‘Outplacement Outtakes’ v4. – Gabrielle’s Lesson in Effective Résumé Writing
Feb 01, 2023When Gabrielle came to us for job search assistance, she was already a few weeks into her search. She was looking for a Customer Service position having spent the last 5 years in a call centre environment for a large courier company as well as having several part-time retail sales roles while she was in high school and college.
Gabrielle felt she had the personality, the skills set and the experience to easily transition to a new, similar role. However, when we met her, she was quite down on herself and feeling depressed since she could not seem to get any response to the résumés she had been sending out.
Customer Service is a broad field that spans across many different sectors and there are often a multitude of opportunities for customer service representatives of varying levels. Gabrielle had seen and enthusiastically applied to over one hundred job postings without getting a single call back. She could not understand what was wrong and slowly started losing confidence and motivation, berating herself personally.
Because customer service is such a broad field, and because there are many customer service representatives in the market, standing above the competition can be challenging. In contrast, someone who works in a more narrow field, neuroscience for example, has a smaller market to target and, even though there are less Neuroscientists out there, they don’t have nearly the problem of getting their résumés into the right hands and read thoroughly. It is simply a matter of volume, or lack thereof.
When we looked at the résumé that Gabrielle was using in her applications, we could see straight away what her problem was.
The focus of her résumé was her name. It was present in big, bold colourful letters. In fact, the entire résumé was formatted very nicely and was appealing to the eye. However, it was very difficult to decipher what Gabrielle could offer as an employee. Only when we spent several minutes reading the small print of her document could we see that she had extensive customer service experience and in fact, had been the recipient of multiple awards in her previous job.
Gabrielle was very proud of her résumé as she designed it and wrote it herself. She loved it and thought it was a good reflection of her personality and her skills set. In fact, she was quite defensive at the start when we wanted to change it. The problem of course, was that although she loved the résumé as it was, she wasn’t going to be the third-party, over-worked and-overly stressed stranger charged with the task of sifting through the pile of résumés received for one customer service posting!
Gabrielle may have been the perfect candidate for the advertised position, but her résumé never made the short pile and was never read because she didn’t make it easy for the hiring manager or HR representative to understand the contributions that she could bring to the table.
Once we confirmed the level of the role she wanted and the industries she wanted to work within, we could then re-write and re-format her résumé to bring her skills, level and experience to the forefront. Ensuring that they were focused and understood within seconds of one looking at her document – not minutes!
Once Gabrielle’s résumé started making the short pile, the calls for interviews started coming in and it is a stark reminder that résumé writing is more than just a presentation of your career history, it is truly an effort in ‘marketing’.
