This past summer I joined the masses out there in what can only be described as dormant job market. The prospects of finding a job were not exactly overwhelming as the economic recession continued to drag on and the unemployment rate continued to rise. With what seemed like an insurmountable task on my hands, I decided to start at the beginning…getting my resume together.

Coming from an extensive healthcare recruitment background where I worked with hiring managers and candidates for the last eight years I thought that I would knock this baby out of the park in fifteen minutes and be back in the playroom fighting with my two year old for LEGO pieces. Boy was I wrong.

I sat down and stared a blank page for about five minutes before realizing that I had to fill at least one page with data about myself and my achievements from my working career. I hadn’t even typed my name yet and I was already getting intimidated. I decided to do what I always do when I get stuck, use the internet. I had a link from a few months back for a great resource on resume writing. I decided to follow the guidelines from the Rockport Institute website as it goes through a step by step analysis of how to draw attention to your relevant skill-set based and present it in an appealing fashion.

2K

Again, it’s a great resource but it’s a time consuming process. I spent parts of the next three days putting together what I thought (at the time) was an incredibly articulate and exciting resume. I decided to send it to my buddy Konstantinos (2K) as he is an executive recruiter at Hudson to make sure I had no errors that needed to be cleaned up.

Within ten minutes of sending out the email, I got a call from 2K reaming me out for putting together such a crappy resume. He said that he was going to kill it and send it back to me to fix. Well, he literally killed it. The amount of red font on it was astounding. It looked my high school calculus tests only without the test score and a “frowny face” in the corner.  I was embarrassed and upset. I had worked hard on this. I have extensive experience in helping healthcare professionals put resumes together based on what healthcare recruiters have told me. I decided to call 2K back to tell him this.

After a couple of minutes he cut me off and said, “Are you listening to yourself? Are you a healthcare professional? Are you applying for a nursing position? NO. You are a BUSINESS EXECUTIVE and your resume needs represent that!”

I hate it when he’s right (and he always is). He and I spent the next few days shooting the resume back and forth with various revisions and modifications and until it was at the point where we were both happy with it.

So I’m letting anyone out there in cyberland know that if you need someone to review your resume, feel free to send it to me frank@beyond.jobs. If it’s a healthcare resume I will be happy to look at it and if it’s for an executive or IT candidate, I will pass it along to 2K. He is always willing to offer his 2 cents.

I called 2K up afterwards to thank him. He said, “Don’t thank me yet, we still have to prepare you for interviews and then you have to actually start looking for a job.” Oh yeah…a job. I forgot about that.