Many thanks to Mark from The Long Cut for being our inaugural Pimp-ee. Mark is a Geographical Information System supervisor- essentially, he makes maps. Specifically, he supervises the people who make maps.

Mark mentioned in his email to me that, “One of my duties as supervisor is to fill open positions in my office and I can never get over just how bad some people’s résumés and cover letters are. I’d feel a lot better if I knew that my résumé wasn’t being laughed at by some HR department too.”

Let me put that one to rest, Mark. Your résumé is much better than many of the ones I see every day. The rest of you can download the sanitized PDF version to follow along with.

What’s good: Your format is clear, leaves plenty of room in the margins for an interviewer or evaluator to take notes, and contains no typos or grammatical errors.

What could be improved: Your experience text kind of runs all together, making it hard to pick out the individual items.

(more in the extended entry)

But let’s start from the top. Under “objective,” you have: “To gain a GIS supervisory position that will utilize my education and experience while offering opportunities for personal input and career advancement.”

BORING. As a hiring manager, I stop reading after “To gain a GIS supervisory position.” Great. You want to be a manager. The rest of the sentence makes me yawn. Maybe this is a personal pet peeve of mine, but I HATE HATE HATE the overuse of the word “utilize” in objective statements. Blah blah, everyone and their grandma wants to utilize their education. And who doesn’t love “career advancement?” Tell me something I don’t already know about you.

Now, my counterparts over at Blue Sky Resumes insist that an objective statement not be all about you. I have to disagree- it’s your objective statement, so by definition it’s all about you. And any hiring manager worth his or her salt understands that an employee whose personal goals match what the position can provide is an employee who will stick around longer. An employer who doesn’t care about what you want is an employer that doesn’t work hard to retain good employees.

So what we want is to talk about what your objective is, but in a unique and meaningful way that will make the hiring manager say, “Great! That guy sounds like he’d be great for this job!” The simplest way to accomplish that is by matching your objective to the particular organization to which you are applying, which I’ve talked about at length already. In this case, you might say, “To gain a GIS supervisory position in which I may contribute to profitability by supporting the retail placement strategy,” for a company that needs a GIS department to figure out where to put its stores. Maybe you can come up with something better- I’m not familiar enough with the day-to-day operations of a GIS department.

Now let’s talk about Experience. It looks to me like you’re cramming it all together to try to stay on one page. Frankly, that one-page rule is BS for anyone who has more than 5-7 years of career experience. After 13 years in your chosen field, you’re entitled to a second page if you need one.

Because it’s more recent and relevant, I’ll just address your current job. You list:

Provide day-to-day supervision of the development and operation of the PWTNMS Geographic Information System. Monitor and delegate office workload. Evaluate GIS Staff (five Analysts and two Interns) and assist hiring of new staff. Configure and maintain all GIS hardware and software. Maintain GIS databases, including ArcSDE and Oracle. Identify alternative methods to create user specified maps and graphic products. Provide GIS application support to end-users. Oversee creation and maintenance of GIS metadata. Project Manager of three mapping projects.

Now, grain of salt here since I’m a little bit outside my expertise about your field… but your experience is all jumbled together and not in logical order. Also, most of it isn’t specific enough, or active enough. What specific accomplishments did you have? Did you do anything with those “alternative methods” after you identified them? How’d you do with managing those mapping projects? Were they on time and within budget? Were they big, small, what?

A better layout would be as follows:

• Supervise development and operation of the PWTNMS Geographic Information System.
• Configure and maintain all GIS hardware and software.
• Maintain GIS databases, including ArcSDE and Oracle.
• Identify, recommend, and implement alternative methods for creation of user-specified maps and graphic products.
• Provide GIS application support to end-users.
• Hire, train, and evaluate GIS staff of five Analysts and two Interns.
• Managed three mapping projects, ranging from (statistics and specifics here)

Apply the same logic to your other experience. Remember that employers are looking for employees who solve problems rather than just fill seats, so remember to list things that make you stand out as a particularly good GIS supervisor. There are lots of GIS supervisors who manage projects, but a small subset of them do it well. Talk about plans you implemented, processes you improved, etc.

The rest of your résumé looks good. You probably don’t need to list Microsoft Office as one of your computer skills- it’s pretty much assumed for anyone above administrative assistant level, and if you’ve managed to get this far in your career without learning about it, there’s probably a reason why.

So… consider yourself PIMPED!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 23rd, 2005 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Pimp My Resume. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.