I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I think I have a great looking resume and impressive experience; that I’m reasonably attractive, smart, and have an outgoing personality. I’ve mailed hundreds of resumes and haven’t had one interview! I’m frustrated and losing confidence. I’m enclosing my resume for your review. I need help so don’t hold back.

I’ve looked it over and here’s what I see that’s working in your favor: You have an impressive education, a competitive major, a strong GPA, and what appears to be a strong work ethic. That indicates you’re focused on what’s important to you and you’re willing to work hard to get it. Your resume looks professional, the spelling’s correct, and there aren’t gaps in your employment. Your track record shows wide-ranging experience: that you’ve worked in a variety of positions for several different organizations in a relatively short period of time.

What’s working against you? Wide- ranging experiences working for several organizations in a relatively short period of time can be a turn off to many employers. Your four- page resume is too long and the tiny type, narrow margins, and all those italics make it hard to read. Your best information is buried inside dense paragraphs, written in technical jargon that’s known to a precious few, and you’ve used too many words to describe too many things. Ouch.

What can you do? Rethink, regroup, redesign, refocus, and refill your coffee cup. This may take a while:

Rethink: Be concise; convincing without hype; and immediately understandable. Include information that reinforces your objective; delete information that detracts from it.

Regroup: What job you want? If you don’t know (your current objective is ambiguous) the employer won’t either, and won’t figure it out for you. If you want to be competitive, you’ll need to spell out what you’re competing for. Once you have it, write a one- sentence objective that describes it. That’s your lead.

Redesign: You went to a top tier school, received a business degree, graduated with honors, worked your way through school while maintaining a 4.0 and hid that information on the bottom of page four. You have an important, impressive selling point. It needs to be on page one, right after your objective.

Use a reverse chronological format because that’s what the overwhelming majority of potential employers want to see. A functional format reads well but looks like you’re trying to cover up something (too many jobs in too few years? terminations? poor choices?) and is likely to get tossed.

Widen those margins, increase that typeface to 12 point, and select a font that’s easy to read.  The typical reader scans your resume in about 20 seconds so if you want your best stuff to get noticed, get it on page one, front and center and get the job done inside two pages, max.

Refocus: For each company you’ve worked, include the name of the organization, location, your title, and start and end dates of your employment. Indicate your promotions with title changes, and briefly outline your broadened authority and accountability. Use bullet points to highlight accomplishments and validate each accomplishment in quantifiable terms that are easily understood and verified. When briefly describing your responsibilities, lead with what you enjoyed most and were most successful doing and minimize or eliminate what you no longer want to do.

Ask objective outside readers (who aren’t friends or family) to proof your resume for correct spelling and syntax and to give you feedback by answering a few questions: To what extent am I: Clearly and succinctly describing the job I want?  Making my case by providing the information necessary to obtain it? Coming across as someone who’s made a difference for the companies I’ve worked?