By Beth Noffsinger Messenger-Inquirer
Naomi Sutton has worked in human resources and recruiting for more than 15 years, and in that time, she has received résumés written in pencil and crayon — and in one instance, on a napkin.
“Those are unfortunately sad, extreme examples,” Sutton said recently, “but they’re not all that far-fetched.”
After working as an HR professional for Daymar College and other businesses, Sutton is using her expertise to start her own, small business, providing tips and assisting job seekers as well as doing HR consulting and working with companies.
She started Résumé Rx in September, and her business has the slogan, “Reviving Careers One Résumé at a Time.”
Sutton offers résumé writing services, including entry level résumés, mid-management level résumés and c-suite résumés; career consulting services, including working with people looking for a new career and people considering a career change internally or externally; and human resources consulting, including HR guidance and/or part-time assistance and assisting companies with their HR files or audits.
Sutton worked in HR and recruiting at Daymar for more than eight years, then spent several months at a recruiting firm before starting Résumé Rx.
She said she “used and really respected” the recruiting firm, “but everybody who was sending in Résumés, I spent more time revamping the résumés to make them submittable.”
Sutton would have to tell people to re-do the résumés because they were in the wrong format, and then they would come back with typos and grammatical errors. In the few months that Sutton worked with the recruiting business, she had more than 1,800 clients that she worked with.
The owner of the recruiting firm wanted Sutton to move to New Jersey, which Sutton didn’t want to do, eventually suggesting that they split off.
Sutton spent a couple months deciding whether or not she wanted to start her own business when clients started contacting her again.
“It’s kind of been blossoming,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting it to take off as fast as it did, which is good, don’t get me wrong. I figure I’d get a couple résumés a week, maybe — more like a couple a month. But it has been steady, and it has been good.”
Clients would ask her to look at their résumés, and when she said she would have to charge them, they would ask, how much?
“You start out really reasonable,” she said, “and before you know it, you have five or six résumés on your desk that have to be done by the end of the day.”
Sutton’s résumé services start at $75. She will give potential clients 10 to 15 minutes of free advice and will quickly review an emailed résumé, giving a little bit of feedback on it.
One of the main mistakes job applicants make on their résumés is not having a clear objective listed on it, Sutton said. The objective is to tell potential employers what an applicant is looking for in a job, and many people’s objectives say they want to work in a company where they can use their skills, Sutton said.
“It’s not narrowed down,” she said. “It doesn’t tell me the position you sought. It doesn’t tell me why you’re a good candidate. … Your objective is not meant to be a cover letter. It’s meant to be an objective. Specific. Be smart with it.”
Sutton will tailor résumés and cover letters to the jobs her clients are applying for. If a client wants her to do another résumé for a different job than what she was initially hired for, it does cost extra. She also asks her clients to send her the job descriptions.
“I will take whatever ad they’re looking at and show them why they should or shouldn’t apply,” Sutton said. “I don’t sugar coat it — this is not a good fit for you for the following reason or it is a good fit.”
One of Sutton’s clients is Chuck Maddox. They both worked for Daymar College at the same time, though Maddox was based out of Louisville. He is now director of education at Miller-Motte Technical College in Roanoke, Va.
“I was interested in updating my Résumé,” he said. “I reached out to her for some help. It was very beneficial. She spent a lot of time talking to me about the different aspects of a Résumé and how to get them past the screening systems to be considered.”
Many companies employ applicant tracking systems, which are designed to help employers find the most qualified candidates. It can be used, for example, to scan for key words the employer wants to see in a Résumé, but didn’t specify on a job ad, Sutton said.
If a Résumé uses a fancy font or special characters, it can lose its formatting or be garbled by the tracking system, she said.
Sutton and Maddox spent a lot of time on the phone to get the most effective Résumé possible, Maddox said.
“She dedicated a lot of time to it, and I think the end product was certainly worth the effort,” he said, adding that he has sent the Résumé to two parties and has interviews with both.
In the past, Maddox worked on his Résumés on his own. He said Sutton helped him make it more specific for the job market he was looking for, and he plans to stay in education.
Maddox spent several years working in public education before moving to private education. He called it a different market with a different approach to getting hired.
“I would recommend (Sutton) highly to anybody out there in the job market,” Maddox said. “It’s difficult to find jobs these days.”
In some cases, Sutton writes the cover letters or Résumés for her clients, but they have to provide the material.
“I might be able to take your job description and start a Résumé,” she said, “but I won’t be able to complete it. … A Résumé is not a job description.
“It’s not all encompassing, and it never should be. It should be the highlights and major achievements of your career in that position.”
She tries not to change her clients’ words when working on Résumés or cover letters.
“I really try to keep it in their vocabulary style,” Sutton said. “Anybody can write for somebody else, but a good interviewer will know that it’s not their wording, so you’re starting yourself off to a bad start.”
Often, Sutton ends up changing the format in which the Résumé is written.
She also does interview coaching, advising both job seekers as well as potential employers. She helped one company learn how to do a better job conducting interviews, giving them a questionnaire of what to ask interviewees. Sutton also provides other HR guidance for businesses.
“The smaller employers don’t know what they can and can’t do,” she said. “They don’t have an HR resource to call.”
She works with clients from around the country, sometimes doing phone meetings or talking via Skype. Sutton lives in Pleasant Ridge near the Daviess County line, and she will meet clients she knows or knows of in Owensboro.
Sutton’s goal is to help people.
“It’s very simple,” she said. “There’s so many things that people need better guidance with, and not that I want to take away from anything, because a lot of people do a great job with their own Résumés, but a lot of people are uncomfortable, get Résumé fright just like test anxiety.”
