I’m working with a lot of clients who are seeking Resume Writing support. These are:

1. first job seekers and those looking for Volunteering and Work Experience Opportunities, who are age 15 and in year 9, 10 or 11 at secondary school
2. university students seeking part-time work, or internship opportunities
3. graduates applying for their first relevant permanent employment or graduate internships
4. job seekers who are between jobs, or seeking advancement
5. career transitioners trying to change employment sectors and take their skills into a new role

This amounts to lots of people with a range of needs, therefore I decided to create some handy resources: My Karen Your Career Coach Resume Writing Resources

You may be wondering why a resume is needed and why the need for such a resource. It’s because job hunting is quite tricky these days. It’s quite hard to get in front of an employer due to the sheer number of applicants for most jobs. So a short document provides a recruiter with a checklist of an applicant’s essential information. However, this document must be extremely well put together; well written and formatted, otherwise it’ll end up in the bin, quick-smart. So let’s look at the need for resumes.

Applying for jobs is a job in itself

The job market is so competitive. For every vacancy, there might be dozens, if not hundreds of applicants and so it’s important to dedicate plenty of time, every day, to your job search activities. A very key part of this is to learn the art of persuasive writing. The Resume is one such document.

Whilst some might argue that some recruiters don’t ask for a resume, this isn’t typically my experience. The vast majority of advertisements for jobs request the uploading of a Resume and Cover Letter. As Associate Career Development Professional Coach, Jim Bright, wrote in The Age newspaper, we tend to underestimate the importance of this important tool for job search success.

Another important document in the job search is the Cover Letter. More on that in a later blog. So first of all, what is the Generic Resume and why do you need them?

Generic resumes and why do you need them?

A Generic Resume is a document you will save as a file, but, does not refer to any particular vacancy. It simply lists broad information about you, your skills and your experiences. Some clients have more than one Generic Resume. Why? Because some people have more than one career objective in terms of work areas, or even volunteering aspirations, in the short to medium term. For example, I worked with a student a number of years ago who was planning a Gap Year. She was applying for a full-time job in her local area and she was also applying to become a Camp Counsellor for a summer season, at a kids’ camp in the USA. Another was seeking part-time work in retail as well as for a place at Performing Arts Colleges.

It’s a great idea to keep generic resumes on file because you can then simply edit them each time you identify a job vacancy that you want to target. You can also edit it if you decide to write to an employer of interest in the event that they might have a suitable vacancy for you. This is what is referred to as a Speculative Application. You must even edit your Generic Resume for a Speculative Application. More about this type of job application another time.

Importantly, not everyone enjoys writing. I hear this all of the time from students, especially school-age students who struggle with English at school. Writing essays for school assessments and external exams is a form of persuasive writing – writing to a prompt, the essay topic. When you apply for a job, you are again responding to prompts. These can be found in the advertisement. But how to do this well is really tricky. Get it wrong and the recruiter may not even bother to read the entire document.

I’ve therefore decided to create 3 Resume Resources. These are more than just Resume Templates. What’s the difference?

Resume Templates Versus Comprehensive Resume Writing Resources

A Resume Template is simply a very generic document, nothing more. A Resume Writing Resource, however, offers lots of tips throughout – explanations of why you need to say things a certain way & why some information needs to be removed. Of note is that as a professional career development coach, I advise against paying a “Resume Writer” to help you.

Having another person (or is it a Computer Bot?) write your resume, means that the document is not written in your style or “voice” and will simply be a broad or even quite subjective set of claims. It is so tempting to pay for and then simply use this document, having assumed that it is highly professional copywriting that you have paid for. However, it may not ‘sound’ like you at all. Indeed, the whole document may be full of vernacular, or jargon, such as USA spelling and phrases. I personally find this quite distracting. Some readers may be even more critical and bin your resume.

Such a ready-written product may be filled with generalisations, or claims that you cannot then explain. Even if the template does result in success in terms of getting you an interview, once you are talking to the recruiter or interviewer, they will most likely ask you questions based on what they have read or are reading from your resume. It is really easy to trip up in those moments. This will result in you having to fumble your way through an explanation and you can then come across as unprepared, or worse still, making false claims.

Back to the resume. Writing for an “audience” isn’t easy. This form of persuasive writing is skillful and it’s important to get it right. So once you have one or more Generic Resumes saved for your immediate and short-term needs, you can go to the appropriate one when you’ve found a dream job. It will then take a short-ish amount of time to turn it into the perfect resume for that particular vacancy. This is sometimes known as the process of curating (pulling together, sifting through, and selecting for presentation).

Curating a Perfect Targeted Resume

Curating your targeted resumes means turning them into the perfect application documents for sending to recruiters. The generic resume will most likely contain non-relevant information and may not sing your praises sufficiently well for the role. What you are doing by editing your generic resume is fine-tuning the document so that the reader will decide really quickly that you are a strong candidate for the role. Be aware; there are no guarantees. There might be someone else in the mix who has just one thing that tips the job offer in their favour. This is out of your control. But if you optimise your application, at least you know that you will have done your best job at selling yourself to that reader/employer.

The Resume Writing Resources I have created teach you important writing skills. I am offering these resources at an introductory fixed rate of just $50.00 each. You can simply purchase the one that’s relevant to your needs:

Karen Your Career Coach Resume Writing Resources

• First Part-Time Job/Work Experience Resume Resource

• Resume for Professional Roles/Graduate Internships

• Career Change Resume

The Next Step – 1/1 Career Coaching Support

After you have spent some time working to create your own resume document, from the KYCC resume writing resource, you can then opt to get started with your applications by yourself. However, if you need some additional support, you can book a 30- or 60-minute career coaching consultation, with the specific objective for the session of perfecting your targeted resume. It’s often a good idea to have a professional career coach check your application before you send it. Once you have clicked SEND, it’s gone and you can’t revise it. Spending 60 minutes reviewing the documents and checking them against the vacancy and other information about the organisation, is a good investment. It may well give you a competitive advantage over other applicants.

Gain Career Confidence with Karen Your Career Coach

It’s such fun going over a generic resume and helping a client to edit it into a perfect targeted resume. A student last week worked with me to reduce the length of her resume and examine some of the items that she might remove, or include. She told me that she; “felt much more confident now“, to send a resume to a prospective employer. I find this work really rewarding.

Buy a Resume Resource Now

If you are interested in purchasing one of the Resume Writing Resources please click on this link to request which of them you need at this time. You can then go to our Contact box to request 1/1 career coaching support to optimise your Targeted Resume.

Then, if you are seeking other career coaching support, such as Writing a Targeted Cover Letter, Interview Skills Training, Selling your Personal Brand, How Find Vacancies, etc you can read more here about our broad-ranging services and key tools.

Work with Karen Your Career Coach. It’s an investment in you!