A well-crafted resume will attract recruiters, HR pros and hiring managers, but getting it just right is a daunting task. To jump start the process, Insider Pro has assembled this collection of real resumes revamped by professional resume writers. (Watch this space for new templates.)
A well-written resume is the foundation of your job hunt; however, resume writing is overwhelming. There’s so much pressure to make your resume stand out, so many formats and styles to choose from. Figuring out how to focus on the most important parts of your career and experiences based on your current job seeking goals is challenging. Log in or subscribe to Insider Pro to download our resume templates. Getting your resume just right in order to attract the attention of recruiters, HR pros and hiring managers is in a word, daunting. To reduce the stress that comes with this task, Insider Pro – in collaboration with CIO.com, has assembled this collection of real resumes revamped by professional resume writers. Each resume available to our subscribers in the Insider Pro Tech Resume Template Library has been designed for a specific sought-after position. These templates will guide you through the process so you can create a resume that will help you land the tech job of your dreams. This particular original resume didn’t feature any glaring flaws, just the common mistakes most of us make when writing a resume. Resume expert, Andrew Ysasi,…. A well-written resume is the foundation of your job hunt; however, resume writing is overwhelming. There’s so much pressure to make your resume stand out, so many formats and styles to choose from. Figuring out how to focus on the most important parts of your career and experiences based on your current job seeking goals is challenging. Getting your resume just right in order to attract the attention of recruiters, HR pros and hiring managers is in a word, daunting. To reduce the stress that comes with this task, Insider Pro – in collaboration with CIO.com, has assembled this collection of real resumes revamped by professional resume writers. Each resume available to our subscribers in the Insider Pro Tech Resume Template Library has been designed for a specific sought-after position. These templates will guide you through the process so you can create a resume that will help you land the tech job of your dreams. IT consultants looking to transition into steady IT management positions face some challenges. They must be able to prove to prospective employers that they’ve got what it takes to be an IT executive and can adapt to a corporate environment. In this resume makeover Caitlin Sampson, a certified professional resume writer and career consultant with Regal Resumes, shows IT consultants how to write resumes to get corporate IT leadership jobs. Sampson identified four over-arching problems with Straus’s resume: It didn’t define his career objective, it was too long, his skills and qualifications were unclear, and it contained a red flag. The challenge, Sampson had to transform a resume for an IT consultant into a resume for an IT leader. The new resume had to demonstrate Straus’s ability to be a corporate IT director by showing how he had fulfilled similar roles in the past. Sampson created a tagline for his resume, beefed up his executive summary, added areas of expertise, focused his work experience and drew attention to his IT leadership and management experience, added a “Consulting Portfolio” section, included his technical skills, and chose a modern layout. With these changes, employers will now be more responsive to this candidate’s resume. Download this sample resume. In this resume makeover a director of technology and a senior technical programmer from the public sector wants to find a position in the private sector. Expert Andrew Ysasi, president of Admovio and vice president of Vital Records Control, provides important insights, not only for those looking to shift to the private sector, but for any seasoned IT pro seeking to move up the career ladder. When applying for jobs in the private sector, your resume should be streamlined, capable of catching a recruiter’s or employer’s attention quickly. The candidate’s original four-page resume was too academic, it had too many acronyms and jargon specific to government roles. Ysasi first needed to make the resume more concise overall by replacing some of the jargon and acronyms with keywords better related to the positions the candidate was interested in. While the original resume was packed with information, it made the common mistake of overlooking key skills and accomplishments. When writing your own resume, it can be easy to downplay your success, having an expert bring a fresh eye to your career history is a useful way to uncover impressive information for your resume. In this makeover Ysasi was able to provide a more focused format and identify what labels and concepts could translate what the candidate had done as ‘public sector entrepreneur’ into a private sector context. Download this sample resume. If you’re going for a role that is technically a step up from your current position you need to get strategic to make your resume stand out. In this resume makeover Stephen Van Vreede, IT and technical resume writer at ITtechExec and NoodlePlace, aimed to rework this resume to better reflect the candidate’s qualifications as a senior technology leader. The original resume had too much technical information and lacked order, it didn’t position the candidate’s experience to reflect his career goal. A resume needs to be more than a boring list that outlines your work experience, education and past achievements. The use of color in the original resume and the right-hand sidebar that included a breakdown of achievements for each position the candidate held was something Van Vreede was able to improve and expand on to create a more cohesive document with better flow. Van Vreede focused on simplifying by eliminating extraneous text and labels. To preserve some of the content being eliminated, Van Vreede created an “addendum” with a similar format to list out additional project details and technical skills, so that just like a list of references, the candidate would have a document ready to hand interested recruiters/hiring managers. Ultimately, Van Vreede refocused the candidate’s professional brand to better present his qualifications for a senior executive role. Moving the skills and experience to a visually appealing section helped emphasize the most important points while helping to steer the reader through the resume. As a general rule, a resume that’s too long will buy you a one-way ticket to the “no” pile. But the opposite is also true; a resume that’s too short, or tries to cram too much information into a limited space, will be difficult for a recruiter or hiring manager to follow and could result in rejection, even if your qualifications are top-notch. Length was the first issue Regal Resumés’ Caitlin Sampson, CHRP, CPRW, CEIP and career consultant, tackled when she approached this IT management consultant’s resume. Sampson helped this candidate expand on his extensive experience while narrowing his focus — a move that lands him his dream job. The resume needed focus. Sampson added a tagline and a catchy statement to draw the reader in, as well as a professional overview that provides a brief summary of the candidate’s qualifications and the potential value that he can add to an organization. Sampson then narrowed the focus to demonstrate his business strategy, innovation, project management and team mentoring abilities, he was then much better positioned for a more strategic IT position that could use the depth and breadth of his entire experience, instead of simply focusing on project-based and company-based projects. Download this sample resume. This job candidate is a career Superwoman. But you’d never know it from looking at her original resume. Executive career coach, strategist, publicist and founder of Executive Promotions, LLC Donald Burns transforms this CIO’s resume from one that was cluttered and text-heavy to one that’s clear and concise — and highlights her accomplishments. This job seeker lives and works in Perth, Western Australia, the resume ‘norms’ are very different than in Europe and North America, Burns said. Here a resume is lean and mean — like a telegram. In Australia (and New Zealand, India and South Africa) the typical resume is more like a booklet, so it wasn’t surprising that this resume looked more like “an eight-page data dump.” The first task was to rework the introduction: create a headline, subheadings and a summary paragraph that can also function as a one-page “networking bio.” Next, Burns’ focused on readability. Once Burns was finished, the new resume shifted from a laundry list of job descriptions to a document that accurately and effectively showcased the candidate’s strengths — solving problems for her employers. The final resume makes the candidate look like Superwoman — with no lying or exaggeration — just a true story of accomplishment without apology and without bloated text. Download this sample resume. Writing a resume means knowing your audience. If you try to please everyone, you’ll only wind up with an unfocused and disjointed document filled with unconnected work experience and accomplishments. Cheryl Lynch Simpson, career, job search and LinkedIn coach and Master Resume Writer, helped this candidate focus his resume to demonstrate his wealth of knowledge and experience. If you don’t have a personal brand, you’re behind the times. As people gain more exposure through the internet and social media, it’s become increasingly important to meticulously craft your professional image — and it all starts with your resume. While his resume didn’t reflect it — much of his past experience directly correlated to his current IT role and aspirations. The challenge was connecting those dots so that any hiring manager or recruiter would understand just how well-rounded his experience was. Simpson tackled the candidate’s “accomplishments” section and moved them into more strategic areas on the resume. This job seeker walked away with a resume that better portrays his career experience and future goals. Download this sample resume. Your resume is how you sell yourself to a hiring manager or a recruiter, which means you want to avoid a long list of job descriptions. That’s the mistake resume writer Andrew Ysasi, president of Admovio and executive director of Kent Record Management, said this job candidate made in her original resume. She focused on highlighting her work experience, but neglected to demonstrate the impact she had on the bottom line of her former companies and the impressive trajectory of her career from manager to senior director of digital marketing.
