Resume with value not tinsle

A good resume is much like a beautiful blue spruce tastefully decorated for Christmas.

I recently worked with a delightful young lady in Virginia who wanted her resume to have a greater professional feel,  one more likely to earn interviews in New York.   With only two years of real-life experience in sales, the resume had only so much to go on. Little is not necessarily bad.

This girl is brilliant; an early graduate with honors from Duke University, civically involved and socially a leader. From right out of school, she’s been an extraordinary employee with her company and branded with accomplishments.

The resume she originally created was well written but lacked a burst of value in the beginning of the resume and was overdone in superlatives, fluff and redundancies. Not that unusual in a early career resume.  Let me be clear, this girl knows how to write and she wrote well, but she wrote a little too much. We needed to come together on what to leave in and what to take out. So back to the Christmas tree analogy.

A spruce tree is a thing of beauty: natural lines, sweet smelling pine, tall and strong. When it’s time to decorate the spruce, the star is carefully centered at the top. It represents the significance of what the tree stands for – a celebration of a birth.

Much like the star, the resume is an affirmation: “I am a star.” A solemn declaration of a winner with education, experience, skills, abilities and accomplishments. I liken these qualifications to ornaments on a tree. Certainly not the foundation for the star. That’s the tree.  Its trunk pushes the star higher each year and multiplies its branches for more ornaments to dangle from. A resume with only ornaments and no tree will not compete in today’s job market.

Now, back to my young client’s resume with her star burning bright. She has good reason to be proud and shout out to the world that she is coming: quality education, overachieving employee, native intelligence, and unbridled ambition.  And that’s exactly what her resume needed to say. But it was shouting, screaming, bellowing an endless stream of embellishments of glitz and glamour that didn’t need to be on her tree . She was good enough without it.  She had cluttered her tree; a veil of glitter, plastic and confetti  was hiding the true value of who she was – a young professional who had real value and would be productive from the first day she landed in a job. Someone to be recognized and considered seriously by a hiring authority.

We stripped away the excessive tinsel, eliminated redundant glimmering balls, and removed the clutter. The final resume still holds her gems and treasures, but it’s toned down. Her core structure now comes through. Those skills, abilities and accomplishments she’s so proud of are easier to read; they pop; her stature is professional . She stands a greater chance for that interview in New York City.

To my point, let your resume breathe. Don’t smother it with cluttered tinsel. Prominently show your value ornaments, succinctly, clearly and accurately. Let your resume twinkle with stylish class under your star.