ABOUT THE RESUME PLACE · THE 50-YEAR STORY
Resume Place, Inc. started in a print shop, one block from George Washington University.
Kathryn Troutman founded Resume Place, Inc. as the first-ever federal resume writing service, and established the best practices in federal resume writing for every kind of federal jobseeker and career professional. This is how it happened.
A print shop and an idea.
The idea for The Resume Place can be traced to 1971, to a print shop one block from George Washington University in Washington, DC. Kathryn Troutman, then a volunteer for the school directory, approached the print shop manager about buying an ad, “because this is where all the law students go to get their resumes done.” When the manager declined, Kathryn asked to see one of the resumes. She had never seen one. It was printed on ivory paper in 10-point type, with a picture. She asked what it cost to print 50 copies. The answer: $7.50.
Kathryn realized she could provide a full-service resume to students. An extremely fast typist, she could typeset a resume in about twenty minutes, have it printed at the shop, and charge $29.95. She proposed the idea to H. David Meyers, a third-year law student at GW, and LDI Resumes was started that day. LDI’s law-student resumes became the best-looking resumes at GW, Georgetown, Catholic University, and every other law school in DC, with the law school directories carrying the company to twenty schools from New York City down to Duke.
The Resume Place opens.
In 1973, Kathryn took off on her own and opened The Resume Place, Inc. at 1740 N Street, NW with one typesetter contractor. Within a couple of years she added several writers and expanded the service to attorneys, the White House, the World Bank, NBC, and SF-171s for federal employees.
The SF-171 dies. The federal resume is born.
1996 brought a sea change. Vice President Gore’s Reinventing Government movement declared that “the government should accept a resume like the rest of the world.” The SF-171, the long-standing life-history application, would be eliminated in favor of the resume, which worked better with email, the Internet, and USAJOBS, also created in 1996.
Kathryn saw what that meant: 1.7 million federal employees would need to convert their SF-171s into the new federal resume format, and they would need samples and a guide. She met with Dick Whitford, the first director of USAJOBS at the Office of Personnel Management, and discussed her book. He declined the idea of OPM writing the guide, so she wrote and published the Federal Resume Guidebook in 1996: a 400-page volume of five- to ten-page federal resume samples built on duties, responsibilities, and accomplishments matched to the specialized experience in a job announcement.
She mortgaged her house to publish it.
Kathryn mortgaged her house for $50,000 to publish the first edition of the Federal Resume Guidebook. At the time she was a single mom of three children, ages 12, 9, and 6. She placed all of her equity on the gamble that she might become the leading expert in federal resume writing in the world.
Her dream came true. The Federal Resume Guidebook is the number one book on federal resume writing: on shelves in every bookstore and public library in the US, the most referenced text by federal human resources, and the book that established Kathryn as the Federal Resume Guru. It has sold half a million copies, and it marked the birth of the Outline Format federal resume that The Resume Place still uses today.
Still the original federal resume writing service.
The Resume Place is still the leading federal resume writing firm in the US. The writing team crafts an average of 1,500 resumes per year, and Kathryn and her staff teach federal resume writing in more than 25 federal agencies each year.
Kathryn Troutman was the first-ever Federal Career Coach™ and founded the Ten Steps certification program to train others in the federal job search methods she uses. More than 1,200 military, university, private practitioner, employment readiness, and career professionals have been certified since 2002. The Ten Steps curriculum is taught at more than 100 military bases worldwide, and the certification is approved, recommended, and mandatory job search training for employment readiness staff in all of the military services.
Meet the founder
The entrepreneur behind the format.
Kathryn Troutman designed the federal resume format and has written more than 30 books on federal careers.