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The 6 Most Crucial Resume Questions You Should Ask Yourself

Your resume is a marketing tool: it honestly shows you, but it also shows you in the best possible light. Hiring managers and recruiters consider you based on your potential and achievements—and your lack of resume skills might make those difficult for them to understand. Here are 6 important resume questions you should ask yourself before you consider your resume ready to send out:

  1. What job do I want? If you need to know your career goals because no recruiter or hiring manager will search your resume for clues. You need a clearly written resume to show your qualifications for a specific position in a particular industry or company type.
  2. How can hiring managers and recruiters contact me? If a hiring manager or recruiter can’t reach you, they will not hire you. Set up a professional email address dedicated to your job search so that emails do not get lost in the shuffle—Gmail or Outlook accounts are acceptable. Avoid Yahoo accounts since they are now paid or have advertising attached to them. Double and triple check your contact information on your resume. It is easy to transpose numbers.
  3. Whom have I worked for and when? Your resume must present the names of the companies you worked for and your dates of employment. However, a line about the company’s size and purpose may provide the context that hiring managers and recruiters need to understand your achievements if relevant and the company is not known. Leading a team in an international manufacturing company with $10 billion in revenue is quite different from leading a local software startup team.
  4. What do I bring to the table? You are competing for each job against people who have likely performed the same tasks and have the same skills. What have you achieved and what goals have you met that set you apart? What makes you proud?
  5. What have the people I work with said about me? Maybe a sentence from an annual review or a customer letter is worth quoting in your resume. Those words may also give you important clues for writing your profile. Whether or not you have written praise, here is another critical resume question you should ask yourself: what do people expect when they come to me and why do internal or external customers seek me out?
  6. What are hiring managers and recruiters looking for? Search job postings and examine the profiles of others in your field to discover what key words crop up repeatedly. These are the keywords that should appear in your resume to reassure hiring managers and recruiters that you honestly have the skills, education, and other job requirements.

Finally, if you have difficulty answering any of these questions, ask yourself whom you would go to for resume writing and career advice? If you answer Robin’s Resumes®, you are well on your way to a successful job search.

What to Do—and Not Do—If You Are about to Lose Your Job

As much as my career involves resume writing, I am also a certified Master Career Director and Job and Career Transition Coach. Many of my clients have recently lost or are about to lose their jobs. So here is my top 10 list of what to do and not do if you are still working but about to lose your job.

  1. Do not quit ahead of time. If you are facing a layoff or other stressful situation, you may be tempted to quit first and look for a job after. If there is any way you can hang on until you have a solid job offer, please do. You may get a severance offer or be able to claim unemployment (which may have incentives during the COVID-19 crisis). It is also easier to find a job if you have a job.
  2. Do upgrade your resume. Update your resume and keep it up-to-date. Now is the time to gather information on your accomplishments in your current position before you forget them in the turmoil after you lose your job.
  3. Do send out your resume. The average length of unemployment right before COVID-19 was about 23 weeks. It may be longer now. Start looking for a new job as soon as you begin to worry. You may not lose your job but it never hurts to revise your LinkedIn profile, opening it up to recruiters and hiring managers (without alerting your own company that you are looking).
  4. Do not start slacking off at work. You may find it hard to keep your enthusiasm for work, but if you spend your time on social media, miss important deadlines, or start using your work computer to hunt for a job, you raise your chances of being fired by a whopping 10 percent, according to one survey.
  5. Do not complain about work online. Recruiters and hiring managers will find your rants and will consider you an employment risk. If you must let off steam online, make sure your settings prevent hiring managers and recruiters from seeing what you are posting.
  6. Do avoid over-sharing at work. If you are in the middle of a job hunt, no one at work needs to know: you do not want your boss to decide to fire you first. If you hear rumors of a layoff, ramp up your job search but do not spend hours gossiping about it with co-workers, especially if you are not supposed to know a layoff is coming.
  7. Make sure you know what you want next. Now is the time to think about your career path and what is most important to you: salary, workplace flexibility, more vacation time, more opportunities for training, different management style, and so on.
  8. Know how to position yourself. Research online for job titles and positions that match your skills, education, and accomplishments. Research companies in your field to find out what types of employees they are looking for now. If you need certification or more experience, consider how you might work toward it before you lose your job. The stronger you are, the stronger your resume will be.
  9. Negotiate. If you get fired, you may be able to negotiate on extending your health insurance, qualifying for unemployment insurance, or getting severance pay. If you quit, all those possibilities are off the table. In either case, be careful about signing any non-compete or nondisclosure agreements that might limit your future job prospects.
  10. Ask for help. You may not have the latest information on how to hunt for a job. You may not have the objectivity or the skills to pursue the next step in your career or write your resume. You may need help with any of the previous 9 items, including revising your online profile. Relying on a career coach and a resume writer like Robin’s Resumes® is a good decision if you are about to lose your job for any reason.