@KennyR:
Perhaps you will find the following helpful. You may get ticked by the relative frankness of my reply: please keep in mind that I am only trying to be honest and supportive, even if that means giving you a figurative kick in the a**. Consider mine spanked afterwards, okay? :-))
The first I noticed about your post and subsequent replies is that you're too damn negative about yourself. Stop. That. Right. Now. If you are not happy with yourself, you will have to divulge in some pretty deep and brutally honest soul-searching. Otherwise that attitude will shine like a beacon in whatever text you manage to write, and earn you a rejection instead of an interview. Capitalize on your good qualities. You have an honours degree. You are (judging from the texts I've seen here) an eloquent fellow with a very definite opinion of your own. You are passionate about Amigas, and probably computers in general. You are specialized in some areas, much more so than any other person. (Yes, you are.) And so forth. You will feel silly writing the first raving paragraph about yourself, I know. You'll hate yourself for turning yourself into a marketable entity. Shoot the bastard responsible for forcing you to do that. But *after* you've landed the job, please.
Second issue: Stop trying to guess what the recruiter will think of your resume. The secret is that you can't guess, so stop wasting time and precious energy pondering the imponderable. It's not your job to supply the recruiter with the information he needs ro reject you, anyway. He needs to ferret that out in an interview, and preferably not even then.
Third point: if writing recruiter bullsh*t is not your thing, then don't write recruiter bullsh*t! That sounds like an open door, but it is forgotten by nearly everyone. BE YOURSELF. I can't stress that enough. Think of it this way: if you were the recruiter, being bombarded with hundreds of resumes, all spouting the feelgood nonsense. There's a few who do not. Who would you select for an interview ...? Good. (I got selected for an interview once because I had the audacity to respond to the question 'Do you object against partaking in a psychological assessment?' with 'Yes, I do, because I consider such tests to be pseudo-scientifical nonsense and thus a complete waste of time'.)
Point four: If you are so concerned about not being able to work good in a team, or not being mobile enough, are you applying to the right sort of job, then? Do you envisage being happy in a job where teamwork is essential? Or, alternatively, why don't you like teamwork? You know your strengths and weaknesses better than anyone else in the world. Accept that you are not the perfect person, and that it is extremely unlikely that your direct competitors for a job are too. Match the job to the person, and not the person to the job.
Five: you *have* weaknesses and bad character traits. So do I. So does everyone else. The trick is not hiding them. (Well, most of the time.) The trick is showing the recruiter you know what they are and how you deal with them. Take the teamwork issue: it is rare for people not working together in teams anymore. You don't like it, but what happens if you need to? How do you plan on dealing with it?
Six: Stop trying to comply with arbitrary resume-writing standards. They're all a waste of bandwidth. Make sure it holds your personal details, your education, previous working experiences, interests, extra-curricular activities and language skills (if you have any). Include single-line summary of job descriptions. Mention highlights (as in 'graduated with honours', 'wrote funky code for A.org, now used by thousands of people', etc.) or keywords which describe the job. Do not see it as bragging about yourself: you did do those things, did you not? Then they're just statements of fact. If the recruiter thinks you're a pompous a** by mentioning those, you don't want to work for that company anyway. The resume should whet the recruiter's appetite for more, therefore it is FORBIDDEN to use negative language. Write about what you did, not what you did *not* or failed to do.
I hope you found it useful.
