Attorney Resume Pitfalls: Pointers from a Professional Resume Writer
By Paul Freiberger
www.ShimmeringResumes.com
Everyone needs and deserves a quality professional resume. But for attorneys, the resume's style may reflect more on the job candidate than it does for most professions. As president of a career counseling firm with many attorney friends, I know that a legal resume must meet the exacting standards of hiring law firms. Attorneys looking to make a career change must demonstrate through their resumes that they are detail oriented.
Be sure to avoid these common traps that plague attorney resumes:
- Excess Qualification.
Attorneys tend to write defensively, an important skill for success. But a resume must be sharp and concise.
- Focus on Previous Duties.
Your experience matters, but your successes matter more. The firm won't hire you because you can do the job. It will hire you because you do it well.
- Typos.
They're bad in a brief and poison here. Many firms will chuck a resume from an attorney with a single spelling or grammatical error.
Like all professional resumes, yours needs to highlight your accomplishments. Your most important accomplishments can have a dramatic quality: problem, action, resolution. You can describe the difficulty, what you did, why, how your action helped, and what it meant. It's one thing simply to say you increased operating profit 35%. It's another to say that the firm was facing a crisis, revenues weren't increasing, and you solved the problem. You underscore the impact.
But don't overdo it. If you describe your accomplishments in excess detail, the resume can become unpleasant to read. You can also appear to be laboring too hard to prove yourself and the resume can suggest poor communication skills. Ironically, it can imply that you are not effective.
Stress your abilities.
Think about what you are good at and emphasize it. If you want to stress intellectual problem solving skills, think of a knotty problem that arose and spell out how you resolved it. If you are strong on leadership, show how you provided a vision or developed and motivated a team to make unusual accomplishments.
Emphasize recent accomplishments.
Omit or briefly mention achievements from longer than 15 years ago, and focus most intensely on your most recent work. A resume is not a curriculum vitae, which lists everything you've ever done. It's a summary and a pitch.
Be sure the key points jump out at a glance.
A glance may be all you'll get. But even if you get more, highlighting the most important points makes it easier for the screener. Those points will sink in deeper. One of the most common errors among resume writers is the gray resume, the flat blur of text with no emphasized points. It doesn't look professional or business like. It just looks dreary.
Make sure the resume is well-written.
A clumsily worded resume suggests you are a bad communicator. It also fails to make the points you want and overall suggests you operate at a lower level. This conclusion can be unfair but your resume is your speaking voice here. It can't sound awkward.
Avoid cliches.
Screeners' eyes glaze over when they see terms like "self-starter" and "team player." They are so common that the mind grows numb to them. Convey the same idea in other words and you can make the point freshly and effectively.
Avoid egotism.
Bragging can sabotage your case. Describe yourself as a "genuine visionary" or "born leader" and you raise questions about your character. After all, what true leader goes around boasting about it? If you really possess these qualities, you can show them in your past achievements, to much greater effect. Don't hold back - make the most powerful case you can - but be careful about forcing conclusions down the employer's throat.
Show your care for detail.
Both you and the employer know how important the resume is to you. If it has careless errors, the screener will reasonably assume the rest of your work is sloppy too. So no typos. No spelling or grammatical mistakes. No tiny formatting snafus. Proofread your resume meticulously, and then get a fresh pair of eyes to do so too. Try to avoid thinking about content as you proof. When the mind seeks meaning, as usual in reading, it is liable to skip over typos. We just don't see them. Focus letter-by-letter and word-by-word, and the invisible yields up. The process will feel unnatural, but the resume is short and this effort can make the difference in you getting the job.
Make it attractive.
This is one area where you can really gain on competitors, since so many resumes look flat and glum, making the task of poring through them unappealing. Why do so many resumes have that battleship gray appearance? One reason is that many people assume it's standard for resumes. This is simple nonsense that comes from ignorance, from the fear that some authority may have ordained it. Resumes do have certain requisites, but ugliness is hardly one of them.
It's all about impression here, and a good looking resume will convey the right subliminal cues to the reader. One key is white space. As graphic designers well know, white space isn't empty space. It's a potent design element. Create a magazine ad that fills the page with text and no one will read it; make the page all white except for a small block in the center and everyone will. So you can use white space and other discreet design elements to stand out. You don't want a resume that looks "decorative" and overdone, but a resume with an elegant, distinctive look will linger in the employer's mind with the right overtones and help set you apart from the competition. If you think design doesn't matter much commercially, look at what Steve Jobs has done with it.
Be brief.
The less you say, the less chance you give the screener to reject you. And that's the key goal. Moreover, the person reading the resume will likely form an impression of you that is an average of everything you state in the document. If you mention just your highlights, that average will be high. Mention everything and the average swoons. Be succinct.
Don't state the obvious.
Build the resume - and all communications - from the knowledge base of your audience. Start below it and you clutter the resume with the pointless. Start above it and you strew it with the obscure, but the obvious is worse. It suggests lack of respect for the reader.
Be honest.
Screeners learn to spot puff and if they suspect you've inflated your feats, they may downgrade or even dismiss all your assertions.
Case closed.
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Paul Freiberger is President of Shimmering Resumes, a resume writing, interview coaching, and career counseling service. Paul is the author of several books and the winner of the Los Angeles Times book award. He can be reached at: Paul@shimmeringresumes.com, or, by phone at 877-796-9737. You can visit his website at http://www.shimmeringresumes.com.