The headline above is intentionally provocative. I have friends at Yahoo who are facing job insecurity. Others have already been laid off. I've helped some with their resumes. Since I've written about technology for years, I'm comfortable with high tech resumes.
I want to encourage all of you to get started on your resume early.
The professional resume writing services’ most reluctant customers are scientists and engineers. It’s a bit hard to understand, until you analyze the trust factor. After all, movie reviewers are seldom filmmakers. Many book reviewers have never had a book published. You might expect that any resume writer could tackle any resume. Yet, engineers (not all of them) don’t think anyone can describe what they do.
The entire engineering, IT and biotech job search and recruiting industry suffers, in part, due to poor communication among the participants in this process. Some changes are needed, including a different attitude on the part of the scientists and engineers. Companies find it difficult to assess job applicants, and recruiters are unable to distinguish good candidates from bad, in part because high tech resumes are inadequate.
Here’s the truth: Resume writers require no expertise in C-BASIC or HTML to craft a software designer or engineer’s resume. A professional resume writer needn’t be a scientist to write a scientist’s resume.
Yet many resume writers cannot do justice to a technical person’s background because they cannot describe technical skills in plain English.
Consider high tech journalists: They spend years learning to write about technology and explain so the rest of us can understand. It’s a learned skill. Bright, capable resume writers can tackle an engineer’s resume, but it will require more effort than, say, a salesperson’s resume. They need to be willing to make that effort.
This is no excuse for the biotech engineers who pay scant attention to their resumes. Perhaps they believe that employers will deduce their merits in the absence of evidence, or think the competition will be weak, or just dislike the effort of creating one. Almost always, they haven’t thought the process out, for they are flying into heavy weather in a rickety biplane.
So if you won’t hire a professional resume writing service, then you owe to yourself to understand some resume basics so you give yourself a fair chance.