One of the difficulties to overcome in getting a new job is crafting a resume that will float irresistibly towards the top of the applicants pile. This is important because in today’s job market, that pile is larger than ever.
The awkwardness of writing so glowingly about yourself, as well as the difficulty of finding just the right words to convey your competence and skill set to a hiring manager, are two reasons that professional resume-writing services have become so popular: they lift from your shoulders the demanding job of crafting an accurate, compelling resume about yourself.
But another school of thought says that no professional resume-writer can do a better job of telling your story, describing your skills, and presenting the golden needles in the haystack of your employment history better than you can, yourself.
Fortunately, there’s a seldom-used strategy that helps you combine your in-depth self-knowledge with the emotional lightness that comes when you’re not writing or speaking about yourself.
The strategy builds on the existence of freely available, professionally-written descriptions of particular tasks, responsibilities, and accomplishments. All you have to do is pick a winning set of descriptions, then adapt them to fit your own resume.
One good place to start is O-Net Online (http://www.onetonline.org).
It’s a compendium of job descriptions (as well as pay rates and other information — but that’s for another article) you can use as a jumping-off point for describing your own work history and qualifications.
Enter a job title like “Project Manager,” for example, and O-Net Online will present you with a long list of industry-specific positions where project management skills play a big role. Pick the one you want, and you’ll find a comprehensive series of bullet points accurately describing what people in that job actually do. These words, carefully crafted by resume-writing experts, will provide you with excellent starting points for your own descriptions of the actual work you’ve done.
O-Net Online lets you zero in on job descriptions from lots of different angles, such as:
- industry,
- level of education, experience and training needed
- expectations for future growth in that occupation
- skills and credentials needed
or just plain keywords.
Another place to get detailed, specific job descriptions is Indeed.com.
Primarily intended as a giant collection of classified ads, Indeed.com is chock full of explanations intended to tell applicants precisely what experience and qualifications an employer is looking for. But you can turn these job descriptions around and get plenty of ideas for how to tell employers what you have done in the past, and what you can do in the future.
There are lots of other places to get this kind of descriptive information, including a local library.
Of course, all these words will weigh heavily on you, so long as you’re focused on telling your own story.
So to unload this emotional burden, it’s fun and also helpful to mentally invent your “job-seeking twin”: a total stranger who has exactly the same job-related background as you do.
If you can make the mental disconnection between yourself and your hypothetical “twin,” you can quickly learn to massage the descriptive words you’ve found into a detailed resume and cover letter that persuasively and effectively convey what your “twin” offers a prospective employer. The simple act of thinking in terms of your “twin”
instead of yourself makes it far easier to avoid the usual awkwardness of expression that comes with trying to blow your own horn.
