Quick and Quintessential Guide: Planning a Stellar Resume

by Katharine Hansen

Quick and Quintessential Guide: Planning a Stellar Resume is a planning guide for resumes. It breaks resumes down into their most basic components and tells what you need to know to craft each component into a compelling part of a stellar, attention-getting resume.

It's a step-by-step planning guide to ensuring that your resume is a sales pitch that conveys your distinctiveness, passion, and unique understanding of the business environment. The book shows how your resume can answer the employer’s question: Why you over any other candidate? Clearly, uniqueness is closely related to both branding and focus. If your resume conveys a sharp focus, as the book teaches, the reader can instantly visualize you in the position you seek. If your resume is branded, as the book advises, it immediately communicates your promise of value. The uniqueness factor takes your resume to the next level by portraying you as not only in the position but the best person for the position, even the only logical choice for the position. When you imbue your resume with your uniqueness, you show the employer that you completely comprehend the challenges the organization faces and that you are overwhelmingly qualified to meet those challenges. If you have adequately sold your uniqueness, the reader reviewing your resume should say, “This person gets it.”

The book is organized around the most important and pervasive aspects of writing an effective resume – the top-tier aspects that impact most parts of the resume:
Focus, Transferable Skills, Accomplishments, Keywords, and Appearance.

The book also includes a second tier of resume considerations: Action Verbs
Branding, as well as Formatting and Readability.

One chapter provides an outline for putting the components of your resume together. Most chapters link to companion worksheets that help you plan your resume.

The book is intended as a relatively short, digestible guide on resumes; it is not encyclopedic, and it’s not a sample book, though you’ll find links to samples.

94 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 21, 2014

About the author

Katharine (Kathy) Hansen, Ph.D., creative director and associate publisher of Quintessential Careers, is an author and instructor, in addition to being a career expert. Her book Dynamic Cover Letters has sold more than 100,000 copies.

Having completed a rigorous credentialing process with Career Thought Leaders, Katharine has earned the designations Credentialed Career Manager and Master Resume Writer, the ninth practitioner worldwide to earn the Master Resume Writer title. The Master Resume Writer designation places Hansen in an elite group of career practitioners who are committed to professionalism and dedicated to continuous learning. She is one of an exclusive group of career professionals to hold both of the Alliance's Credentialed Career Manager and Master Resume Writer designations.

In more than six years as a college professor, Katharine taught the writing of resumes and cover letters and critiqued the job-search correspondence of countless college students. Katharine also is editor of QuintZine, a free career and job-hunting newsletter filled with timely and topical tips for springboarding careers.

Katharine holds a doctoral degree in organizational behavior from Union Institute and University, Cincinnati, OH.

Katharine was writer-editor at numerous newspapers, magazines and nonprofit organizations, and she served as speechwriter for the first woman elected to the Florida Cabinet. Katharine, who earned her bachelor of arts degree in humanities from Stetson University, lives in Kettle Falls, WA, with her writing partner, Randall.

- excerpted from http://www.quintcareers.com/creative_...