CEO/Founder of Battlefield Resume, Bruce Benedict

CEO/Founder of Battlefield Resume, Bruce Benedict

If you are looking for a job or new career in or outside the federal government then Bruce is the guy you want to call! He has more then 27 years of experience with Military, Federal Government and Defense Contracting Experience and knows how to get your resume seen.  Here is a snippet from the show.

HOST:  This brings me to a question.  When you see somebody’s resume, what is a common mistake that you see on people’s resumes?

GUEST:  Well, the common mistake for – I don’t know if it’s a mistake, but what I can tell normally – a normal veteran resume, somebody who’s transitioning out of the military, their resume – normally the first bullet of every work history job will be a supervisory bullet, and the last bullet will be some liaison or coordination with other organizations bullet.  That’s the standard, and normally it’s like a biography, right?  It’s, you know, “Hey let me tell you everything I’ve done whether it’s relevant to the job or not.”  Really, because most guidance, it’s overwhelming, the resume guidance.  You can ask everybody a question about their resume, and everyone is going to tell you something different.

HOST:  Right.

GUEST:  It’s amazing.  When I do hiring events, I’ll do resume reviews.  300 resumes come across my desk, and I’m looking at them doing quick 30 second reviews because the hiring manager is only going to look at it for about six to ten seconds.  I go through that, every single one is formatted differently.  If you can imagine, it’s all formatted differently.  There’s so much different guidance out there that people are trying to pay attention to.  What I tell everybody is the first question is the hardest question you’re ever going to be asked.  If you give me a resume the first question I’m going to ask you is, “What job do you want to apply to?” Before I even look at your resume.

The mistake that most veterans have is they don’t know, and it will be very generic.  “Well, I want to apply to something in the IT field.” That’s not good enough.  You have to give me a job.  What I would recommend is – because I focus on targeted resumes, and what I mean by that because, again, transitioning out of the military, I’ve done that, and everyone told me to tailor and target my resume, and nobody really told me what that meant or how to do it.

I knew I needed to do it, and so what I’ve done is defined it.  When you target a resume, I define that as your target just like you’re on a range shooting at a target.  Your target is the job that you’re applying to, and you have to know that in order to be successful, all right?  I can’t tell you to go to the range and qualify expert on your weapon if I don’t give you a target to shoot at, and so you have to know the job, so spend the time to find the job, right?  Then say, “Look, that’s the job I want to apply to.” Now you’ve tailored the language in your resume for that job itself.

To listen to the whole show Click Here

Bruce also has a podcast show on HMG and you can also watch him on youtube!  To learn more go to https://www.battlefieldresumes.com