Early Career: “The Aha! Moment” – October 1, 2018
A backstory for every breakthrough.
In our work here at Resume Professors, I like to think of what we do to help our clients reassess and rebuild their resumes as a certain form of pseudo-forensics. Each effort is just a little bit different, but they all share a certain kind of fact-finding mission in common.
Typically working from the bare bones of an existing resume, along with anecdotal career information and; hopefully, a largely completed questionnaire, I start to assemble the structure of a brand new document. The pace varies from slow to fast and back again, but soon gives way to progress—and usually, the sense of uncovering the small things that add up to big things. Then, there’s a spark …
“Hey, this is gonna work!”
More precisely, there’s a realization that what I’m doing has to work. Sometimes that means finding inventive ways to treat setbacks as timely setups for the next step forward. In other cases, it’s about addressing changes in career direction or providing greater context to extended gaps in employment.
Paraphrasing Johannes Haushofer, an assistant professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, who recently made news by publishing his “resume of failures,” most people are likely to attribute shortcomings in their careers only to themselves. Seldom do many see that the world dishes out good and bad luck at random, and that human beings routinely make simple, but irreconcilable errors in judgment.
Exasperation to exhilaration.
As we say on our website, when you choose to work with Resume Professors, you’ll receive much more than a career-winning resume. In fact, our most popular package gets you two variations of your resume, plus a tailored covered letter that can be used over and over again when applying to multiple positions. Perhaps more importantly, you’ll come away from the process with a better understanding of the skills, experiences, and achievements that make you appealing to employers.
The boost in confidence to you as a job seeker can be priceless.
More words to the wise.
In a post published on Forbes.com in May 2018, contributing writer John M. O’Connor wrote, “In today’s modern-day resume, achievements and numbers matter, but so do context, collaboration and cooperation.”
To that end, we second O’Connor’s suggestion that those elements are essential in developing resume content that “truthfully, but powerfully,” describes what candidates have brought to their profession, what they are currently doing in their current positions, and what they aim to accomplish in the future. The goal, as he sees it, is to “articulate [even the most] complicated work history as a continuous, achievement-filled journey.”
You’ve got a friend in the business.
Naturally, it’s all easier said than done. But at Resume Professors, we specialize in turning the possible into the probable. We stack the decks in your favor by verifying and optimizing keywords through our own applicant tracking system—one that replicates the same algorithms used by 95% of today’s Fortune 500 companies to determine which resumes actually get read by a live person.
If having someone you respect put in a good word for you is important, then having an authority “put all the good words in for you” on your resume can be even more career-defining.
“Aha!”
Your moment has arrived.
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