After working in Recruitment for more than twenty years, I’ve seen a lot of Resumes. By a conservative estimate, 250,000. How many of these have really inspired me to pick up the phone and call the sender? Less than 5%.
95% of Resumes are formulaic and non-representative of the person that wrote them. They’re a dull check-list of the tasks performed and a list of dates and previous employers.
Don’t get me wrong, your skills and experience are important. However, what’s important to my clients is what you want to do, and how you want to do it.
For example: Everyone knows the duties performed by a Receptionist. This means that to list your responsibilities as ‘Answering the Phone’ and ‘Greeting visitors’ is unnecessary. Instead, why not say: “I was responsible for professionally managing the front-of-house function for the Company. This entailed greeting an average of fifteen visitors each day and managing three hundred incoming calls each week’ – Now we really know what you can do.
You need to be able to stand out, not with gimmicks and graphics, but with personal content that leaps from the page and tells the reader who you are and why they should meet with you.
Elmer Wheeler famously said:
‘Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle’.
That’s timeless advice when compiling your Resume.