Career Management Alliance Blog

About every other client who comes to APerfectResume.com has an existing resume that they’ve either just created or have been using for some time. And it’s astounding the number of senior executive candidates who show me something straight off a Microsoft Word template.

This is what normal people do. Nope, scratch that. This is what below-average job candidates do. This is by no means a bash against MS Word, but executives, I really have to command you to just not use it. It doesn’t apply in your case.

There are a couple of problems with a very experienced candidate using a template:

• Think about what the word template means. It’s a formula. It’s meant for everybody to use. If everybody uses it, how are you going to stand out?

• The template is instantly recognizable as a template. All professionals in the employment industry can see it’s a template. This says that you have no ability to go above and beyond.

• The reason for using a template is you can’t come up with your own format. So you fill in the blanks in the format that’s provided. Just this week I had an executive with essentially zero education, but 30 years of fabulous experience and accomplishments, begin his resume with education, because that was the section that came first. It was wrong, just wrong.

These resume samples were all born of a blank piece of paper. THAT was the template. I like for the client to breathe life into the resume. It’s a very individualized process, and the result is genuinely, uniquely reflective of you, and you alone.

Posted by Jewel Bracy DeMaio

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