An Effective Resume

As a result of the downturn in the economy, there are a lot of people today who find themselves either out of a job or quite nervous about keeping the job they have. We've heard about how the economy is improving, but so far that improvement has not filtered down to the employment figures.

Understandably, the current state of affairs has motivated many to start thinking about putting their resumes in shape, either to help them get a job now if they need one or to be prepared "just in case something happens."

Most of the resumes I see in my recruiting business and in my consulting with candidates who need help marketing themselves are not written or formatted in such a way that they will get the attention of a hiring manager. The main reason is that these resumes are mostly focused on features about the candidate rather than the benefits that will accrue to the company or individual who hires them. People don't buy (or hire) based on facts about you. They hire based on benefits that will come to them as a result of hiring you.

It used to be that a skill set alone could get you a good job back when we were in a seller's market. However, we've been in a buyer's market for a couple of years now, and the rules are completely different. There are a lot of people who have the necessary skill sets for every job, so companies can afford to be very picky about who they interview and hire. That's why your resume has to focus on the benefits to them rather than features about you.

Another common problem that I see with resumes is misspelled words. You get a little "poetic license" to write incomplete sentences and sentence fragments for abbreviation purposes in a resume, but there is no allowance given for a misspelled word. That's a resume killer, and it's so unnecessary because of the tools available today to check your spelling before you send the resume to someone.

In my consulting practice with job seekers, I hear one refrain over and over that so many people think is a "rule" for resumes; that is, that a resume has to be just one page. I don't know who came up with that silly "rule", but it's completley off base. In all the years I've been sending resumes to my corporate clients, I've never heard one of them say that they didn't like a resume because it was more than one page. A resume should be as long as it needs to be...no more, no less. If you make the first page good enough, the reader will want to look at the next page as well. In fact, if you have been in your career for a while and have some "skins on the wall", it's doubtful that you can produce a one-page document that gives a good represenation of you to a hiring manager.

If you are concerned or confused about your resume, send it to us for a free evaluation. We will send you a detailed e-mail...no phone calls...with a thorough analysis of your resume. We'll tell you if it's a good one, and if we can make it better, we'll tell you specifically what it needs and how we can help you with it. You can either make the changes yourself or we can do it for you.

Send your resume as an e-mail attachment in Microsoft Word or PDF format to ken@austincareerservices.com. Within a few days you will get an e-mail back from us with our analysis.

Get the Resume Right

For the first few years I was in the recruiting business, the biggest frustration was when I knew that I had a great candidate for a position, but that candidate was rejected out of the box because the client company didn't like the resume. The people I was recruiting were very well qualified for the jobs, but often they wouldn't even get an interview because the hiring manager at the client company just didn't get a good feeling about the candidate from the resume.

For a while I thought that the solution was to find candidates who had better resumes, but what I found was that most people were using variations of the same format. They would find a template somewhere on the internet or from the resume of a friend or relative, and then just put in their own information. They would send out these resumes "en masse" and wait for the calls to start coming in.

Finally, after enough rejections to fill a large barrel, I began to think that maybe the problem was that the resumes just weren't doing a good job of letting the hiring companies know who these people really were, and why they would be a good fit for the jobs. So, I began to ask the employers what they wanted to see and what they didn't want to see on these resumes. It was like the light came on in the darkness. That's when I began to fully understand something that should have been so simple in the beginning; that is, companies hire people, not just skill sets or experiences...and most of the resumes that I and these companies were seeing didn't say much at all about the people behind them.

The result was that I began to scrutinize the resumes very carefully before I sent them to employers. I'd ask myself, "If this is all I can learn about this person, do I want to meet him/her?" More often than not, the answer was a resounding "NO". What I noticed was that when candidates followed all the resume "rules", they were unlikely to get an interview. When they ignored most of the rules and told a little about themselves, they started getting interviews and job offers.

My business went up nearly 60% when I started reviewing and revising candidate resumes.

In this economy, job opportunities are too precious to waste. A candidate whose resume is rejected outright rarely gets a second chance. That's why it's so critical to get it right the first time.

At Austin Career Services, that's what we do. We help individuals who are very good at what they do, but don't know how to market themselves. It all starts with the resume. The only purpose of the resume is to help you get an interview. That's all it does. After that, there are other important steps in the job hunting process, such as the interview, compensation negotitation, and how to leave your current position in the right manner.

We will discuss those areas in another post.