For instance, you could decide not to breathe! That would affect rest of your life! You could decide to take a risk and step out of your comfort zone to speak to person of your dreams standing next to you in line at store. You might even find that this person might be looking for you! Would that change your life? You bet!

How about a decision that is more consciously made? What if you thought you needed to move to a new place, find new work, find a new mate, or thousands of other life altering decisions you could make?

My question to you is: How do you make those decisions? What tool or tools do you use to help you make a decision that will affect rest of your life, not to mention those lives you might feel responsible for like your spouse and children? Such a tool, if used correctly, might possibly be one of most important to own.

Here are two tools. I’ve discussed them before, however, given their importance, here they are again in case you missed them first time around!

1. All Features, no Benefits Make sure you market yourself by highlighting benefits that you can offer to job and company. If you fail to market yourself, no one else will market you. Your resume is your first and last chance. Unfortunately, if you have few or no benefits or if your benefits are hidden away in some dark dingy backwater on line 200 of your resume, reader will give up long before reaching there.

Read Job Description and Person Spec. thoroughly. Reflect on essential and desirable skills and your experiences pertaining to vacancy. Then you should turn to your features and consider how each one relates to skills required AND how you can convert your features into benefits.

Remember an effective resume is a marketing tool...your most POWERFUL one when it comes to job search.

Attributes like, "excellent interpersonal skills" are a FEATURE (of you). What employer is interested in is "what's in it for me?" if I interview you...."being able to communicate patiently and clearly with customers" is BENEFIT of excellent interpersonal skills.

"A driving license," is a FEATURE, "willing to travel to clients," is BENEFIT.

Pack your benefits into your Statement Summary, which should be at top of page one of your resume and lead with your USP or your BIGGEST benefit.

2. Personal Opinions It's a big no-no. Firstly, giving personal opinions will be seen by reader as being unprofessional and something you may even do in future regarding them! Secondly, its just that...an opinion. When personal opinions are stated on a resume, it can come across as moaning. If there is something unflattering...omit it.

In an interview, you will be able to explain things from your resume and it sounds a lot better then than through a few coarse sentences on a resume.

3. Inadequate or Outdated Contact Details It is surprising how many candidates give no contact details or give an old phone number, email address or postal address. This is simply because they have not proof read their resume adequately. Other candidates, give a means of contact such as an email address or phone number that they check irregularly. Only give out contact details that you will answer directly or check regularly (preferably 3 or 4 times a day). It is often difference between an interview and a rejection.

4. Spelling and Grammatical Errors Proof read once for spelling, once for grammar, again for general content and once again for flow. Never try to proof read once and cover everything. Most candidates do try this, but unfortunately, if you adopt "one-read-covers-all" your resume is very likely to have errors.