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What's included in this Program:
5: Custom Tailor Your Format
Last Update: 3-2-03
One size does not fit all when it comes to resumes.
That is the challenge to 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 resume services don't take the time to investigate alternative formats, sticking mainly with one or two boilerplate forms. It is not easy to fit people to their ideal resume; it takes a lot of focus by the job seeker. The payoff is well worth the effort in the opportunities you can open up.
The Resume Kit shows how to manage your resume and cover letters so you are not 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.
Customizing your resume will make it fit into the specific opportunities you know 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 we'll show you:
- 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
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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