Welcome to Resume Optimization!

Hi!  Welcome to the Resume Optimization website and blog. 

Resumes are one of the most important resources relied upon by hiring leaders in organizations but the average candidate is limiting their opportunity for success.

Resumes have captivated me for a long time.  Like many, I started working on resumes looking at and marking up resumes of friends and family members.   Since I’ve worked in financial services for over 30 years, I’ve had to update mine often and needed to scrutinize it carefully when I did to make it as powerful as possible if I hoped to get noticed. 

Initially I just tried to use good grammar and organization and replicate what I saw in the resumes of my successful colleagues or graduate business school classmates. 

But as I worked on resumes more, particularly as part of the Career Aspects of Personal Finance chapter in courses I’ve taught the last ten years in my Personal Finance courses, I began developing my own strategies and being more aware of how other media capture readers’ attention.  Then, over time, I started to get excited feedback from students and professionals I worked with that these methods were helping them get noticed and their resumes chosen.

My mother was strong at grammar, often correcting my written and spoken English when I was growing up. She took Latin and earned all As.  I took AP English in high school, have an interest in and enjoyment of good writing.  I’m an undergraduate engineer who is naturally aware of three dimensional organization and the impact of proportion and spacing.  (I walk into a room and notice the pictures that are hanging crooked—I can’t help it!)  I bring these personal characteristics to resume review. 

And I’ve worked in competitive professional environments (Wall Street investment banking) where the most ambitious and many who were accomplished worked and, by necessity, over time learned better, more effective ways to express myself and those I advise with their resumes.

I help people write powerful resumes. Using the Resume Optimization strategies they’ve learned working with me, students and professionals write resumes that attract attention, cause reviewers to want to meet them because they put the best representation of themselves on the page and, doing so, generate fantastic opportunities for themselves.