This article explains how to take your résumé from an informative, but dull list of your qualifications, to an expression of your passion for what you do and what you will bring to the employer.
"Your resume is bland, boring, and meaningless." He seemed a bit shocked that I would say that to his face. "It has no content, no personality, and no potential." He finally spoke up and started to defend his work, but I cut him off and said, "Ah! Now we can get it fixed…I needed you to get passionate about it first!"
Yes, I was a bit tough on the young man, but sometimes it takes getting a person's complete attention before he will agree to really rethink his resume. It was nicely formatted and had the basic structure and content, but it was lacking excitement and details.
He had been defending lines like "Helped write a department training manual" and "Ran the nightly computer backup programs" – urgh! It sounded like a job description rather than a resume of personal success! He needed to get past his modesty and develop a resume, not an obituary.
To get this fellow's resume on track I decided to show him the STAR model. Now there are several variations on STAR (CAR with the "challenge" or PAR with the problem), where some people like to merge the S and T parts, but here is the one I like that keeps them separate:
Partly because many of us have been taught to be modest in public, we tend to write modest resumes. But you need to look at your resume not as a "journal of activities", but rather a "marketing document of your talents".
Think of TV commercials that advance the benefits and strengths of their products. How often have you seen a commercial selling a truck and it talks about horsepower, towing capacity or payload. They are clear, enticing, dynamic, and targeted – exactly what your resume needs…clear situations, enticing tasks, dynamic actions, and targeted results.
Avoid the job description type of resume. Think S.T.A.R. When writing each and every line, consider a STAR statement. Tell us a story in each sentence. Do not exaggerate, but be proud and even a little boastful of your past work. This is a marketing document – Sell Me!
Source: C.J. Trayser, https://mrl8nite.com/2009/11/30/resume-writing-star-statement/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.