One of the best-selling resume books of all time and a trusted resource for job-seekers for nearly three decades, this edition of The Damn Good Resume Guide has been completely revised and updated for today’s marketplace. The Shortest Distance Between You and Your Next Job For hundreds of thousands of job seekers, The Damn Good Resume Guide has been the go-to resource for writing and refining their resumes to damn near perfection. Filled with savvy advice and written in a straightforward, user-friendly style, The Damn Good Resume Guide will help you zero in on that dream job, then craft a winning resume that gets your foot in the door.  This tried-and-true best seller has been fully revised and updated for today’s job market, including: Contemporary sample resumes (all of which landed interviews!) with job objectives running the career gamut—from line cook to sales manager, school principal to software engineer. Tips on creating a functional, chronological, or hybrid resume—and advice on choosing which format is best for you. What to include and what to leave out of your resume, so you get the job you really want. Smart ways to deal with gaps in your work history and other less-than-ideal resume scenarios. Instructions for writing cover emails and submitting resumes electronically. How to set up (and excel at) an informational interview. Advice for formatting, polishing, and proofing your resume so that it stands out in the right way. And much more! Follow Parker and Brown’s ten easy steps, and you’ll be well on your way to a smart, effective, and thoroughly modern resume—a resume that makes you look good and produces results.   “Most resume books are written for people with perfectly impeccable, straight-as-an-arrow work backgrounds. [This is] for the other 99 percent.” —Joyce Lain Kennedy, nationally syndicated career columnist YANA PARKER was the best-selling author of five highly successful books for job seekers.   BETH BROWN is a former contributor to Yana’s Damn Good newsletter and has worked as a resume consultant for more than fifteen years.   Visit www.damngood.com. HOW I CAME TO WRITE THE DAMN GOOD RESUME GUIDE Long-Time Interest      For many years I’ve had a great interest in people’s work lives and job satisfaction (including my own); this first showed up in a three-year volunteer job as director and coordinator of a community youth employment service. That led to a job with an upstate New York community college project to train unemployed high-school dropouts in job-related skills, and then on to a similar position as “Community Worker” with New York state employment offices in Albany, Troy, and Schenectady—a job I really loved.      Later, living in California, I noticed that many of the people in my personal network were involved in career counseling and small business development, so I started organizing get-togethers to brainstorm and strategize about our own work, just for the fun of it. Then, in 1979, I decided to try self-employment, using my writing skills and my new red-hot IBM Selectric typewriter. I resigned from office work in the big city to use my talents in a more personally rewarding way. I began by offering an editing, typing, and business-writing service out of my home in Oakland, but soon specialized in resumes, because it turned out to be a natural for me, and because very few people seemed to know how to do it well.   The Humble Freebie Gets Status      I never really set out to write or publish this book. It started out, in 1980, as just a few loose pages of instructions and examples, handed to clients as “homework” before we’d get together to work on their resume. (I’d grown weary of giving the same instructions verbally over and over, so I’d finally written them down.)      In our “Briarpatch” self-help group of small-business people, there was a financial consultant, Roger Pritchard, and one day I hired him to help me look critically at the fragile economics of my business. He noticed the packet of “homework” pages I gave to clients (by now it included sample resumes and a list of action verbs), and he asked, “Why are you giving this away? Don’t you see that it’s valuable, and that you could easily get a few dollars for it?”      So I took his advice and at the same time expanded the packet and wrote up the instructions in greater detail. I designed a card-stock cover, stapled everything together, and priced it at $2. Over the following year I expanded it twice more, the cover price increased, and I began to suspect that it might be marketable as a how-to guide independent of my resume writing business. So I typed it up even more carefully, added some graphics, designed a more professional cover, and persuaded two Berkeley bookstores to carry a few copies on consignment.   Getting Published      It turned out that Phil Wood, owner of Ten Speed Press, almost immediately found a copy in Cody’s Bookstore, liked it, and proposed publishing