Using Resume Samples to Help You Write a Resume

There are certainly a lot of books and resources on the web to help you write a good resume. If you have the financial resources, it's also not a bad idea to have a professional resume writer prepare your resume. However, for most people a resume writer is out of their budget. In that case, you can still use their resources by viewing the resume samples that are posted on the web.

The first key to using a resume sample is to understand who wrote it. Professional resume writers obviously have the skills and writing expertise to produce the most compelling statements. So make sure you are looking at resumes that are well written by professional writers or career consultants. If you can't tell who wrote it, it may be randomly generated text. So be careful.

Next, search for resumes on the web that fall under your job title or field. If you have a job that is somewhat obscure, then just search for resumes that are in the same industry. If you still can't find resumes in your field, then look at executive, management and sales resumes as these resumes are generally written by the best resume writing firms.

Once you find some resume samples to review, you need to pay attention to the resume format. Look how the personal information heading is constructed at the top of the page. Pay attention to how the summary is produced. Look at the headings for each section and review the sentence structure of each job position.

The idea behind using a resume sample is not to copy statements, but to learn how the phrases are constructed. The top of the resume should have a summary that will list skills and expertise. Some of the statements are vague and can easily be transitioned into your resume. You may have to make slight modifications to ensure that the statements describe your background.

The phrases within the experience section should start with action verbs. They shouldn't be written in first person and they shouldn't use pronouns. An example of an experience statement:

"Planned and implemented new marketing software that increased sales by 25%."

You may not have actually implemented software system, but maybe you deployed another project that saved the company money. You can build a statement using the action verbs, describing the event, then quantifying the results if possible.

Using resume samples can be very helpful. You can learn how others have put together compelling statements that grab the reader's attention. You can learn how to structure the resume and utilize interesting formats. And in the end, even if you don't use any phrases, the resume samples can help you generate ideas that you can use for your own resume.

Robert Thomas is the author of this article on Resume Samples. Find more information On Resume Writing Resources here.