Developing your own resume is dumb. Think about this for a moment. Would a company selling a product or service in the marketplace ever just ask any one of its employees to slap together a brochure so they can have something to help sell whatever they are offering? Never, ever. What do companies understand that nearly all people don't get? Companies understand how critically important it is that they present to their prospective customers a professionally written and developed document. It is so important to them that they spend millions of dollars every year to produce marketing, sales, communications, and public relations brochures, documents, and other collateral. How much have you spent in the last year, the last 10 years, to help sell and market yourself better? Zero.
You are probably thinking, well, first of all, I'm not a company, I'm a person. It's not same. Oh, really. Put on your thinking cap for just 30 seconds and let this sink in. Are you not attempting to get a company to pay you money to provide a service to them? Of course you are. You are offering a service for sale to companies. You must present your features and benefits, and the better you do it, the more likely you will find a buyer. As soon as this sinks in you can hopefully stop with the egregiously irresponsible decision of piecing together your own resume.
Let this sink in... A resume needs to open up and hit the hiring manager, HR person, or recruiter between the eyes as exuding polish and success, whether you're a garbage man or a CEO. It is a written advertisement, a marketing brochure, and a press release. An advertisement must be exceptional to be effective. It represents people and the service they provide in a highly competitive marketplace. Somehow people out there have convinced themselves that what they have is either good enough or it really does not matter that much. If that is you, you need to seriously rethink some things because you are making a colossal personal and financial mistake.
You need to treat yourself and market yourself like the leading product and service you are. There is no more valuable product than you. There is an old saying, perception is reality. It does not matter if you actually are one of the best whatever on the planet. If the perception from your resume is that you are not, then you are not. There are no second chances to explain. Employers, your potential customers who you want to pay you money for your services, do not want some refurbished resume template or free resume example you stumbled across on the Internet. They do not want some cheap resume builder that you plowed all of your stuff into.
I am aware that 99% people reading this will not take this advice, because they are utilizing man's greatest downfall, which is the ability to rationalize, or they are just too cheap to invest in themselves. There are more important things like eating out, partying, or whatever. What an inexcusable huge mistake. People need to change their awareness level and realize that what they see and what others see is not the same with regard to resumes. After the tens of thousands of resumes I have seen, I can confidently make the statement that all people do not know how to assess what is great in terms of a resume. If they could, they would not be sending out these horrific resumes. As recruiters, we can't use garbage resumes and we certainly won't send them to our hiring managers. Your resume represents us.
This is not a game. This is reality. People are inexplicably gambling with their livelihood. Realities may differ with people on many topics, but the reality for hiring managers and employers is that they want to be sold. They want sharp. They want the best. They want polish. They want professional. They want organization. They want creativity. The resumes people are using clearly do not say any of these things. There's just no nice way to put it. Making your own resume is the epitome of stupidity. Smart people have their resumes prepared by qualified professionals.
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