Career Advice Blog

Career Tips, Insights and Career Advice by Paul Freiberger

A Resume Worth $1 Million

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You may not realize exactly how much a successful job transition is worth to you. Most people don’t.It’s easy to get a general idea. Let’s say you act astutely and move up from an $80,000 job to a $120,000 job at age 40. You ...

Instamatic Resume? Not So Fast

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Fill in the blanks, click three times and you’re hired! That is basically the promise of the automated resume. The claims seek to convince you that text formatting has replaced the professional resume writer. The boasts go something like this:“Go online and print your resume instantly!”“Enriched with ...

Help for Job-Seeking Engineers/Programmers and Resume Tips

I have been counseling many software engineers this year, developing resumes for engineers and crafting job-search strategies. The economy has made it tough for some very smart people. There are some things to keep in mind. I'll offer a few here today and I'll come back to this topic again ...

Fired? How to Get Back to Work

How to handle being fired from a Bay Area career counselor

Getting fired is generally not a career highlight, and there’s no sense in trying to soften the blow by spinning it as a positive event that opens you to magnificent new opportunities. The plain truth is that it hurts to be fired. It’s a blow to your ego ...

How to Write a Legal Resume and Make Your Case

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What does a lawyer’s resume look like? In most respects, an attorney's resume is no different from an executive resume or any other six-figure resume of any other professional. It should clearly outline your accomplishments, experience, education and skills. It should look crisp and contemporary. It should be ...

The Reverse Chronological Resume Format

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“Order is heaven’s first law,” said Alexander Pope. A resume provides order to our career. The reverse chronological resume is the most common resume format in use today. It is the one most favored by recruiters and employers. It is a common form of executive resume writer samples or ...

How to Write a McKinsey Resume

McKinsey

Among management consultants, McKinsey & Company has earned a reputation for its rigorous hiring process. Let’s look at what a McKinsey resume looks like and how to write a McKinsey resume. McKinsey can certainly afford to be rigorous. It attracts a remarkable pool of applicants, including Rhodes and Marshall ...

Fashion Resume Tips to Shape Your Future

Starting a fashion industry job search? Among your earliest tasks is to understand some basics in preparing a fashion industry resume, a daunting task even for seasoned professionals. If you are looking for an entry level fashion job you also need a professional fashion resume. Fashion industry job search tips ...

How Many Pages Should My Resume Be?

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Unlike what your college adviser or career counselor may have told you, there are very few hard and fast rules regarding how many pages your resume should be. There are guidelines, but these can be broken at the drop of a hat if the end result, your resume, would be ...

Highlight Your Achievements, Not Your Duties

Suppose a top baseball player like Albert Pujols submitted a resume to join your team. Would it say, "Responsible for getting hits and covering first base on ground balls"? Not likely, since every first baseman does that. Instead, it would stress his benefits to your team: his batting average, slugging ...

How to Start Writing Your Resume: Ask the Right Questions

Ask the right questions

Most people think about goals casually, turning them over in the mind. That's not enough. Do this analysis in writing. Do it before you write your resume, or do it while you are working with a professional resume writer.You may use a resume writing service to develop your resume ...

A Resume's Basic Framework

As you approach the task of  building your resume, you need to be comfortable with the standard, expected approach. It's the technique a qualified professional resume writer uses and the one hiring managers expect to see. You can find examples of this in properly written sample resumes that professional resume ...

Resumes for Programmers: Tips for the Software Engineer

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The calls often begin with an apologetic "never needed a programmer resume" admission: "I've never had to get a professional resume before."  Or, "I never dreamed of hiring a professional resume writer. I've always been able to land a programming job." Or, "I never even had to look ...

How to Write the Perfect Graduate School Resume

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Prepare your graduate school resume (some call it a graduate school CV) once you've decided to expand your knowledge and skills by earning a Master's Degree or PhD. This is a key part of the grad school application process.  This is not the conventional job application resume that ...

For Your Sake, use the CAR Approach to Resume Writing

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Resumes are usually written using one of a trio of strategies. There’s the chronological resume, the functional resume and some hybrid of the two. A different approach can make your resume stand out, and the CAR approach is one option that adds to the chronological or functional structure to ...

Mistakes C-Level Job Seekers Make: Part 2

Bay Area career counselor explains executive job seeker mistakes.

Mistakes in the Executive Resume So, according to your resume, you’re a results-oriented professional with deep industry knowledge and exceptional leadership skills? Strangely enough, your competitors’ resumes are making the very same claims. To a Hiring Manager or any prospective employer faced with a pile of resumes, the fact ...

Bay Area Resume Writing Services Bring Success to Job Seekers Nationwide

Bay Area Executive Resume Writer

Entry Level to Executive, Bay Area Resume Writing Services Help You Shine on Paper. With so much at stake in a high tech job search, job seekers nationwide are finding the value in Shimmering Careers Bay Area resume writing services. Engineers require comprehensive job search to target jobs all over ...

Practical Help in Resume Writing Services for Career Change

Resume Writing Services for Career Changes

Career Change Job Search Strategy and Resume WritingLooking for secrets of the career change job search and the career change resume? When you are contemplating a career change, you certainly need to know what job you want to do. But making a change can  force you to know what you ...

The Shoebox Approach to Creating My Professional Resume

Resume Writing for Sales Professionals

How to Start Writing a Dynamic Job Search DocumentGetting your resume ready for a job search can be a daunting task. You will wonder about the ideal length of a resume, whether to use a functional resume approach or a chronological approach. If you’re writing an executive resume and ...

Focus Your Resume for the Best Bay Area Job Search Success

Bay Area Career Coaching Expert Job Search Strategy

Resume writing is a necessary evil throughout all industries. Whether searching for an executive-level position or a part-time gig at the local eatery, the resume leverages your experience as it relates to the desired position. Sounds easy, right? Well, as millions of job hunters experience, detailing previous experience and education ...

Resumes for Career Change

Career Change

A career no longer means a job with a single company and retiring with a healthy pension. Today, career stability doesn’t even reflect staying in the same field. Career change is the norm. Some of us have changed out of necessity, others out of personal desire.  But career change ...

Job Search Tax Deductions: Alleviating Job Hunting’s Financial Costs

Tax DEductions

If you are job hunting, tax deductions may not be your top priority, but your expenses may be deductible. If you can use those deductions, you’ll lower the real cost of job search services. In other words, the real cost of getting professional help in your search is lower ...

Am I too Old for a Career Change?

Older gentleman at work

What’s in a Resume to Combat Age Discrimination?Once upon a time, in a place not far from here, workers who wished to stay with the same company for their whole working lives could have that wish granted. Yes, there were disadvantages, but promotions were predictable, companies rewarded seniority ...

Best Practice in the Job Search: The Essence of Your Resume

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Writing with Power Nothing says “I will get results” better than a history of getting results.The essence of your resume is not the responsibilities you had; the essence is what you achieved. Depart briefly from the standard format—a reverse chronology of experience followed by education—and open with ...

Complementary Skills Matter in the Job Search

Photo by Leio McLaren (@leiomclaren) on Unsplash

Provide Extra Skills in your Resume to Impress No matter how great you are, you want to get better. Improving is key to a successful career. Learning new skills is an essential part of improvement. Want some proof? Ben Franklin was always learning and taught himself Italian, French and Latin ...

Who Moved Your Parachute? Job Search Advice from the Trenches

Photo by Bryan Minear

My conclusions about job search strategies come from years of experience with hiring managers, HR professionals, recruiters and from my own career changes: journalist to project manager to researcher to author to communications professional. They are conclusions drawn from years of helping applicants—at every level and in many different ...

Engineering Skills in the Job Search: Leonardo’s Resume, Tools for Greatness, and Career Improvement

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At first glance, an engineer in the job market looks like a fish out of water. After all, the job market is all about selling – selling yourself to prospective employers – and that’s not a conventional engineering strength. Sales skills aren’t part of the engineering curriculum. As a result ...

Some Real Rules of the Modern Resume Game

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Before analyzing the details of state of the art resume building, a bit of context is in order. As a job applicant you need to know how the process really works to gauge your perfect resume’s chance of success.Let’s take a quick quiz.True or false?1 ...

When is Your Resume Worth a Million Dollars?

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What’s a resume worth? It’s just a piece of paper, after all, with a minuscule amount of toner attached, and it can’t be worth more than a penny or so. Perhaps it’s worth two cents if the paper is fancy enough. In reality, though, a resume ...

Sales and Marketing Experts Need a Professional Resume Writer

Cristi Tohatan Unsplash Love Me

Create Your Brand When it Counts the MostAs a sales and marketing professional are you prepared to promote yourself with an effective resume that will land you an interview? The average human resources manager spends less than 30 seconds reviewing a sales resume before deciding to keep it or throw ...

Hurdling a Major Career Roadblock:

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How to Use Your Resume and Cover Letter to Navigate Gaps in Your ResumeFor special situations, such as gaps in your career or frequent moves from one job to another, your resume and cover letter have to work overtime.You have to handle your resume in the right way, and ...

The Process Centered Resume

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Showing that You Excel at Lean-Agile, and Continuous ImprovementOver the years, I’ve focused much resume-writing advice on the notion that the best way for your resume to tell your story is through quantifiable accomplishments. Putting your achievements into numbers makes it easy for hiring managers to understand how, when ...

How to Compensate for Job Hopping with the Right Resume

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Job hopping has often gotten a bad rap. But recent economic and social trends indicate that job-hopping is not going away. You need to know how to improve your resume to overcome concerns.The average tenure for a job has been getting shorter and shorter. Last year, employees quit their ...

5 Rules of Resume Content: B.R.A.T.S.

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No, I’m not referring to sausages.BrandWe’re all our own brands. In reality, the notion of personal branding is not so new. At one time, you had an image. Now, you have a brand. The real difference is the multiplicity of places, many of them online, in which ...

Basic Tips for Writing and Editing Your Resume

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My message today is short but important. The language choices you make in your resume matter. Why? Along with a cover letter, your resume makes your first impression. It should communicate your professionalism. If you aren’t careful, you can blur a vital point or sabotage your resume in other ...

Ten Tips for a Remote-Ready Resume

Photo by Kornél Máhl on Unsplash

In today’s Covid-preoccupied working environment, offices are still very much on the remote bandwagon. The old days, “good” old days or not, have been slow to return, and there’s a great deal of skepticism that they ever truly will.That skepticism is partly driven by the fact that ...

The Job Interview’s Best Supporting Actor is Your Resume

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Your resume is the best supporting actor in your interview presentation for several reasons. But here I have a chance to emphasize the single thing that’s most important in eliciting the performance of a lifetime from that supporting actor. It’s a resume tip that bears repeating, especially because ...

The Functional Resume has an Image Problem

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Consider a HybridMost resumes follow a reverse-chronological format. This is a great way to showcase steady experience in the same field. For people reentering the workforce or changing fields, this structure may not be perfect. An alternative is a functional resume that highlights skills and achievements first. However, there’s ...

Revamping Your Resume for a Career Change: The Power of Transferable Skills

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash

This year, I’ve been working a growing number of clients who are actively considering or already in the midst of changing careers. If you are contemplating such a shift, rest assured, you’re not alone. Career transitions are a normal part of the professional journey.When writing a resume ...

Crafting an Effective Resume: Unleash Your Inner Beatle with a Core Competencies Section

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Imagine Sir Paul McCartney, the legendary musician and former member of The Beatles, pursuing a role as a Music Director. How can he quickly demonstrate his expertise in his resume? One effective strategy for Sir Paul is to include an impressive Core Competencies section near the top of his resume ...

Should You Add a Dash of Rizz to Your Resume?

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Ah, the ever-evolving English language! Just when you thought your resume was polished to perfection with action verbs and quantifiable achievements, along comes "rizz" – the Oxford Word of the Year for 2023, originally coined by a Twitch streamer.For those of you who've been too busy tailoring your cover letters ...

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