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    Your Amazing Resume
    Your Amazing Resume
    Your Amazing Resume
    Ebook165 pages1 hour

    Your Amazing Resume

    By Jeff Kontur

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    About this ebook

    What’s Wrong With Your Resume. Most people have it all wrong when it comes to writing their resumes. They completely misunderstand the fundamental purpose of a resume. No matter what your resume looks like right now, whether it's in pretty good shape, needs some help or even if you don't have a resume at all, I can help you make it better. Much better.

    There is more to an amazing resume than most people realize. A lot more. In just eight easy lessons, I'll walk you through a dizzying array of tips and tricks that will have your resume looking amazing and ultimately help you land the job of your dreams.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJeff Kontur
    Release dateJan 9, 2018
    ISBN9781370814916
    Your Amazing Resume
    Author

    Jeff Kontur

    Freelance copywriter, business builder and professional marketer. My role is to learn my clients' stories and then retell those in such compelling ways that their customers can't help but want to do business with them.

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      Book preview

      Your Amazing Resume - Jeff Kontur

      Introduction

      No matter what your resume looks like right now, whether it's in pretty good shape, needs some help or even if you don't have a resume at all, I'm going to help you make it better. Much better.

      This book is going to run, rapid-fire, through so many tips that it may all seem overwhelming. Don't feel daunted. Just take everything in little chunks.

      There are two main strategies that seem to work well for going through the material presented in this book. Only you can decide which works best with your style. They are:

      1. Open your resume on your computer and make changes to it as you go along.

      2. Read through the entire book at least once then begin your changes.

      You may find things here that you disagree with or feel simply won't work for you. You can certainly feel free to ignore such items but I'd encourage you to keep an open mind. Especially if your current resume isn't giving you the results you'd like.

      Now let's get to it!

      Before You Even Start

      Before you sit down to update or write your resume it’s actually very important to understand a few things about the psychology of the whole hiring process. This is fundamental stuff that most job seekers will never know but it will make all the difference in the world to how good your resume comes out.

      In fact, knowing it will give you a leg up on all those other job seekers out there.

      What’s Wrong With Your Resume

      Most people have it all wrong when it comes to writing their resumes. They completely misunderstand the fundamental purpose of a resume.

      The purpose of a resume is not to get you a job; the purpose of a resume is to get you an interview.

      From that basic misunderstanding spring all sorts of small problems, some of which usually go completely unnoticed to the untrained eye. I can (and will) show you all of those in detail, along with how to fix them.

      By the time we’ve finished working together, if you follow all the advice given, your resume will look amazing. Let’s start with a little basic understanding that most people never stop to consider….

      Nonverbal Communication

      At first glance, you may wonder what the following section has to do with your resume. Just follow along and it will start to make sense in a few pages.

      Social scientists more or less universally agree that the majority of face-to-face communication is nonverbal. In fact some scientists estimate that if we were standing right in front of each other and having this conversation, as little as just 7% of the communication taking place between us would be the words that are spoken.

      This means that the vast majority is other stuff: body language, gestures, facial expressions, posture, voice tone, cadence, volume, what direction we’re each facing, eye movement, hand movement, how close we’re standing to one another, whether or not we touch, plus where and how…. Everything from our blinking to our breathing.

      To say that as much as 93% of communication is nonverbal is shocking and you may question its validity so let me paint you a couple of pictures.

      Imagine we are out in a bustling place with plenty of people milling about. It’s a very nice day so we decide to sit down and people watch for a bit.

      There is a young couple not far away from us having what appears to be an intimate conversation. They are standing very close and facing each other. She has her arms draped easily over his shoulders and around his neck. His hands are on her waist.

      He is wearing a casual shirt with short sleeves. It looks well-worn and comfortable. It was probably mid-range expensive when he bought it. The shirt is paired with nicely pressed khaki pants. She is in a brightly colored sun dress with wide straps and matching open-toe shoes.

      We can’t hear anything that’s being said but it seems they are speaking in low whispers. He says something then smiles. She giggles a little bit, bites her lower lip and lowers her eyes demurely.

      He reaches up and brushes a hair away from her face then rests his hand back on her hip. She runs the palm of her hand across his chest, smoothing his shirt.

      When we look in the other direction, our eye is caught by another interaction between a different man and woman.

      He is sitting on the sidewalk. His clothes are tattered and dirty. It’s hard to even tell what color they are through all the accumulated filth.

      His hair is unkempt and he has smudges of dirt all over his face. He has downtrodden eyes which completely lack sparkle. He hardly looks at the woman but holds out an open hand as she approaches.

      She is smartly dressed in a crisp, well-tailored charcoal business suit. The suit hugs her small, athletic frame and the heels of her shoes rap out a staccato cadence as she marches briskly past.

      Her predatory eyes are fixed intently on her destination. She pays little attention to the man. In fact, she notices him only to the extent required to not allow him to touch her as he sticks his hand out.

      He speaks to her without looking up. She responds curtly, never even looking in his direction.

      Notice in both cases that words were exchanged but we could not hear any of them. Yet a tremendous amount was communicated, both between the participants and to us as observers.

      We know what kind of relationship each couple has with one another. We know a bit about their station in life, about their socio-economic circumstances. Looking less broadly than at society as a whole, we know what status each has in the relationship and how each feels toward the other. We know a bit about what kind of day each is having. We have a pretty good sense of how they spend their days. We can surmise a good bit about age, health, hygiene, grooming, diet, lifestyle, cultural background and so much more.

      All of that came from nonverbal communication.

      Even if the exact numbers are open to debate, surely you must agree that nonverbal communication accounts for a great deal of the communication that takes place between people.

      Nonverbal Communication on Your Resume

      If much of so-called verbal communication is actually nonverbal, it follows that some large percentage of what’s being communicated by your resume may also come from something other than the words on the page.

      You see, there’s this whole hidden structure to a well-written resume. Most people have no idea what it is. Most people don’t even know that it exists.

      Other than your own, how many resumes have you seen? If you’re like most people, you can count the number on your fingers. In fact if you’re like a lot of people, the number is probably somewhere around zero.

      Hiring managers literally see stacks of resumes. Dozens. Hundreds. They have the benefit of seeing resumes side by side and being able to compare them. An experienced hiring manager can pick out a good resume without even reading it.

      Three to six seconds. That’s about how long it takes most experienced hiring managers to get an overall impression of a candidate based solely on a resume. That impression comes mainly from the nonverbal elements. (Later I'll tell you about a very astute person who figured out a way to judge the viability of candidates with a reasonable degree of accuracy without ever even seeing their resume at all!)

      I'll show you how to make it past those first few seconds of judgment so that your resume gets put into the to be looked at stack.

      Bringing Marketing to the Resume Process

      The whole resume/interview process is really nothing more than a way of marketing yourself to a potential employer. In this scenario, you are both the product and the salesman. The companies you apply to are your potential customers and your resume is exactly like a sales letter that might be used in direct marketing.

      You get direct mail marketing letters all the time. You probably refer to them as junk mail. Truthfully, many are junk. (Just like many resumes are junk.) Even those junk letters will sometimes be looked at by some people. The well-crafted ones will be read by far more people.

      So the general approach I will take is to teach you how to write your resume and cover letter so that they are not just a list of the things you've done but in a way that actively markets you to the companies that see them.

      Why Companies Hire People

      It’s actually very important to understand why companies hire people in the first place. As an extension of that, let’s also look at why they choose one applicant over another.

      There are really only two reasons why a company will hire someone. The first has nothing directly to do with the company’s interests; it could be called nepotism, altruism, charity or whatever. This is best illustrated by the boss’ nephew getting hired despite having no obvious qualifications or giving that high school kid his very first job by putting him in the mailroom.

      The second reason why a company will hire someone is because those running the company (or at least those doing the hiring) believe

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