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Epic Resume Go! is my book on creating a great resume, focusing on a “storytelling” style – making a resume fun to make (as a kind of narrative media) and interesting to readers. It’s origins illustrate just how an idea can develop – in this case, over a decade.
The origins of Epic Resume Go stretch back about twenty years. I was reading some article in a local employment newspaper (think of it as “Dice.com” before the internet was the job search place) about resumes. The article noted that you wanted to make your skills and experience apparent.
That lovely little article kicked off my interest in making good resumes. Over time I polished my method of making resumes, and got good results from them – people liked them. A person interviewing me for a job mentioned I’d covered everything, that I told a good story. That’s when it struck me – I was telling a tale.
It was pretty obvious in retrospect. I had an introduction (setting a scene), skills (showing what I can do), a history (like a backstory), and bits like hobbies that showed me as a person. It showed who I was and where I was going – and that bit of feedback helped me further perfect my method.
As life went on, I found myself giving people advice on resumes. This meant I was learning more, but also I kept giving the same feedback. So why not a book?
Writing the book was pretty easy, since I already had a system, I just had to give it structure. Thus Epic Resume Go! was born – the idea was to make it an exciting title evoking things like Sentai and anime. Because I’m a nerd.
I also paired the book with speaking at cons and developing handouts. This helped people out more – but also it meant I now had several things to send people who needed advice. Sometimes reading my stuff was far more productive than letting me ramble.
I even rewrote the book later, wanting to make it clearer and more up to date. Surprisingly, little changed – mostly you had to sync it with your other social media.
If there’s a lesson to take away from Epic Resume Go! it’s that we probably all have something very useful to share that should be in book form. Maybe for friends, maybe for a limited audience, maybe for the world. So why not go for it?
Steven Savage