Information regarding Certified Professional Resume Writers (CPRW) and the Professional Association of Resume Writers (PARW)

Professional Resume and Career Development Center – 415.314.0982

About PARW/CC
The Professional Association of Resume Writers & Career Coaches was founded in January of 1990. Prior to that time, there had been no association for career professionals to exchange information, enhance their skills, or demonstrate their commitment to providing professional services to the general public. Today, those who display the association’s logo affirm their dedication to excellence in meeting client career goals. In addition, many members then choose to seek certification to further affirm their expertise as career professionals. For information on joining PARW/CC, please click here.

About PARW/CC Members
Association members include independent business owners, as well as non-profit career centers such as colleges and universities, military bases, workforce development offices, and state Departments of Labor. Their participation in PARW/CC demonstrates an on-going commitment to learning, exchanging ideas and information, and gaining the expertise to best help each client achieve their personal career goals. Working with a PARW/CC member is similar to hiring a personal advertising agency to market you successfully. The resume is your “sales message” that must stand out from the competition! Association members can guide you in targeting your message to appropriate employers through networking, targeted mailings, the Internet, your own career field’s association, etc. Then, they help you prepare for the hiring interview so you stand out from the other finalists as the best choice for the available position.

Certified Professional Resume Writers (CPRW)
Are the career industry’s leading experts in the development of strategic resumes. The purpose of the resume is to secure a personal interview from among the dozens or hundreds of applicants for a given position. Since 1991, CPRWs have demonstrated their knowledge, talent and writing expertise in meeting the industry standard of excellence and in serving the client’s career interests.

Certified Employment Interview Professional (CEIP)
Represents association members who have undertaken specialized training to prepare their clients for the critical employment interview. From possibly hundreds of resumes, an employer will select perhaps 10 or so of the best candidates for personal interviews. Candidates who have practiced their interview skills and are best prepared for this decisive meeting will be more confident, relaxed, and able to make a positive presentation that leads to the job offer.

Your Job Is To Do What??

…Help People Hate Each Other Even More:  Divorce Lawyer…and more:

What Exactly Do You Do??

• My Job Is To Read things that don’t matter, then write papers saying they do matter, for points that don’t matter, in order to get a job doing something totally unrelated: Student
•  Take numbers on pieces of paper, rearrange them and put them on different pieces of paper: Tax Accountant
•  Explain big words to sales people and then cower before customers while trying to convince them that the sales people really didn’t say what the customers understood: Customer Solutions Engineer
• Learn laws created ages ago so that I can tell engineers why I’m smarter than they are while complaining how it’s a travesty that they get paid more: Physics major
• Show you innovative ways to burn money in the spirit of patriotism: Fireworks Stand Manager
•  Help people lie consistently to their bosses: Business Intelligence Consultant
•  Teach your kids enough to complain but not enough to make a difference: College Teacher
•  Pass poisonous gas on command: Research Assistant in solid state ammonia storage
•  Make people who are already filthy rich somewhat richer by duping poor people into buying stuff they don’t need: Corporate Software Engineer
• Find as many synonyms for “explosion” as possible: Novelist for Teenage Boys
•  Supervise the guys and gals who try to protect the good people from the bad, only to be hated by the good people AND the bad: Police Sergeant
•  Make corporate propaganda feel like folksy truthisms: TV Ad Director
•  Manage waste recycling, promotion & sales: Antiques Dealer
•  Arrive after the battle and bayonet all the wounded: Auditor
•  Sell gas: Energy and Telecom Business Analyst
•  Tell forty year-old men it’s okay to behave like fourteen year-old school girls: Printing Press Production Coordinator
•  Provide arcane information on a need-to-know basis: Chief Accountant
•  Shepherd clients through the process of setting their products on fire: Consumer Products Tester
•  Manage urban renewal and pest control: B-52 Bomber pilot
•  Persuade kids that it’s really fun being wet, cold and scared out of their minds: Sailing Instructor
•  Draw up plans for something that will not be built according to those plans: Civil Engineer, Transportation Design
•  Teach kids to be evil…or so they say: Video Game Creator
•  Ensure that stupid people stay in the gene pool: Lifeguard
•   Spend most of the day looking out the window: Pilot
•   Wear a tuxedo and smash metal plates into each other: Musician
•   Go to strange people’s houses and take their money: Pizza Delivery Boy
•   Sell gluttony: Cinema Concession Stand Attendant
•   Tell people that they can’t spend money they thought they had: Government Analyst
•   Take pictures of the unlucky and the stupid: X-ray Technician
•   Profit from the misfortunes of others: Cops and Courts Reporter
•   Take a simple two-way promise and turn it into several complicated one-way promises which neither side can understand or hope to fulfill: Lawyer
•   Bring a little rain into the lives of flood victims: Government Debt Collector
•   Have people spend far more than they estimated: Building Inspector
•   Make sure nothing ever happens: IT Security
•     Move things from one tube to another: Microbiologist
•     Try not to kill the baby: Housewife
•     Misinterpret the universe: Astronomer
•     Be a human napkin: Stay-at-home mom of three
•     Run away and call the police: Security Guard
•     Copy and paste the Internet: Student

The Top 10

•     Help people hate each other Even More: Divorce Lawyer (Scott Adams’ favorite)
•     Stand on a field and get yelled at for hours: Baseball Umpire
•     Talk in other people’s sleep: College Professor
•     Call people who know what they’re doing and ask them what they’re doing: Incident Manager
•     Show people how beautiful the Earth would be without them: Mountain Landscape Photographer/Climber
•     Make people feel bad about their work: Quality Assurance Tester
•     Repeatedly fix what you repeatedly break: IT Director
•     Clean up an animal that makes more money then me in a year: Assistant Horse Trainer
•     Write words that no one wants to read: Technical Writer
•     Make food that is as healthy before it goes in your body as when it comes back out: Fast Food Employee

If you liked this, you’ll love the Funniest Strangest Job Titles Ever.  Thank You Jacob Share and Scott Adams!

What Job Hunting Is Not…

Job Hunting Is Not:

• Wasting time
• Worrying about how to get started
• Feeling lost
• Sending Resumes that companies don’t read
• Losing documents or other important information needed for applications and internet postings
• Forgetting the critical follow-up (thank you letters and call backs)
• Spending time what to say in a cover letter
• Sending the WRONG resume
• Not understanding your unique value in the marketplace
• Having the tools needed to get the job you deserve

Professional Resume can help you transition into a new job.

Professional Resume Potential has a VALIDATED CAREER ASSESSMENT with worksheets
designed to help you understand your strengths and career potential, specifically
matched to your abilities, interests and personality.

Professional Resume Research is designed to help you find the hidden opportunities within the
unpublished job market, which account for over 75% of available jobs today. Without
these skills, your chances are slim of finding your ideal job.

Professional Resume Marketing provides all the tips and tools you will need to market yourself to
prospective employers.
Professional Resume Interviewing contains the do’s and don’ts of interviewing, prepares you for
the difficult and unusual questions, shows you how to resign, negotiate your compensation
and handle the difficult transition from former company to future company.

Professional Resume Career Assessments help you identify and search for job opportunities
that best match your experience and abilities. All our assessments are validated
and exceed U.S.Government Guidelines for industrial use.
Professional Resume provides a link to the online U.S. government informational website on job
classifications. This is a user-friendly resource, providing an easy-to-understand
frame of reference for occupational profiles as stated in our Career Reports

Professional Resume can help you in the job hunting process.  Call our staff on 415.314.0982 and we will help!

Welcome to Professional Resume and Career Development Center

Here is some information about Professional Résumé and what we do:

What We Offer:

We offer two basic levels of service:

The first is a writing service. We take your raw data and transform it into a powerful marketing brochure that will tell the prospective employer why you are the best candidate within that critical 15-second window of opportunity.

Secondly, we offer reformatting if your résumé does not require editing.

How much does it cost and what form will it be in?

We have résumés from $50 to $400. That’s a broad range, but we work with people in all fields and at all levels, from entry-level high school students to senior-level executives and professionals. We have a broad range of styles and samples, but our signature trademark is a distinctive brochure style of résumé that is available in one, one and one-half page, and two-page styles.

All final products are available in hard copies, scannable copies, fax copies, electronic copies including Adobe PDF files ready to send as an e-mail attachment, or post to the Internet.

Lifetime updating means that if you lose a copy of your résumé, we’ll still have it. We have a secure database of thousands of résumés.

Tell me about your company:

Our company is part of the world’s largest and oldest résumé writing service established in 1959.
We are certified by the Professional Association of Résumé Writers (PARW) and each writer on our present team has a minimum of five years of experience.  We’re members of the major trade associations including the Professional Resume Writers Research Association (PRWRA).
We’ve been represented in the Kansas City and the Bay Area marketplace for nearly 40 years.

Have you worked with many people in my field and do you have a specialty?

We’ve written résumés for every imaginable occupation – A to Z from dog catchers, brain surgeons, rocket scientists, morticians, musicians, senior marketing managers, executives, evangelists – about every profession you can think of.

Writers on our staff have expertise in different specialty areas.  We have writers who specialize in senior-level candidates, sales professionals, IT/IS consultants/analysts/programmers, education, healthcare, insurance, engineering, accounting, food service, retailing, etc. You name it and we’ve done it.

On a one-on-one basis, we will show you concrete examples of résumés we’ve prepared for people that you will be competing with — real résumés that have proven results.

How do you work, what is the process?

We conduct our business by conference call, internet, email and Skype.

1. We start out by setting an appointment (phone interview) for a free consultation.
2.  We  review the résumé you’ve used in the past, or you fill out a profile to provide us with the information. We talk to you about your goals, how you intend to market yourself, where your skills lie, clarify your job duties, and any unique circumstances we  need to know about.
3. We then talk to you about current trends, philosophies and what human resource managers want to see.
4. We will describe, fax, or e-mail Adobe PDF file samples of résumés that will  be in your area of specialty.
5. If you are satisfied with what you see, we will then settle on the price of the package. This initial process takes approximately 30 minutes.
6. If we’re going to develop a résumé, it will take about another 45 minutes after the initial interview to collect the information we need to properly tell your story. We schedule a time to visit by phone if required.

The benefits and features of a professional writing service. Our services far outweigh the cost.
We specialized in developing a résumé that sells YOU on paper/electronic file.
We maximize your number of interviews by telling why you are the best candidate in the first half of the first page, or 15 seconds, the average length of time a résumé is read.

Our résumés are like a sales brochure. WE CAN GUARANTEE A 60% INTERVIEW RATIO TO RÉSUMÉS MAILED OR SUBMITTED ELECTRONICALLY.

What information do you need from me?

A. The chronology of employment and education.

B. Your areas of strength, effectiveness, demonstrated performance, quantifiables, how you’ve been able to solve problems or make money for the companies you’ve been with.

C. Accomplishments,achievements, recognition, anything that you can tell us that will help us tell someone whey you’re the best candidate for the position within the 15-second window of opportunity. That’s the average length of time résumés are read.

We give the résumé the proper focus and write a scenario that tells your story. We use the combination style of résumé that employs the best parts of a chronological and functional style.

We have a profile form that we may fax or e-mail to you. Fill it out with your detailed information and/or submit your old résumé, and we’ll schedule a time to talk with you.

Most importantly:

We specialize in is developing a résumé that WILL INCREASE YOUR NUMBER OF INTERVIEWS – a résumé that will tell why you are the best candidate in the first 15 seconds! A SALES BROCHURE, about you — we SELL you on paper to maximize your interviews.

MORE OF THE BASICS:
We craft:
Résumés
Cover Letters
Follow Up Letters
Thank You Letters
Salary Histories
References
Custom Letterhead
Custom Labels
…anything you will need to market yourself professionally and discounted packages containing all of the above

Where do we go from here?
If you’d like to request a profile form to fill out, submit a resume, schedule an appointment, provide intake by telephone, fax, or e-mail more information about yourself, contact us in one of these ways.

The staff at Professional Résumé is looking forward to working with you!

The Best Career Advice You Were Never Told…

The most effective people make career choices for fundamental reasons, not instrumental reasons.

That’s one of the key points from Dan Pink’s excellent book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need.

Dan Pink’s book is excellent on two counts.  First, it presents the material in a creative and engaging way -  the book is actually the first American business book in manga.

Second, the content is helpful — and sometimes counterintuitive.  Here are the six lessons of the book:

- There is no plan.
- Think strengths, not weaknesses.
- It’s not about you.
- Persistence trumps talent.
- Make excellent mistakes.
- Leave an imprint.

Here is some advice for those who aren’t sure what to do next.  Make your next choice for fundamental reasons, not instrumental reasons.

Here’s how Pink explains it (via one of the characters in the book):

“You can do something for instrumental reasons — because you think it’s going to lead to something else, regardless of whether you enjoy it or it’s worthwhile.

Or, you can do something for fundamental reasons — because you think it’s inherently valuable, regardless of what it may or may not lead to.

And the dirty little secret is that instrumental reasons usually don’t work. Things are too complicated, too unpredictable. You never know what’s going to happen so you end up stuck. The most successful people — not all of the time, but most of the time — make decisions for fundamental reasons.

They take a job or join a company because it will let them do interesting work in a cool place — even if they don’t know exactly where it will lead.

There’s the key idea. If you don’t know what you want to do next, do what you think is inherently valuable. You don’t need to know where it will lead. And, almost certainly, it will lead to someplace interesting, because, first, you already are doing something interesting (that was the point of your choice!) and, second, we are more effective when we are doing something exciting and placing ourselves in a ‘growth’ mode.

Even if you do have a clear goal for where you want to end up (which is a good thing), don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you will best get there by making a bunch of instrumental choices to do things you don’t really want to do, but which will “keep your options open” and eventually let you get closer to your interests. This approach usually backfires. Instead, have your large goal, but stay open to seizing unplanned opportunities to help get you there, and along the way seek to follow the path of doing what you find inherently valuable.

Applying for jobs and not receiving call backs? It is your resume…

Looking for a new job but wondering why you’re not getting interview calls?

It must be something to do with your resume.
Why do you need a professional resume writer?

Your resume is the first thing that communicates with recruiters. Remember that it has just 30 seconds to make an impact on them. It should provide relevant, up to date, true and compelling information about you and your work experience. In addition to providing convincing and gripping information, you must take care of font sizes, font colors, grammar, spelling, punctuation and choose the right resume format for the kind of job you’re looking for. Make sure that the details included in your resume are not conflicting with each other. Make use of a spell check software in order to ensure that there are no fundamental spelling errors. Read more >>

Creating the Best LinkedIN Profile – A Must Have Job Search Marketing Tool

Think of your LinkedIn profile as an interactive business card. It’s a summary of your professional experience, interests,
and capabilities that is designed to attract the attention of important people who are searching for you online — recruiters,networking contacts, and grad school admissions officers. A strong profile is a key differentiator in the job market. So let’s get started…
1. Craft an informative profile headline
Your profile headline gives people a short, memorable way to understand who you are in a professional context. Think of
the headline as the slogan for your professional brand, such as “Senior Product Management Expert”. “Student, National University” or “Recent honors grad seeking marketing position.” Check out the profiles of professionals you admire for ideas and inspiration.
2. Display an appropriate photo
Remember that LinkedIn is not Facebook. If you choose to post a photograph — and we recommend that
you do — select a professional, high-quality headshot of you alone. Party photos, cartoon avatars, and cute pics of your
puppy don’t fit in the professional environment of LinkedIn.
3. Show off your education and accomplishments
Be sure to include information about all institutions you’ve attended. Include your major and minor if you have one, as well as highlights of your activities. It’s also appropriate to include study abroad programs and summer institutes. Don’t be shy— your LinkedIn profile is an appropriate place to show off your strong GPA and any honors or awards you’ve won.
4. Develop a professional summary statement
Your summary statement should resemble the first few paragraphs of your best-written cover letter — concise and
confident about your goals and qualifications. Remember to include relevant internships, volunteer work, and extra
curriculars. Present your summary statement in short blocks of text for easy reading. Bullet points are great, too.
5. Fill your “Specialties” section with keywords
“Specialties” is the place to include key words and phrases that a recruiter or hiring manager might type into a search
engine to find a person like you. The best place to find relevant keywords is in the job listings that appeal to you and the LinkedIn profiles of people who currently hold the kinds of positions you want.
6. Update your status weekly
A great way to stay on other people’s radar screens and enhance your professional image is to update your status at least
once a week. Tell people about events you’re attending, major projects you’ve completed, professional books you’re
reading, or any other news that you would tell someone at a networking reception or on a quick catch-up phone call.
7. Show your connectedness with LinkedIn Group badges
Joining Groups and displaying the group badges on your profile are the perfect ways to fill out the professionalism of your profile and show your desire to connect to people with whom you have something in common.
8. Collect diverse recommendations
Nothing builds credibility like third-party endorsements. The most impressive LinkedIn profiles have at least one
recommendation associated with each position a person has held. Think about soliciting recommendations from
professors, internship coordinators and colleagues, employers, and professional mentors.
9. Claim your unique LinkedIn URL
To increase the professional results that appear when people type your name into a search engine, set your LinkedIn
profile to “public” and claim a unique URL for your profile (for example: www.linkedin.com/in/yourname). This also makes it easier to include your LinkedIn URL in your email signature, which is a great way to demonstrate your professionalism.
10. Share your work
A final way to enhance your LinkedIn profile is to add examples of your writing, design work, or other accomplishments by displaying URLs or adding LinkedIn Applications. By including URLs, you can direct people to your website, blog, or social media pages.

What were they thinking??

They should of been thinking they needed help! Funny résumé blunders.

Staying Mentally Healthy on the Job Search

Staying mentally healthy on the job search is vital if you are to operate at your peak.

We can help: 415.314.0982

http://professionalresume.com

You Had Me…