Resume Help: Don’t Be Dense When It Comes to Your Resume

This week we received a resume from a very bright and accomplished senior technology project manager.  The problem is Chad has presented a dense block of words with not so much as a bullet or space.  The only thing separating one thought from another is a hyphen interspersed between some of the sentences.   A reader would have to be extremely motivated to get through this dense resume to learn more about Chad.

This is the approach we suggested and ultimately executed for Chad.

1. Break up his history line by line so we can actually read the initial information he has presented.  Next we sort that information into two groups:  Major duties and accomplishments. 
2. Cut out any superfluous language to get to the heart of what Chad is communicating.  Identify opportunities to dig deeper to provide results for accomplishments and to quantify the scope of his responsibility. 
3. Now that we know a little more about what Chad has done in each position, we can explore further to uncover additional achievements, particularly those involving cost savings, quality improvement, enhanced security, increased revenue, and other ways Chad contributed to the bottom line.

It is amazing how much more clear things become after steps one and two.  After the clutter is removed, the real work on the resume can begin.  Resumes like Chad are common.  In Chad’s case, he was trying to fit many years of experience into a single page.  With the freedom from knowing a two-page resume is acceptable, Chad now has a nicely-spaced two-page resume with ample margins (.8” all around) and an easy-to-read font of 11 points.

If you are struggling with resume issues, contact me.  I would be happy to critique your resume at no charge and share a few tips as we did for Chad.  In the meantime, please check out these blogs:

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