Page 15 - Complete Idiot's Guide to The Perfect Resume
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Foreword
Since Susan Ireland first published her highly instructive and highly successful guide to the perfect
resume in 1996, a whirlwind force has hit resume preparation—and it’s called cyberspace.
Even in the new millennium, the resume remains one of the most important tools in your job
search, and in this updated version of her earlier book, Ms. Ireland—an expert resume consultant
and writer—gives you the basic, insider information you need to make sure you’re the one who
gets that job interview by showing you how to create the perfect resume.
Additionally, in this, her latest book on the subject, she emphasizes the importance of your elec-
tronic job search—and spells out how to pursue it. No job seeker can afford to be without her
straightforward, Internet-correct directions on how to conduct an online job hunt.
Even if you’re not a cyber geek, you don’t have to worry about the challenging task of searching
the Internet for appropriate sites or posting your resume on the World Wide Web because Ms.
Ireland tells you exactly what to do. As a job seeker, you probably worry—and rightfully so—about
whether your resume, when sent electronically, actually will get there in readable form. And there
are other Internet concerns: Do you format it in an attention-getting way, do you have the right
keywords to arouse the employer’s interest, and do you send it as an attachment to an e-mail?
These are important questions, and if you follow Ms. Ireland’s advice—and she doesn’t miss a
keystroke—you can be confident that your resume, the one you worked so hard on, will get
through as a viable record of your skills and experience.
She directly approaches the issue of recruitment Web sites, and what they can do for you. In fact,
she calls them “online resume banks,” and gives invaluable information about which are the most
interest-producing resume databases, which industries actually bank on them, where to find the
banks that are best for your job search, how to “deposit” your resume in them, and how to follow
up on your online search—all the new resume rules for this high-tech age.
But whether you transmit your finished product by e-mail or snail mail, Ms. Ireland walks you
through the entire process of creating the best resume for you. Following is one of the author’s
many invaluable insights that particularly appeals to me because it dissipates so much of the anxi-
ety that many job seekers bring to the challenging process of writing a job-getting resume:
Because your resume is not a confessional, you don’t have to tell all. Be selective.
Pick through all your information and choose only what’s relevant to your job
objective.
That’s the kind of advice that gives you a leg up on every other applicant for the job you want
because if you follow her directions, you’ll have the perfect resume.
—Carol Kleiman
Carol Kleiman is a nationally syndicated Jobs columnist for the Chicago Tribune. The author of
several career books, her latest is Getting a Job.
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