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Author: Sam Bauer Published: Sept 2020
Before I begin this piece in earnest, I should add a personal disclaimer which is: I love writing. I took at least three creative writing classes across three different semesters in college and those semesters were by far my favorite. It also wasn’t by accident that the vast majority of the classes I took depended upon my ability to write essays, not my acuity with synthesizing numbers.
With this in mind, I absolutely loathed writing my resume. It felt like I was trying to write a travel brochure for a town that no one had ever heard of and that also hated tourists. The whole concept of writing a resume seemed ridiculous in theory and proved to be depressing in practice. My life experiences didn’t look good on paper and trying to upsell them felt dishonest in a way I couldn’t quite articulate. So, when a friend of mine told me she had experience writing resumes and offered to look at mine, I jumped at the opportunity. The end result turned out better than anything I could have produced by myself.
Had I not had my friend as a resource, I would have eventually invested in a professional resume writer. But why? I was already “good” at writing so why not just look at some samples and get started? Well truth be told, I did. But a resume is a sales pitch for your services. It requires the appropriate language and formatting to fit that purpose. There were extra-curriculars in my college career that I thought were barely worth mentioning in a conversation, let alone a resume. But my friend reframed them and suddenly they were my strongest selling points. And the thing is, you only need to make that investment once. As soon as someone else sets up the formatting, you can simply update your resume whenever you need to because the groundwork is already there. Spend the money once on a resource that lasts.
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