Importance of a Professional Resume

As a professional, your resume is your marketing brochure. Just like brochures for complex products, a resume tries to present the overall features of a professional in a concise, attractive and palatable format. A typical recruiter spends less than 10 seconds on a resume before deciding whether to proceed with a candidate or not.

With the usage of Application Tracking Systems (ATS), more than 75% resumes are rejected for a role, which means that a qualified person may never be contacted by a recruiter just based on the quality of their resume. That is why, it becomes very important that a resume is not just compelling for a human reading it, but also gets a high score while being processed through ATS.

In the next few articles, we will talk about the art of writing a compelling resume. It all starts with self- discovery, then developing a professional story that is interesting to read followed by some important, practical guidelines while writing a resume.

Writing a resume yourself can be a rewarding experience, but it can be time consuming and our self-biases may become a challenge while writing about ourselves.

That is why, it makes a lot of sense to engage with an external person to do the information gathering from you and help with the resume writing process. However, that person needs to be of the right caliber to write your resume.

Sometimes an industry veteran is required to distill the necessary information from your professional life if you have a lot of years of experience.

It All Starts With Self-Discovery

Like all great journeys, a resume has to start with the end in mind. It is critical to spend time in finding out what the ultimate career goal looks like for you. Imagine yourself at the end of your career, just before you are going to retire, and fix that as your uber professional goal. Resume should be written to advance in that goal’s direction.

It is possible that you may have more than one possible career paths, so note down all that appeals to you and then rank them after either finding your career inclinations or discussions with gurus in your circle. Ultimately this list needs to be very focused.

Now that you know where you want to go, find out more about your strengths, weaknesses, interests, passions &career priorities to further trim the list of your uber goals. It is highly recommended to take a professional self-discovery psychometric assessment (like MKCS’s Dream Finder program).

A detailed professional persona report helps evaluate whether the uber goal aligns what your inner-self truly desires and helps eliminate noise from the decision making process.

Now that you have a view of what you want, assess your accomplishments, experiences & skills to identify which ones are relevant for your uber goal. These are the foundation stones of your resume as you go about building it.

Another key element of building a resume is that it should reflect your personality in subtle ways otherwise it is just words and numbers. Knowing yourself helps you identify what elements of your personality you would like to?“sprinkle”?across your resume. For example, if you are an extrovert who likes to talk to people as part of your self-discovery exercise, you may highlight your customer facing achievements and competencies.

Telling Your Story Through Accomplishments

Like a marketing brochure,?“what”?we are selling is half the story. The other half is “how” we are selling it. It is the art of storytelling that can make even the most mundane of tasks seem engaging. And, as a reminder, resume is build just to grab attention of a potential interviewer and start a conversation.

That is why, storytelling is critical to resume writing. To tell a great professional story, first of all you need to think of all your accomplishments. Take all the time you need (with more years of experience, you may need more time to reflect). List as many accomplishments as you can think of and then select the ones that fit the objective you are trying to achieve through your resume.

It is important to remember that for identifying an accomplishment that is worth telling, it doesn’t matter where it happened and when it happened. If you still remember it, and recall it with a sense of pride or pleasure, its worth weaving in your story.

Another important aspect while selecting accomplishments, to tell a story about, is that they need not be just limited to your professional life. They can be from your personal life too. Anything that warms the heart isn’t bad as long as it is told with professionalism.

Now chose the top 5-7 experiences that you enjoyed the most while giving you a high sense of accomplishment as you went about doing them. Rank them and describe them in detail with special emphasis on what you achieved, what was your role in achieving it, what skills you used to achieve it and the impact of your achievement. Now mention the work-related accomplishments first and put them prominently on your resume as they reflect what you like doing, do well and want to do again.

Recommended Resume Writing Guidelines

Being the brochure about our own self, resume writing has to adhere to some core guidelines while being built grounds up. Don’t expect to cramp your whole life’s story in 2 pages – remember, resume is to peek a hiring entity’s interest in your profile and progress you to an interview conversation.

Here are few of the top recommendations when it comes to building effective resumes:

1.??????Guided Conversation:?An interview will probably use the content of your resume as the first conversation opener and delve deeper into your profile. That is why, put things that you would like to talk about and topics that you have a firm footing on.

2.??????Instead of focusing on the past with a list of your former companies and positions, be strategic and focus on the future. Do this by highlighting parts of your personality & professional that you want to built upon. For example, if you have done coding in the past and don’t desire to do that in future roles, do not give a list of all the programing languages that you have mastered.

3.??????Resume should be adaptable for a particular job easily. Build a master document that has all the flavors of your target professional profiles and make it easy to pick and choose from them based on the target job you are applying for. Omit what is not relevant, don’t cling to strengths that don’t matter for a particular job.

4.??????Make your job history easier to understand to an outsider by using roles instead of using internal job titles in the resume. Remember the difference between a?“Role”?(What you do as your day to day work) and a?“Title”?(How your function is identified inside a company). An interviewer is probably not interested in your title but more in your role.

5.??????Accuracy is paramount in a resume. Lying, however subtle or small, will be caught – sooner or later. That is why, don’t try to smudge facts or overstate things. Also, don’t sacrifice readability and keep the matter clearly understandable for a person who doesn’t belong to your organization

Resume writing is both an art and a science. While each one of us is capable of writing our own resume, at times its best to engage an external service like what we offer from MKCS.

It helps bring objectivity and remove the myopia that we all suffer from.

Until next time, stay tuned for another interesting topic.

#meghnakhan?#goalfinder?#highereducation?#dubaiblogger?#dubaicareer?#counsellingservicesindubai?#resumewriting?#cvwriting?#personalbrand?#dreamfinder?#profilebuilder?#linkedinprofiles

About The Author:?Meet Meghna, the career coach on a mission to help you make conscious career choices. With over 20 years of experience in the education industry, Meghna has worked with startups, big corporations, NGOs, and esteemed educational institutes globally. She has counseled numerous individuals on their career paths and believes in keeping the individual at the heart of the counseling process. Meghna founded MKCS to provide conscious career choices and career guidance for students, working professionals, institutes, and corporates. MKCS offers various programs, including workforce readiness programs for students, career planning for professionals, professional profile building and deeper insight into candidates/employees for HR departments and recruitment companies.

She can be reached at [email protected] or +971-55-33-93-115