Resume reverse engineering redux
Speaking as I was about reverse engineering the other day, the entry in Wikipedia got me thinking…
How do you reverse engineer a resume? I love the idea, so let’s step back a little bit and see how this would work.
Step 1: First, as suggested in the last post, I’d recommend first determining what your ideal next position would look like.
Step 2: Head over to Salary.com and do a search on job titles. Different companies use different terms – marketing director, marketing VP, chief marketing officer – you get the idea. Get a sample for your research.
Step 3: Find a likely resume. You search on those sample job titles at resume writing websites, which would undoubtedly have samples of resumes that actually worked for their owners. Or Google terms like “marketing director resume.” That’ll get you started in the right direction.
Step 4: Get networking. Here’s my three recommendations – which may overlap here and there – for what groups to approach:
1. People in your desired industry.
2. People in your desired profession.
3. People who hire the people in your desired industry and/or profession.
And when you get in there (keeping in mind the Golden Rule of Networking – “Give before you seek to receive”), ask various people if they would kindly send you a copy of a resume that helped to land the kind of position you’re seeking.
Step 5: Between steps 3 and 4, you now have a sample of successful resumes. To paraphrase the Wikipedia reverse engineering definition, now it’s time to “analyze [the resumes’] workings in detail, to try to make a new [resume] that does the same thing [land you an interview for a similar job] without copying anything from the original.”
If your current resume isn’t getting the results you want, why not give this a try, and let us know how it works for you.




