At what point does working on your resume become counterproductive?

True story: Many years ago, while in the infancy of my career, I found myself between jobs. I had a fair bit of confidence in my writing ability and thought I'd written a pretty decent resume.

But at that time, I wasn't as experienced in the job search field as I am now. So I did the only logical thing – I consulted a resume pro. He told me to move this, change that, chop this and add something else. Dutifully, I did as the resume pro suggested.

Then, just to make sure I did everything right, I checked back with him and showed him my resume. He told me to make just a few minor tweaks.

I tried my resume out and got a few minor hits. It was nice to have employers interested, but it would have been nicer if the employers were relevant to my career interest at the time. The employers were out of state and out of my field.

I showed my brand spanking new resume to an HR pro to see if she could figure out what was going on. She hated it. She told me to move this, change that, chop this and add something else. Since she was someone who reviewed prospective hires' resumes, I moved, changed, chopped and added as she suggested.

At that point, I received no employer interest at all. Not even out of my field, obscure employers.

Upon reviewing my resume, I realized that I had taken advice, tweaked, taken more advice, tweaked some more and, at this point, my resume was horrible. Too many cooks and all that.

I went back to my original resume and reviewed it anew. It had been three months since I had laid eyes upon this version of my resume, so I was able to view it with a certain level of objectivity. Then I added a bit here, changed there, did some chopping and a few changes, taking into account both experts I had talked to – but only a few of their changes. The changes to my original were very minor.

The result? I started getting real interest from relevant employers.

But I had wasted three months getting to this point. I had done an awful lot of work on my resume and didn't have the results to show for it. Once I reverted back to the original and performed minor changes, I got the results I wanted. I could have saved a lot of time – and gotten better results – by doing less work.

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