Hey, the SDMB has a marketplace, maybe ask there?
What the hell? No, don’t do this. If someone is good at writing resumes, they’d be working, not writing resumes for $100 a pop.
Finding a job isn’t some kind of esoteric, formalist procedure that requires divining of obscure and arbitrary rules.
The equation is actually remarkably simple. If you’re looking for a job that pays $X salary, then that represents a cost of roughly $2X, fully loaded. This includes taxes, healthcare, office space, training etc. An employer will be willing to hire you if they believe that you will bring in an additional $4X worth of profit. If you can convince an employer that you can bring in profit commensurate to your salary, then you’ve a good shot at being hired.
Talk in your employer’s language. There’s two ways add profit: You can increase sales or you can cut costs. Write your resume around these two goals, show how you can do at least one of these things if you are hired. If you’re on the growth side, talk about what you did to make the product better or sell it better and show how your involvement increased sales by 15%. If you’re on the cost cutting side, focus on how you made things 30% more efficient or streamlined some process to reduce errors. You’ve given very few details about what you actually do so it’s hard to give specific advice here.
Then, using your past as a basis, demonstrate how you can transfer those same skills over to this new company and deliver them the same boosts in profit that make you so invaluable. Stop focusing on the resume and focus more on the story. A resume may be a part of telling the story or it may not. Your story might be better told through a personal website, or a video or over beers with your future boss. Instead of starting from the resume and working backwards, start with the story and work forwards.
Your story is unique and you’re the best person to tell it. Others can help or assist you in bringing it out but it would be supremely dumb to outsource the telling of it to someone else.
Luckily in my industry with 20 years of experience, we’d already know there about a 20% chance that you don’t have a degree. And it would be okay, especially with 20 years of experience. It’s all about what you can deliver, and we’d generally base that off of what you’ve already delivered.
Note: for those of you with zero experience, don’t bother applying without a degree.
Most of our best hires don’t come from H.R. They come from people you know, and people that know you. Good, old fashioned networking. It’s the best way to get around those impersonal computer scanners.
Don’t you people have annual performance reviews? Use the information from those to help build your resume. They should list all of your tasks and acheivements for each year and will also give you dates you held certain positions.
Speaking as someone who has had to review resumes and interview people for five different roles over the last four months, being concise is important. I skip over lengthy paragraphs and prefer point form. Those that have actually read the job description and use the key words in a fit for purpose resume are more likely to get an interview.
Yes. Referals from other employees get put on the top of the list and don’t go through the HR screening process (where I work, YMMV).
Nonsense. The person who wrote my resume is a HR worker who left her job to work at home with her kids. She has a degree, a website, LinkedIn profile etc. This IS her job.
And it isn’t some kind of esoteric, formalist procedure that requires divining of obscure and arbitrary rules?
Well, on another MB, devoted to jobs, we were talking about bringing a copy of your resume to the interview. There was one HR manager who said it better be on high quality bond paper to show that you care enough about the job. Another HR dept head said that if it was on such paper, she’d shitcan it as it shows you are superficial.
If indeed, hiring was left up to number crunchers you’d be right. But the first hurdles are HR depts., who define “esoteric, formalist procedure that requires divining of obscure and arbitrary rules”.
Yes, you know your story. But just like a good autobiography uses the help of a pro author- then a pro editor, you need professional help.
Altho it is a cracked article and thus needs to be taken with a grain of salt, there’s this:
I bet they don’t for the people I hire.
For the OP especially a resume is the last thing to depend on - being non-degreed.
In 20 years do you know people outside your company, perhaps fellow workers who moved? You have one lead already, it seems. See if you can get connected to a hiring manager in your area, and convince him or her that you can excel at the job based on your long experience. Once you’ve got him hooked, and he asks for a resume, then you can say that you don’t have a degree but as you’ve just demonstrated you’ve got the knowledge no school can teach. If you’ve done this right, it won’t matter.
it’s not like it takes them all day to produce a resume. Spend a half hour interviewing someone, an hour writing up the resume, email it to them for comments and to spot anything important that was left out, a half hour to clean it up…this is the sort of job that, if word gets around that you’re good, you could earn $75K working at home, and give yourself 2 months of vacation every year.
nm.