Though I am a sales rep, at my current company I am a big part of the hiring process. We are very small and I am the senior person aside from the absentee owner. I screen the resumes and call people for initial phone interviews.

I find the same things as you do. Misspellings, grammatical mistakes and, worst of all, a generally unimpressive resume format.

It seems as if most people avoid talking about their acheivements or their successes. It seems odd, but apparently many sales people AREN'T into tooting their own horn.

The resumes all contain the same sort of verbiage: "Responsible for Prospecting and blah blah blah."

Once, I called a candidate with a very boring resume, (I actually thought the companies he had worked for aligned with what we do,) and started talking to him. I asked him to tell me about one of his successes. He said, "Oh, I secured a multi year state contract that was worth about 500,000 a year in revenue."

I asked him why he didn't...you know...put that in his resume! He said that state contracts are bids and he felt it wasn't really "sales."

Little did he know that we were a small office with virtually no experience to date in negotiating the realm of state contracts. Yet we had always wanted to seek them out.

As I probed, the guy could talk in depth about many sales victories he had done. But I really had to pry them out of him. I talked to his references and they had nothing but praise.

We ended up offering him a position after interviewing him, but he got a better offer somewhere else.

We do stay in contact with him periodically, in case he wants to make a move.

Here is this consistent performer with some nice accomplishments, but his resume never reflected that in million years. It looked just like boring, run of the mill, templated sales resumes.

Great story! Absolutely agree that resumes should contain RESULTS.

A resumes is actually a piece of marketing collateral for an individual person. Marketing collateral needs to speak about the benefits the product (in this case a person) will bring to you and back this up with examples of how these benefits have been delivered to others.

It's doubly-scary when sales and marketing people cannot write good resumes. It says something about their ability to write good marketing pieces for your clients (including email from sales people to prospects etc.)

Resume as marketing collateral is good idea. Any promotion speaks first to the prospect's problem .. then the solution. In this scenario, it's s about the buyer, not the seller. But a resume is about the seller and therein lies the basic problem. I would rather write a brochure style piece about myself rather than the dreaded resume format. Is it time to get rid of the old-fashioned resume? Everybody hates them anyway - so don't we need a major change in how sellers (candidates) are presented to buyers (the hiring organization)?

Nige- spot on with this article! although you've missed one additional element that imho is every bit as important in today's techno age- that of the cover letter or email. In my current position, I have been responsible for hiring several new sales reps over the last 2 years and the quality of the written responses is absolutely shocking! when the job posting specifically references "writing skills" as a primary prerequisite for the position, it never ceases to amaze me when I receive emails that have not even been spell-checked! And that's just the tip of the iceberg- the company's name would be mis-spelt, my name would be mis-spelt, sentences would lack any semblance of punctuation or structure etc. I don't understand how any self-respecting job applicant could think they would earn an interview with such sloppy penmanship. I certainly wouldn't give them one!!