Functional Resume Samples: Why ?Functional? Isn?T ?Boring?

‘I want functional resume samples so I can write resumes that get me in for the interview’. Nothing wrong with that statement. The trouble is that for many of us, a cursory glance over some functional resume samples that have proven to work may still not convince us that there’s anything wrong with the resume we always like to write.

We are the worst possible people to vet our own resume, as we lived that job history and we can only ever read our work subjectively. The hard-pressed HR person at the other end of your resume’s journey will see just words on a page, and maybe an embarrassing passport photo attached.

All that person is thinking about is the risk attached to you:  is it more of a risk to let you work for a competitor, or is it more of a risk to have you working for them? Your resume will lead them towards one of those conclusions.

But when we talk about ‘functional resume samples’, many people make the mistake of thinking that their resume must be objective, direct, businesslike, and devoid of personality. Nothing could be further from the truth. We call it a ‘functional resume’ because it performs its function, ie it gets them ringing you and wanting you to come in for interview. In fact, the image we often have of the word ‘functional’, in other words objective, logical, ‘left-brained’ is precisely the sort of resume that usually gets a big yawn and then gets trashed. .

Truly functional resume samples are in fact nothing like ‘functional’ in the sense we think of. What we need to do is stand out from the crowd, and appeal on an emotional level to the person reading it. For example, a powerful resume will always begin with an objective, almost like a mission statement, because that really makes them take notice. You want to include reasons why you want the job and why you are ideally suited to it. Ninety five percent of the other guys won’t even think of doing that. .

So why is this opening objective or statement so effective? Because it aligns your resume with effective business meetings that the reader has probably attended. They expect an agenda, a purpose to the meeting. So your resume can signal to them within seconds that you have a background of attending high-powered business meetings. You haven’t started listing your job history yet, and already they are wanting that job history to back up the warm feeling that they have from your mission ‘statement.’ .

You see how it works? Much the same as how we ‘buy’anything of value, we want it emotionally first and then use the facts to logically back up the decision we want to make. So functional resume samples, far from being the dry, tedious documents that that phrase suggests, are resumes that score an early emotional hit with the reader, and puts them in exactly the frame of mind that you want, before they ready their eighty fifth job history of the day! .

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