Recommendation from an older friend of mine who has submitted (and read) more resumes than I care to think about existing: "Tell her to demand her money back for receiving an unusable product, and to write a review online condemning the place.". I agree, if at all possible you should try to get money back. You gave them money and they gave you back something that isn't going to assist you get a job.
As far as what was wrong (mostly listing in case you want to argue that you should have your money back, skip to the bold fixing if you don't care about this part for now):
-Showed significant lack of effort and accuracy-checking on the part of the person who processed your resume. Duplicated items and grammatical errors would be akin to changing the oil in a car and leaving the cap off, or forgetting to put new oil in.
-They use ellipsis and semicolons where not appropriate to do so. Sometimes.
-Formatting is insane and will not display properly in most word processors. You can get around this by exporting to .pdf, but seriously they have newlines and extra whitespace all over and it's crazy.
-Resume is crazy long. As a rule of thumb assume the person reading it is only ever going to read the cover letter and the first page of the resume. Anything longer than 1.5-2 pages long is madness (the second half-page or page might be looked at if comparing two people that didn't get thrown out in the first pass over however many applications showed up for a job).
-Inconsistency. I generally shy away from using any personal pronouns in a resume (in theory it is nothing more than a marketing document describing a product (in this case, you), so third person seems more appropriate). This resume goes back and forth, which looks extra bad.
-Bolding something doesn't mean the sentence started over.
-Italicize for emphasis. Bold for lots of emphasis. Bold-Italicize for OMFG emphasis. All three probably unnecessary.
-Uses lots of synonyms that make awkward sentences. This is not invader zim (really hoping you get this joke because I'm trying to cheer you up), so more organs does not mean more human, and more words does not mean more better.
As far as fixing it! :
-From here I would say write it yourself.
-Hold onto what you have so far. It has some valuable data that's already down on paper that can be reused or reformed into pieces that are useful in your real resume.
-The cover letter for a resume sadly (because this means more work and I don't know about you but I am lazy) should be tailored at least a little to each position you apply for, and should be a page.
-The Internet is our friend. Our very good friend with the collective knowledge (and ignorance) of tons of people we would otherwise never get to talk to. Useful, good information abounds.
Ensue freak out from yours truly. It took a solid day for my brain to really process this, but this morning I woke up ready to take on the tasks of writing my OWN $150 resume. From the crap that is my already written $150 resume. Seems a bit backwards, doesn't it? Now I spent a bit of time looking around the internet to see how to start. First of all, I found JobJenny who I absolutely adore. She's got some great tips for people out there looking for jobs, and she's funny. Funny people will keep me reading their advice for longer, so this is a big pro for me. Since I'm a student who hasn't had a lot of exceptional jobs or job experience, my skills from school and these jobs are going to be more important than my actual work. So I'm changing my resume to a skill based format to show off those things and make people want to hire me! You can find examples of different resume formats here. So, to start, I decided to figure out an accomplishment at each of the places I've worked at. Here's what I got so far:
Company 1:
I created a database using Excel that let the Sales Lead (who was also the President, this was a pretty small company) have all of their leads and contacts at their fingertips basically. It could sort them by location, company type, and if they were already current clients or not as well as just search by a company name or the name of a contact within a company. I set it up so he could access it anywhere, and kept it updated constantly.
Company 2:
I fostered a belief in the products and brands to customers to keep them coming back. This is harder to explain on paper, but I worked in the lingerie department, and basically sold bras, mainly. One of the biggest brands, a Company 2 exclusive, is actually of great quality, but pricey. I love it myself, and my belief in it's quality really allowed me to sell it, making it something many people would come back to our store to buy.
Company 3:
Since it's already all over my resume, I was an "Own the Experience" award winner. But the reason I was is because of my understanding and belief in the products that Company 3 offered, as well as my exceptional ability to explain them customers, and show them how they could use them to make their life better. I.E. cross selling, kind of. A lot of people called because they were unhappy with something that was happening on their account. Because I wasn't doing the job for a sales quota (even tho I was supposed to be, but I hate forcing things on people) I focused more on what Company 3 could offer them that could solve the issues they were having. I was really good at it.
Company 4:This is harder. I was really good at my job, I saw the ways things happened here that allowed me to be really productive, and I think what I'd probably choose to put on a resume would be my employee training, because I added a lot of personal thoughts and things that really allowed them to do their job better. My understanding of my job helped others do better at their job. But I don't know exactly how to write that as an accomplishment.
Now, what I've done since this is imported all my information from big clunky resume into new, skill based format resume! It's still too long, and I haven't added the things that I think are accomplishments, but it's a good start. From here, I'm going to pick and choose things, fix some grammatical things and wording, and get it to 1 to 1 1/2 pages. That is my goal for this evening.
Does anyone out there have any good resume writing or job searching tips?
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