The general consensus is that a resume is a short and snappy, but informative history of your work and achievements underscored by your skills and a profile on who you are.

The ‘who you are’ aspect is for employers and recruiters who are interested in soft skills, that is personality, motive, vision and the kind of things that will bind you to their own vision of themselves as an employer.

Generally speaking, a resume is a portrait of you and obviously, if you have a new job you need to be able to include that new information into the latest version of your resume.

However, it’s unlikely that YOU are going to change personally and so the update is related more to the latest details in relation to your experience, professional development and/or studies.

In terms of the timeline, you will not necessarily tell the story in a chronological order, you might decide to put it into order of important because if a job you held five years ago three jobs back, is now suddenly more important in terms of your next application, then having it five years ago and three jobs back will not necessarily be in your best interest.

So you can list your experiences in order of importance related to the job you are applying for.

A resume should be:-

• concise;
• informative;
• compelling; and
• it should sell you in the best possible way;

so that the employer or recruiter who looks at your resume, will be able to make the decision very quickly whether they want to invest time to interview you.

A resume should include your 30-second elevator pitch.

A 30-second elevator pitch is based on the philosophy:-

When you get into an elevator in a tall building with someone who you can benefit from and who you want to impress, but that someone is going to get out on the 30th floor, you need to make an impression very quickly.

What can you say to them that will make them want to continue the conversation or to invest time to find out more about you? This is your 30-second elevator pitch!

Your 30-second elevator pitch should be in your resume and you should also mention it at the interview. When you are asked: “tell us about yourself”; this is when your 30-second elevator pitch should be used. Nobody wants to listen to you talk for 2 or 3 minutes on ‘who you are’ and ‘what you do’, they want to hear a really dynamic overview that takes no more than 30 seconds… That’s your 30-second elevator pitch.

The answer is ‘Yes’ and ‘No’.

Interests and hobbies are part of the whole ‘you’. They are things that make up who you are and they can be of extreme interest to employers, but of less interest to recruiters, who are more interested in the very core information about what you can achieve.

An employer, however, IS interested in knowing what makes up ‘you’, the person who’s going to join their team:-

• Will you fit with their culture?
• Will you be a good member of their team?

What you do outside of your work in terms of interests and hobbies, whether it’s keeping fit; going to the theatre; or a community activity where you volunteer, are the sorts of things that are of importance to employers. It will not cost you to leave them out, but it may benefit you to include them.

Gaps in your work history can be caused by many things:-

• raising a family at home;
• being sick over a prolonged period of time; or
• because you’ve taken time off work to travel.

These are all understandable and all acceptable, but you must declare them, they must have a place in your resume. Do not try and hide them because eventually the truth will come out and if you are caught lying or covering up, even if it’s not a bad cover up, it will count against you in terms of the potential employer’s assessment of you as a potential employee.

‘Soft skills’ are the glue that binds an employer and an employee together once technical competency has been established. People with skills and experience don’t always get the job and if they do they are not always the best person for the job.

One major Australian recruitment firm has a list of what they call ’8 Success Factors for Evaluating Candidates’:-

• Technical Competency – evaluates your competence in the required technical aspect of a position.
• Evaluating an individual’s ability to build rapport with other people in the team, and with external and internal stakeholders.
• Values and motives – evaluates an individual’s work ethic and personal motivators within a business environment.
• Cultural – evaluates the match of an individual’s attitude and value system with the overall company culture and value system.
• Potential – evaluates areas of strength and areas for future development.
• Personality fit with team dynamics, management and leadership of the organisation.
• Cognitive ability – where they evaluate the aptitude for learning and the applicant’s ability to apply new and abstract information.
• Comprehension skills and spatial awareness.
• Reliability and character – which evaluates people through the eyes of their referees and reports from people who previously worked alongside the individual applicant.

Soft skills are very important, as mentioned, “they are the glue that sticks an employee to an employer after the technical competency has been established.”

There is no ‘one’ common mistake made in resumes. However, there are many mistakes that are common. Simple obvious mistakes are:-

• spelling mistakes;
• grammatical errors;
• use of different tenses in a document – which talks about things in the past tense, in the current tense or in the personal tense, that is 1st person, 2nd person or neutral; and
• a regular mistake is Capitalisation. People seem to want to use their own way to capitalise words. They assume that if the word is important it should be capitalised. That is, if they talking about a particular skill, such as management accounting, unless management accounting is part of a headline it should not have a capital ‘M’ or capital ‘A’. It should be treated like all other words. Capitalisation is one of the most glaring errors and it happens at everybody all levels.

If you are still employed, when you apply for a job you’re very conscious about giving away a lot of information to someone that you don’t know and you will want to make sure that they are not going to divulge that information to your current employer. It’s fair to say that, generally speaking, most recruiters understand that the information exchanged between the applicant and the employer or recruiter is ‘confidential’, but we often include the word ‘confidential’ at the heading of a resume, particularly for an individual who’s in a very sensitive or senior position and they are really concerned about leakage of their information.

There are a number of steps a professional resume writer can take but we deal with that as a general day-to-day issue when compiling someone’s resume.

There are a lot of stories out there on how long a resume should be. Basically, it depends on the country:-

• America – a resume is one page long.
• England – they are very concerned that a resume or a CV, should be kept within 2 pages.
• Australia – there is general consensus that a resume should not exceed 3 pages, if possible, but 2 pages would be ideal.

A resume length should not be kept short at the expense of valuable information. This is where using a professional resume writer comes into play. A professional resume writer has the words and tools to write about a job applicant in a much more dynamic and therefore concise way and generally keep a resume to not more than 3 pages.

Yes, you should hire a professional resume writer.

Would you cut your own hair? Would you extract your own teeth?

There are professional resume writers who have had many years of experience in compiling resumes professionally. Some people on the Successful Resumes team have been writing resumes professionally for 20 years:-

• They know what makes employers and recruiters tick;
• They know the language to use when compiling a resume; and
• They know the format and the wording that will gain attention and put the applicant in the best possible light.

Also, most people are inherently shy or lacking in confidence on saying positive and dynamic statements about themselves. It’s a quality that’s natural but a professional resume writer will look at you from an external prospective. We will view you as another person, another product, and we can ‘sell’ you because we are not emotionally involved. You, as a person, would be very emotionally involved as far as writing your own resume and you would probably underplay or underscore items on your resume that should be stated about yourself.

Generally speaking, resume templates from the internet and from word processing software are not good enough. They are of the most basic type of document. Why a resume template isn’t good enough:-

• They do not guide you in completing achievements in your resume;
• They do not guide you in the personal profile section of your resume;
• They do not assist you in completing your professional assets; and
• They do not include details of ‘soft skills’ that are really important in your overall application.

We certainly do not recommend that you use templates.

Obviously there is a cost involved in hiring a professional resume writer, but it shouldn’t be looked upon so much as a cost, but more as an investment in your future. If you do not spend that money you may be out of work for longer than if you do spend that money. It’s literally one of the most valuable investments you can make.

Generally speaking, and certainly in our organisation, we don’t just give a client their resume and see them on their way. We are available for telephone consultation and follow-up work at either no cost or very reasonable cost to our client. Successful Resumes have been in business for 20 years and we pride ourselves on giving our clients quality and value for the money they spend on their resume.

Selection criteria is a tool used by governments at state, federal and local government levels as well as for statutory authority employers, to level the playing field for all applicants. It ensures that recruiters who don’t know you have a good idea whether you can do the job or not, without first having met you. This allows them to cull to a refined number of applicants and all applicants are asked the same question. It’s not so much a question as them asking you to prove your experience or demonstrate your capability in general and specific aspects of the job. Selection criteria are complex for people that are not experienced, but for the team of Successful Resumes, selection criteria are simple and they cannot be avoided if you are applying for a job in government.

Cover letter expectations by a recruiter:-

If you’re applying for a job with a recruiter, then when you first see the advertisement, we suggest you ring the recruiter to find out if the job is still available and the closing date for job applications. This is your opportunity to make contact with them. They will probably ask you questions about yourself as a precursor to deciding if you’re a worthwhile applicant for the job. This is where you establish that there is no real reason for a cover letter, unless they ask for one, because, in your general email or in your online application, you can say “further to our conversation about the position, I am attaching my resume here with.” You might decide that you want to say something about yourself personally that relates to information provided in the job application, but, otherwise that is all that is needed in a cover letter.

Cover letter expectations by a prospective employer:-

Writing a cover letter for an employer is a different situation. An employer wants to know a number of things. He does not want to hear your resume rehashed in the cover letter. The cover letter should not be about you, it should be about the employer:-

• why you want to work for them;
• why you admire them; and finally
• what you can do for them in respect of the specific job.

A five paragraph letter well-worded on one side of one page is all you need to ensure that you get a job interview.

The benefits of employing a member of the Successful Resume professional are numerous, but in essence, it comes back to experience. Successful Resumes has been around for 20 years. The size of our organisation and the breadth of talent that we have in our writing team, currently of which there are 35 in Australia, have acquired specialist knowledge in areas such as in mining and I.T. That’s not to say that any of our team can’t handle resumes for other industries, but those two areas do require a need for specific technical knowledge. Successful Resumes is a caring organisation. That might sound a bit trite, but the truth is that the Successful Resumes team does care about our clients. We do like to know how our clients are going after they leave with their resume and any other items or application material we prepare for them, including cover letters and selection criteria, or the guidance on interview skills that we provide, or the toolkit of documents that we prepare to help them understand more about the application process.

Successful Resumes is a caring organisation of talented individuals with a depth and breadth of knowledge that far transcends any other professional resume writing organisation in Australia.