95% of people fail miserably in their search for a simple job interview – 95%!! That’s in spite of the fact that they put in the effort to create a good resume, they buy the appropriate clothing to make a great first impression, and they take the time to learn the effective job interview techniques for success.

But instead of an invitation to a job interview, they get the cookie cutter, “Thanks but no thanks” letter, notifying them of job application failure. In other words, they don’t even make it to the job interview stage! Sound familiar?

If that’s been your experience so far, listen up: chances are it’s not your fault. Chances are it’s not your lack of experience or qualifications that’s letting you down. It’s something as simple as your resume. In fact, I’m almost certain it’s your resume that’s not cutting the mustard for you.

And that’s where this ebook by an expert resume writing veteran can help you learn:

• How to get more job interviews without spending a fortune on professional resume writers (page 6)
• What real, winning resumes look like because I provide you with samples of effective resumes that got interviews for my customers (pages 24 and 77)
• The SINGLE most critical resume step that means the difference between success or failure and can GUARANTEE a resume that gets results in hours (page 16)
• The biggest resume blunders and how to avoid them (page 69)
• What you must do NOW to dramatically increase your resume response rate by 100% (page 10)
• The one explosive secret that’s sure to get you more job interview requests than you could have ever imagined (page 19)

…and much, much more in this specific A-Z step-by-step guide on how to write a resume that will be a magnet for job interviews!

Praise for Pro Resumes Made Easy:

Great and easy to follow
“This book really covered a lot and definitely made me realize that my old resume should be in the archived of the archives….totally recommend it for anyone who is looking to update their resume but cannot afford to get a professional to do the job.”

Easy to implement
“As a recent college grad, I can use all the help I can get when it comes to perfecting my resume for future job inquires. Pro Resumes Made Easy was a great starting point…”

an excerpt from

Pro Resumes Made Easy

by Andrea Drew

CHAPTER 1

some basics

What is the purpose of a resume?  If you ask most people, they will tell you it is “to get a job interview.”  Yes, that’s right it is designed to get you a job interview.  But a resume is also designed to sell you, or generate enough interest in you to make the reader make contact and schedule a meeting time.  Your resume has had enough impact, that out of the hundreds of resumes a recruiter receives in their email inbox daily, yours has stood out.

If you’ve heard the saying that recruiter’s look at most resumes for between 5 and 20 seconds, it’s true.  Add to that equation the fact that resumes are now received via email inbox, and you need to consider the fact that this means that the top third of your first page will be the first thing the recruiter sees when they click open the attachment.

I’ll be running you through the step by step process I use when writing a resume.

My resumes are written in a way that they;

1. Catch the recruiters eye immediately

2. Give them a reason to keep on reading

3. Stand out by writing them in a way that only 5% of all job applicants use effectively; and

4. Works with scanning software sometimes used by recruiters

5. Makes the reader want to meet with you!

CHAPTER 2

the first part of the resume writing process – planning

I’m sure most of you have lots and lots of questions including what headings to use, how long should it be, and do I include an objective and similar questions.

In my 11 years of writing resumes professionally, I’ve lost count of the number of questions that I have been asked about resumes.

Honestly, I think the best way to do this is for me to go through my resume writing process step by step, and then, when we’re done, I’ll include a list of possible questions and answers that may be still unanswered at the end of this book, OK?  How does that sound?  Good.  OK, here we go.

The first thing to understand is that you don’t need to include the word resume or curriculum vitae (CV) as a title within the document.  What you are really telling the recruiter in doing so is that you really do think they are thick as two short planks, and that they are so dumb they don’t even realise that this is your resume.  No, don’t go there.  By the same token, you don’t need headings or identifications such as name, address, telephone.  It is obvious what they are!  Surely people aren’t that dumb?  (Hold your tongue!)

Most resumes I see (and I have seen thousands) fall into the “shopping list” resume category.  That is, they are a hastily written document scribbled down, and it is just a list of boring, general descriptions which mean little.  The problem with this type of document is that it only describes the sort of duties that anyone in that position could do.  There is nothing in there that markets you as a unique individual with value to bring to the potential employer.

Usually, when a client purchases a resume writing package online, they also upload their current CV to me.  At this point I acknowledge receipt of their payment and documents, and ask them to complete my in-house questionnaire.

Why do I do this?

Well most resumes are what I have rather cheekily termed “shopping list” resumes.  That is, a quickly scribbled dry boring very general list of functions and responsibilities.

This does nothing to market the candidate, and actually really only talks about the types of functions anyone within that position could perform.  A resume needs to talk about why you are different.  What challenges or problems did you face, no matter how small?  What did you do to solve these problems?  And (hopefully) what was the fantastic result?

It is this information that I am really looking for when sending the questionnaire to a client.  I also send them a video to guide them as to the “resume gold” that I am digging for.

Once I receive this, I get to work.  I’m going to show you my process from start to finish, using the case study of “Angela” but firstly the planning stage.  I usually write an action plan as this makes it easier to write the resume.  It doesn’t need to have all the boxes and look beautiful so long as you have the information there to work with.

       Here is a sample:

So you can see there I have the person’s name – their position title, the position they are aiming for or targeting and their personal traits.  Similarly I list the number of years’ experience they have, as well as their “hard skills.”  These are their skills that I will be using to formulate a list of keywords within the resume, more on that to come.  Hard skills list should only include those skills and ability that can be backed up by evidence.  General skills are something most job seekers use a lot of; I see lots of words such as “team player” and “excellent organisational and prioritisation abilities” and most readers will scan over these if they look general without hard evidence.

What the job seeker doesn’t realise is that almost every other job seeker out there has done the same.  Of course they don’t realise this, as they don’t get to see lots of CVs as I do (and lots of recruiters do) and so these statements lose impact.  Statements such as “Contract Negotiation” and “Process re-engineering” or “Profit Maximisation” where this is backed up with evidence is much more powerful and makes the reader sit up and take notice, even if just for the fact that they very rarely see a resume of this kind.

Keywords are something that are not only used to attract the readers’ attention, particularly in a situation where a recruiter is scanning through hundreds of resumes; they are also occasionally picked up by computer scanning software.  Not all recruitment companies use this software, but those that do are able to search across their entire database of say 20,000 resumes through scanning for several keywords which may be for example, FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) or Contract Negotiations.  So including “hard skills” here within the keywords section serves a dual purpose in that these words listed on the first page could more than likely assist you in gaining an interview, months after registering with a recruitment company.  A position comes along, they interviewed you six months ago for a different position, and they registered your CV on their database and do a search and bang, up comes your resume in their search results months later!

Getting back to the action plan and resume writing, the second page of the action plan is where I plan the “meat” of the resume or achievements.

I use a tried and true method of CAR or Challenge, Action, Results.  Here what I am doing is splitting up achievements into chunks to make sense of these prior to writing the resume.  You will see here that these make up the bulk of the job seekers “story” and really demonstrate their skills:

Here you can see the challenge, action result planning in action.  As the above text is a little small, I thought I’d include a few of them here:

Challenge

• Lack of shared purpose amongst staff, four departments all working hard but efforts disjointed and haphazard

Action

• Strategic Planning Review – several meetings took place, review distributed to staff.  Met with resistance due to perceived increase in workload, involved staff to gain 90% commitment – arranged meetings so staff could “vent” – facilitated sessions to demonstrate how sharing of information needed to be reciprocal (i.e. other depts., customer) – arranging training sessions in customer service and dealing with difficult people for managers and supervisors

Result

• Two supervisors struggling with change resigned, Staff turnover reduced from 30% to 5%, Profit increased by 3% as well as adding 4 additional resources across the contract, Finance and Facilities depts. Held their own strategic planning sessions using my principles to ensure uniform message, resulting in late invoicing and debtor’s payments reduced from 60% to 5%

As you can see this is my rough “internal” text.  From here it is a matter of tight phrasing, trying to get the salient points across to the reader without being too drawn out and long winded.

In this case the CAR approach became these two bullet points one after the other:

• Instigated and rolled out a series of strategic planning review meetings with outcomes distributed to staff.  Allowed staff to communicate frustrations and concerns whilst simultaneously facilitating training sessions in customer service, and dealing with difficult people.  Staff turnover reduced dramatically from 30% to 5% with a marked upsurge in morale and a more cohesive unit.

• Increased profit by 3% whilst adding five additional resources across the contract through formulation and rollout of strategic planning, staff training, facilitating staff meetings and demonstrating how improvements could be made

Here’s another example of how a rough CAR planning point became a selling point within the resume:

Challenge:

• Tenders for project work not being effectively managed with customer complaining – complaints were justified

Action:

• Arranged for myself and two others within Facilities department to be trained in defence’s procurement guidelines, then implemented these into all project processes including Identifying exact scope of work, using correct forms and processes throughout tender process

Result:

• Additional $3 million of work managed from writing scope of work through tender process and to financial completion for year 2007/2008 – on time and on budget.  By 2008/2009 this was done without my input

Which when rewritten became the following:

• Recognised poor management of tenders for project work resulting in disgruntled client.  Arranged two staff and myself to be trained in formal Defence procurement guidelines, implementing these into all project processes.  Subsequently managed an additional $3 million in project work (estimated $7m in 2010/2011 financial year) throughout the entire tender process, enabling staff in following years to manage this process with minimal input

chapter 3

Writing the resume

So now we have done our planning, we can get to writing.  Remembering our earlier example, Angela is a graduate nurse, passionate about midwifery.  She is trying to gain entry into this program.  But her existing resume is just likes so many others I see, boring, ho hum, plain and in my opinion pretty useless (sorry Angela but I am sure you would agree with me )

Right, well here is a snippet of the first section of the first page of her resume as it was:

So what’s wrong with that?  You might be thinking.  Well, here’s what’s wrong with it.  Firstly, why does it need a heading or title of “Curriculum Vitae?”  Shouldn’t it be obvious to the reader what this is, after all they’ve already received an email in response to a job ad (most of the time) so the recruiter should know that you aren’t sending them the latest cricket scores.

Unless, you really are desperately trying to tell the recruiter that you think they are stupid.  No?  I didn’t think so.

The second thing is that this heading doesn’t really stand out to me.  Keep in mind that I was a recruiter in a previous life.  Picture this.  Your manager has put you in charge of the advertising and screening process for 30 positions.  Each position receives between 100 and 1000 applications including cover letters and resumes.  So you really do only give each application about 5 to 30 seconds, meaning that the resume has to stand out immediately.

Combine this information with the fact that over the last thirteen years I have looked at thousands of resumes, and I can assure you that most resumes look exactly like the “before” resume listed here.  Bland, boring, non-descript.  When I write the resumes, I try to incorporate in the very top section of the document:

1. Contact details of the candidate:

2. A quick idea for the recruiter as to what sort of candidate they are dealing with e.g. Results focussed Accountant seeking auditors role (or similar)

3. 6-8 bullet points of “hard” skills

You can see below how I rewrote the very beginning of this clients resume:

A couple of things to remember:

1. Only list “hard” skills.  You may notice above I have listed these, which I discovered via Angela’s questionnaire.  Don’t, don’t please don’t include wishy washy statements and “soft” skills such as “effective team skills” “outstanding communication” “ability to prioritise and manage time” I see these sorts of general meaningless statements all the time.  Trust me, 99% of all resumes I see make these sorts of claims which, without evidence mean nothing!  Every man and his dog will claim they have these skills.

2. Don’t go overboard with fancy graphics, fonts or layout.  I say stick to black and white, with a regular font or typeface such as Arial or similar.  Yes, use bullets and bold or underline for emphasis, but don’t go overboard.  If you are using these for emphasis, they are no longer emphasised if the entire page is bold, or 75% or 50% of it is.  Get the idea?  Use bolding or underlining or italics sparingly and only where definitely needed.  Also if you use bullets ensure these are uniform throughout the document and well formatted

3. Start bullet points or achievements using the CAR approach with a verb or strong action word e.g. revamped or collated or redesigned.  Refer to the end of this eBook for a list of power words for use in your new resume.

From here you need to continue writing the resume, as outlined in the previous chapter, and using the CAR approach.  Once your resume is completed, including an education and references section, have someone that you trust look over the resume to hopefully give an objective opinion. (Including me – refer to bonus section!)

Hint: Don’t be tempted to use the same action word over and over in your resume.  For example:

• Improved sales performance by 30% through implementing new sales force training program

• Improved customer relations through individualised follow up

To help you I’ve included a “power words” section at the end of this book to use when writing your bullet points/achievements.

CHAPTER 4

Professional history/employment narrative

This is where you get into the “meat” of the resume and which is the recruiter’s main focus. What is your experience, working background or as I sometimes call it “Career Snapshot”

Keep in mind here, that less is more.  Truly.  This is a marketing document designed to generate enough interest that the reader really wants to meet with you to find out more about you and what you are capable of.

That doesn’t mean that you list out every single function of your job as well as outstanding achievements.

This is what Angela did within her resume.  Let me ask you a question.  Would you find reading through that text interesting?  Does it grab your interest?  No?  Well then how can you expect a recruiter to see anything other than “boring” written all over it?

How should this be written?  Well personally I believe that accountabilities or functions can be discussed at interview if necessary.  Duties and responsibilities are the sort of thing that anyone in that job could do.

What is going to sell or market you and your skills effectively?  How do you demonstrate proof of your skills or evidence that you can do what you say you can?  How can you position yourself as unique or the best person for the job?  The CAR formula or;

• Challenge or problem

• Action – what did you do to solve it?

• Result – what was (hopefully) the result of your actions and overcoming the problem?

The trick here is to tell your “story” to the employer.  In this way, not only do you provide evidence to the reader of your skills, but you set yourself apart from the pack.  To demonstrate this a little better, I’ve included some statements where I managed to reword the job seekers information into something eye catching:

Before:

• Departments I manage are Emergency Services, Administration and Finance (includes IT), Facilities Management, and Commercial Operations

• My focus since moving from the Operations Manager to the Executive Business Manager’s role has been to streamline processes and procedures with the aim of providing a more effective and consistent service to our contracted customer (Department of Defence) and to other stakeholders such as xxxxxx residents, xxxxxxx Test Facility Customers, and tourists and other visitors to the community. This has been achieved while still maintaining a healthy bottom line for the Company

  Positive outcomes achieved to date include the development of a strategic plan for departments which has resulted in significant improvement in the timely processing of the finance functions; including a customer satisfaction survey process; development of an HR plan to improve our ability to retain and attract key staff , including a review of remuneration and benefits; development, in conjunction with the Facilities Management team, of a strategic plan for the management of contracted activities for the next 5 years; improved commercial opportunities for additional business; development and implementation of an improved, effective Helpdesk service, and the timely management of Project plans to meet key objectives of BAE Systems and the customer.

  BORING!!  Would you read through all of that if you had 99 other documents to read through?

  And after:

  xxxxxxxxxxx, State                 03/2006−present

  Executive Business Manager

  Upon commencement, the challenges appeared daunting.  Long standing customer difficulties combined with a four departmental team suffering lack of vision and failing to meet Key Performance Indicators prompted the need to develop a strategic plan and address customer shortfalls whilst improving profit, cash flow and staff morale and decreasing staff turnover.

  Identified challenges including dissatisfied customers, backlogs in accounts payable and receivable, frequent staff turnover, and lack of shared vision.

• Instigated and rolled out a series of strategic planning review meetings with outcomes distributed to staff.  Allowed staff to communicate frustrations and concerns whilst simultaneously facilitating training sessions in customer service, and dealing with difficult people.  Staff turnover reduced dramatically from 30% to 5% with a marked upsurge in morale and a more cohesive unit.

• Increased profit by 3% whilst adding five additional resources across the contract through formulation and rollout of strategic planning, staff training, facilitating staff meetings and demonstrating how improvements could be made

  Are you getting the idea?  It’s a matter of quantifying your achievements and giving context or “the story” based on the CAR approach.  Employers are interested in results.  Funnily enough, very few candidates manage to include these in their resume, less than 1% of all job seekers manage to do this.  Simply including these results is enough to make you stand out from the pack.  You may see above that I am telling the job seekers individual story.  I state the problem or challenges, what was actually done to overcome these challenges, and the measurable, quantifiable result.   Once you start talking about results or how you can add value, employers are all ears.

  Another tip: always start each bullet point with a strong action word or verb.  And don’t use the same verb or action word over and over.  Use the power words section at the end of this document liberally!

  chapter 5

  Where to focus

  I’m sure many of you are interested in where I put my focus within a resume?  Well, it goes a little like this:

  70% of the focus should be on the first page

  20% of the focus on the second page

  10% on the rest

  Why?

  The first page is what recruiters will look at primarily.  They will make a snap, ten second decision on whether to continue reading.  So this is the point of impact.  They are also primarily interested in what the job seeker is doing now, and how they can add value.  Give this information to them quickly and effectively with impressive wording and layout and you will have their interest.

  I am going to include a sample here of a successful resume, so I can show you what I mean by where I place the focus.

  Keep in mind that the samples I am showing you here have:
  a. Won the job seekers lots of interviews; and
  b. In many cases gained the job seeker their pick of job offers.  One of these clients was offered more than one position from which to take their pick!  Nice position to be in don’t you think?

John Citizen

Details removed for confidentiality reasons

Email:  sample@sample.com Home: (00) 9999 9999

Career Highlights

Sample Employer – Melbourne, Victoria    1998 – 2010

This x communications company employs 200 staff worldwide, and 18 within the Melbourne office.  This position reported to the Vice President Operations and supervised six staff.  Initial employment in 1998 was as Quality Officer, whereupon I was promoted to Payload Engineer in 2000 and Mission Director in 2010

Mission Director (2004 – 2010)

Highlights include:

• Participated in conversion of all Payload procedures from an Astrium control system to an ISI (EPOCH) control system.  This involved conversion, testing the completed procedure via a Dynamic satellite simulator and ultimately comparing bit patterns from the original procedure to the newly converted procedure using ‘Wireshark.’  During this process determined some procedures were not being converted correctly so wrote software to correct the conversion process using Visual Basic (VB)

• Analysed and identified failure on board Asiastar satellite resulting in switch off of an active unit and powering on of a redundant unit.  After bringing the beam back online, edited all procedures that referenced the failed unit, and rewrote sections to reference the new unit

• Improved payload recovery procedure from 8 hours to 2 hours by rewriting and streamlining procedures, removing redundant steps and speeding up various parts of the procedure

• Repositioned the North East beam resulting in better coverage over China

• Promoted to Mission Director from previous position as Payload Engineer

  “Over the years, I always talked up the Melbourne mission, GCN and PFLS crew to the WS and FVI people here at HQ.  You made things go really smoothly, even in the face of MCC trouble.  I could always count on you for mastering any issues pertaining to channel activity on Asiastar.  Also your creation and management of the PHP ‘Satellite Anomaly DB’ is really an excellent piece of software and has worked well from day one for us here in Washington.” Name Removed, Colleague,(Mission Director) Washington HQ, Sample Employer

  Responsibilities included:

• Trained Payload engineer as well as 5 satellite Controllers

• Directed the satellite engineering team on payload reconfigurations and anomalies

• Managed daily operations of mission engineering and broadcast operations

• Maintained regular contact with ground stations in China Melbourne and Singapore as well as regular teleconferences with Washington head office

Sample Employer – Melbourne Vic

Payload Engineer (2000 – 2004)

Highlights included:

• Proposed and created a web site accessible by both Asian and African sites, in order to share satellite anomaly data, improving failure recovery time.   Used MySQL, PhP and HTML to create the application, which is still in use today

• Wrote software application which automatically converted trend data into graphs using Visual Basic Application (VBA) and Visual Basic (VB).  This saved large amounts of time as previous system meant manual retrieval of data and manual creation of graphs in Excel.  As a result of this successful application was asked to extend its capability to graphing more complex plots

• Promoted to Payload Engineer from Quality Officer position

Responsibilities included:

• Supported Mission Director in monitoring and controlling channel programming, routine maintenance on feeder link station and day to day running of the mission segment

Sample Employer – Melbourne Vic

Quality Officer (1998 – 2000)

Highlights included:

• Resolved complaint of staff bullying and conflict.  Initial complaint of racial abuse resulted in senior management proposing dismissal of two controllers.  Negotiated with management to investigate the matter further, eventually determining that two staff members were targeting all controllers, rather than the behavior being personally or racially motivated.  Counselling of two staff members ensured staff retention and dramatically improved morale.

Responsibilities included:

• Ensured on-site configuration changes and anomaly management were implemented in line with xxxxx quality requirements

• Performed operational impact assessment of procedures and indicated improvements where appropriate

• Implemented quality audits

• Executed operation qualification on Asia star satellite including procedures prior to launch

• Monitored all procedures and satellite tests, reporting anomalies, requesting changes and confirming all activities relating to operational qualification

• Coordinated with ground stations globally to line up carriers, and configure resources on board to broadcast their programs to one of three downlink areas in Asia

• Member of the Asia star launch and early orbit phase team (LEOP)

• Supervised controllers and coordinated all Controller related issues

• Facilitated smooth functioning of Regional Operations Centre during nominal operations

Sample Space Agency – Darmstadt, German  1995 – 1998

Analyst

Highlights included:

• Created web page in order to disseminate monthly performance reports to all European space agency sites, subsequent to Operations Manager request to disseminate monthly reports in an effective manner.    This page is still in use at http://ersmonrp.esoc.esa.de/start.htm

• Acted as Ranging Officer for ESR1, and Quality Officer for ERS2 including monitoring data collection from a remote sensing station in Sweden, as well as ensuring the satellite was delivered to the owner in orbit, and functioning as expected

• Involved in all three satellite launches both in Europe and Australia.  ERS1 and 2 (scientific satellites) and Asia star (communications satellite) including launch and early orbit phase.

Responsibilities included:

• Supported European Remote Sensing Satellite (ERS) ERS-1 and ERS-2 nominal and anomaly operations

• Managed both ground and space segment operations

• Assessed overall platform and payload health

• Trained new Controllers and assisted Spacecraft engineers with trouble shooting and report generation

Education

Bachelor of Information Technology (Networking)    Monash University     completion 2010

(final semester)

Professional Development

Introduction to 3D Studio Max (Graphical Design software) RMIT Melbourne    2002

Platform, Payload and Associated group  equipment Alcatel, Astrium and Xxxxx France    1998

User level Introduction to UNIX    ESOC Darmstadt (Germany)    1997

Certificate in Spacecraft operations    ESOC Darmstadt (Germany)    1994

Technology

Programming PhP, Java, JavaScript, HTML, VB, VBA, SQL

Operating Systems Windows, Linux, Unix Applications    MS Office, 3D studio max, Flash, Dreamweaver

References

References removed for confidentiality reasons

This was only one sample, but I am hoping it is enough to give you an idea of what I am aiming for.

Do you notice how the bulk of the focus was on the first page, as well as the way the achievements were worded?

Recruiters really are interested in current positions first, keywords (in this case such as Satellite engineer, X/L band payloads).  The focus when I write this resumes is firstly the current position, less so the one prior to that, and even less the one before that.

You may also notice that the word “I” isn’t used in my resumes.  That’s because the resume is a marketing document.  It should be written in the third person, and using the word “I” makes it first person.

From there I get into headings such as Education, Professional Memberships, Technology/IT skills (if applicable) Licenses and References.  There are other possible headings, but we will get into those later in the book and in my “Q and A” section where I take up the most commonly asked questions over the last twelve years or so.

A couple of points I wanted to make about these last few sections though.

1. Only include education that is relevant to your career path or the position being applied for.  Case in point.  I once saw a resume received from a candidate seeking work within a large hospital as a Ward Clerk.  She had in her education section information regarding her responsible service of alcohol certificate and her accreditation as TAB corp gambling processor.   Hardly the sort of qualifications being sought by a hospital whose job it is to take care of patients often whom have been injured as a result of alcohol!  Yes this may take you some time to amend for each resume, but it is worth it definitely, as to do otherwise is to give the recruiter the impression that you are adopting a “one size fits all” approach and are not checking your resume before sending it off to each application

2. Don’t include professional memberships if you have not been a member for years.  Stating that you were a member of the Law Society five years ago is not going to add value to your resume, as well as considering the fact that in all honesty memberships are not exactly a focal point of the resume (they are usually listed on the second or third page).  Yes, definitely in the eyes of some recruiters memberships do carry weight, particularly when specified within their job advertisement or position description, but definitely not when the membership is lapsed.

I get asked whether it is better to list references individually or simply “Available on request.”  The answer is that this depends upon your individual situation, but most Australian employers according to survey, do prefer telephone referees listed within the resume.  Refer also to the references chapter later on in the book.