April 2008 - Does My Resume Stink? Alesia Benedict 04/23/08

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And now, on to this month’s before and after...

Judy, this month’s resume overhaul winner, was targeting a position as a CFO or SVP for a financial services company. She had lots of experience in the field but her old resume was simply not up to par and was not resulting in interviews. The general appearance of the old resume was quite plain, and with tight text it was difficult to read. The focus was not clear and the job descriptions were quite wordy.

Taking it to the Executive Level

The first thing I did with her new resume was develop a new executive summary. This was followed by a revamped core competencies section that did a better job of giving an overview of her skills and experience. The core competencies section serves not only as an at-a-glance skills section but also functions as a keyword section to boost the resume’s profile in databases.

Judy had a date gap that was fairly obvious between her last job and today. Upon questioning, she revealed that she has actually been very busy professionally, consulting within her field since leaving her job as VP of Corporate Strategy. It is not uncommon for executives who have excellent industry reputations to do consulting concurrently with permanent positions or even as a full-time endeavor. So, I decided to highlight her consulting work by creating a section at the beginning of the professional experience.

Her old resume was crammed with information that was not executive in nature. Judy had made a common mistake of thinking “more is better.” This resulted in placing information in the resume without considering if it was relevant to her current goal as an executive candidate. I condensed and summarized much of the information she provided in our conversation and removed older job information that -- though it served her well earlier in her career -- was no longer needed.

A User-Friendly Resume

In the content of the jobs themselves, I created job descriptions and restricted the use of bullets to achievements and high points only. This reduced the overuse of bullets throughout the resume, making them more effective. She had some repetitive wording, starting each section with “Led”, so I switched it up to bring in better, more varied language. I also simplified the tone. A user-friendly resume is not necessarily one that is full of complex and compound sentences that go on forever. Recruiters tell us they like the “simple language” method. I smoothed out the language and made it easier to read.

Last, the education section needed a better presentation. I placed it in a better visual design, without bullets, and wrote out the names of the schools to give a more professional appeal. What is not apparent when viewing the two resumes however, is what is not included. In the information provided during our conversation, Judy gave me details on affiliations and memberships that she had had in the past. Since they weren’t current, however, I elected not to include them but rather use the space more effectively in bringing out her accomplishments and achievements in the content of the experience section.

The end result is a much stronger resume that gets the important information front and center to position Judy as a strong CFO or SVP candidate.