R-SQUARED: Repackaging & Reframing the Resume Rules

Alright, so ‘career experts’ are continually repackaging and reframing the rules of resume writing and job search. For fun, let’s call this R-squared.

My resume writing business focuses heavily on serving the senior manager and executive client. Except for the multiplicity of vehicles [MS Word, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, SlideShare (hat tip to @ErinKennedyCPRW for her recent Tweet regarding Slideshare)] that transport your resume words, the rules of executive resume writing have not fundamentally changed over the past 10 years.

The resume story’s initial purpose is to provide a compelling value proposition that obliges a targeted reader to call or email you for a conversation. As well, the resume’s further purpose is to accompany you throughout the interview process, enhancing, complementing and lifting your value proposition mapped to the hiring decision-maker’s needs.

At the foundation of this career communication is the critical need for a content-rich, deep-dive and focused approach to communicating your value. Tapping into a target company’s pain, and then resonating with a story that persuades is not a one-two-punch message catering to the attention-deficit-disordered audience.

Instead, it is comprised of a respectfully rich repertoire of selling information and value statements that sway thoughtful, introspective decision-makers to take action. Further, here are seven reasons I feel this way:

1. A richly written and layered resume is like a work of art that initially, at a glance, grabs attention, and with further, deeper reflection, continues to entice the viewer with your message subtext and nuance. Like fat-free foods that eliminate flavor for calories, a too-lean resume devoid of the richly seasoned words and stories that plump up your message will not fulfill a smart reader’s ultimate needs.
2. Building a meaty, content-rich resume must precede the whittled down, executive summary or executive profile or executive brief (many names for nuanced versions of a leaner, briefer resume).
3. The abbreviated, sound-byte resume has its place in networking online and in person, with colleagues, senior board members, recruiters and  key decision-makers, but to mince words in the foundational, story-board resume is not in you best interests. Specificity requires the ‘story behind the story.’
4. Yes, we live in a society bombarded by rapid-fire messages exacerbated by social media venues. However,  interviewing and hiring decisions result in large financial investments impacting hundreds of thousands of dollars and directly influencing profits. To say a 15+ year career be whittled down to a handful of words, headlines and surgical strike sound-bytes is devaluing the impact of the conversation.
5. Akin to a ‘this will only take 5 minutes’ phone call that balloons into an hour tete-a-tete with texture and nuance, a resume conversation must be more than a tweeted blip on the screen or a fleeting career marketing flyer.
6. Fleshier, more nuanced messages that readers can literally wrap their emotional and intellectual arms around and feel the fit in their corporate environ are essential to your career propulsion.
7. So, for the moment, I suggest, forget all of the R-Squared resume messages ‘swirling about’ and embrace and promote your pithy VALUE. Better yet, partner with a professional resume writer to help you focus in on and ferret out those best, meatiest and most inspired messages that  will ‘get interviews.’