Description:
In this video, Harrison Barnes is evaluating a resume of an in-house attorney. Though it has a few things he disapproves of, he likes how the resume is composed, and it focuses on a direction that lets the reader understands what the path is for this attorney. Below are two things that Barnes didn’t like on this resume:
1. Lengthy summaries/introduction at the beginning of the resume.
2. Bar association numbers at the top.
This error is not limited to just these two, but some resumes have a lot more placed at the noticeable start of the resume. Putting these two shows that you are worried you won’t get hired, so it feels like you try to oversell yourself.
Transcript:
Okay, so this is another type this is real estate resume of a in-house attorney. And and it violates a lot of the rules that I've talked about so far, but in this particular case, a lot of it is probably the, a lot of things are probably okay. You don't, again, I keep saying this to people, but if you're an attorney someplace, you don't need to constantly put your bar association number up there.
They didn't, they it's presumed. This person could put there, doing admissions or something on their one-page resume. But you don't need to put your bar association stuff up there. The reason I don't like seeing these summaries at the top of resumes is people there's a lot of consultants out there that charge people to do resumes and and when they do, and I personally have never Me personally, I've never charged people to work on that resume because it's just not it's not a lot of it is the industry.
I don't like a lot of things about the industry, but these sort of summaries at the top, you can certainly do them, but the reason people do these is there's a long kind of history to them, but people resume writers will. Make their money based on putting together these summaries, when you do these, it shows that that that you're worried that you won't get hired to some extent when you do these kind of long summaries.
And so they're not always a good idea, is what I'm saying. And and not only, they're not a good idea, but they can they can really detract people from stuff. And then you can see here, just all these. Kind of small errors it should be, that, that come out there's going to be other issues.
And so you have to, you just want to be very careful. Anytime you're writing stuff, you can see here, like just all these little things. And and most of these are not that serious. This is this is a good attorney here, but This person, I liked this resume. This person has a lot of PR pretty good employment stability.
You can see here that they they switched practice areas to some extent. Now they're doing mainly real estate stuff. And then before they were doing something else back in 2000 and actually, no, 2007 to eight, they did do real estate.
That's where they got interested in it. And then they were doing real estate, 1998. So this is a good attorney and this person has a lot of good skills. What I would probably recommend for this person would be to have their legal and business consultant means a lot of times that the person was unemployed during those dates.
And so I would, when you're, anytime you're doing like a contract type job I would be very careful about how you put that down because you, when you, if someone's going to hire you they want to know that you're going to do it, the job long-term, they're also going to want to know whether or not it can be managed and and so that and people are going to wonder why you've been unemployed for eight years.
So you have to be careful. But other than that, this is a good, this is a very good resume. I I'm not sure. Let me just see here, but a couple of things with that, but for the most part it's a very good, it's a good resume. I don't I generally, as a general rule do not like these things at the top.
But. If this person is looking for an in-house job I was actually thinking about this before this webinar, if this person's looking for an in-house job, in-house people do not necessarily know how to hire attorneys and what to look for. So if they see that the person knows real estate and commercial, they see that they know how to do.
Debt, equity financing, and corporate governments, and that pops out, it actually might be okay for this resume because this person's looking for an in-house job and probably, and but if they didn't have the, if they didn't want to have that there and they took it off and they cleaned all this up here.
Then I would work with them for a real estate position in wherever they're looking. So this is another person I would work with if they in Colorado probably. This is going to have to be some questions about what's been going on here with this particular business, this, and if they have any business and if they've been working full time and if not, why not?
