Summary of tips. It’s everywhere lately. Honestly, there’s so much of it that a job seeker would have to work hard not to get bombarded by it. Do this. Do not do that. Make sure you have this. Make sure you don’t have that.

Not only is the amount of advice overwhelming, but it is also often contradictory. In fact, I met a job seeker last week whose first comments were, “Please don’t give me any more resume advice!”

I can’t say I blame him. I’m not sure I’ve ever known a profession like ours where we try so hard to make people our equivalent. Do lawyers explain all aspects of the law when they work with you? Do accountants teach you all the nuances of the tax code? No, they tell you what you need to know and answer your questions, but they don’t teach you how to be lawyers and accountants.

For whatever reason, us running professionals seem to feel the need to turn everyone else into us.

And we seem to feel the need to do so in such a general way that we often raise contradiction after contradiction. My job seeker above was mostly frustrated as blog after blog passed on different advice on how long your resume should be, how the resume/profile section should be organized, and how much to trust bullet points. Every “career professional” who reviewed her resume had something different to say and, yes, often contradictory. Not only that, but recruiters said one thing, hiring managers said another, and resume writers said another.

It’s no wonder so many job seekers are skeptical about paying for resume services! Looks like we don’t know what we’re talking about!

And they walk away not appreciating us, but they stand by all these edicts (“resumes can ONLY be 1 page long”, “resumes should ONLY use bullet points, “resumes should ONLY have 10 years of employment history) that sometimes may need to be tailored to meet the specific needs of that client’s audience.

Rather than bog job seekers down to the nitty-gritty (and I’m as guilty as the next professional) of resume details and so-called “rules”, perhaps we should take another approach and explain all the factors that go into the job. development of a resume. strategy, which then determines the length, number of bullets, etc.

Hey, maybe we should market our “value,” which is not that we know how to arrange things on a page in a nice format, but that we actually know how to “sell” a paper customer to the audience he or she is dealing with. reaching.

And maybe before we give advice on what a resume looks like and whether they followed all our edicts, we can remind clients that writing a resume, like any form of marketing, is not an exact science, that you’re playing a game of odds. . it all depends on how well you can anticipate not only the needs of the reader(s) but also their preferences.