Targeted resume equates to shorter job search

Dear Sam:

I am trying to develop a resume that positions me for accounting and auditing roles, but I do not want to completely limit my options. I was a nurse earlier in my career, and might be interested in pursuing that again. How can I develop a resume that keeps my options open?

– Annie Dear Annie:

I hear this question all the time. When candidates are afraid to close doors, they often create resumes without targeted content.

While keeping your options open may seem like an effective strategy, it actually achieves the opposite. If you present yourself as a jack-ofall-trades you become a master of none, which is clearly not a good presentation of your candidacy. Although I understand the need to not limit options in today’s job market, a one-size-fits-all resume is rarely effective.

Instead, identify a primary target, even if this means you have to make separate resumes for a second or third target.

Defining your purpose is the first critical step in crafting an effective resume — a step that facilitates your understanding of what your target audience is looking for and what keywords to incorporate into the document.

Let’s examine your specific situation. When presenting your candidacy for an accounting or auditing role, you would be pulling from your recent and relevant experience in those fields. Your language would be centered around accounting and auditing keywords — reconciliation, payables, receivables, general ledger, compliance — and you would use a traditional reversechronological format.

For this resume you may even omit your nursing experience, as it occurred more than 15 years ago and does not enhance your candidacy at this juncture in your career.

Now, if you presented that same resume to an employer seeking a clinical professional, the accounting keywords would not resonate at all. It would be akin to doing a Google search for cars and seeing search results for cats.

If you were to apply for nursing roles, you would need to turn your candidacy upside down. By that I mean you would likely use a combination format resume so you could highlight earlier versus recent experiences.

Your Qualifications Summary would contain completely different content, and your core skills would be night and day to those on your accounting resume. You also should consider whether you would be the most qualified candidate for those roles.

Sometimes, just because we think we can perform a role does not mean the hiring manager will view our candidacy as strong enough to compete against those with more recent and relevant experience. It can be a tough pill to swallow, but defining where you will be seen as highly qualified is an important step to ensure you conduct an effective job search.

If you want to pursue both career options, you would need to develop two different resumes to maximize your response.

Preparing a resume that would keep your options open in this situation would yield very little response, significantly diluting the impact of your search.

If you only need one job, your best bet is to develop the most targeted resume possible so that when you send out a few each week, you actually get a response.

It can sound good to keep your options open, but creating a general resume rarely does. Samantha Nolan is a certified professional resume writer and owner of Ladybug Design, a full-service resume-writing firm. Have a question for Sam? She can be reached at dearsam@ladybug-design.com or 614-570-3442. Find out more at ladybug-design.com.