it’s very hard to write your own resume because a resume is a macro view of your life, but you live your life at the micro level, obsessing about daily details that have no bearing on your resume. so i recommend to a lot of people that they hire someone to help them. after all, spending money on a resume writer is one of the few expenditures that will have good return right away.

but some of you will be able to do a decent job rewriting your resume on your own. the first thing you’ll have to do is make some mental shifts. you need to rethink the goals of a resume, and rethink the rules of a resume in order to approach the project like the best of the resume professionals.

here are three ideas that guide professional resume writers and should guide you as well:

1. don’t focus on your responsibilities, focus on what you achieved.
a resume is not your life story. no one cares. if your life story were so interesting, you’d have a book deal. the only things that should be on your resume are achievements. anyone can do their job, but only a small percentage of the population can do their job well, wherever they go.

the best way to show that you did your job well is from achievements. the best achievement is a promotion. it is an objective way to show that you impressed the people you work for. the next best way to show objective measures is to present quantified achievements.

most people do not think in terms of quantified achievements when they are in the job, but on the resume, that’s the only part of the job that matters. no one can see that you were a “good team player” on your resume unless you can say “established a team to solve problem x and increased sales x%” or “joined under-performing team and helped that team beat production delivery dates by three weeks.”

if you are only putting achievements on your resume, you are going to be hard-pressed to fill a whole page. that’s okay. anything on your resume that is not an achievement is wasting space. because you don’t know what a hiring manager will look at first—and if you have ten good achievements and three mediocre lines about your life story, the hiring manager may only read those three lines—so remove them.

2. don’t make your resume a moral statement; it’s a marketing document.
think about when a company announced the launch of their product. first of all, the product is not done. second of all, it has bugs. and third, the company is probably showing photos of prototypes and the real thing will look different.

all this stuff is fine. it’s accepted practice for marketing. the company will tell you that they are doing their best to get you the information you want in the way they think is best for letting you know what your consumer options are.

you need to take the same approach with your resume, because a resume is a marketing document. the best marketing documents show the product in the very best light, which means using whatever most outrageous tactics possible to make you look good. as long as you are not lying, you will be fine.

here’s an example: you join a software company that just launched a product and the product had so many problems that they had to hire someone to handle the calls. you start doing the tech support, and you work tons of overtime because the calls are so backed up. you clean up the phone queue and then you start taking long lunches because there’s not a lot to do, and then you start job hunting because the job is boring.

here’s how you summarize this job on your resume: assumed management responsibility for tech support and decreased call volume 20%.

how do you know 20%? who knows? it was probably more. but you can’t quantify exactly, so err on the safe side. but if you just say “did tech support for a software company” no one knows you did a good job.

there is a fine art of almost-lying-but-not-lying on a resume. you need to talk about it a lot in order to know where you fall on the spectrum. here is a sample of my own family discussions about what is lying and what isn’t.

3. don’t give everything away in the resume. //tr.hjenglish.com
the idea of a resume is to get someone to call you. talk with you on the phone. offer you an interview. so a resume is like a first date. you only show your best stuff and you don’t show it all.

some people dump everything they can think of onto their resume, but a resume is not the only chance you’ll have to sell yourself. in fact the interview is where the hard-core selling takes place. so you only put your very best achievements on the resume. sure, there will be other questions people will want answers to, but that will make them call you. and that’s good, right?

for those of you who can’t bear to take off the twenty extra lines on your resume because you think the interviewer has to see every single thing about you right away, consider that we have statistics to show that people don’t want to know everything up front. it does not make for a good match. of people who got married, only 3% had sex on the first date.

做一份个人简历非常不易，因为一份简历就是你的生平的宏观体现，而你的生活却是处在微观层面的，几乎包含了你所有的日常生活细节，而它们与你的简历根本无关。所以我向很多人建议他们可以雇人来帮他们。（译者注：作者在这里有一个相关链接）毕竟，花钱请人来写一份简历是为数不多、却很快就有回报的支出啊！
 
但是你们当中的有些人会有足够的能力自己来重写一份简历。你首先要做的就是在脑子里过一下“电影”。你需要重新思考一份简历的目的，重新思考写简历的规则，这样就能像最好的职业简历写手那样来完成这项工程了。
 
以下是三个指导专业简历写手的要诀，你也应当用它们作为指导哦！
 
1、不要着眼于你的责任，而要着眼于你的成绩。 //tr.hjenglish.com
 
一份简历不是你的生活故事。没有人会关注这个。你要把你的人生故事写的那么有趣，那你得写成一本书。你在简历里应该仅仅写上你的成绩！任何人都能完成本职工作，但只有一小部分人无论到何处，都能把工作做得出色。.com

证明你工作出色的最好方式就是你的成绩。最好的成绩是一种自我推销。它是一种客观的方式，能表明你给为之工作的人留下深刻印象。第一个最好的表明客观尺度的方式便是陈述经过量化的成绩。

大多数人在做简历时并不考虑量化成绩，但是在简历上，这却是惟一至关重要的部分。没有人能在简历上看出你是一个"良好的团队成员" ，除非你能说出“成立了一个团队来解决x问题，增加了百分之x的销售额”或者是“加入一个绩效欠佳的团队，并帮助团队提前三周完成产品交付。”

如果你把各项成绩写进简历，你要把它们压缩到一整页纸里。这没有问题。任何与成绩无关的内容都是在浪费你的简历空间。因为你不知道招聘负责人首先会看什么--如果你写了十个良好的业绩，而用了三行字写你平庸的人生故事，招聘负责人可能只看那三行字--所以请把它们去掉！