“I’ve been in HR for 15 years and this is one of the best résumés I’ve ever seen – not only the content, but also how you have it laid out and presented.”
Maria was a small-business owner who had started and was running her own bookkeeping/accounting practice. After two large clients left, Maria needed to either attract more customers. She also considered moving into a full-time.
Maria gave me her résumé which was two pages, with the second including roughly one-third of a page of miscellaneous information. Her work history section consisted of company name, job title and city, followed immediately by a bullet list of her duties.
I pointed out that anyone looking at a résumé for an accounting position would already know that bookkeepers manage bank reconciliations, payables and receivables and balance sheets.
We reconfigured her résumé to include a job description for each position in her work history, then changed her bullet points to accomplishments, shortening her résumé to one page.
Maria called me within a few weeks to tell me she had been offered a job. The recruiter told her…
“I’ve been in HR for 15 years and this is one of the best résumés I’ve ever seen – not only the content, but also how you have it laid out and presented.”
We placed additional core competencies at the end of the résumé to make it more ATS-friendly.