Company policy requires him to stay in his current position for six months before looking around for other internal opportunities. April 2025 will be his sixth month. His father, a former client, recommended me to help him with this résumé. What they don’t know is that this is really a two-pronged branding challenge.

The first branding challenge is getting his experience framed the right way. This is a mental exercise.

The second branding challenge is capturing that framework on paper. This is a writing exercise.

The First Challenge

He is NOT a mailroom clerk who specializes in running errands, as his LinkedIn profile would have you believe. He is NOT an MFA grad whose contributions are limited to student-level assignments. He is, in fact, a talented script and production development professional with obvious writing talent who happens to have an MFA and work in the mailroom of a major studio. Big difference. The mailroom job defines what he does, not who he is.

The Second Challenge

Screenwriting has its own peculiar formatting rules. Since it is a writing medium, it makes sense to mimic some of those rules without coming across as too gimmicky. Space that is dedicated to articulating his real talent and career direction is space that does not have to account for the entry-level nature of the internships he held. The whole focus of the writing exercise is to boost his credibility as an industry talent. Fetching coffee for the production team does not qualify as a credibility booster. Notice the mailroom clerk job title is missing.

In other words, he is a writing professional NOW, not when the industry decides to give him a commensurate title. No studio in the country would consider him for even a minor project without seeing samples of his work, so a portfolio link is provided to give the reader a path for further exploration.

And the reason I’m sharing this with you is because many times a client will approach you to solve one problem (a résumé), when the real issue is actually something that has to be addressed first (branding). Anyone can write down a reverse-chronological job history, but is that really what we’re hired to do?

Along with a sample of the résumé I created for this client, here is a list of questions to help you apply a branding mindset to any future projects you might have. Reflecting on these questions will help you think critically about how to approach branding and résumé writing in a way that transcends job titles and focuses on true professional identity and goals.

1. Reframing Identity
   • How can you (or your client) reframe your current job or role to reflect your long-term career goals and true professional identity?
   • Are you letting a temporary position define who you are, rather than what you bring to the table?
2. Core Strengths
   • What are the unique skills and accomplishments that differentiate your client from others in similar roles?
   • How can you highlight things outside the current job to align with your career aspirations?
3. Brand Perception
   • Does your branding (e.g., LinkedIn profile, résumé) tell the story of who you are professionally, or is it focused solely on where you are right now?
4. Positioning for Credibility
   • How can you minimize space dedicated to tasks that don’t enhance your credibility (e.g., administrative or clerical duties) and emphasize your core talents?
   • Are you using industry-specific language to show your understanding of the field?
5. Tailoring to the Industry
   • How can the formatting or tone of your résumé reflect the unique requirements and expectations of your industry, without becoming gimmicky?
   • Are you showcasing relevant creative work, such as linking to a portfolio or providing project examples?
6. Defining the Narrative
   • What narrative are you creating about your career journey, and does it align with your ultimate goals?
   • Are you focusing on how your current experiences are preparing you for the future rather than emphasizing entry-level or unrelated duties?
7. Presenting Work Samples
   • How can you provide access to your work (e.g., portfolios, links, or case studies) in a way that strengthens your professional story?
8. Overcoming Misaligned Perceptions
   • What steps can you take to ensure that employers and decision-makers see your potential and not just your current job title?
9. Understanding the Client’s Real Needs
   • How often do you dig deeper to uncover the true branding challenges behind a client’s request?
   • Do you approach résumé writing as merely compiling job history, or as crafting a persuasive story about a candidate’s future potential?
10. Ongoing Career Development
    • What additional steps (e.g., networking, portfolio building, personal branding) are needed to support the career narrative you’ve developed?

The post Writing with a Branding Mindset appeared first on PARWCC.

Q1 — January/February/March 2025

You have all your P&L totals from 2024, and a few months before taxes are due. But you don’t need precise year-end data to know where your revenue drivers are, where the skill gaps exist, and where the boat is leaking. The beginning of the new year is the right time to DO something different, and it doesn’t have to be a major overhaul. It just has to be something that puts your personal or professional development more in line with your #1 priority, whatever that is.

Power Question: When it comes to résumé writing or career coaching, what is your #1 priority for 2025?

“Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” – Robert Collier

Q2 — April/May/June 2025

This is likely to be your busiest quarter of the year. Yet you’re still going to attend Thrive in Chicago and fill your head with a bunch of new personal and/or business development ideas. This is a good thing; you can’t sell from an empty wagon. But don’t let the buffet line distract you from focusing on that one aspect of your business or development that feeds the reason you pursued this line of work in the first place.

Power Question: What is the most impactful action you can take right now to align your efforts with your core purpose?

“Where your focus goes, your energy flows.” – Tony Robbins

Q3 — July/August/September 2025

Mental health check. What’s working? What’s not working? What parts of your life/work bring you the most joy? What parts of your life/work drain you the most? You can’t be so focused on making a living that you forget to make a life. Before you plan any next steps, conduct an honest assessment of where things stand at this precise moment in time. 

Power Question: Are you living in a way that balances your personal well-being with your professional ambitions, and what adjustments can you make to enhance both?

“Balance is not something you find; it’s something you create.” – Jana Kingsford

Q4 — October/November/December 2025

As you move toward the end of 2025, you’ll have a pretty good sense of your success stories and your shortcomings. Before you enter final grades on your report card, challenge yourself to honor the grace and neutrality of positive and negative outcomes. Both are inevitable; change is optional. Ending the year in a state of gratitude is the fuel for sustaining a healthy and productive path moving forward.

Power Question: What lessons have you learned from your successes and setbacks this year, and how can you carry them forward with gratitude and purpose?

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill

The post Power Questions for Quarterly Planning appeared first on PARWCC.

Two were immediately disqualified for targeting the wrong position in their cover letters.

Of the nine résumés that remained:

• 8 were not professionally written. This is a guess, of course, but an educated one. The most visually appealing résumé included one with a two-column format and a photo. It was not selected.
• 6 were two pages; 2 were three pages long.
• All of them included a customized cover letter, as requested in the job ad.
• In general, my fellow committee members were much more critical of the cover letters than they were of the résumés. 
• 4 were selected for interviews. I agreed with three of those choices.

That’s where it stands as of this writing. By the time you read this, there is a good chance that an official offer has been extended and accepted. One person is going to have an even happier holiday season.

Eight will not…at least not as a SWIC employee.

Some of them will perhaps start a position at one of the 10 other jobs they applied for using the exact same résumé. Some of them will postpone their job search until after the new year. Some of them will go to holiday parties and tell their friends how tough the job market is right now.

And a large percentage of the unchosen will never suspect that NOT A SINGLE APPLICANT appeared to customize their résumé for the position. Some had professional experience that was more aligned with the job requirements, but clearly it was up to the reader to make that connection.

For some of them, it might not have made a difference.

But for those of you who serve clients in competitive job search situations, think of targeting the résumé as a bare minimum, drop-dead, gotta-do checklist item that is sure to help them stand out among a pool of DIY résumé writers.

Marketing guru Seth Godin said it this way:

“It’s so tempting to write for everyone. But everyone isn’t going to read your work, someone is….Name the people you’re writing for. Ignore everyone else.”

In the case of the new SWIC Recruiting Coordinator, someone who ignored that advice is still going to get a job offer. But the candidates who ignored that advice and were not interviewed could have increased their chances tremendously by thinking about the mindset of the people they were writing for.

I expect to see more of this dynamic as AI empowers people to try writing their own résumé or cover letter with a few simple prompts. In the wrong hands, AI is hardly an equalizer. It ensures we’ll have more work in the future. Strategic and authentic writing are both in high demand, still the byproduct of critical thinking.

I look at it this way. I see all these fancy video clips and recipes for the most appetizing meals and desserts, so simple even a non-cooking fool like me could do it. Except even if it turns out good, it’s an accident at best.

Stay in your lane, amateurs! Don’t you know that we’re trained for this?

The post Who Are You Writing For? appeared first on PARWCC.

More recently, Alvin has been in consulting roles and wants to continue along those same lines. Reverse chronology is definitely in play…infinite chronology is not. 

In essence, he’s saying “I’ve done a lot of stuff all over the world, and because of that I have a lot to offer a stateside company who needs someone who knows how to walk that line between hands-on project management and strategic consulting.” 

The nature of project work gives the writer two distinct considerations to navigate:

Redundant types of assignments can be implied to the client’s advantage. Simply provide enough content for the reader to think through…then stop. As if to say “And I did similar work with this company and with this company and with this company.” The power lies in what you don’t say.

In Alvin’s case, this decision was pretty simple. If you want the reader to focus on “2015 to Present” or whatever time frame you choose, then the supporting material — or in this case, the lack thereof — needs to reflect that. You can help the reader focus on RIGHT NOW by taking away the kind of job-by-job analysis that comes with traditional handling of the reverse-chronological format.

Projects are researchable. You can go into detail about each one if you want to, or you can even provide a link on the page that allows the reader to opt for any deep-dive background information. But each one of the Notable Projects listed is a Google-able entity, with details that would let the reader know everything they wanted to know about its size and scope.

His project list spans a wide range of companies and countries. Is it essential for the reader to know his job title and the year he worked on each of them? Perhaps at some point, those details will become more relevant. But to do the kind of work he wants to do now, and to present all that in an easily digestible form without getting lost in the details…the answer is “no”.

A client who walks in the door with pride, experience, a solid reputation, and pages and pages of source information is often shocked by taking this kind of approach. I get that. It doesn’t have to be done my way to be effective. 

But I think where we sometimes go astray is when we assume that a second or even third page — by sheer volume alone — will carry the value we hope to convey. Given the shrinking nature of an average reader’s attention span, that can be a dangerous assumption to make.

Can implied value be equal to or greater than value that is overtly stated? Co-creating value in the mind of a résumé reader is a collaborative mental process, facilitated by a written process, that relies on a delicate balance between the known and the unknown. 

Keep in mind that, in this case, the decision to go with a one-page format was NOT pre-meditated. The goal was to showcase the most recent 10-year period, and then ask “Does the remaining content support or distract from seeing the client as a solution to the reader’s problem?” 

If I really wanted to drive that message home, would saying it louder help? If you believe it would, keep writing. If you believe the volume is sufficient, stop. Trust the process. Based on the quality of the content you present — as opposed to the amount of content you choose NOT to present — did you get the volume right?

The post Turn Down the Volume appeared first on PARWCC.

“In both lab-controlled experiments and real-world trials, headlines that used common words with fewer syllables attracted more reader engagement. More analytic and complex headlines got fewer clicks, and some readers didn’t even remember them just minutes after seeing them.”

What are the implications for résumé writers?

For one, it is a reminder that résumé reading is often done in a competitive online environment where people are “economical with their attention.” No surprise there. But perhaps more importantly, the study revealed a gap between writers and readers, a “disconnect between what journalists think audiences will read and what they actually do.”

I believe that same gap is abundant across our industry. It applies to my work, your work, and anyone else who uses the written word to address a decision-making audience. And it applies to more than just headlines.

Our Fundamentals team recently explored one of the ways this might creep into your own work. A common concept among résumé writers is to “match the language of the job description” because the ATS will use that language as the basis for scanning résumé content to identify qualified candidates.

We looked at a randomly selected job description that included this phrase: 

“Set strategy for data governance work streams to ensure integrity and quality of large data sets that inform business decisions and optimize operations, influencing 3rd party vendors and internal analytics partners to manage timelines and deliverables.”

It might be grammatically correct, but that sentence received a negative score on more than one readability tool. It is a collection of syllables not worthy of being copied and pasted as is. It SOUNDS very corporate, but that’s about it. If it’s important enough to be included, it’s important enough to be included more simply.

A simplified version of that phrase might look like this: 

“Create plans to ensure important data is correct and useful, enabling better business decisions and work efficiency. Partner with outside companies and internal teams to track progress and meet deadlines.”

That’s much better from a readability standpoint because it has fewer words and syllables, but it comes at a price. If you regurgitate what was originally written, theoretically you stand a better chance of satisfying the ATS gods…but readability is compromised. If you revise what was originally written, you risk that ATS alignment…but stand a better chance of connecting with a human reader. Now imagine making that decision 25-50 times within the same document. The potential upside is huge.

To anyone studying for the CPRW credential or looking to improve the way their work resonates with readers, I wholeheartedly support the conclusion that researchers have once again affirmed: “When all else is equal, and you are on the fence…simpler language is better.”

[HINT: CPRW test submissions are graded by certified WRITERS, not electronic tools or certified readers. Play your hand accordingly.]

The post The Science of Simple appeared first on PARWCC.