6 errors you'll make when copying your friend's professional resume
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Professional resume writers often encounter this scenario: a new client asks for a resume rewrite, and upon looking over their original document, it becomes apparent that something looks familiar.

Then, it suddenly becomes clear: the resume was written for someone else, and copied by a friend!

If you've copied a compelling professional resume, you have a lot of company. But barring the obvious part about copyright infringement, you can do yourself a grave disservice with a copied document.

Most often, the copier won't understand the branding and building process that went behind a professional resume. Copied-over resumes (with a new career story squished in between that of someone else) are rarely coherent in formatting, writing style, tone, or grammatical usage.

If you’re determined to make your resume look like the masterpieces created by a professional resume writer, here are 6 likely problems that you can encounter:

1 - You can easily unravel the original brand strategy… and be left with a garbled message.

So… you think you have the same career path and can therefore just “tweak” a word or two? Not so fast.

For a resume to be effective, the strategy is set (prior to any writing) based on how well the candidate fits the desired role and the potential for screen-out factors based on his or her personal career path, age, industry preferences, and a host of other factors.

Professional resume writers must compare a client’s career path and achievements to others in the industry, pulling out any areas of strength or weakness in credentials (including education and former jobs) to make decisions about word choice and emphasis.

The writing process only starts after lengthy data mining and analysis of the job goal. Then, content and personality traits are woven through the details, resulting in a robust, unmistakable value proposition.

Changes to a professionally written resume create problems in this message… and while these nuances may go unnoticed by you, they are all key factors in whether a resume gets read or dismissed.

2 – You can slide into generalizations that blur the message.

Here’s what one candidate did with a power summary that described market-leading achievements (including a 70% rise in revenue over 2 years, a totally restructured team and profitable turnaround effort, plus a total obliteration of the competition):

“Dedicated and hard working professional with over 12 years of experience in the food service sales and marketing industry, Successful experience in strategic planning, analysis of results, and international media relations.”

Ouch! If you haven’t read lists of overused words for resumes, it might be time to do so.

Words like “hard-working” or “successful experience” are both no-brainers and not be taken seriously by employers… plus they’re a dead giveaway that the writer doesn't know what he is doing.

Phrases such as "over 12 years" are also grammatical errors (and specifying years of experience won't distinguish you from candidates with the same tenure).

3 – You could repeat yourself…

And put words like “created,” “spearheaded,” and “developed” in the document so many times that they’ll lose their meaning.

Hopefully, you’ll refrain from describing all your achievements as “successful” and reference a thesaurus to avoid using the same word 4 times in 1 sentence (as recently spotted in a copied document).

Here’s where training in power verbs can really save the day.

Not convinced? Most professional writers count word occurrences (yes, really) and tend to scan documents for their favorite words, just to ensure that employers remain fully engaged in your resume.

4 - Your changes can mess up the formatting.

Professional resume writers are masters of presentation and formatting, to the point that they’ll incorporate tricks and nuances into a resume that escape your untrained eye.

In fact, just moving a sentence or two will often throw an entire page into disarray, because you’ll be challenged by figuring out how to change point sizes for spacer lines and adjust headings.

You might also feel the need to shrink the font below 11 points. This should only be done for certain sans serif fonts, and then reviewed on different monitors to verify that the over-40 crowd of employers can read your document.

5 - Your writing might take up valuable space.

Professional resume writers specialize in something your English teacher never approved of: sentence fragments. They also reduce sentence volume by using implied first-person writing style and ruthless editing, both of which help avoid that shrinking font problem.

By following the rules of journalism (where the first 5-10 words are critical, and 25-word sentences are the holy grail), professional writers can also cut to the chase.

Without practice in tight writing, your sentences can end up as long as the one recently found in a copied resume: 79 words!

6 - There won’t be any way to update your “work” professionally.

Your personal work style and energy will rarely (if ever) show up in someone else’s document. So, you’re already operating at a severe brand disadvantage before even trying to have someone update the resume for you.

Think about it: you started with someone else’s strategy, brand message, tone, and presentation, and tried to use the same verbiage to hammer over the original text.

Now, it really doesn’t represent you, and this will make it difficult for a professional resume writer to make sense of it without starting fresh (which would have been the best idea at the outset!).

In summary, you CAN try to adopt a professionally written resume as your own, but the pitfalls that can trip you up along the way might harm your job search results. You’re better off pulling in some formatting styles that appeal to you, and writing about your own career history—from scratch.

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