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Summary of What's included in this Step:
5: Custom Tailor Your Resume
Last Update: 2-21-03
One size does not fit all when it comes to resumes.
That is the challenge to student and experienced job seekers in today's wild and confused digital job marketplace: how to make the most impact in your presentation and still fit the narrow guidelines of hundreds of overloaded job posting services including local services, national resume banks, fee based services and employers' own sites. The loading is so employer/vendor controlled at the moment that it is hard to fit a multi- dimensional person into the narrow slots and filters that stand in the way of a reasonably productive person-to-person connection.
Many career counselors do not take the time to investigate alternative formats, sticking mainly with just one or two. It is not easy to fit people for their best resume types, and takes a lot of focus by the job seeker and the The payoff is well worth the effort in the opportunities you can open up.
The Resume Kit shows how to manage yourself so you are not completely typecast by trigger words or educational definitions that represent old job titles and past competencies. This is not easy given the superficiality of many current job search protocols. Far better to avoid them, go around them, or supplement them with a custom tailored resume format.
The art of customization fits neatly with Targeting - the first section of The Resume Kit. It begins with the assertion that you have more capability than will fit on a few pages. In fact, if you have any experience at all, the various combinations and permutations of your skills, accomplishments, qualities and work style could run into the hundreds. You are not a job title, you are a results producing entity who can step into a multitude of situations and take on the challenges that haven't even been invented yet. As a just now graduating student, this seems hard to see; as a person with experience it is sometimes still hard to see the full scope of your potential. The tendency to lump together degrees and majors and job titles is widespread in the recruitment process. The reality of the work itself is a totally different matter- the day-to-day challenges vary to a degree that makes job descriptions almost meaningless except at the very lowest levels.
The reason to customize your resume is to make it fit into the specific opportunities you have decided are the ones you want to take on, and organize the words and phrases so they fit that model, or to build several different resumes that can qualify you for a multiple of paths.
In The Resume Kit we review five different resume formats. Each presentation includes a description of the format and its pros and cons, the instructions for preparing that format, and a sample resume written in that format. Here are the five formats you will consider:
Chronological format - organized by employment history
Functional format - organized by functional choices with small amount of job history
Targeted format - organized by interpreting the job target you are seeking
Combination format - organized by functional choices with fuller job history
Resume alternative format - a substitute for a resume using a letter approach
This is a detailed description of what you might have found in Your Resume Calculator. In this step you will also go through the details of formatting and layout, pros and cons of a presentation format and a list of things to avoid.
Included in this section of The Resume Kit are the rationales for customization,
descriptions and examples of each resume format and layout suggestions.
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