Professional Resume Design

• Progress at JobSpice

  Thursday, July 8th, 2010

  Anyone who is following this blog or looking for new posts, I’m now writing for blog.jobspice.com – I’m a founder of JobSpice, an online resume builder. All of my design talent is pouring into this site, which includes both resume templates as well as graphic and UI design for the site itself. We’re charging $20
  
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• Comments on the blog posts

  Monday, May 10th, 2010

  Hey everyone, I’ve been overwhelmed over the last month or two by the amount of spam comments I am getting on the blogs…that being said, there have been a few legit comments, so I’m going to be better about combing through the comments every day or so, rather than every other week.

  I wish I could
  
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• Lately…

  Friday, May 7th, 2010

  I’ve been absent from ProfessionalResumeDesign.com for a bit…I’ve joined the start up JobSpice, which gives me a forum to build fantastic resume designs, and have them be available to a wider audience. I feel like I’ll be able to help more people in less time – always a good thing.

  JobSpice is a great experience, and
  
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• 5 reasons why online job search is overrated

  Monday, March 8th, 2010

  #1 – It’s too easy
  Anyone can be an expert. Anecdotal evidence (’there was a guy who got a job based on one tweet!’) spreads like wildfire, yet it is totally unrepresentative of the overall job situation. It’s too easy to claim success, and too little room to examine the deeper ups and downs of the
  
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• Buck and Jane – Branding

  Friday, March 5th, 2010

  Buck and Jane is a household management service based out of Seattle, WA. Working with the owner/operator of the company, we created a brand based on a few core values: simplicity, compassion and organization. The client wanted the brand to be ‘approachable luxury’ – aiming at a grounded, easy-going clientele with disposable income. The brand had to be simple and high-class without pretense, elitism or showiness.

• Resume – not a complete biography

  Friday, March 5th, 2010

  A resume is not a complete biography, but rather a story we construct that’s verified by our experiences in the world. It’s a smaller portion of a larger personal brand.

• Establishing credibility in a Resume

  Friday, February 26th, 2010

  The process of establishing credibility in a resume starts with reading in detail the job listing. More on reading a job posting carefully.

  A job posting often has key words that hint at the kind of person the company wants to hire. Here are a few phrasing examples from a job listing:

  on the move
  working closely with
  
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• College degrees are overrated?

  Friday, February 26th, 2010

  This article in Time Magazine seems to think that, yes, college degrees are overrated. I’m not sure what I think about their arguments – they seem to think some people are simply ‘unqualified’ for the skills and tasks in college. Without getting into to a lengthy discussion of the American education system, I would say
  
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• 4 ways to write a better cover letter

  Thursday, February 25th, 2010

  #0 – Don’t mass mail; target your cover letter
  But you already knew this, which is why it’s #0

  #1 – No spelling mistakes
  This is will be #1 until time immemorial. No grammar mistakes, either. Be sure to check the contact information for errors. An incorrect digit in the phone number could doom an otherwise spotless cover
  
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• Economic reality check

  Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

  I don’t want to be too relentlessly optimistic – I think it’s equally important to acknowledge the pain that some people are going through in this latest recession (at what point do we call it a depression, I wonder)?

  I found this New York Times article about long-term unemployment. Whenever I read about people sending their
  
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• Credit history now part of job screening process?

  Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

  Can poor credit be a barrier to finding a new job? MSNBC.com says yes. My first reaction to this piece was defensiveness for job seekers everywhere – as if finding a job isn’t hard enough already. Now a potential candidate has to open up about their credit history. There are so many things at play
  
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• Clip art in resumes

  Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

  It’s always a bad idea to use ‘clip art’ in a resume. Many of Amazon.com’s books on resume writing have sample resumes that use clip art. And despite these books being very well-written and generally excellent resources for resume writers, I find their decision to use ‘clip art’ appalling.

  Clip art is by its nature fun,
  
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• What color resume paper?

  Monday, February 22nd, 2010

  This is a no-brainer: white or off-white paper. Never use colored papers. Never use ‘fancy’ fonts – leave those decisions to professional graphic designers, like those at Professional Resume Design. When in doubt it’s much better to have a well-written, descriptive, unified resume document printed on standard white paper, using Times New Roman font with
  
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• Fashion Consultant Resume – Martha

  Thursday, February 18th, 2010

  Martha was looking to apply for an internship with a nationally-known designer luxury brand. Despite having 10 years of industry experience, she needed to downplay her fashion work history – since she was applying for an internship, it was important not to look immediately overqualified for the position.

• Fashion industry resume

  Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

  Working on a resume for someone in the fashion/marketing industry – in the process of making her a personal brand, and re-structuring her resume. The before/after photos should be an excellent testimonial to the value Professional Resume Design can add to a portfolio.

  One of the best lessons here – she thought she needed to account
  
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• This is an interesting twist…

  Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

  Pleasefireme.com is the latest evidence that many many people are displeased with their jobs. Unhappy employees are not productive employees.

  Employers also need to be careful, since any uptick in the economy could potentially lead to a mass changing of jobs – thought given the economic outlook, recovery is years if not a full decade away.
  
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• Nursing resumes: in brief

  Monday, February 15th, 2010

  Be sure to include your credentials at or near the top of the resume, along with a 1-sentence statement about your professional qualifications. A resume’s job is not only to sell yourself, but also to make the hiring manager’s job easier: make it easy for them to classify which position you qualify for. A clear
  
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• Rex’s Resume – Marketing/Sales

  Sunday, February 14th, 2010

  Rex had gone 5 months without an interview when we started the redesign process on his resume. After working with him to determine successes, awards and achievements, as well as working closely with Rex to develop a personal ‘brand’, we came up with a resume that Rex was pleased with. Within 3 days of submitting his newly redesigned resume, Rex had his first interview in 5 months. One month later Rex interviewed for a position with over 300 applicants. Based on his professional brand, well-written resume and interviewing skills, Rex landed a lucrative position as head of marketing for a national corporation.

  Design package: Resume Writing and Design

• JobSpice: Resume builder

  Friday, February 12th, 2010

  Talked with a great company here in sunny Austin, TX – JobSpice – they’ve created a helpful resume builder, where your resume information can be converted into a printable PDF, and stored on their system. You can even get a vanity URL on their system. The advantage of JobSpice over LinkedIn is that LI does
  
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• Nursing Jobs Report on MSNBC.com

  Thursday, February 11th, 2010

  Found an excellent article on MSNBC.com about growth in the Health Care industry is contrasted with losses in blue collar jobs. Nursing, and other jobs in health care has been a good bet going back 10 years at least.

  Most of the article is about unemployment, but I thought it was promising for those in the
  
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• 5 jobs for the internet – CNN

  Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

  I found an interesting article on CNN – “Five jobs for internet enthusiasts“. I’m a little skeptical of ‘Social Media Consultant’ but it does exist as a position, I just wonder if it has enough value-add to survive a recession.

  It’s part of an on-going series CNN has called “Where the jobs are” which seems to
  
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• Preparing for a phone interview

  Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

  Whenever I can find great articles about career-related stuff, I like to pass it on: here is a great article for job-seekers preparing for a phone interview. In a market where employers are getting 300-400 resumes for a job, it’s becoming more and more common for them to interview candidates over the phone, to be
  
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• Sample Resume: Jon

  Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

  This is the first page of a resume for a client – a mid-career web designer. On the first page are skills and accomplishments, and the 2nd page (not shown) includes job experience, education and knowledge about specific software programs

• Sample Resumes: Tim Liner

  Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

  Tim had been working real estate for the last few years, but was looking to switch careers, since his training and passion lay in engineering. We were working on designing a skills-based resume, with a subtle design/layout change to create a professional image that wouldn’t be too ‘designer-y’ for the engineering field.

• Giving up on the job search

  Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

  I found this story on MSNBC about people giving up on their job search – and I wonder if they have done anything with their resumes or gotten professional interview coaching. Sometimes it’s hard to recommend these things – but that’s the world we live in – it’s competitive, and there exists an excess of
  
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• How to survive unemployment

  Monday, February 8th, 2010

  Unemployment can be a difficult time. On top of financial worry is piled feels of apathy, low self-esteem, anger, sadness, depression and loneliness.  Many people make it out of unemployment unscathed, but many do not.

  Know you aren’t alone
  Many people in this economy have been laid off, are activity seeking work, have taken lower-paying jobs or
  
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• Why a stellar resume may not get you the interview

  Friday, February 5th, 2010

  Simply put, there are no guarantees.

  ‘Organizations’ are sometimes mis-labeled – they are dis-organizations – chaotic enterprises that advertise for jobs that do not exist (because of company regulations), place ads for jobs later eliminated by budget constraints, or find applicants that are more qualified for the position and interview them instead.

  No reason to give up
  Even
  
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• Make resumes less than 100k file size

  Thursday, February 4th, 2010

  For versatility – the Craigslist.org mailing system does not accept emails over 100k, and sending a resume and cover letter piecemeal (one page per email) is definitely a bad idea. Employers don’t have time to put together the various parts of resume.

  Use Microsoft Word, or Adobe InDesign
  Most often this means creating documents in .doc format
  
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• Cover letters – don’t oversell yourself

  Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

  As a resume writer I will sometimes submit my own resume to job openings to see what the response rate is, and to gauge the effectiveness of methods I employ in writing resumes and designing brands.

  The cover letter is changing
  All the resume books currently available in print have the exact same style of cover letter:
  
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• Is Google subverting quality writing?

  Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

  It’s a little off-topic, but this is a subject I’ve been wondering about since I started ProfessionalResumeDesign.com, and am working hard to get a good ranking on Google (like everyone else….) I’m not going to write an article with hand-wringing lamentations about the current state of affairs, but I think there is a movement towards
  
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• An effective resume starts with the job posting

  Monday, February 1st, 2010

  An effective resume, one that gets the interview, always starts with the job posting itself. Resumes generally fall into two categories: they can be either stable – unchanged for individual job postings – or targeted (change often). Each targeted resume is going to have its roots in the original job posting, and the language used
  
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• Mid-Level engineering resume

  Thursday, January 28th, 2010

  A mid-level engineer’s resume will highlight work experience, with a short skills section near the top of the resume (after the summary). Engineers need to focus on their core competencies, along with statistics that backs up claims of having done well for a company.

  Short summary of qualifications
  Even at the mid-level, your work experience should start
  
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• Engineer resume for recent graduate

  Thursday, January 28th, 2010

  As with all student resumes, experience and relevant education is highlighted up at the top of the resume, with work experience being listed last. Try and keep the resume to one page, as with almost all student resumes.

  Strong summary
  Write a strong summary, and summary of qualifications. These should be short, to the point and t
  
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• Advice for recent graduates

  Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

  Recent graduates from college are having a tough time finding work. For good reason, it’s an extremely competitive job market, even for qualified job seekers. I talked to a client yesterday who applied for a legal job (that required an advanced law degree) and he said that HR received over 1,000 applications for a single
  
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• Resume summaries for engineers

  Monday, January 25th, 2010

  A resume summary should include many of the words used in the job description, as long as they are applicable to the candidate – no lying or exaggeration!

  The summary on an engineer’s resume
  For engineers, this typically means front loading the resume with the specific skills and personal characteristics the employer requires. And just like anywhere
  
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• Why design is important in an engineering resume

  Monday, January 25th, 2010

  A well-designed resume immediately stands out, and invites potential employers to read more.

  Google is an excellent example of how design and functionality work together. For for most people, Google is the essence of an engineer’s creation – sparse, usable and to the point.  Engineers the world over should be flattered that so many people have
  
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• The ‘objective’ section of a resume has been repurposed

  Sunday, January 24th, 2010

  It’s true: the ‘objective’ section at the top of the resume is dead – outdated. That’s because objectives typically listed what the job seeker was looking to get out of employment, a relic of economic growth and a surplus of jobs and a shortage of employees. How times have changed!

  Meet the ‘Summary’
  The paragraph at
  
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• Employers are getting 300+ resumes for jobs

  Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

  I’ve had anecdotal reports from a number of sources that many job postings are receiving 300+ resumes in response.

  Bad news for job-seekers AND for employers
  While this might seem like great news for employers, I think it actually makes their job more difficult. Many of the submitted resumes are people blasting resumes to any open
  
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• How to write a successful engineering resume

  Friday, January 22nd, 2010

  It always starts with the summary
  Every resume needs a summary. A summary does two things: first, it summarizes your skill set and benefit to potential employer; second, it gives you a tool for writing your resume. Everything in the resume should support the information provided in the summary.

  Next up: skills!
  Your skill set is going to
  
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• Teachers job report on MSNBC.com

  Friday, January 22nd, 2010

  Basically the market for teaching jobs is heating up, meaing fewer positions and more applicants, check out the article on MSNBC here.

  The tragic part is that students, parents and schools still need teachers at the same rate as always. Because of the deep recession, however, schools are having to slash budgets and often that means
  
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• 5 Reasons a professionally-designed resume gets the interview

  Thursday, January 21st, 2010

  I’m going to start my post with what should be the mantra of all resume writers and designers – that a resume gets the interview. First of all a caveat – great writing is the new baseline for effective resumes. Great design is what applicants need to compete in a hyper-competitive job market.

  1. A subtle,
  
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• Resume verbs

  Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

  I’m going to create a list of great verbs to use in resumes – every writer has a stock of their favorites, and I’m going to compile (there’s a great one) a list of my own. It will be alphabetical, and I’ll be updating it over the course of a few weeks – when I’m
  
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• The steps I take to write a Resume (part 1)

  Sunday, January 17th, 2010

  A resume gets the interview – that is its purpose, its whole reason for existing. Since most people write their own resume, I decided to make a guide to improving a resume, from the job posting on up, to help people get the interview.

  First and foremost:  read the job posting!!

  Don’t just give the posting
  
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• The steps I take to write a resume (part 2)

  Friday, January 15th, 2010

  Since most people write their own resume, it’s is something that can be improved upon immediately – no specialized knowledge necessary to make it better – you probably won’t get it perfect (that’s up to the experts but certainly you can give it a fighting chance of getting you an interview.

  Write to the
  
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• Worker Satisfaction (hint: it’s really low)

  Thursday, January 14th, 2010

  Companies are scrambling to keep workers at their posts, as it turns out. 55% of worker plan to change jobs when the economy recovers, according to the article in the Global Post.
  I’ve read many other studies that workers are extremely unsatisfied with their current jobs. Fear and economic distress keep them in place, but probably
  
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• Number of Applicants

  Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

  In the town where I went to college, there was this great newspaper stand (that eventually went out of business). It was a small town but this place had an amazing magazine selection, pretty much anything you could want. They had a help-wanted flier up one day, and I asked them about it. They said
  
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• Some jobs not coming back

  Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

  I found this article on the Wall Street Journal online. Apparently some jobs won’t be coming back after the downturn. Some jobs probably shouldn’t come back, given that they were attached to predatory or unhealthy industries. Unfortunately the market put money towards training people to have those skills, and now those people are suffering unemployment
  
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• Scrib – good place to upload job search documents

  Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

  http://www.scribd.com/

  A good place to host your general resume, cover letters etc so you can link to them.

• 50% Fewer Job Openings than in 2007

  Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

  The jobs data that keeps coming in is bad news for job seekers, but I don’t think it’s hopeless at all. To say that life has ups and downs may seem flippant to those without a job, but that is the truth.  Now is an extremely competitive time in the job market, and probably will
  
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• Great verbs to use in a resume

  Sunday, January 10th, 2010

  The English language is full of great words, from all sorts of origins. The great part about using verbs, especially to start phrases in resumes, is that verbs are so direct. A strong verb can communicate competence, action and result all in one word.

• How a resume works

  Thursday, January 7th, 2010

  A great resume does two things:

  1. Eliminates red flags / questions – Is the resume free of spelling mistakes? Does the resume highlight or downplay gaps in an employment record? Is the resume relevant to the job description in the job posting? A great resume does not get in its own – a great resume rearranges information so the applicant’s true strengths are clear.

• sample testimonial 1

  Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

  It had been 5 months of turning in resumes and not a single call-back. Literally 3 days after submitting my newly redesigned resume to potential employers, I was able to setup an interview. Amazing work!
  -Rex

• Why I started Professional Resume Design

  Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

  I was at a point where I needed help with a resume, to get to the next level in a career in Web Design. I kept my search at first confined to Google – but, unhappy with the results, went to Craiglist to find someone to help me out writing a stellar resume. Every site I visited, I had the same thought – the sites were outdated and unattractive. Why would I trust this company to market me to employers, when they can’t even market themselves effectively? In looking at the resumes they wrote, so much emphasis was placed on writing that it seemed like design wasn’t a priority at all.

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