Career Advice for Job Seekers
Don’t Let Your Friend Review Your Resume
January 31, 2006
So you have your resume all typed up and just need someone to review it. Time to ask your friend or someone in your family, right? Wrong. Pamela Braun of Campus Career Counselor advises candidates not to have their resume reviewed by a friend or family member for two reasons.
- The person performing the critique knows you too well so they’re too able to infer meaning. But your resume should be written in such a way that the reader need not read between the lines. Facts should be stated explicitly, not implicitly.
- The person performing the critique is likely to give advice based upon what they look for in a resume rather than what the employer to which you’re applying will look for in a resume. Put another way, it doesn’t matter if your uncle likes how your resume is written unless you’re applying to work for him. What matters is how the employer to which you’re applying likes to see resumes written.
Don’t shut your friends and family out of your job search. They can and should be valuable members of your network and can and should provide you with great moral support. But if they don’t write or read resumes for a living, then look for someone who does.
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