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EmploymentScape

RoleResume Writer
TypeFreelance
PeriodAug 2008 – Jun 2009

Background​

My first job out of college was writing resumes for attorneys and law students. Not exactly the creative writing career I'd imagined, but it turns out that distilling someone's entire professional identity into two pages of compelling prose is harder than it sounds. (It's also more satisfying than it has any right to be.)

I telecommuted for this role and worked regularly with EmploymentScape's team in India. The writers there had distinctly British English tendencies--a consequence of Indian English conventions that I hadn't encountered before. A lot of my early editing work involved reconciling those stylistic differences against the American English standards our clients expected. It was a crash course in dialect-aware copyediting, and I didn't realize that's what it was until much later.

The actual resume writing process ran through the company's CMS. Clients filled out questionnaires, the system compiled assignment requirements--resume only, cover letter combo, or the full package--and I built the deliverables from scratch using established templates. The challenge wasn't the formatting. It was figuring out how to make an attorney with twelve years of insurance defense experience sound meaningfully different from the next attorney with twelve years of insurance defense experience.

The pay wasn't enough to sustain full-time work. My manager kept me on in a freelance capacity, which gave me room to sharpen my skills without the pressure of volume quotas. Eventually I decided to take what I'd learned and launch my own service, Lefty Resume.

What I Did​

  • Wrote resumes and cover letters for Attorney Resume, ResumeApple, Legal Authority, and Employment Authority--four separate jobseeker brands under the EmploymentScape umbrella.
  • Built each resume from scratch using only the client questionnaire. No phone calls, no interviews. Just the form and whatever I could infer from the answers.
  • Edited 5-10 resume and cover letter drafts daily from the overseas freelance team, reconciling British English conventions against American English standards.
  • Researched legal and professional field terminology to ensure resumes used accurate, industry-specific language that would pass recruiter screening.
  • Authored 20+ career-focused articles on resume strategies for specific disciplines--legal, healthcare, engineering--each requiring independent research into hiring norms and keyword expectations.
  • Wrote a competitive analysis report comparing EmploymentScape's business model and service offerings against a direct competitor.

Key Skills​

Resume Writing · Cover Letter Writing · Copyediting · Proofreading · Editing · Content Management Systems · Client Deliverables · Keyword Analysis · Competitor Research · Knowledge Articles · Topic-Based Writing · Document Templates · Research · Microsoft Word · Adobe Acrobat · Collaboration · Remote Work · Task Management · Managing Deadlines · Process Improvement · Workflow Processes · Peer Review · WYSIWYG Editor · Microsoft Office