What does yours say about you?
Does yours simply relate where you've worked or what you were responsible for? That's not the story recruiters, HR professionals, & hiring managers really want to read about you.
The story they want to read is the "back" story that underlies & drives your career history to date:
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Why do you choose to do what you do? What motivates you to do your best & what does your best look like?
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Why have you taken the career path you've chosen to date & what are you looking for next in your worklife?
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What difference have you made in each of your roles & how did you do so? What unique contributions have you made? What legacy have you left behind in each role?
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What sets you apart from other candidates? What makes you stand out?
Of course, your resume is not only a career story telling tool - it's a sales tool, too - so it also has to promote your brand, your history of achievements, & your complement of skills, qualities, & traits while laying the groundwork for your interview performance & paving the way for effective salary negotiations. And when you consider how little time a human being actually spends reading your resume (a whopping 25-30 seconds) it has to do all of this succinctly, clearly, & artfully.
But that's not all. Your resume also has to stand up to a metrics-driven assessment by the databases employers rely on to screen incoming documents. This assessment is designed to screen out 95-98% of incoming resumes & only passes those resumes which meet the strictest key word, experience, & credential standards.
[If you've been applying for lots of jobs online &/or directly to lots of companies & are getting little to no response to your resume, then yours is consistently failing this screening process, which is, of course, very bad news for your reemployment hopes.]
Next your resume has to stand up to the rigorous review of a human being. Initially it will be seen by an HR professional, then later it may be evaluated by a hiring manager. In both cases they will be looking for different kinds of details than those sought by the databases just described, all the while on the look-out for evidence of your career story.
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