by Kevin Hartford

Created on: February 08, 2010

The resume that gets attention is the one that fulfills the requirements of the job in the first place.  A job seeker needs to target his or her resume to the specific job or position that they are applying for.  Just like an arrow that is shot from a beginner's bow an unfocused resume will miss the mark and not get the ultimate prize: an interview.  There are ways to make to make the resume targeted.

The first way is to focus on an objective.  There are some resume "experts" that say an objective statement is not needed.  For them that may be true, but for most job seekers an objective narrows down the noise and allows them to focus on one thing.  A  good solid objective just needs three things: a position, a level and an industry. For example:  Senior Technical Writer for the Defense Industry. Now that we have the objective we know that everything else in the resume needs to support the objective.

Of course, this will not work if the company does not have any senior technical writers or is not in the defense industry.  The job seeker needs to research the organization they are applying to.  This research will tell them many things about the organization and should be filed neatly in some system for further reference.  For the resume, this research is critical.  Many organizations have job listing on their web sites and these are a potential goldmine of information about different positions in the company.

The job seeker needs to take one of these job listings, preferably one that they are qualified to do and interested in, and create the resume using the job listing as a template.  The bullet statements in the resume should use the same key words that are mentioned in the listing. In addition, the job listing will have other requirements that are unique to that organization or instructions about how the resume should be formated.

There are basically three types of resumes: chronological, functional, and combination.  The type of resume depends on where a person is in their career.  It is not important what type a resume a person uses, as long as they can accurately answer the questions imposed by the job listing.  The combination resume is usually flexible enough to answer these questions, but in some cases the other types work just as well.  The bottom-line about resume type is that it depends.

In order to create a resume that gets attention the job seeker needs to target the job they are interested in.  They need to do this by creating a focused objective, research organizations, and use key words from job listings.  Their resumes should accurately answer the questions, regardless of type of resume.  A good targeted resume will certainly help a job seeker get the job interview and perhaps the job.

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