Recently a JibberJobber user sent me a resume that one of my colleagues did for him and asked me what I thought.
The resume was really quite impressive. I’m not surprised. The resume writer is someone who has been doing this for a long time and loves to stay current and do a great job.
My first impression after looking at the resume was that this guy had decades of doing amazing things. The companies he worked at, and the products he worked on, are household names.
If I were interviewing I would want to satisfy curiosities and ask more. I would want to ask stories about his experience. Some of my questions would be because it would be intriguing to know, and others to learn how involved and instrumental he really was in each of the things he claims on his resume.
He needs to go through his resume, pull out every claim, and put at least one story behind it.
I’m not much for critiquing resumes. I almost always decline when someone asks me to look at their resume. But I opened this one and that was my very first impression. You have a great resume, now what? Be ready to TELL STORIES!
My second thought was to be careful not to ask too many UNQUALIFIED people their opinion of the resume you just got. I asked people for opinions of my resume and the information I got was misleading (making me think it was great, while it really kept me out of interviews). Everyone will have their opinion but recognize this is a marketing tool to get you interviews, and that is it. Dick Bolles talked about resumes very frankly in our last Ask The Expert – you can view the interview here (he comes on 20 minutes into it).
As a marketing tool, do you suggest the best person to review your resume is a chief marketing officer, a career counselor, or a professional resume writer?
That is a pretty good question Ari. I personally would get responses from each of them and weigh them all.
I would not expect the CMO to give great feedback, even though they should be marketing experts. They might be thinking about B2C or B2B marketing and not understand the resume game well enough to give the right feedback.
Career counselors are a gamble. Some are inexperienced or too busy with school politics. Many are only experienced in their field (say, recent graduates, law students, MBAs, etc.). Many I’ve worked with are swamped with so many things, including the red tape at their office and being understaffed, I’m not sure they are “expert” at resumes.
Resume writers should be the right answer. I have seen many responses, though, where the answer is “here are all the things wrong and I’ll fix them for you,” even if it is a fine resume. There are honest ones, for sure, but many look at a critique opportunity as a future sale. Nothing terribly wrong with that, but if you only need to fix 5 or 10% of the resume, do you need a complete rewrite?
Honestly, there isn’t one single right person to ask. Even if you find three recruiters for hiring someone in your field you might get three different reactions. This relies too much on human factors.
(I don’t mean to bash on any of the three above)