See the dramatic results of our resume makeover

by Abbi F. Perets | Dec 18, 2002 8:00:00 AM

Takeaway: All the skills and experience in the world won't guarantee that you get the job offers you deserve if your resume doesn't represent you well. Check out the changes that were made to one manager's resume to improve her chances of getting a better job.

A few weeks ago, the IT Manager Republic invited you to submit your resume for the chance to win a professional resume rewrite. The resumes came in from all over the world. In the end, our winner was IT manager Prudence Smith, who hails from London. Her resume, she said, wasn’t getting her any interviews.

To make Prudence’s resume more effective, I first took out all of the personal, first-person stuff—descriptions of how she got in to computers, her marital status, etc. Then, I looked at Prudence’s goals—the kind of job she’s hoping to get and the skills she needs to highlight for that to happen. One thing I noticed immediately is that Prudence has a lot of great experience but had more or less buried it in her resume; it was too much work for potential employers to dig it out. That was why the phone wasn’t ringing.

To fix the problem, I reformatted Prudence’s resume to show off her skills and experience in an easy-to-read document with bulleted lists, bold text, and a clear font. I divided skills into subcategories where necessary and focused on demonstrating to employers what Prudence could do for them based on money-earning and timesaving results she had produced in the past.

Finally, I eliminated irrelevant experience that distracted employers from seeing what Prudence’s real skills were. When all was said and done, Prudence was left with a streamlined, results-oriented resume. See for yourself; you can download the before and after versions and see exactly what I did.

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