributes and determine his three-second impression of your resume.

(…)

Moreover, if youve changed jobs often, you can put yourself in a better light by composing a skills resume that emphasizes your abilities before listing the companies where youve worked.

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Skill words:

Inventing, Building, Editing, Organizing, Selling, Appraising, Auditing, Designing, Writing, Planning, Managing, Researching, Negotiating, Distributing

(…)

Use the list of skill words as a guide, quantify, and qualify your work history - words people don`t actually use in ordinary conversation.

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Prune your descriptions mercilessly - the more print on the page, the more defensive you seem. Think of former United States President Jimmy Carter. Type the following words on a piece of paper and you`d be done:

Diplomat at-large
Former President of the United States
Former Governor of Georgia
Peanut plantation owner
Graduate of Annapolis

Note that his resume has just five lines and theres no question of the dimension of Carters power.

22 
Dan C, that's good info, however...

most people are not dplomats at large or former president of the united states...See, Im not even a graduate from a University at the time.
23

Dan C’s got some good points there. The skill words are what I was looking to use in your resume.

Also, build leadership skills on your own, and apply them to the job. Some good resources:

A few books by John C. Maxwell – Developing the Leader Within You; Developing the Leaders Around You; The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.

Those are some of the best leadership books I’ve ever read. Also, become fluent in Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” and Les Giblin’s “How to have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People.”

24

Also look on the job ad and if they say “must be expert in photoshop” and you are an expert in photoshop then you put that as close to the top of the resume as possible. Therefore they see a needed requirement right away. If they don’t they may just toss it before reading the whole thing and be on to the next resume. But Dan had good advice. :slight_smile:

25

Diesel, here are my “words of wisdom”:

Point: At 23 you’re not going to be managing anything like what you’re thinking about. It won’t happen. The only exception to this would be (a) you own your own company or (b) if you work someplace like Burger King where managers are routinely in their 20’s (which you don’t want to do). So I wouldn’t worry about trying for “more responsibility” at this point. If you have no degree, no real experience in your field, and no history with a given company, you’re not going to get what you want just by being a smart person. Fact of life. So why am I telling you this? Just so that you won’t screw up your chances by pestering your superiors for promotions when - objectively speaking - they can’t give you one anyway.

Point: I’ve worked in Personnel before, and the ONE THING that the personnel manager is thinking when he interviews a prospective employee is, “Is this guy going to embarrass me?” All he wants to hear is reassuring noises from you that you can and will do the job. Although there might be guidelines that he has to follow to hire you (i.e., applicant must have two years experience in the field, etc.), if he likes you well enough he’ll probably bend the rules and let you in anyway. So during your interview, what you’ve put on your resume is of secondary importance to how you come across in person. And how you want to come across is: fucking balls-out confident that you can take that job by the neck and do it better than anyone they’ve had in the position before.

Point: That said, a spelling mistake on your resume is fatal. Make sure, make double-damn sure, that it’s gramatically perfect. Show it to absolutely everyone you know and solicit comments. You don’t have to take those comments necessarily, but you never know when someone will catch a mistake that everyone else has missed. Every personnel manager that I know has had one rule that they follow: If a person doesn’t care enough or have enough attention to detail to get the resume right, I don’t want him working here. Cut and dry.

Hope this helps.

26 
  Char, good points. 

  I dont want to be a manager. See, my goal is simply to get a more challenging job which isnt a dead end - one where I can move up after a while. 

  Thanx for all the advice. It improved my resume a whole lot.