Powerfully Persuasive Resumes
from your Vancouver Resume Writing Service
Powerfully persuasive resume – a crucial career tool that opens interview doors to the jobs and the salaries you deserve by:
- Uncovering your key accomplishments and presenting their value while providing enticing hints of how you made them happen – and why you’ll achieve equally valuable results for your next employer,
- Showing you leading teams that deliver above expectations,
- Proving that you’re ready to take on bigger challenges.
Over the last decade, more than a thousand CEOs, other executives, mid-career managers and professionals have relied on Fast & Focused Resume packages to help make their job searches short and successful.
Tim Cunningham, CPRW
Owner and Principal Writer
Andrew O’Brian
Chief Executive Officer, Reach Airports
“Thank you for your tremendous support . . . the resume was crucial in terms of selling my skills. I am off to manage five international airports as the CEO. It was a pleasure to work with you.”
What’s the Difference?
Why do my resumes win job interviews and make my clients happy?
Here are some of the reasons.
First: an extensive operational background. Unlike many who came to resume writing from HR assignments, my previous positions were in financial supervision, purchasing and sales. Then I founded my own company and made it profitable. This wide-ranging operational experience gives me a huge advantage — a deeper understanding of the qualities and skills managers need to see in their hires than the job descriptions can convey.
Next: interviewing skills. The best way to add persuasive power to your resume is by uncovering professional wins that show hiring managers how well you’ll perform in their open positions. When hiring managers see you delivering significant sales growth, creating helpful procedural improvements, devising successful operations strategies, or whatever achievements are counted as successes in your field, they’ll know that you’re one of the people they need to interview.
But knowing what we should do doesn’t automatically help us to do it. When we sit down facing the blank screen, many of us discover that knowing that we should focus on our accomplishments doesn’t help us remember more than one or two successes per position before our minds freeze.
That’s where I can help.
I start with a conventional resume writer’s questions like:
- What corporate strategies did you conceive and execute?
- Did you build or lead teams? How well did they do?
- Did you mentor juniors into more responsible roles?
- What kind of sales did you make?
- How did you grow revenues? By how much?
But then I bring a special skill to the table.
My dad was a TV journalist. Night after night as I grew up, I saw him interview newsmakers. Time and time again, he would realize that his subjects left out key points, and he would ask insightful questions that produced the missing information. Watching him work taught me to recognize when resume clients had forgotten critical details and to ask questions that helped them remember significant professional wins. These case studies show the difference my unconventional interviewing can make.
Next, I move on to asking — and answering — unaskable questions. These are questions that managers can’t include in their job ads, but they’d love to know how you’d answer them. Questions like: “What crises did you manage?” “What disasters did you clean up?” or “Did you do the right thing when you faced an ethical challenge?” Recounting your successes in managing one or more of these challenges can be the decisive tactic that triggers job offers.
But uncovering and listing your accomplishments is not enough to ensure success.
With hundreds or even thousands of people applying for a single opening in today’s job market, hiring managers don’t have time to read every word of all those resumes when they have so many other things to do. Instead, they’ll only read the first third of the first page of your resume before making the circular file/interview pile decision.
This is why the last step is presenting your successes in ways that maximize their impact. Over the years, I have developed a range of strategies and tactics to capitalize on this situation, and I’ll select the strategy that will quickly capture a prospective manager’s attention and ensure that your success stories will make the impact you deserve.
Eric Li
Accountant
“Your magic resume writing won more than ten interviews within just three weeks and played a crucial role in landing a job with a major local company and as a board member of a non-profit. Besides the offer I accepted, I got two other offers.”
LinkedIn Coaching
These days it’s not enough to have a strong resume. Because you can provide more information on LinkedIn than you can on a resume, many recruiters and hiring managers will only consider a candidate if that person has a strong LinkedIn profile.
If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, I’ll show you how to set one up. And if you already have one, I’ll show you how to make it work for you by increasing reader interest and steering hiring managers to find you. I’ll also teach you how to locate and research new job opportunities and how to use LinkedIn to help you stay ahead of your field.
Resume Alignment
Creating a resume that presents your successes is only half the battle. A generic resume might match up perfectly with company A’s requirements and get you an interview. But if company B advertises a similar position with only slight variations in their chosen requirements, your company A resume might wind up in the circular file even though you’re an ideal candidate for the job. That’s why the next step in my resume writing service is to align your resume with each job ad you reply to – so you’ll present the best possible fit.
After more than a decade in the field, I know how to tailor clients` resumes to match the requirement of specific job ads. When you work with me, I`ll do it for you – and show you how to do it yourself.
Interview Preparation
When your resume, your cover letter, and your LinkedIn profile proclaim your successes, your chances of being interviewed increase exponentially.
When you arrive at your interviews, you`ll get another bonus. You`ll discover that everything that you learned during our resume consultation will have prepared you to handle the critical questions about your professional experience. When you find the answers you need on the tip of your tongue, you`ll relax – and your confidence will tell the interviewer that you are ready to do the job.
Call me today to prepare for your job interviews.
Agne Zurauskaite
Business Development Manager, The Economist
“In the 16 days since you sent me the resume package, I’ve been called for five interviews – in the middle of the recession!”
Why You May Need a Professional Resume Writer
(if you’ve never used one before)
Finding a great job doesn’t have to be Mission: Impossible. But if you’re looking for a new position in today’s tight job market, working with a professional resume writer can make the crucial difference between a short job search and a long one at a time when StatsCan tells us that the average BC job search takes well over 15 weeks. (Not to mention that getting into a new job sooner can reduce your anxiety levels and more than pay for your investment in your new resume.)
Today’s internet has made jobs easier than ever to find and apply for while making winning the job more challenging. According to the leading job posting sites, each corporate job opening attracts an average of 250 resumes. However, hiring managers will call only four to six candidates for an interview.
Right now, more than 90% of BC’s job seekers rely on resumes containing the writer’s name, contact information, educational credentials, and a job list. These resumes also describe the candidate’s job responsibilities – what they did at each job. And then the writers stop talking about what they did and turn to other matters – sometimes hobbies, sometimes computer skills, sometimes something else. But they don’t give their readers the crucial answer to the question that every hiring manager wants to know before making the hiring decision: “How well did you do your jobs?”
If your resume doesn’t answer that question, it’s an average resume. And because average resumes don’t give hiring managers any reasons to put them in the “to be interviewed” pile, HR professionals consistently tell us that these resumes fail to produce interviews in more than nine out of ten applications.
That’s where I can help.
Instead of the average resume, I write resumes that proclaim client achievements and their significance in ways managers will recognize and approve. And when your resume presents stories that show you delivering success in a way that hiring managers notice, job interviews start to happen. Instead of one interview in 15 weeks, my clients report results like:
- Five interviews in sixteen days,
- Four interviews and two job offers in two weeks,
- Ten interviews, three job offers (including one from a Fortune 500 company) and a board membership in three weeks, and
- Multiple reports of double-digit salary increases.
And before I forget, there’s one more thing. I’ll also show you how to transform the conventional thank-you note into a powerful job-winning tool all by itself. That way, you’ll have another opportunity to stand out from the crowd.
Wendy Kebwaro
Senior Executive Director, Operations BC Centre for Disease Control
“I was keenly looking for a professional to connect with in the large undertaking in finally investing in myself and my career. Tim is incredibly knowledgeable, very efficient and asked me questions positioned to bring out the absolute best in me. Tim helped create the best resume I have seen to date, and I say this confidently as part of my role is recruitment… I wholeheartedly recommend Tim if you are contemplating truly investing in yourself and your career.”
How We’ll Create Your Outstanding Resume Package
The traditional way to write a resume is to sit down at a computer and write out your contact information, educational details, a job list and an outline of responsibilities for each job. Some people have been taught that they need to “add job achievements” to this checklist, but when they try to remember job accomplishments, many of these folks find that they need help to remember all their successes.
Over the last 15 years, I’ve created a resume writing process that gives clients repeated opportunities and triggers that help them remember the critical details that prove their mastery of every challenge that prospective managers need them to meet.
Here’s how it works. First, I’ll invite you to review your career from some perspectives many job seekers never consider. Then we’ll get together for our interview where I’ll ask questions that trigger forgotten memories and reveal the unmentioned achievements that will strengthen your case. When you review your resume and cover letter, first at the draft stage, and then at the post-feedback stage, it’s highly likely that this approach will stimulate your memory and you’ll remember other key details.
And there’s a fringe benefit to this process: when you submit a results-focused resume, your interviews will change. Hiring managers won’t need to figure out whether you can do the job when your resume has already made that point clear. Instead, they’ll want to find out how you did what you did to get a better feel for the way you work. And because we’ve already made a deep dive into these accomplishments, your answers to their questions will be at the tip of your tongue – which will make you a far more relaxed and engaging candidate.
You might be wondering, “What’s the turnaround time?” Under normal circumstances, I give clients multiple opportunities to review their work history and remember additional details. Using this timeline, I’ll produce your resume in about a week. But if you have a tight deadline, I’ll make special arrangements to meet it.
So don’t rely on the average resume writing process. Instead, let me help you craft a resume that works in today’s business world.
Maryam Najafiam Razavi
Product Manager
“I found Tim reliable, detail-oriented, fast, and efficient . . . In a month, I had numerous interviews, which led to multiple job offers, and eventually, a new job with a 45% bump in the salary. This was such a worthwhile investment in my career.”
Providing Help When – and Where – You Need It Most
From my base in Vancouver, BC, I’ve helped hundreds of clients move on to bigger and better jobs. These folk were not just from BC’s Lower Mainland. Clients have sought me out from other Canadian cities, the US and several countries on five continents. With this experience, I can provide the state-of-the-art resume, cover letter, and LinkedIn profile tools that will make your job search short and successful, no matter where you are from – or where you want to work.
If you’re looking for work with an English-speaking company anywhere in the world, I’ll provide a resume that meets local content expectations while powerfully presenting the value you represent to prospective employers in places as diverse as the United States, Gabon, the UK, Germany, the Cayman Islands, the Arabian Gulf, and Australia.
Joao Pimental
Manager
“Tim nailed the resume that made me land in my dream job. What I liked the most in the process were his skills to read my master resume, proceed with an interview and after all that, come up with excellent material (resume and cover letter). Thank you, Tim. I hope you keep helping people achieve their dreams as you did with me.”
How to Choose a Good Resume Writer in Vancouver
1- Look for a professional writer who holds one of the following credentials ACRW, CARW, CPRW, MRW, NCRW.
2- Check out the samples they provide. Do they:
- Stop short at listing job responsibilities, or do they emphasize results and patterns of success over multiple jobs? Choose a writer who highlights their clients’ successes.
- Are those results quantified?
- Can readers understand the significance of the results?
- Does the writer use strategies that gain reader attention quickly?
3- Look for client reviews that mention successful results and ease of working together.
4- Talk to the writer. How many people in similar positions have they worked with? With what results?
Don Coulter
CEO Concentra Bank / Wyth Financial, Former CEO Coast Capital Savings
“I wanted to let you know that I was appointed to the President and CEO position. Thank you very much for your help.”
Professional Association of Resume Writers & Career Coaches™
Resume writing is a challenging art. For more than twenty years, the Professional Association of Resume Writers have set the standards for the field, and the seal of a Certified Professional Résumé Writer (CPRW) has identified professionals who have mastered the challenges of producing resumes and cover letters that help job seekers win the jobs they deserve. Today, the CPRW is so widely recognized that many career book editors will only accept resume submissions from writers with this credential.
As a CPRW for more than a decade, my goal is to offer my clients an unbeatable resume writing service while upholding the standards that revolutionized the industry.
Featured In:
The Gallery of Best Resumes
The Gallery of Best Resumes is a state-of-the-art collection of 150 resumes and 30 cover letters written by some of the world’s finest professional resume writers.
Career Directors International,
Member
CDI is a membership-based business dedicated to mentoring successful career and resume entrepreneurs who love what they do. Founded in 2007, CDI has developed significant professional initiatives, including:
- Toast of the Resume Industry awards
- Best Practice Tips sheets
- Expert Webinars, Video Lessons and Teleclass series
- Career Innovator awards
- Mega Trend reports
- World’s Best Resume Writer awards
- Global Career Empowerment Summit
- Update Your Resume Month and Update Your References Week
- Numerous media and press initiatives.
