ARCHEUS WorkSearch: Selling yourself to an employer

Improve your ability to communicate the value you offer an employer with Gary Will's book How to Prepare for an Employment Interview -- now available as an e-book in Word.
Sample chapters:
What You Need to Know About Business
Asking Questions -- An Essential and Overlooked Step

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There are thousands of books out there on writing "high impact" resumes and "perfect" cover letters, and on "knocking 'em dead" in an interview. Most of them have some good ideas, but few live up to the hype in their titles and back covers.

This is a very select list of books that I've found to be the best of the bunch. These are the ones to read to develop your skills in selling yourself.

There are many useful books that are not on this page, but these contain everything you need to know. Read them and reread them, but most importantly adapt and apply their ideas when you make contact with employers.

You should be able to find many of these books in your local library or at bookstores in your area. All of them are also available from Amazon.com -- just have a credit card handy and click on the "Order" link. Most titles are shipped within 2-3 days and they can be returned for a refund within 30 days from when you receive them if they don't meet your expectations.

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The Overnight Resume
by Donald Asher
Ten Speed Press
1991

Outstanding guide to writing a resume -- possibly the best. Follows a very efficient step-by-step process and gets every section of the resume right in just a few dozen easy-to-read pages. Asher then provides many sample resumes showing how you can apply these ideas. I can't think of another resume book that comes close to this one -- and there are hundreds on the market.

Some great advice:

"It is absolutely not true that your resume must be one page. It should be long enough to establish what you have to offer..."
"The hottest resume style on the market today is the profile style ... it answers that all-important question -- "What can this candidate do for me?" -- in the first ten lines."
"De-emphasize the dates by putting them on the right"
"Never be vague by accident; be vague on purpose."
"What do you do if your most important jobs fall behind unimportant or unimpressive jobs? The answer is simple: reorder them. List your jobs out of chronological order ... you may wish to divide your experience under two headings -- RELATED EXPERIENCE and ADDITIONAL EXPERIENCE"
"Do not be a perfectionist. A perfectionist will still be working on his resume long after you have a great new job." [Possibly the most important advice you can get.]

Asher calls the all bullets style a "Teflon resume" because "it reads fast but nothing sticks." But his preference to begin a resume with a paragraph of text instead of bullet points makes some of the profiles in his sample resumes hard to scan. Since it's essential that the profile be easy to read, this is the one piece of advice from Asher that I would dispute. In every other respect, though, this is an awesome guide to resume writing.

Unfortunately, it was out of print the last time I checked at Amazon, but you may find it at the library.

Order The Overnight Resume from Amazon.com now

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