Spin Your Resume Into Gold

When I was a little girl the story of Rumpelstiltskin fascinated me. If you don’t know or remember, it’s the Brothers Grimm tale about a miller who lied to the king and said that his daughter could spin straw into gold. The king locks the girl into a room in the castle and tells her to spin away or he’d kill her. Out of nowhere an elf appears and spins the straw into gold in return for a piece of the young woman’s jewelry. This goes on day after day until the young woman has nothing more to give the elf. The elf goes away after the girl promises to give him her first born child. (Why am I not surprised that a family named Grimm wrote this?) The king marries the miller’s daughter. Now a queen, the young woman has a son and the elf comes back demanding what was promised. She declines and the elf relents only if she can guess his name.  She guesses after spying on the elf and he gets so angry that he runs into the forest never to be heard from again. (I’m glad that my mother never read the other version that said that the elf was so angry that the queen guessed his name that he drilled himself into the ground and then tore himself in two).

For some reason, this story pops into my mind when I’m faced with a big job such as a mountain of laundry. I’m also reminded of it every time I write a new resume. It’s challenging to have a pile of “straw” or in this case accountabilities, responsibilities and notes and try to spin those into succinct, measurable accomplishments.

How do you spin the resume straw into gold?

1. Pick through your piles of job responsibilities and pull out the accomplishments for each position.
2. Research your former company and position and note the number of people served, budget/earnings, location. Research your position by asking yourself what you did and accomplished. Look up your job in the Occupational Outlook Handbook or another source and let the wording remind you of your actual duties and subsequent accomplishments.
3. Only bother with the past ten to fifteen years (if you go back that far) and bundle any other positions into a “Prior Employment”. You can organize these by company name, location and your previous titles.
4. List your education by degree, institution and location.
5. Categorize your strengths. Looking at these, draft a branding statement.

These five steps will take that jumble of thoughts and information and help you start to “spin” them into something concrete and manageable. Down the road you may tweak your resume for a particular job but with these steps, you will create a template to get you started. There’s no magic to creating a resume; just a bit of organization, creativity and data collection.