You Are Your Resume

Whether or not you use social media with all its bells and whistles and networking links to others, in the end, you are still simply your resume. And your resume is your best sales tool to broadcast what you can do. Make sure your resume is the best representative of you that it can be. Especially in contract employment, it's not how many likes you have or who knows whom at such and such a company. Instead, availability, quick response, clarity, and the ability to be found are your essential tools.

Your resume is you: your history. It is who you are as a sum of your education, training, and work experiences representing for whom, where, when, and on what projects, equipment, software, languages, programs, etc., that you are prepared to interface with immediately. These items set you apart from the crowd. And these are what contract firms must find in your resume in order to offer you your next assignment. Direct employment can function a bit less rigidly because of the time element, but a contract employee must hit the ground running. You must be ready and able to function immediately upon the start of each assignment. Make sure your resume is the best representative of you that it can be.

So often requirements come into contract staffing firms and are filled immediately from resumes posted on our website at www.contractjobhunter.com. This helps to explain why many opportunities never even reach the posting stage before being filled. We are a niche site for contract employment and are unique in that we have both sides of the equation, if you will, in our system. Make sure your resume is the best representative of you that it can be. With your resume in our database, ONLY the firms that advertise with us have access to you. Unlike the mega sites with 100,000+ searches a day, our contract firms know our members are familiar with and ready to work on a contract basis. Most of our advertising contract staffing firms have partnered with us for so many years that they trust the caliber of our members' resumes. You are then the beneficiary of the fast turnaround time most members experience between contract assignments.

The contract staffing industry has functioned successfully in nearly the same manner for 75 years. It has, of course, modernized with the electronic media available today. For example:

• Resumes were originally hand carried across the country to client companies! Today, your electronic resume is at their fingertips.
• In the beginning, you would have to wait for a telegram or snail mail contract before you left to drive across the country. Now you can be anywhere and could even start the next day if necessary.
• The time from the release of a requirement to your acceptance can actually be only a few hours. You want to receive that attention with the clearest statements of who you are and what you can do. Make sure your resume is the best representative of you that it can be.

As you critique your resume, think of words that identify your specific skills; be sure to include buzz words that recruiters would use when searching our resume database to fill an assignment YOU are qualified to handle. Do not be left out of their searches because you omitted certain skills or used uncommon wording. Be your own analyst and determine what best signifies your background. Remember sometimes there is rework to be done on an older project even though that experience may seem passé today. Do include companies, job titles, programs, specific information they may be using in keyword searches. Make sure your resume is the best representative of you that it can be.

Take advantage of access to our Guide to Resume Writing for further suggestions. Our industry is unique with many amazing opportunities for skill advancement and challenges. Be sure you are ready!