Best Outline of a Resume

Most resumes share too much information and are poorly formatted. The best outline of a resume should not only have a professional look and feel, but generate high interest from hiring authorities.

In short, your resume is your personal advertisement of your professional skills and strengths.

Cover letters for a resume should be used sparingly and only under certain circumstances.

I can't emphasize this enough: Creating an attention grabbing resume is not easy. Expect to devote many hours writing and honing it to as near perfection as possible.

Trust me...it's worth it!

Companies rely on them more than ever to determine who gets interviewed and who gets rejected. You simply can't afford to do a half-baked job on your resume...especially in this turbo-competitive job market.

As a veteran Executive Recruiter I have to sift through thousands and thousands of resumes a year looking for outstanding candidates to present to my key clients.

My livelihood depends on not only convincing a company to interview one of my candidates, but then pay me a hefty fee if they hire them.

I've seen just about every outline of a resume you can imagine. It's a miracle I'm not permanently crossed-eyed and brain damaged by now.

Believe me, after you've looked at 4 billion resumes, you know a good outline of a resume when you see one.

There are Human Resource Specialists who spend half their day just reading, sorting, and screening resumes. Only a handful of resumes ever make it up the mountain to the hiring manager's desk. I don't know which job is worse...a resume reader or a tollbooth collector.

So, why am I telling you all this?

Fact: The number ONE complaint I hear from job seekers is, no response from a company after sending out a resume. Nothing. Just dead silence.

Don't you just hate that?!

Reminds me of the old saying: treating people with indifference is worse than rejecting them.

So how do you stop the silent treatment?

I want to share with you a free professional resume that I frequently recommend to my candidates. It is the best outline of a resume I have ever used. After many of my candidates used it, they reported getting more calls from companies requesting an interview; when before ...deafening silence.

Does my outline of a resume work all of the time?

Of course not. Nothing works 100% of the time. But, it will improve your batting average. And, in some cases, remarkably so.

Here is how I'd like to walk you through my best outline of a resume.

I want to make this as painless as possible for you because I'm sure you already have plenty of pain either being unemployed, or working somewhere where the highlight of your day is lunch and 5:00PM.

Special Tip for Long-Term Unemployed: When you've been unemployed for longer than 6 months, desperation sets in. Many job seekers start adding more and more information to their resume in an attempt to make something happen. Resist doing this. Less is more when it comes to creating a powerful resume. The more information you add to your resume, the more reasons you give prospective employers to screen you out. Keep your resume simple and wanting to know more about you.

On another web page, I take you step by step through each section of my good resume sample. I explain the logic of each section, words and phrases you might want to use, best formatting, the length of your resume, other do's and don't s, and common resume mistakes to avoid.

I've also created a PDF file with a good resume sample of my free professional resume. Right-click to download this PDF file here. This way you can print it off and see exactly what it looks like in its completed, polished format.

I've also created this same resume sample in a PDF file with my notes written in the right margin explaining why you should build your resume this way. Right-click to download this PDF file here.

Lots of books and websites have been written about other resume outlines, such as functional resumes, but that is beyond the scope of my website. For now, I just want to share with you one free resume format that has been very successful for many of my candidates.

One last thing...if your job search isn't going so hot, I publish a free monthly newsletter, Job Brick Wall, exclusively for subscribers. The goal is to give you some fresh ideas and new approaches to your job search.