Many of you will have used resume templates in the past, or may be thinking of using one now.

They seem a tempting option don't they? After all, they've been put together by 'experts' in order to satisfy the most discerning employer, right? Well actually that may well not be right.

Templates come from a variety of sources such as the ones available to you in Microsoft Word, and free or paid examples available for download from a host of websites. It looks as if they solve all of your problems when it comes to creating that killer resume, but I would strongly advise against using them. The reasons?

1. Employers tend to read lots of resumes. Trust me when I say that they quickly learn to spot those employing templates. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as such, but what it does say to the employer (albeit sub-consciously) is that this person is used to taking the easy route and can't be bothered with making the effort to put their own work together.
2. Your resume needs to "Stand Out" from the crowd. Using a fill-in-the-blanks template simply doesn't help you to achieve this.
3. Many templates are simply badly made and end up taking more time to rework into something decent than it would have done to design something good from scratch.
4. Fashions in resumes change as in most other things. What was regarded as essential a couple of years ago is now seen as a distracting nuisance. An example: The "Goals" or "Mission" section. It wasn't that long ago that these were an expected inclusion on all good resumes. These days however time has become a high priority, and employers don't want to waste it reading through text that they don't consider relevant to the employees ability to do the job.

Many people see creating an outstanding resume to be beyond their abilities, but I can assure you that it isn't. If you take the time and trouble to learn the current requirements, how to put those requirements into readable prose and then spend a few hours diligently working at it, then you will most certainly be able to produce a resume that passes the number one test - it Gets Noticed!

So, make sure that you craft your resume to be a high quality, precision engineered job-seeking missile and good luck into your future job hunting.