Although most measures show that the financial recession has hit younger workers the hardest, widespread layoffs and a high unemployment rate have forced many in the Baby Boomer generation to go job searching in the past couple years. For Boomers, especially those who have been employed at one company or in one line of work for decades, the modern job market may seem to be an unfamiliar and overwhelming place. Most jobs are advertised through digital means, not in print ads. Most applicants use social networking services such as LinkedIn to connect with potential employers. And, of course, any Boomer who returns to the job search for the first time in decades needs to brush up on their interview skills and modernize their resume.

Certainly, when compared with many other elements of the job search process, the resume hasn’t changed too significantly over time. Other than moving from a typewriter to a computer composition, the resume still retains the same basic purpose and structure. But these larger similarities should not lull workers into thinking that their resume from 1982 is good enough for 2012, even if 30 years of experience is updated at the top.

On that note, here are a few major tips that older workers should keep in mind when modernizing their resumes:

Remove the “Objective”

In the past, most resumes traditionally began with an “Objective” line where the applicant briefly stated their overall goal in the job search. This section has firmly fallen out of favor over the last decade. Instead, delete any objective line and start your resume with the “Education” section.

Give More Education Detail

For older applicants who have been out of school for several decades, the work experience you possess is certainly more important than the educational background you received. That being said, however, even older applicants should be aware that employers care to see more details in the “Education” section these days. These details may include the title of an anthropology dissertation your wrote, honors you were given upon college graduation, or whether you received any nursing degrees online.

Be Well-Rounded

Modern employers care just as much about a worker’s talents as they do about his character. They want to hire people who are well-rounded and who will contribute positively to office culture. To this end, many applicants choose to balance the impersonal data provided on a resume with some more personal information. In a section at the end of the resume that is often simply titled “Personal,” an applicant will briefly list facts regarding their background, their volunteer work, and their recreational interests.

Keeping these tips in mind will hopefully help older applicants update their resumes for the modern job search. While resumes haven’t changed tremendously over time, it is always important to get even the details right in today’s competitive job market.

I recently saw a copy of a professionally-written resume that was shown to me by the person who had paid to have it written for him. I’m not sure how much it cost but he did tell me “it cost me a lot to get it done” so I’ll take his word for it.

In a word, it looked fantastic. It gave me a great first impression…and that was before I’d even started reading it! It looked like it was written in some sort of template or perhaps was made into a PDF because the lettering was unlike anything you’d see in a regular Word document.

Each of the person’s previous jobs had a profile paragraph within a light colored blue box that really stood out from the page and caused my eyes to look right at the contents of the box. No doubt this was the goal and it worked.

As far as the writing of the resume itself, it was also very well done. The resume started off by showing in large bolded font lettering that the person’s career goal was a Key Account Manager position so right away I knew he was in sales even if I didn’t know anything else about him.

All in all, the design and actual written aspect of the resume was excellent. It simply stood out – for the right reasons – and demanded to be read. I suspect it would stand out from the many, many other resumes the average sales manager gets from sales professionals like this one.

Is paying someone to write – and in this case design – your resume a good idea? Depending on the cost and the skills of the person writing and designing it, the cost could certainly be worth it if it gets you in the front door of a company that eventually hires you.

Even if it simply accomplished the feat of getting you more interviews, that might be considered a success too.

We’ve already talked about resume writing and the truth is that many people aren’t that good at it. For some people, writing just isn’t their bag.

For others, it might be a language thing where your English skills aren’t great and/or you’re a bad speller who tends to make lots of grammatical errors, use run-on sentences, etc.

For others still, you might not realize how you write an effective resume and to design it in a way that makes people want to read it.

Ideally you want to write your own resume since on one knows you better than you. Or so one would expect.

The problem with resume writers is the same problem with anyone else you might considering hiring to do a job: Some are good. Some aren’t.

One of the newer ways that companies get you to use their resume writing services is by using the free resume critique offer. This is where you email them your resume and get one of their people to give you an honest assessment of your resume. So they aren’t going to rewrite your resume for free – they’re not a charity and aren’t doing this for their health – but you might think that they will offer up some great ideas that you can use to improve your resume.

Unfortunately that’s not the way it usually works. I offer a resume critique service on my Services page but it’s a paid service. What I’ll do is read over your resume and using my experience as a recruiter and someone who has read thousands of resumes and helped many people find new jobs, give you some advice based on the solid resumes that I’ve seen that have helped people get interviews that resulted in them getting jobs. I don’t claim to be a professional resume writer – I’m not – but if I can help a person improve their resume with some suggestions and tips, I’d like to help out.

With the companies that tend to offer the free resume critique, what it usually entails is you getting a generic and canned response from them that doesn’t actually tell you what to change in your resume but instead tells you all the things you’re doing wrong in your resume, in their opinion.

Essentially, it’s a pitch for you to pay for their paid resume writing services. In other words the goal of the free resume critique is to get you to buy a new resume from them.

You could send over the best resume ever written and they’ll still find a canned response to send you to convince you that you need their resume writing services.

As with other career-related scams, it’s the offer of a freebie that is actually masquerading as a sales pitch.

Last month I wrote a post about how some businesses – particularly career counseling type firms – offer you a free resume rewrite and when you end up getting the new resume, you find out that the new resume was based on a cookie-cutter format that every other one of their other clients also received, one that is possibly worse than the resume you wrote yourself that you were trying to improve upon.

As mentioned before, writing your resume yourself is your best bet but if you do need the help, make sure you use someone you trust who can supply you with free samples of their work and ideally, references you can speak with if you so desire.

Yesterday we talked about why you might consider using a professional resume writer.

Most recruiters are not professional resume writers so that right there is a good reason to not allow most recruiters to rewrite your resume.

From time to time, there will be occasions where a recruiter finds out that you have experience that is either not mentioned in your resume or is mentioned in a way that undersells what you achieved. I can think of numerous cases where I knew a particular job required specific experience and upon speaking with a job candidate, find out that they have the experience but either don’t even mention it in their resume or don’t really make it clear to the reader that they have this experience. In this instance, I’ll suggest how they add it into their resume to draw attention to it.

This only makes sense and is a benefit of working with a good recruiter since they can tell you what parts of a job description are “must have skills” that you should highlight in your resume and which skills are “nice to haves” that are perhaps not as important. When you simply read a job description and apply for the job yourself, you often can’t tell exactly which skills and experience is paramount and what isn’t as important.

One area that you need to be aware of though is the issue of when a recruiter tries to get you to overstate your experience or flat out lie in order to make you qualify for a job that you really don’t qualify for. Just like it’s not right to make stuff up yourself and lie on your resume or in an interview, it isn’t any better when a recruiter convinces you to do it.

I once worked with a recruiter who was renowned for this especially with clients he was working with. He’d often add stuff into a person’s resume without even letting them know. Other times he would convince them to change their job title or accomplishments to make it seem closer to what the job required even if it was a lie. He ended up getting fired for another reason so things caught up to him in the end.

But what’s the point in lying like this? If you’re applying for a job and lie about experience you don’t have, if this experience is really that important, it’s most likely going to come out in the interview that you don’t have this experience and if not, it will probably come out once you’ve been hired so either way you’ll probably get caught. If the experience isn’t really that critical then I wonder why you’d lie about it in the first place and risk getting caught! So in either instance, it really doesn’t make sense to lie since getting caught or exposed can end up causing even bigger troubles for you down the line.

Allowing a recruiter to help you tweak your resume to better match your legitimate skills and experience to the job makes sense. Allowing a recruiter to convince you to lie or choosing to do on your accord does not.