By Heather Mundell
Heather Mundell is a certified professional coach and founder of Dream Big Coaching Services, a national life and career coaching business specializing in helping professionals to find career happiness and providing interview and job search coaching. Heather blends her extensive individual coaching experience with a background in corporate HR leadership to help her clients reach their full potential. She has published numerous articles online at major career sites such as Jobbankusa.com, CareerBuilder.com and AOL.com. Email Heather at heather@dreambigcoaching·com
My name is Heather Mundell, and I am not a professional resume writer.
I am, however, convinced that a professional resume writer will do a much better job of writing your resume than you, or your friend Jack who used to be a copy editor, or pretty much anyone else. Here’s why.
Your resume is a crucial marketing communications document, the effectiveness of which will either get you an interview or leave you waiting on the sidewalk. You need a powerful resume to get the job that you want.
Your resume is not a chronological list of all your past jobs and job duties. It is not an historical record of everything you’ve done since college. It needs to attract the audience you want and highlight what that audience wants to see. It needs to communicate your brand and your value to your audience in a clear and compelling way. It needs to create excitement about you and differentiate you from the other job candidates in the big pile within seconds.
Do you know what your audience wants to see and how to write for that? Chances are this is not your expertise.
Even if you are a professional writer or a professional interviewer, you are probably not the best choice to write your own resume. Wri ting your own resume can be like cutting your own hair, giving yourself advice, or, yes I know this is a bit extreme, setting your own leg after you've broken it. In other words, having an outside professional's perspective on the job can make all the difference in how well that job is performed.
For example, many of us suffer from "accomplishment amnesia". We completely forget all the great things we've done very soon after we do them. The negatives compel our focus much more. Also we tend to discount as " no big deal" accomplishments that are in fact noteworthy. A professional resume writer understands what you should be bragging about better than you do and has no hesitation about horn tooting.
Skilled, savvy, professional resume writers know what kind of information they need from you to write a top-notch resume. Coming up with this information takes considerable time and effort on your part. However, this investment of your time not only strengthens your resume but prepares you for the interview process as well.
During job interviews you need to articulate examples of the challenges you have overcome, the results you have achieved, and the quantifiable impacts you’ve made on the organizations you have worked for. Working with a professional resume writer is excellent preparation for honing the message you want to get across to interviewers.
Having a well-crafted resume is essential. Good resume writing is a specialized skill that takes training, experience, a particular knowledge of recruiting and marketing, and plain ole' talent to do well. I didn’t build my house myself, I don’t fly myself across the country, and I don’t repair my car myself because I don’t have those skills.
I’m a career coach and a former human resources director, and I hired a professional resume writer. It was an investment in myself and my career that has paid for itself many times over.