Rewriting Your Resume: Easy Edits You Can Make To Your Resume To Get Improved Results Today

If you've been job searching recently, you know that the market is competitive! If you are like many job hunters, you've wondered if changing or improving your resume might help. After all, your resume is almost always the first impression and can determine whether or not you get the interview. Like many people, you've probably searched the internet looking for help writing your resume, whether that help takes the form of hiring a professional to write your resume or whether it simply means you are looking for tips to edit and improve your resume yourself. Either way, you may have come away from that reading confused! There are vast volumes of advice out there and much of it inconsistent.

While no resume--even the most persuasive resume--can get you a job, written effectively and used properly, it will get you an interview, and the interview almost always comes before the job offer. In that sense, it is absolutely true that your resume has the power to determine the success of your search. When unemployment is high and your competition is stiff, your resume plays a key role in getting you noticed among the masses. A poor resume, or even just an "average" resume, could be losing you valuable opportunities. While you may be perfectly qualified for a position--perhaps even the absolute best candidate possible for a position--unless your resume effectively promotes that fact and gets you noticed, the hiring company will never know.

Even though the economy has been in a downswing for the past couple of years, companies are still hiring and job seekers are landing jobs on a daily basis. So, what are these newly hired employees doing that get them noticed, get them interviewed, and ultimately get them hired ahead of their competition in the job market? Whether you are writing your resume yourself or planning to hire professional help writing your resume, what can you do to make sure your resume lands in the "to-be-interviewed" pile rather than the trash can?

The trick, as you've already learned, is a common sense one--the job seekers who are getting interviews and winning jobs have found a way to distinguish themselves from the masses. What is it about their resume that does that? The answer is not as complicated as you may have thought. Successful and effective resumes promote the job seeker's potential to deliver benefits and value rather than just skills and qualifications that virtually all of the other job seekers have as well. In other words, effective resumes tell a story of promised value, using past accomplishments to illustrate how the job hunter has solved problems, met crucial needs, and delivered results to past employers.

A resume filled with boring job descriptions, like many are, is bound to fail and not make the cut. Job responsibilities simply tell the reader what you were supposed to do in each position. Think of it this way: Teenagers are gerenarlly "responsible for" keeping their bedroom clean. But do they? Not often. If asked, they may tell you their "responsibilities included keeping my bedroom clean." At best, not a very meaningful statement. At worst, a bit misleading. To differentiate yourself, your resume must tell the reader what you have accomplished--and more importantly, the value and benefits that those accomplishments have produced for past employers. If you have numbers (e.g., dollar figures, percentages, raw numbers, etc.) that demonstrate the impact of your achievement, make sure you include them. They lend credibility to your claims and in today's competitive job market, it is essential that you know your value and be able to articulate exactly how you contributed to your past employer's bottom line.

Like you almost surely do in your own family, when times are tight companies often reassess their budgets looking for opportunities to make more money or save more money in ways they may not have previously thought about. It is important to recognize that as an employee, you are an investment. The hiring company invests in you with the expectation that you will deliver returns on that investment. What types of returns? Most employers are seeking employees who have the proven ability to SOLVE a challenging problem, to help them MAKE money, to help them SAVE money, or to help them INCREASE efficiency. By articulating how you have delivered these results in the past, using numbers when you can to de,omstrate that actual return on investment you have delivered, you will easily set yourself apart from the masses of job seekers you are competing against.

Don't let the high unemployment rate make you nervous. There are still new job openings that crop up every single day. Will you be the next person to get a good job? It's all up to how you look at the situation. In short, you must change your focus to emphasize what is in it for the employer. It's not about what's in it for you. It's all about the employer. What can you do for them? How can you solve their problem? How can you make money for them? In what ways can you save them money? How can you help them in these economic times? Emphasize and communicate how you can be an asset to the company, and you will be surprised how quickly you will see positive job search results.