Before you pay someone $300 to write your resume, before you waste 20 bucks on a book that is full of bad advice, hear me out: It's easy to write a cookie-cutter resume. It's one of the easiest things in the world to do. The thing is, your resume could be well written, grammatically correct, error free, full of specific details about your career - and highly ineffective.

Here is what you need to do to get noticed:

Keep it simple. If your resume is more than one page long, it's too long. No overworked HR person will even read beyond the first third of the first page if it doesn't grab them and force them to keep reading. By the end of the first page, they will have decided whether to put you in the "Call" pile or the circular file. You are not simply listing your skills. You are selling.

If someone were selling you a house, would you really care to hear about their "objective?" Their objective is to sell you a house, not find the perfect home for you. If a real estate broker or car salesman started telling me about their objective, it would turn me off. Tell me about the product. Don't waste my time. HR people are the same -- they don't care about your objective. It's a waste of valuable page space to state it.

Oh, and all those "accomplishments" - the sad truth is that nobody cares. So many people pad their resumes with bovine feces that HR folks are largely immune to them. If you have extremely impressive accomplishments, by all means state them directly. Otherwise, just the facts, ma'am, please.

Give the people what they want. What they want is someone with the skills and experience to get the job done without a lot of on-the-job training. Therefore, highlight your skills and experience right at the top of the page. The rest is just an outline. If they want details -- and they will if you've got the skills and experience they need -- you can delineate them in the interview.

Try it. You'll see.

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