Proactive Career Networking

Your Resume - Supporting Your Marketing Plan

A mistake that many job seekers make when they start their search is to write their resume without thinking about what they want to do and what type of job they are looking for.  It seems natural to write your resume and send it out to everyone you know and post it on every job board you can find.  The problem is your resume maybe sending the wrong message.

When you start a job search take the time to think through your transferable skills, experiences and accomplishments.  Determine if you are going to make a career or life style change.  If unsure take an assessment and engage assistance to help you guide your decisions.  You must know what you are selling before you start your marketing campaign.

Once you know what you are selling then it is time to write your resume.  You want to make sure that your resume supports the direction you want to go and does not conflict with what you tell people verbally.  I almost always recommend a chronological resume.  They are easier to follow and generally better accepted.  Only in a few special circumstances would I suggest a functional resume.  When I receive a functional resume the first thought in my mind his "what are they trying to hide?"

Here are a couple of suggestions to follow with your resume.

1. Think of your resume as a newspaper sitting on the news stand.  What are the headlines and key words that will convince someone to pick up the paper and buy it to read more.
2. Keep the document easy to read using white space and format to guide the reader.
3. Start your resume with a summary not an objective.  The summary should answer two questions for the reader.  What type of job you are looking for and why are you qualified for that job.
4. No section should be more than four lines long.  People do not read resumes, they skim them.  The longer the section is the more likely it will be skipped over.
5. Use spell check and have at least two other people proofread the document.
6. Make sure your name, phone number and email address is on each page of the resume as it should be on every document you create for your job search.
7. Your accomplishments should be written in the results-action format.  Tell the reader the results and then explain how you achieved the results.  Quantify, quantify quantify!!! Numbers speak louder than words.
8. To save space the older the work history to less information you should provide.  Employers are much more interested in what you have done and accomplished in the last ten years.
9. When you think you are done see if you can pass the thirty second thumb test.  Take the first page of your resume and fold it in half.  Ask yourself if anyone else could put their name on your resume.  If the answer is no, you have passed.  If the answer is yes, you have failed.  Rework your resume so it is unique to you and gives the reader a reason to what to read more and meet you.

Want help developing a resume that will pass the thirty second thumb test?  Contact Career Networking Pro to work with a professional coach to make your resume unique to only you.

Avoid these 10 key points when writing your resume

        1.  Contact information is MIA

2.  Typos

3.  Too much information

4.  Too little information

5.  Extreme formatting

6.  Lies

7.  Lack of focus

8.  You, you, you

9.  Being funny

10. Not enough white space

Create a STORY to replace your resume.

Some job seekers have had challenging pasts, filling their resume with frequent gaps and job changes. This makes their job search seem almost impossible. What should these job seekers do?

In these cases using a traditional resume will lead to rejection. When people read their resumes they have so many questions and red flags going up that they never get the opportunity to sell themselves. In these cases a traditional resume leads to repeated rejection.

Stop using a resume and create your story. Instead of using high quality paper like a resume print your story on thick paper or card stock. Rather than trying to hide your past, hoping people will not find out, be honest with people that you have made mistakes and have had some bad luck. Share with them what you have learned from these experiences, what you can do to help the right company, and ask for them for advice and referrals to find an opportunity.

Give each person four copies of your story. Ask them to keep one and give the other three to people they think might be able to hire you.

Taking this approach will improve your self-esteem, as you will not feel like you are trying to hide your past, but being open and honest with the people you meet. People will respect you more and this will increase the odds of someone giving you an opportunity.

Need someone to help you present yourself in the most positive light? Want to talk to someone who has the experience to provide valuable guidance? Visit the Career Networking Pro website, http://www.careernetworkingpro.com, to learn how to get hooked up with an experienced career coach. Read about the job search process in the new book, People Hire People – Not Resumes, http://www.careernetworkingpro.com/book.

How to send your resume?

Every day I receive resumes from people across the country.   They come in different types of software, some which I cannot open, and different versions of the same software.  If people actually saw what their resumes looked like after all the conversions between software, servers, email providers and operating systems they would be amazed.

Today a lady sent me her resume in Word.  When I opened the document the formatting had changed so much that it went from two to four pages.  The page breaks were way off, different lines spilled over to the next line and the text was not aligned within paragraphs.  When I asked her if she ever emailed her resume to herself or to friends and asked them to review the format she said no.  She was silent as she had sent out this resume for the last couple of months.  Too much formatting had caught up with her.

The simplest method to minimize the impact is to save your resume as a PDF.  With a PDF what you see is what you send.  You do not have to worry about conversions.  This also protects you from people taking your resume, making changes and sending it to others.  Even if you make your resume “read only” all I need to do is save it under a new name and I have full access to the document.

Many job applications ask for resumes to be in Word format.  To make this work, prepare a version of your resume with as little formatting as possible and save it as a RTF file.  This is an option when you save the document in Word.  By minimizing the formatting you are eliminating what can be changed when passed through cyber space.

When your resume is complete and you have it in Word, RTF, and PDF formats send it to a number of friends and colleagues and ask them to review the format for conversion errors.  Better to have a friend tell you about a poorly formatted resume rather than a potential employer.

Need someone to turn to when you have questions in your job search? Want to talk to someone who has the experience to provide valuable guidance? Visit the Career Networking Pro website, http://www.careernetworkingpro.com, to learn how to get hooked up with an experienced career coach.