Transcript
Description:
Harrison Barnes notices that this attorney resume he is reviewing has many things on it, and it's way too long. These errors cause Barnes not able to understand the direction the attorney is leaning toward. For a better resume, he advises the following:
- Write a concise resume to be easily comprehended by the reader.
- Use grammar-checking software to aid in writing your resume.
- Be specific on your chosen career path by showing relevant information.
Transcript:
All right. So we're going to get start again, a couple of people. Also ask the question about personalizing resumes based on the type of job you're applying to. And that's actually a very good question as a general rule if you're applying to a certain type of job, you want your resume to come out and be very have talk about a particular type of practice area that you're in.
See seeker and we did change all the names I was just going through and making sure we seem to do a lot of resumes later. So I wanted to make sure all the names were changed. So that's why we took a little bit longer than the break. So these are not. Real people's names or employers. But if you recognize your resume, you're welcome to ask questions.
So the big thing though, is that this particular person looks like a trust in the state's attorney. Here. Or this particular, last person, I'm sorry, it looks like a trust in the state's attorney here, but then here she starts talking about all these other types of things that she did related to business and contracts and so far.
So if this resume would be much stronger, if it was just trust in the States and showed a pattern of maybe moving from a smaller law firm to a bigger law firm, doing trust in the States people want to see a focus. So the resumes that have a focus. Are typically the best this person's resume's good because of the type of tax, I don't know what type of taxes person does.
Exactly. So it would be better like if they did Like I work with different types of tax attorneys and big four accounting firms all the time. And you can, if you have the right experience in the right particular niche, like if it's employee benefits or if it's a state local tax, you can often be employable in a law firm, even if you've only worked in a County firm and you've worked there for a long time.
So any type of focus you show us better. And the more focus your resume shows for a particular job and from the better off you're going to be. Let's see here.
Okay. So this person is a government attorney working for doing alternative dispute resolution. Now, w a lot of times it's very difficult for people that work for the government and have careers in the government many times to transition into private practice because of the types of resumes.
And I believe the government must teach this the types of resumes, the government government attorneys tend to. And don't like government resumes as a general rule. I think that they're very difficult to read. There's too much information on them. And I often have a hard time understanding them this particular resume as you can see is very long the resume.
Is far too long. And and doesn't really tell me very much that tells me that they worked for the government and and and that they it's just, it says an awful lot, and you can see how long this resume is. All this stuff is really doesn't show anything.
Other than that this person is overcome unprecedented challenge to both develop and implementing new process because they not that exist for attorneys effective work product oversee the ADR program. It's time consuming should have a Cash after it. So you can see that it's just this resume as far too long, and it's a narrative and this sort of thing wouldn't even be acceptable, but for a cover letter it's just, it's way too long.
All you need to say is what the person did there. And then a couple of bullet points about what the experience is this we're talking about a lot of, and these are very common by the way. There's nothing wrong with this resume. As a government, rather than resume, this is how government attorneys are taught.
But there's just a lot of problems with this resume. And I hope you can see it. Cause I honestly, I've been reading this for the past few minutes. I read resumes, hundreds of them a day. Am. I still don't understand what this person does. And and so if it was much shorter what I would like to see is if the person did whistleblower investigations for the government, that's enough, like then I could search for jobs that did that.
And And find information about that, but this all needs to be boiled down and that's what good attorneys do. They take a lot of very difficult to understand information and they boil it down. That's why you're taught to read cases and come up with a couple of conclusions about what a case means in law school.
And so you need this resume. It needs to be way boil down a lot. And there's a lot of problems with this from the standpoint of somebody who is trying to do private practice too. The problem is you can't, can you do the job? You have to. People have to be able to write concisely and quickly for most types of jobs.
Can you be managed? This person looks like they're keeping track of every single thing that they do. So that's not good. If you had someone that's notating every little thing that makes everything that they do good that wouldn't be the kind of person, you would necessarily want in your company or firm.
And then this person may do the job long-term they may, but I don't know. Can't understand any of this. They work for the government for a long time. And here they worked on social security and then, and here they're working on something else. So I just, I really can't answer those questions.
And then these are jobs that they had before that were unrelated. And so each job just seems like the person is doing all this different stuff. And so there's just it's too complex. This person needs to no, one's going to hire this person. Not because this person may not be good at their job.
But because attorneys are taught to. Write succinctly, to put things down to syncly and this person seems to think everything's relevant. Can you imagine if you ask this person for some research and they came and I'm not being critical, but what this says, if you ask this person to do a quick job, they would come up, they would look at all this information and they would think things that would be are important or not.
And then Education find I don't know that who's who among American law students is really something that you need to put on there. Don't know. That minor in aging is necessary. Unless it's, your job is dealing with aging. And so this is just, there's a lot of information here and then
No, there's no graduation date from the law school. It looks like this person probably graduated in 2000 maybe. Okay. Yeah. So 2000. So you just, you want to make sure that you have a a graduation date and just cause again, that's, if you don't put a graduation date in your resume what you're saying is I think you employer are going to discriminate against me because of my age and that's possible.
You can't get around it, you have to make that up with their personality or whatever. And and I do think everyone should put their graduation date on their resume. I think that this needs to be run through a grammar program and probably even a this is Grammarly that I use, but there's also another one called pro writing aid.
Let's see hers out here. That's on here too. And so you just need to shorten all this up. The resume is way too long. It's a good government resume for someone that wants to continue to work in the government maybe, but you don't need. All of this stuff on here and no one's going to know except someone that's in the government with the DOD OIG unique team award means you just have to clear all that up.
The big event, the big thing is you just want to show people. The one page typically is enough that you can do the job. Okay. Again, a made up name see here are Roco ACORE nada.
