A Professional Resume Gives You an Opportunity to Market Your Career
Perhaps you’ve discovered that your career has stalled. While it is true that
you are gainfully employed, you just don’t seem to be progressing down your
career path as fast as you’d like. You’ve determined that the roadblock in your
career is not the result of your lack of experience, your lack of education, or
your lack of interpersonal skills. You’ve come to the conclusion that your
failure to hit a career high is due to the fact that you simply don’t know how
to market yourself well.
You realize that you cannot take out a billboard advertising your
credentials. And, while you can certainly work on polishing your networking
skills, a lack of contacts doesn’t seem to be the problem. You’ve been
diligently sending your resume to numerous employers, but no one seems to be
biting—you haven’t secured a single job interview for quite some time. You’re
stuck in a career rut—and the only way out is to make your resume more
professional and more attractive to a potential employer. But how do you go
about accomplishing that goal?
Realize the Importance of Your Resume
Up to this point, you might have been throwing together your resumes at the
last minute, thinking that you could compensate for any problems with your
resume in your subsequent job interview. However, you must realize that your
resume is, in fact, your most effective career marketing tool. If worded
properly, it can open doors for you, offering you opportunities that you
wouldn’t have had otherwise.
A resume represents your initial introduction to a hiring manager. It should
demonstrate how your work history, career accomplishments, job skills, and
personality traits are ideally suited for the job that’s been advertised. In
fact, you can think of a resume as being like a corporate website, introducing
anyone who reads it to who you are, what you’ve done, and what you could
potentially do for a client—i.e., an employer. The resume needs to be inviting
to read and reflect upon—but, like a website, it should provide snippets of
information in an easily digestible format.
Demonstrating Your Marketing
Savvy
Once you realize the crucial function of your resume in terms of marketing
yourself, your next step is to find ways to show off your marketing savvy. In
order to do this, you should draw up a list of your chief skills and
professional attributes. Then, come up with a list of career milestones that
provide further evidence of your abilities. Do not limit yourself to paid work
experiences. Also include your significant volunteer activities, educational
experiences, and the like. Some of the skills you might want to highlight would
include your managerial ability, your leadership capability, your communication
ability, and your decision-making capability. These are the types of skills a
prospective employer is likely to be looking for in a job applicant.
Next, you need to give serious consideration to your audience—the prospective
employer. You should try to determine the employer’s chief challenges, based on
the nature of the industry, the competitors the company faces, and similar
considerations. With this information, you should have a greater understanding
of the employer’s wants.
Connect the Dots
Once you’ve identified your strengths and an employer’s needs, you need to
connect the dots, showing how you can fulfill the requirements sought by the
employer. This can be accomplished by carefully crafting your objective so that
it will capture the eye of the hiring manager, making him or her think that you
are the perfect candidate for the position.
Drawing the right connections may, in fact, be the most critical part of the
resume-building process. Unless you can convince an employer that he or she
would be better off hiring you, you are unlikely to make the final cut. At
times, you may need to demonstrate a fair amount of creativity in order to show
the connection—but it is well worth the effort, particularly if it enables you
to attain the job.
Polishing the Product
Any sharp marketer knows that you have to hone your advertising copy in order
to ensure that it captures the interest of the consumer. The same is certainly
true for a resume. Once you have the basic format in place, dress it up by
placing the most important points near the top…whittling away extra verbiage so
that the document is not overly wordy…and deleting any non-essential information
such as social security number, birth date, and marital status. While it is a
wise idea to incorporate certain stylistic techniques such as italicization,
bold-face, and elegant fonts, resist the urge to overdue it. Otherwise, your
resume could end up being quite difficult to read.
Be Sure to Use
Marketing Phrases
Given the fact that you are attempting to market your career, it’s advisable
for you to use some key marketing phrases throughout your resume. These would
include words such as “top-earner,” “high-performance,” “number-one seller,”
etc. Granted, you don’t want your resume to sound like a commercial, but you do
want to get a strong message across. After all, the employer is in a buying
mood—he or she wants to hire someone to fill a vacant position. Therefore, you
should take advantage of the opportunity to highlight your qualifications in the
most effective way possible.
Remember—One Job Leads to Another
It is important to keep in mind that the position you’re now applying for may
not be the last job you ever have. Chances are it will lead to additional
jobs—jobs that offer even greater opportunities for professional advancement,
networking, and significant responsibility.
Consequently, in addition to marketing yourself in the here and now, you are
marketing yourself for the future. This is particularly important if you are
applying to a company that has a history of promoting from within. You want to
show the employer that you have the capability of growing with the company,
contributing significantly to the corporation over the long-term. In other
words, your resume could lead you to the job which could provide the stepping
stone to even more rewarding positions in the years ahead.
This article was written by the certified professional resume writers of Resume Writing. The writers at
AccuroResumes will help create a perfect professional resume suited to your best
needs. See why thousands of people are discovering the benefits of a perfect
professional resume written by AccuroResumes.com. You are guaranteed to be 100%
satisfied with your new, professional resume or, your money back. Reproductions
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