How to make your resume stand out with insights from Marian Bernard

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Hello, and welcome to the Zero2Hired Podcast, the show that helps struggling job seekers find a career that's right for you. In every episode, we have one mission, to provide you with unique tips and strategies from leading industry experts that will get you in front of hiring managers. Enjoy the show.

**John** (0:22)
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Zero2Hired Podcast. Our special guest today is Marian Bernard.
Marian is Ontario's first certified professional resume writer. She's one of six certified employment interview professionals in Canada. She's Canada's first certified job search strategist, and she's Canada's first certified online professional networking strategist. She's proudly affiliated with the PARWCC, the CPC, CDI, BARW, which are all resume associations, and the aurorabusiness.com. She's a contributor to the following career books, Expert Resume for Managers and Executives, Gallery of Best Resumes for People Without a Four-Year Degree, Best Canadian Resumes, Cover Letter for Dummies Edition 3, and the Best Canadian Cover Letters. Please help me welcome Marian.

**Marian Bernard** (1:17)
Hey, Marian. Thank you so much for introducing me. You cannot see how I'm blushing right now.
And I am thrilled to be a part of your podcast.

**John** (1:28)
Yes. This is such a timely topic because resume, we were just, Connell and I were just at the Canadian Immigrant Fair last week. And one of the questions, actually, one of the things that we ask every person that walked by our booth was, what's one of your biggest challenges? And one out of three would say, my resume doesn't make it through the hiring, or doesn't make it through the process to get me an interview. So this is why I'm really glad that you're on the podcast today, because it really helps us give the right information to the audience members, so they can actually get a leg up on their competition. So just to get started, Marian, how did you get started in this particular career? Because you got quite the accolades as part of your resume here. So share with us, how did you get into this particular line of work?

**Marian Bernard** (2:14)
Well, I actually kind of fell into resume writing.
Typically, what happens is, not everybody winds up doing the career that they were originally trained for. I originally started life out as an executive secretary, went to the local community college, graduated with honors, and what I was doing, in effect, I was capitalizing on a much higher than average keyboarding speed. Not even 10 days after finishing my studies, and a good five months before convocation, I landed a departmental level secretarial role at CIL. And the vast majority of people in Canada would know CIL from the consumer side, that they manufacture and resell paints, plant food, lawn fertilizer, that sort of thing. When I first started working at CIL, that would have been considered tip of the iceberg, because they also served industry in a lot of other capacities. And at that time, I had worked for three bosses. Three years later, I got promoted to word processing operator, and three years after that, got promoted to word processing consultant. And the difference between operator and consultant was that I would solve problems as operator. I would solve problems for people in my department. There was about 70 of us. As consultant, I would be solving problems for all 1500 people at our location. Now, at the same time, I had been there maybe about nine and a half years and change, and I wanted to start my own side hustle, and my business was originally a secretarial service. Six months after starting my side hustle, CIL underwent a major reorganization. At the time, I didn't think I would be affected because I was told that out of all of the people in my department, I consistently had top performance rankings. When I found out I was one of 35 people who were affected by the organization, I was in tears on the way home because back then, the idea of being let go from an organization, you hung your head in shame. Although I did have another job to go to, and I got that job through networking, I quit after three days because the pull of running my own business was just too great to resist. I had said to them at the time, they were fabulous to work with, but I would kick myself if I didn't follow through on my dream of forming my own business. They wound up becoming secretarial clients of mine for about three years afterwards.

**John** (5:03)
Nice.

**Marian Bernard** (5:04)
Now, a lot of my secretarial clients at the time, they would say, well, my brother, my sister, my third cousin once removed, they need to have their resume typed up. I would look at it and I think, we can pump this up and we can enhance this and magnify that. I got to the point where I thought, I'm really enjoying the resume writing side more than the secretarial side. This is when I found out that resume writing organizations exist. I was able to further perfect what I could do, and as a result, as you alluded to in the introduction, my work has been published by a handful of resume writers and resume collections.