Tag: resumes

By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Mindset, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , ,
While doing my morning exercise bike ride, I’ve been reading Linchpin, a book Seth Godin wrote more than ten years ago. I got to a part where he shares his view that creative people may not need a résumé to get hired. Since résumé writing was the largest part of my business for ten years, and still something I do (and enjoy), I wrote him a note agreeing that the “boring recitation” he criticizes is generally not helpful—and then explaining how my nontraditional approach actually serves my clients very well, and how it steered me toward writing nontraditional “story-behind-the-story” press releases that also serve my clients well. Writing press releases and book covers got me started in marketing as a career. I still do that kind of copywriting too, though these days, client assignments are more likely to focus on strategy, partnerships, and reaching different audiences with unique messages for each.
This is what I wrote to him:
I’m enjoying the book and hope to finish it in time to review in my mid-April newsletter. Certainly by May.

You might already know that résumé writing was really my bridge to copywriting and that for ten years (1985-95), it was most of my business before clients started hiring me to do PR writing. I struggled hard to write my own first résumé, with seven different career paths, very short job tenures (I went to Antioch, so my life was chopped into three-month sections—but I had lots of experience for a new grad), and a handicap of being perceived as too young. I was 19 when I finished college and 20 when I got my degree the following year, after finishing an incomplete.

I ended up doing a résumé for each career path and one or two others that synthesized two or three of  them and made them feel connected. I got some help from my mom in figuring out that approach but after that, I was off and running and started writing them for other people. My résumés got interviews, which is all they’re supposed to do—but I was too out-of-the-box to get hired and it took me a year to get a job—with what turned out to be a crooked literary agent in NYC, where I quickly got fired for trying to organize my colleagues.
Right from the start, I somehow attracted clients who didn’t fit into traditional workplace culture and had unusual histories. I still prefer working with that sort of client, even though I charge a flat $199 fee for the first two hours and therefore get paid a lot more per hour for writing a straight up teacher/nurse/salesperson résumé that I can knock out in 20 or 30 minutes. Two hours is usually enough, but sometimes it’s two or even three sessions.
A résumé doesn’t have to be the boring recitation you call it. My only résumé writing rule has always been “make the client look as good as possible FOR the types of positions they’re applying for, without lying.” And often, I do a bit of career consulting to open up their minds to possibilities they hadn’t thought of. I never worried if I needed to invent a new format. I once defined a year of travel as a self-directed learning intensive. A lot of what I do is look for connections and patterns that enable me to provide some continuity to a work history that might otherwise look too scant or too scattered. I don’t write for the computer scanners other than to make sure that if my client is applying through corporate channels, the résumé contains the most likely keywords an HR person would enter. But most of my clients aren’t looking for corporate jobs. They apply to places where a human makes the first pass, where they will be treated as a linchpin and not a cog, where their individuality is a strength. Or they are running their own businesses or writing grants, and their clients/funders need their résumé to satisfy their internal protocols. The résumé becomes a way of increasing their self-esteem as well as their employability.
Yes, the project-based approach is important. I’ve been known to put in testimonials and links to portfolios. I focus many of my résumés not on a straight chronological approach but on what my clients have done and can do. Often, that means grouping work experiences into categories that may or may not be chronological within the category but always drive the most relevant skills and accomplishments to the top.
And I love the feeling of empowerment my clients have when we end the Zoom call with a document that opens the doors they want to open and highlights things in their background they may not have seen as important. That’s why I still offer this service and why I keep my prices much lower than my B2B work.
Writing résumés was my “copywriting school.” I don’t think I could have invented the story-behind-the-story press release without those ten years writing mostly résumés and newspaper articles. The press releases I wrote as an activist before starting my business were mostly the boring old 5Ws variety.
And I got this response (fairly typical of his responses—I’m sure he has a ton of mail to respond to and I’m impressed that most of the time I write to him, I get an answer, even if it’s a brief one):
well said, Shel!
quite a journey
To which I replied, not really expecting (and as of this writing a day later, not receiving) a follow-up answer but wanting him to know:
Thanks. Indeed it has been, and it isn’t over yet. My next big project will be a primer on activism for elders. I just got some really good coaching on what I’ve been missing in my search for a charity partner, so I’m hoping that I can now find one quickly and then approach publishers.
One takeaway I hope you get from this exchange is not to be afraid to approach superstars. I’ve been corresponding with Seth for years, but I started out, like so many others, writing a cold email because something in one of his posts resonated and I wanted him to know. I’ve built relationships with quite a few that way, and several have endorsed one or more of my books. And decades ago, I became friends with Dave Dellinger of the Chicago 7 because I went up to him after he gave a terrific speech at a small demonstration. I didn’t know who he was at the time, and maybe that’s a good thing, because I went up to him without any artifice and just told him I appreciated his words.
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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Eco-friendly, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , ,

Value is about not just price, but quality. This busy market obviously understands.
Value is about not just price, but quality. This busy market obviously understands.
If you want to market on price, look at words like “affordable” and “value.” “Cheap” can be deadly.

As a service provider, I did lead on price for a number of years. Back in the days when much of my business was resume writing, I used a simple half-inch in-column ad in the Yellow Pages (remember them?) with the slogan “Affordable professional resumes while you wait.” The year they changed it without permission to “Affordable professional resumes while U wait,” I successfully argued that proper grammar was a key selling point in my line of work and they killed it—and got the cost of the whole year’s ad refunded. I turned out to be wrong; that ad brought me plenty of clients. But I personally would not patronize a writing service whose face to the world was ungrammatical.

Those ads ran in the 1980s and 1990s, and resume writing is only a tiny fraction of my current business. These days, I stress value, not price–for all the services I offer. Some are still quite inexpensive, like writing a press release or book cover—or, for that matter, the occasional resume I still write. Others, including strategic consulting on green and social change profitability as well as book publishing consulting, can be fairly pricy.

I would have moved away from marketing on low price anyway, as my business matured. But if I hadn’t, my business would have dried up. The market is very different now. Nobody is a prisoner of their own geography any more. I can’t compete on price with some clown on a bottom-feeding service bidding site who throws an article into a word-blender and spits out crap for $5 a shot. But I sure can compete on value and quality.

As a consumer, I’m price-sensitive on some items, but quality will trump price, and so will politics. Yesterday, I spent $40 or $50 at the farmers market. I could have bought the (theoretically) same items at a supermarket for half the price, but not the organic/local/fresh choices I purchased. But I also stopped at the local independent discount store and picked up some just-past-date polenta for a buck. I cooked it last night and it was fine. I have a less gourmet one in my fridge that I paid $3 for at a different store and it doesn’t expire until November, which means the one I ate tonight was probably packed last summer. But that’s OK, it was fine.

I learned all the way back in the 1980s that price and value were not necessarily the same. After a couple of bad experiences with cheap electronics, I started buying better quality components for my stereo, better telephones, and so forth—and being much happier with my purchases. I learned that I could get a good deal through a remainder catalog, and that a $100 item with an original list price of $300 was generally going to be a much better value than a $75 item that had never sold for more than $100. And when I bought my first computer, I went with the expensive but easy-to-use Macintosh and was very happy I did.

I will shop at that local discount store, but I won’t shop at that very famous low-price big box store beginning with a W. While I recognize that they are among the best in the industry on sustainability (something very important to me), I’m also painfully aware of how much I dislike their store siting and closing policies, their community relations, labor practices, supplier practices, and a bunch of other stuff. Plus, I’ve heard that the quality is often less than stellar. I give them kudos in my speeches for, among other things, developing a massive market for organic foods among people who have never been inside a Whole Foods. But I personally choose not to shop there.

But I’m perfectly happy to drive inexpensive, functional cars. Right now, we have a 2004 Mazda, bought new for $17K, and a 2005 Toyota Corolla, bought at six years old but with only 26,000 miles on it, for $10K. I expect both to last several more years. When we bought the Corolla, one of our other options was a used Prius with 99,000 miles, for $12K. The Corolla seemed like a MUCH better deal. It wasn’t the lower price so much as having only 1/4 as many miles.

In short, as a consumer, I’ll definitely factor in price, but it won’t be the only factor. How about you? As a business owner and as a consumer, how does price factor into your decisions.

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