You don’t know, what you don’t know

One of my job search advisory tweets sent out today (follow me @GayleHoward) received an interesting reply.

You’ll see the screen image of it here, where I advised jobseekers not to get too concerned with making the first draft of a resume perfect, but instead work to get it all down before starting to refine it.

The unexpected response from a follower posed the question, “Just like most writing, right”?

It’s true, yes, just like most writing.

But… just how much writing does the average person who is not a professional writer, actually do?

Would everyone know that it it is easier to brainstorm and throw any and all information into a document and then slowly and surely move and refine the content as the strategy starts to take shape? Depends on your job I guess!

Judging from people’s efforts that I see every day, they don’t! I see resumes where people have obviously toiled over the wording in the first page, only to get bored and tired in subsequent pages.(And it shows!)

Working on getting one paragraph perfect at a time could mean that after five or ten hours you have one almost-perfect paragraph… a job application deadline looming and a not-so-perfect middle sentence that continues to bug you!

Sometimes things seem very simple, but the fact is, you don’t know, what you don’t know.

If creating an information-dump of material and whittling it down to a strategic powerhouse of a resume is something you didn’t know, then no matter how simple it appears, the advice has done its job!