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Please write to dearsam@dispatch.com. Samantha Nolan is a Certified Professional Résumé Writer with a graduate degree in Marketing and Communication and owner of Ladybug Design, a full-service résumé writing firm.

For more information, call 614-570-3442 or 1-888-9-LADYBUG or visit www.ladybug-design.com.

Tony's objective was to secure a coveted pharmaceutical sales position. His main concern was that he lacked the preferred business-to-business (B2B) sales experience. He had been engaged in B2B transactions, but they were not highlighted prominently. Instead, there was a clear business-to-consumer focus on his résumé.

Tony also wanted to showcase the transferability of his career in the fitness industry to support his medical and health knowledge. He also had participated in an informal preceptorship, which added to his qualifications to begin a career in pharmaceutical sales.

Tony's original résumé was not strong enough in content or presentation, so both areas were addressed in the development of his new résumé. Instead of an objective statement, I opened the résumé with an extensive qualifications summary highlighting his related experiences and education.

Beginning the qualifications summary is a brief highlighted list of key qualifiers, a highly effective approach when candidates need to focus the hiring manager's attention on the aspects of their background that qualify them for a particular job.

Next, Tony's professional experience section was expanded based on information we reviewed during his phone consultation. His primary B2B experience was expanded from four bullet points to a full paragraph and seven bulleted achievements.The formatting of this section pulls the hiring manager's eye to the most important information in the section.

Page two of Tony's résumé continued to explore his experiences, highlighting B2B interactions whenever possible. I also highlighted his preceptorship along with a personal training certification.

Lastly, Tony's education was presented as a complete list of all science and medical coursework completed.

After one week Tony wrote: "I've been sending out my new résumé for a little over a week now and I've had one phone interview, I'm scheduled for a face-to-face (F2F) next week, and I've had many e-mails from recruiters who comment on how great my résumé looks and that I'm moving to the top of their list of people to call for upcoming opportunities …all in the new field I'm pursuing. All I can say is 'thank you, thank you, thank you!' The finished product is awesome and turned out better than I even hoped for."

Three weeks later, Tony wrote: "As of this coming Monday, I'm a new pharmaceutical sales rep for ABC Pharmaceuticals!! And this is all possible because of the awesome résumé that you created for me. Once I started sending out the updated résumé, the calls started coming in. I had an F2F interview with two ABC Pharmaceutical DMs that went extremely well, so they scheduled me for an F2F with the regional director. When I met with her, the first words out of her mouth were “who did your résumé for you?”…I'm not lying!! When I told her it was professionally done, she said that it was one of the better looking résumés she's seen in a long time! She really liked the fact that I decided to 'step up' and do what's necessary to make my résumé 'stand out.' Thanks so much for taking the time to give me an awesome résumé that catches the eyes of hiring managers."