Two things came together to make this week happen. First and foremost were the requests from people that ask what they are doing wrong in their job search. I also felt a need to return to a â€œtheme weekâ€ and cover one topic more completely by taking a five-day look from different angles. Many job seekers seem to think that the chore of putting stuff in writing to make up a resume is a onetime shot and that when it is completed the road to that dream job is almost done. Both of those ideas are troublesome because a resume is a dynamic tool that is never finished and the resume alone will seldom guarantee employment. At the end of compiling the data for these articles several other facts have become clearer to me:

There is no end to this discussion â€“ These articles are an attempt to bring something new into public eye by omitting the already overworked advice about using action verbs, avoiding flowery adjectives, the myth of the one page resume, and others. I have failed anyone still looking for THE answer.

The evolution continues â€“ Even while addressing some of the changes that have taken place over the past few years in resume theory, it is not possible to crystal ball the events of tomorrow. Things are still changing and next year the advice given here may yield to more progressive concepts.

Nobody knows it all â€“ To continue to profess to be a job seeker advocate I must learn as much as I teach. Feedback is critical to everyone in the recruitment, counseling, and human resources arena. Let us hear your thoughts, but please offer constructive ideas and not just complaints that it is hard.

Image credit: rtimages / 123RF Stock Photo

June 24 -Â Why the Resume is Not Dead and Why You Still Need One -Â There is an abundance of free advice for job seekers online and a significant amount of it is pure crap. Crowdsourcing for best answers requires a high degree of fine tuning the crap filters to get rid of the outliers of reality. In order to be bold and daring many futuristic thinking individuals have created a new fiction about the resume. – more –

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June 25 –Â How To Write Your Resume And Why You Do It That Way â€“Â First of all, there is no standard format for a resume. If you paid for a book of 1001 resume samples you may find one that you can clone to produce a halfway decent looking document, but remember that you and a few thousand other people own that book. If plagiarizing someone elseâ€™s resume is the best that you can do, then you may expect to be lumped with the other copycats in the discard pile. – more –

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June 26 -Â How To Use Your Resume and When To Do It â€“Â Nobody ever reads the instruction manual, but resumes donâ€™t come with details anyway. Instructions on how to use a resume would almost seem to be unnecessary, but there are some very wrong things that people do with them. Underexposure is one culprit. The best resume in the world will not be of any help if it never gets seen.Â The biggest offense is usually overexposure. – more –

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June 27 -Â How To Know If Your Resume Needs Help and Where To Get It -Â Cut to the chaseâ€¦ your resume always needs help, so you already know how to know if you need help. Do you have a resume? Then you need help. This is particularly true if you wrote it yourself having no background in resume writing, had a half-assed self-proclaimed professional do it for you, or got some bad advice on how to embellish it to get an interview. – more –

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