A Reader Now Has A Professional Resume

As the summer is now upon us I have been doing many Resume Makeovers. This Makeover service is intended to show our readers how to write a professional resume. From the amount of resumes John and I receive each month, I thought it would be a great time to post one of the resumes I made over today. For each (you can see our first resume makeover on Career Ramblings here: resume makeover) resume I redo, I will describe the type of resume it is, the field in which the person submitting is in or wants to be in, and walk you through the steps of what we did to makeover the resume.

Today, I am giving Laura, from Seattle University a Resume Makeover. Laura is going to be a senior at Seattle University. Like many students, Laura did not have a resume. She has held a few jobs here and there but nothing career related. She is a Business Management major and needed a resume that would help get her foot in the door of a potential internship. Laura is in luck, that’s our specialty. She is not sure what area of business she wants to be in, even more reason for her to get an internship.

I had Laura create a quick rough draft of what her resume would look like if she created one. I gave her a Microsoft Word resume template for her to use as a draft. Her first try wasn’t the best as you can see below. Based on what she gave me, I asked probing questions to get examples of the responsibilities she had with the different jobs she worked listed.

An example of needing clarification was on a bullet like this:

• Catering to customers needs.

How exactly did you cater to customer needs? What types of things would you do on the job?

You never want to have just one duty or responsibility (bullet) under a job. Break down your role with your respective employer to capture the best picture of your experience.

Below is Laura’s before resume, you can download the PDF here, Laura’s Before Resume:

I will be using a chronological resume to makeover the above resume. If you would like to see a clear image of the actual resume, be sure to download the before and after PDF’s I have linked.

Because Laura was not familiar with creating an effective resume, she did not know how to articulate her job responsibilities very well. So we walked through step by step what she did for each job and incorporated powerful action words to strengthen her resume.

This is Laura’s Resume Makeover. To download Laura’s resume in PDF format, just click here, Laura’s After Resume.

As you can see, we beefed up Laura’s resume quite a bit! Since she wasn’t familiar with writing her job responsibilities in a way that best described what she did, this helped her tremendously. She was excited to see her Resume Makeover because we began the process having no resume what so ever and very little work experience.

After finishing with the resume I had Laura go to all the major job posting sites to put her resume on the market. With the excellent new look to her resume she posted it on Beyond.com for free and to Resume Zapper. Resume Zapper was able to distribute it to thousands of recruiters for her.

I received an email from Laura last week telling me she found an internship with a private consulting company for the summer. Congratulations Laura! I’m glad we were able to help.

If you are interested in having your resume professionally critiqued, need help with a cover letter, or other job search materials, be sure to contact us and we can walk you through the services we offer. Regardless of the situation, I’m sure we will be able to help.

Sites to remember:

• Beyond.com for free resume posting
• Resume Zapper for distribution to recruiters

• If you need business cards you can get 250 free business cards here