Resume Writing

3 Simple Questions that Can Radically Transform Your Resume

3 Simple Questions that Can Radically Transform Your Resume

For many job seekers, writing a resume can often feel like a difficult or awkward exercise in professional self-reflection. Though they say that “hindsight is 20/20,” why is it that visualizing one’s professional past can appear so hazy? Well, depending on the length of your career and/or tenure in your roles, you are often digging through the layers of many years of experience in order to surface the gems that should appear on your resume. Since writing a resume is not something that you do often, your excavation tools may not be as sharp as needed for the task. In this case, your digging tools are the questions that will help you uncover the achievement stories that will effectively position you for your target audience.

In a previous post, I wrote about how to adopt a journalistic approach to help you build context in your resume. Here I want to share three specific questions that will help you select rich achievement content for your resume and help you drill down to why it matters.

How Context Can Make or Break Your Resume

How Context Can Make or Break Your Resume

“What you just told me sounds amazing! Why isn’t that in your resume?” 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve exclaimed this when speaking with clients after uncovering the bigger story behind an achievement they have listed on their resume. I have frequently observed a major chasm between how clients relate their stories verbally, compared to what appears on paper. Aside from simply underselling an accomplishment, experience has taught me that the bridge between these radically different narratives often boils down to one key element -- context.

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6 Ways You Undersell Yourself in Your Resume & How to Fix Them (Part 2)

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6 Ways You Undersell Yourself in Your Resume & How to Fix Them (Part 2)

One of my favorite rappers has a line that says, “...[I] sketch lyrics so visual // They rent my rhyme books at your nearest home video.” In this vein, I strongly encourage my clients to be as vivid as possible when it comes to telling their achievement stories in their resumes. Writing a resume can certainly feel much more like an art than a science, but to achieve success in telling your story, you’ll need a bit of both. From the scientific discipline, we can draw upon certain laws that can help govern how we paint our career pictures, to ensure maximum impact on our target audience. Underselling often occurs in resumes when these laws aren’t followed.

In the previous post, we explored some reasons why people undersell themselves in resumes. Below we will explore 6 specific ways in which underselling manifests itself when writing your resume and how to fix them.

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5 Reasons Why Your Resume is Underselling You (Part 1)

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5 Reasons Why Your Resume is Underselling You (Part 1)

You’ve accomplished a lot in your career to date, but somehow, your great career story isn’t shining through on your resume. So...what gives? Chances are, you feel like your resume is underselling you and you can’t figure out why. Aside from the fact that writing a resume can be a painfully awkward exercise in professional self-reflection, it is also impacted by unseen or even unconscious internal and external factors that can influence how [well] you tell our story.

In this post, we will explore 5 key reasons why you might be writing a resume that undersells you and how to shift your mindset to overcome them.