Hi everyone. I hope you are all well and staying safe. It's been a very strange and uncertain time for everyone and I can only hope and pray everyone comes out of this alive, well, and better people in spite of everything! (We have to keep positive!)

Now, on a completely different note....this is a question I'd like to pose to all the other professional resume writers out there.

This is a situation I find myself in more often than not but this time I'm a bit stumped. In order to get the most current and relevant information for the new resume, I send my clients worksheets to complete and follow up with a phone call in order to go over anything I'm not clear about, address any other issues and basically get a little better acquainted with each individual, bla bla bla..

Inevitably, regardless of how many times I stress the importance of the resume being concise, I will get people who write a novel for each position. Obviously, I cannot include everything, so it puts me in a situation where I am forced to decide 'for' the client what information is important enough to include and what should be omitted. I don't feel this is fair, as how can I determine what is important for another person? Does this make sense?

So, now I have a client who wrote literally three full pages for every position!

We talked and I told her there is no way I can use everything and asked her if she could go back and highlight the really important information. She did, yet it's still way tooooo much!

She is a lovely, wonderful person, so I don't want to piss her off, yet I'm in a situation where I have umpteen details about an industry and position I know virtually nothing about!

That's the key. So, my question is what do you resume writers do when a client bombards you with a ton of information and it just happens to be for an industry you're not at all familiar with?? How do you intelligently determine what to use and what to omit?

In most other cases I've had enough prior knowledge of the industry, etc. to at least make some educated guess - this one not so! Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks much.