Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Storytelling As A Resume Strategy | Tim’s Strategy™
“I have never met a boring person, but from time to time I’ve failed to ask the right question.”
Spend some time in a networking event, and chances are that the people who you will remember most are the ones with whom you exchanged stories. Hiring managers will tell you after a day of interviewing candidates, the ones who stood out were the ones who had an interesting story to tell.
Good marketing is good storytelling. And a job search is all about good marketing. But if you wait for the interview to tell your stories, you may be missing an important opportunity to distinguish yourself from the crowd. Stories, when told in the right way, to the right audience, can be a terrific resume differentiator, the key to standing out in a pool of qualified candidates.
So, what are the critical success factors to making a story-telling strategy work? Find out on my guest blog post on Tim’s Strategy: Ideas for Job Search, Career and Life
Five Statistics That Matter for Your Job Search
Each year for the past nine years CareerXroads has conducted a survey about the sources of new hires. The most recent survey (full report available here) solicited source of hire stats for 43 large companies, who collectively filled 176,000 positions in 2009. While the sample size is small, and arguments can and have been made about the accuracy and applicability of the statistics, the survey results are nevertheless revealing, and have some important implications for how jobseekers invest their job hunt energy.
- Internal transfers and promotions were the source of 51% of all full-time hires in 2009. This is up by 19% from 2006.
- Why it matters: It is the perennial jobseeker debate: should I take a lower level or lower paid position, just to get back in the workforce, or should I wait for my dream job? Three years ago, it may have been good advice to hold out for your dream job because two thirds of positions were being filled externally. Today, it may not be such a good strategy. If you can get your foot in the door of a good company, you stand a better chance of being able to work up to your dream job.
- Referrals account for 26.7% of all external hires, and yield an average of one hire for every 15 received.
- Why it matters: You hear it all the time: if you want to land a new job you must network, network, network. This stat demonstrates why. More than a quarter of jobs are filled with somebody who leveraged their network of contacts to get a referral. Outside of internal transfers and promotions, referrals were the single largest source of new hires. BUT, and it’s a big one, nearly 75% of external hires were NOT referrals, which means that as a jobseeker you need to have a multi-pronged job search strategy.
- Job boards and corporate career sites accounted for 22.3% and 13.2% of new hires respectively, 35.5% in total.
- Why it matters: There is a lot of noise about job boards being dead. Don’t believe it. Don’t spend all day, every day, scanning job boards, but do make sure that you are checking in on a regular basis to see who is hiring. Use aggregator sites such as Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com to monitor multiple boards at once, and Linkup.com to monitor new postings on corporate boards.
- Third party recruiters accounted for 2.3% of all external hires in 2009, down from 5.2% in 2005.
- Anecdotal auxiliary stat on this: a typical recruiter will have some kind of contact with an average of 100 candidates a week, but will place a fraction of 1% of them.
- Why it matters: A lot of jobseekers have the misconception of the importance of recruiting firms in the grand scheme of job placements (a lot of recruiters do too). Candidates are often outraged about recruiters who focus exclusively on passive candidates, and begrudge the seeming injustice of it. But 97.7% of jobs aren’t filled through external recruiters. Those 2.3% of jobs that are tend to have very specific technical, sales or leadership pre-requisites that are hard to find, or have a mismatch between the location of the talent pool and the location of the job. Be findable by recruiters, but don’t invest a huge part of your job search energy on trying to break down the recruiter’s door. And don’t sweat it if the recruiters aren’t returning your calls.
- 2.3% of external new hires were people who walked in the door
- Why it matters: It’s a comparatively small number, but here’s the thing. Most jobseekers don’t do it. My guess is less than 20% do it. In fact, I’d be venture to say that less than 10% do it. This means that 23% of jobseekers who are so bold as to walk into a company and ask for the job actually end up landing a job. Polish up your cold-calling technique if you want to be one of them.
So jobseekers, now that you have some insights on sources of hire, how will you change your job hunt strategy?
A Conversation With David Graziano – Social Recruiting Strategist
If you follow David Graziano on twitter, read his articles, or listen to his contributions on call-in programs such as Recruiting Animal blog talk radio, you will already know that he is one of the good guys. With more than 28 years of experience as both a corporate and third-party recruiter, David has seen a lot of changes in the industry, and has watched recruiting firms come and go. Recognized as one of the 25 most influential recruiters on twitter, he is a vocal critic of a recruiting industry subculture that treat candidates as commodities. I had the opportunity to speak with David recently about his concerns.
How did you get started in recruiting, and are you any good at it?
I kind of came into recruiting through the backdoor. I am a master’s level clinical psychologist, and when I first relocated to St. Louis I saw an ad for a recruiter. I thought it might be a good interim job while I looked for a placement in my field, so I applied and got hired right away. It was a sweat shop. High volume, lots of pressure. The technology wasn’t there yet, but you could see the early warning signs that transactional recruiting was coming. But my background in counselling gave me a leg up over other recruiters in the firm, and I did what nobody had ever done in the history of the company: I made my first placement within five days of being hired. I had empathy, and I understood the importance of building trust. Instead of transactional recruiting I did relational recruiting. I did my best to be genuine when I talked to candidates and hiring managers, and I wasn’t afraid to ask questions. This made it easier for me to recognize candidates who were going to be a good fit for my client’s needs. Not just a good fit on paper, but a good fit for the long haul.
Later, I worked as a corporate contract recruiter, and the recruiting center relied on ATS technology. The firm’s average time to fill a job was 75 days, but their goal was to reduce it to 65 days. I did 10 days better than that. My time to fill was 55 days, and I did it through relational recruiting. If somebody called me, I stopped to talk to them. Why? Because if a candidate is going to pick up the phone and call me, that speaks volumes about them. And in a 15 minute conversation, I can find out more about a person’s talents, knowledge, goals, and motivators than an ATS system could ever discover. Sure I leveraged the ATS, I made sure that the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed. But I took a transactional recruiting model and made it relational, and that was the key to my success.
What do you see going wrong with recruiting practices today?
I deplore the transactional nature of the recruiting business today. We are all technocrats, 1984 Orwell-style, and technology is vastly taking over relational recruiting. Recruiters and corporations are under the misconception that an application tracking system will take the place of engaging, communicating, connecting, and this behaviour is permeating the industry across third party, corporate and staff recruiting. It’s all “don’t call us, we’ll call you”, and candidates are being treated like a commodity.
There’s a huge push toward transactional recruiting, especially in this economy where there is such pressure to reduce hiring costs. Corporations at the senior level are thinking that their sophisticated applicant tracking system is reducing their cost per hire, but they are deluding themselves because they are measuring the wrong things. They aren’t considering the time to fill a position, the lost opportunity costs, the impact of a black-hole application process on their employer brand. They don’t understand the value of having a good recruiting process that is built on people, not just technology.
Is it fixable?
Frankly, I don’t know if the problem is fixable, but I think it can be influenced. People like Jerry Albright, who understand that picking up the phone is the primary way of making things happen, they are quietly following a relational model of recruiting. It’s not really revolutionary, good recruiters have known it for years. But there is more urgency now if the recruiting industry wants to survive. The recession has only made it worse. Recruiters aren’t recruiters anymore, they are resume sourcers, paper hangers.
There is a lot of buzz about social media and recruiting through social media. As if social media is going to be the new recruiting panacea. Tools like twitter and Facebook are just another form of handshake. The value is still in relationship building, and this takes time. You won’t magically improve your cost of hiring by setting up a twitter account and blasting job ads. Companies like Sodexo know that. They are actively online, building candidate relationships. Most companies haven’t figured that out yet.
Corporations need to be taught how to use recruiters more effectively. We can save them money, we can improve the quality of hire, we can shorten the time to fill jobs, if we go beyond a transactional model. Perhaps I need to offer a series of seminars on how to work with recruiters. It isn’t all the fault of the corporations. Recruiters haven’t been all that transparent or forthcoming. Some recruiters are afraid of looking stupid, so they don’t ask questions. They are afraid of risking the client relationship, so they don’t push back when corporate processes aren’t working. It’s the emperor’s new clothes thing. So they end up with job descriptions that are poorly written, or jobs where there is a hidden agenda, and because recruiters aren’t taking the time to really talk with the hiring manager, they aren’t seeing the intangibles. They just get told “no, he’s not the right candidate” or “bring me somebody else”, but they aren’t finding out why.
If jobseekers want to fight back against a “candidate as commodity” talent acquisition culture, what do you suggest that they do?
If you get a call from a third-party recruiter, ask questions. Not just about the job, but about the recruiter himself. Or herself. Figure out if this is even a person you want to work with. Ask how long they’ve been in the business. What kind of success have they had? Who are some of their customers? What do they know about your current skill set – the marketplace you work in? As a candidate you have the right to ask this stuff, and if the recruiter resists telling you, they may not be somebody you want to work with. Also, pay attention to whether the recruiter understands the position being filled. With the tools available for a recruiter to get up to speed on different verticals, there is no excuse for them not to be able to have an intelligent conversation about your industry. But they should also be willing to acknowledge what they don’t know. If they can’t do that, they shouldn’t be in this recruiting space, and you as a jobseeker shouldn’t work with them. Don’t forget, only 5% of jobs are filled through third-party recruiters. You have options.
I’m probably going to get a lot of flack for this, but my recommendation is that, for a lot of companies, jobseekers should by-pass the corporate recruiter altogether. If you see a job that interests you, find out who the hiring manager is, and connect with them. In my experience, most in-house recruiters don’t care about the candidate experience, and they add little value to the hiring process. These are the ones I hear from all the time saying “I’m too busy to speak to every candidate” or “I can’t possibly make all the follow-up calls”. Don’t believe it. Corporate recruiters who think like that just aren’t aggressive enough. There are exceptions, and Sodexo is a shining example, but unfortunately companies like that are rare.
Jobseekers should also learn how the hiring process works so that they can work it to their advantage. Understand the different players – the third-party recruiter, the corporate recruiter, the hiring manager, and who does what, when, and why. Understand the so-called rules, the small-p politics, so you can know which rules can be broken, which ones can be bent, and which ones they absolutely must comply with. It isn’t easy, I know. Jobseekers have to be much more savvy than they did in the past. But using tools like twitter and recruiting blogs can help, because recruiters and HR experts share information with each other that is valuable for jobseekers too.
Are there experts you would recommend that jobseekers follow?
There are some really good people, both corporate recruiters and third-party recruiters, whose voices are helping to bring integrity to recruiting and talent acquisition. Lots of them are on twitter, and jobseekers would do well to listen in on the conversation. My recommendations include:
- @Greg_Savage: Greg Savage, CEO of Aquent International
- @Deandacosta: Dean Da Costa, Senior Talent Sourcer/Recruiter with Microsoft
- @CincyRecruiter: Jennifer McClure, Founder of Unbridled Talent LLC
- @SodexoCareers: Kerry Noone, Head of Marketing & Employer Branding for Sodexo
- @sullivanmarkd: Mark Sullivan, Director of Recruiting for Time Warner Cable
- @BooleanBlackBlt: Glenn Cathay, Vice President of Recruiting at Kforce
- @Ray_anne: Rayanne Thorne, Marketing Director at Broadbean Technology
- @lruettimann aka @punkrockHR: Laurie Ruettimann, HR Blogger and co-founder of New Media Services LLC
- @ResearchGoddess: Amybeth Hale, Editor of ERE Media’s The Fordyce Letter & SourceCon -
- @AmitaiGivertz: Amitai Givertz, Principal at AMG Management Advisors and Program Leader at Brown Bag Recruiter
- @animal: twitter persona of Michael Kelemen, Canadian Headunter and host of the Recruiting Animal Show
- @BillBoorman: Bill Boorman, producer of The Recruiter Unconference events, with TRU Conferences in North America, Europe, and soon in Southeast Asia and Australia.
- I would also recommend Jerry Albright. He’s not on twitter any more, which is a shame because his voice is missed, but you can catch him as host of the Recruiting Animal aftershow.
Follow David Graziano through twitter @DavidGraziano
connect with him on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidgraziano
or follow his blog http://davidgrazianostaffing.blogspot.com/
In Defence of Jobseekers
I don’t know. Maybe it’s the gloomy economic forecasts. Maybe it was listening to a particularly brutal Recruiting Animal show. Or maybe it was hearing from a 55 year-old who landed a job after an 18-month job search, only to see the company go bankrupt within two weeks of his start date. Whatever it was, by the end of the week I wasn’t in a chirpy mood, and that’s when I came across a semi-comedic blog post from a corporate recruiter about a jobseeker who had the nerve to use a typewriter to prepare his resume for an IT support position. Now I have tremendous respect for the author, and I know that he goes out of his way to give jobseekers stellar advice. But something about the post didn’t sit well with me.
Here’s why:
- One in five people in the US do not have access to the internet.
- One in five people who want to work right now, can’t find a job.
- Those groups overlap, and where they do, it’s ugly. Soul-sucking-hopelessness ugly.
I can type up a one page document on the computer in about two minutes. If I tried to do it on a typewriter, even badly, it would take at least 45 minutes. It’s hard, I know, because I used to produce all my university essays that way before I got one of the very-first-ever Mac’s (yes, I’m THAT old). This guy is doing it for Every. Single. Job. He. Applies. To. That takes tenacity. Even more so to walk into every office and hand deliver that resume, and risk the scorn of the person who receives it.
No, the applicant wasn’t qualified for the job he applied to, and he probably knows it. But the reality is that somebody without computer skills in today’s job market is screwed. In fact he probably applied to the job on the slim chance that he could get on-the-job-training to acquire the skills he knows he’s missing. Long term unemployment can make a person desperate and hopeful that way.
One of the pitfalls about being a recruiter or a hiring manager or the HR assistant who screens resumes is that it is too easy to become jaded about the people who are looking for work. Right wing rants to the contrary, most people I know who are out of work right now would rather be gainfully employed. They would rather not be typing up and hand delivering hundreds of resumes to people who will give those documents less than three seconds of eye time. And they would most definitely rather not be the laugh-for-the-day when their best efforts fall far short of the high bar that has been set for how to land a job in a tough economy. If we can offer jobseekers nothing else right now, we can at least offer them acknowledgement for their efforts and respect for their dignity. I don’t think that’s asking much.
Okay, hopping off my soap box now.
Jobseekers, Bland Is Not a Good Look for You
I was ready for a change. There were things that weren’t making me happy. I was bored with the same-old same-old. How hard can it be, I thought. People do it themselves all the time. If you listen to the ads, they make it seem so easy. Just buy the right off-the-shelf product, follow the easy instructions, and voila, a brand new me. At a fraction of the cost of hiring a professional. So I did it. And now, I have orange hair. Orange is not a good look for me.
There are some things that are worth spending money on to get the right professional. For me, hiring a colourist is clearly one of them. For a jobseeker, hiring a professional resume writer may be another.
Why Hiring a Professional to Write Your Resume May Make Sense for You
- Having worked with hundreds, if not thousands of clients, an experienced resume pro will have a good idea of who your competition is likely to be. This means that we have unique insights on what it will take to make you – specifically – stand out from the crowd. We can be objective about what to include or exclude from your resume, and can create a profile that grabs the right kind of attention from the right target audience.
- Our skill isn’t just in the writing, its in the questioning. Good resume pros know what questions to ask you in order to get the gems to put in your resume. We have honed the art of interviewing, probing, pulling out the details that can be used to create a compelling career story.
- Good resume pros dedicate hours each week on researching the job market. We know what skills are in-demand, what keywords are becoming passe, which employers use which job boards, which employers don’t use job boards at all. These insights mean that we can fast-track the time you would otherwise have to invest in getting ready for your job search.
- While we typically work arms-length from recruiters in order to be a neutral advocate for our clients, good resume pros take the time to nurture strong networking relationships with recruiters. This means that we can get a heads-up on hiring trends. We can tell you why calling yourself a Farmer instead of Hunter right now will leave you dead in the water if you are looking for a sales position, for example, or why using “Public Relations” instead of “Public Affairs” could result in greater hits on your resume.
- By leveraging our recruiter and HR network, good resume pros are able to get independent feedback on our product, in order to make sure that it’s going to work for our target audience. After all, it doesn’t matter if you are tickled pink about your new resume, if recruiters aren’t impressed.
Just like off-the-shelf colour kits, there are many books on how to write your resume. You can find tons of samples, many of them submitted by resume professionals. You should be aware though that we rarely submit our best work for publication. Why? Part of it has to do with protecting competitive intelligence. An edgy format, a unique design, really meaty content, loses its edge if its copied by 10,000 other jobseekers. Mostly, it has to do with the target audience for the book – in order to appeal to as broad a range of jobseekers as possible, the samples tend to be fairly generic and bland. Jobseekers who copy them end up looking fairly generic and bland too. And jobseekers? Bland is not a good look for you.
How to Ruin Your Brand at the Press of a Send Button
Grandma knew the importance of brand management. In Grandma’s days, children were not allowed out of the house with holes in their underwear for fear of the proverbial ambulance ride. Housewives cleaned thoroughly under their beds and chesterfields lest dust bunnies be discovered and whispered about. Business owners were careful not to do anything that could alienate their local customers. Grandma and her compatriots did brand management by instinct, although they called it protecting one’s reputation. Small-town living made brand management a matter of every day survival.
The internet is moving us back to the imperatives of small town living. We are in a global village where reputations can be ruined at the speed of light. The examples are numerous: an instant of road rage, captured on traffic cam, forever brands the corporate executive as a lunatic. An ill-considered comment forever brands the politician as a moron. A funny caption on a Facebook picture forever brands a jobseeker as a problem-drinker. Fortunately, we seem to be taking heed of these brand accidents, and many of us are paying attention to our online footprint.
After years of social media and email debauchery, we are re-learning the value of circumspection. At least, some of us are. Today I was cc’d on an email to a local volunteer about a dispute the sender was having with a recreational sports organization in which they were both involved. The email was angry and inflammatory, verged on slanderous, but anybody who has experience with volunteer-run sports leagues will recognize it as par for the course. What was unique was that the sender elected to cc dozens of other people who were not involved in the dispute – myself included – and signed the email using her professional position as the owner and president of 25-year old small home services firm.
This business owner had done the email equivalent of going out with hole-filled underwear, exposing her dust bunnies, and alienating her local customers. While I’m sure that it was emotionally satisfying in the moment to craft her email and press the send button, it was clear that the sender did not consider the long term impact of her email message. She had just announced to nearly one hundred households in her target market that, as president of her company, she was somebody who was prepared to resort to mud slinging and petty tactics.
And as Grandma will tell you, a reputation once ruined cannot easily be mended.
Afraid You’ll Be Laid Off? Don’t Be Passive, Take Control!
I came across a couple of interesting surveys this week. The first one, an employee attitude survey, indicated that nearly 1 in 5 people who are currently employed fear that they will lose their jobs due to corporate downsizing. The second survey, from Mental Health America, indicated that 82% of people, when faced with a stressful situation, turn on the television or rely on other forms of distraction. There are probably few things in life more stressful than facing a real or potential layoff, but this is no time to be passive or numbed out. If you think your company may be considering layoffs, take control.
- Make sure that you remain a superstar in your current position. Without being a total sycophant, demonstrate through your performance how you add value to the company, and how you contribute to the big picture.
- Take advantage of opportunities to participate in special projects, especially projects involving other departments. The more people in the company who know you and can attest to your strengths, the easier it will be for you to remain gainfully employed, regardless of which side of the retain/layoff tallysheet you end up.
- Psychologically and emotionally prepare for the worst (or for some of you the best) case scenario, that you will be let go.
- Get your home front in order, which includes preparing and sticking to a tight budget.
- If you haven’t been doing it all along, start putting together a portfolio of your success stories, the projects you’ve worked on, copies of your performance reviews, any emails or letters that you’ve received with positive feedback on your performance.
- Take an inventory of the strengths and expertise you have to offer – your value proposition in today’s job market. What kinds of problems are you good at solving, and who currently has those problems? This will help narrow down the target for your job search for your next career move.
- Get your networking tools up to date – names, titles & contact numbers of suppliers, clients, industry associates, company colleagues. This is easier to do while you are still in your job.
- Implement a networking plan that should include online-connecting with at least a couple of new people per week and warm-connecting with people in your current network.
- Start researching companies that you would be interested in moving to, and see who in your network of contacts might have leads into these organizations. Consider current suppliers, clients, consultants and competitors as likely candidate companies.
- Find niche job boards in your field/industry. Set up alerts to let you know when new jobs are posted that fit your target criteria.
- Identify reputable recruiters who specialize in your field.
- Once you have a target for your job search and know what and to whom you are marketing yourself, prepare your resume and LinkedIn profile. For the investment of less than a few day’s salary, you can enlist the services of professional who can help you create a distinctive, targeted career marketing package.
The more you take control of your career now – before you receive notice – the less likely you are to feel paralysed with fear about layoff decisions over which you have no control.
Don’t Fill Your Resume With Sea Junk
I am an inveterate beachcomber. One of my soul-satisfying delights when I’m on vacation is to find interesting bits of sea glass, seashells, broken pottery, and rusty something-or-others, and at the end of a seaside walk I will inevitably return with a few new treasures in my pockets. Over the years I’ve amassed quite a collection of odds and ends, which until recently have been tucked away in boxes, baskets and whatever is handy around the house. This week I decided to consolidate my collection into a single location, and was dismayed to realize exactly how extensive it was. If I didn’t want to be overwhelmed with sea junk, I needed to cull, and I needed to be ruthless in doing so.
Beachcombing Collection
Maintaining your resume over the years can be like that. You create a document to land a job, add bits to it as you progress through your career, until one day you realize you have six or more pages of “sea junk” and no clear idea of how to cull it down into a useful document again.
If you don’t have a clear career brand, if you don’t know who your target audience is, if you don’t understand what their buying motivators are, then it can be hard to decide what to include and what to cut out. Your resume is your career marketing document, a key component of your job search arsenal, and every word, every phrase, every formatting decision must add value from the reader’s point of view. The better you know your target audience, the easier it will be to decide what to include and what to exclude from your resume. By researching your target companies and understanding their pain points, you will be able to go through your resume with a ruthless “so what” editing pen, to ensure that what remains provides a clear and compelling picture of why you are the perfect solution to your target audience’s biggest challenge.
What Is Resume Strategy Anyway?
Today I completed my 600th free resume critique (wild-stab-in-the-dark estimate, but my point is it’s up there). I always take the time to review each resume in detail and provide very specific advice on resume strategy (unless you’ve given me something truly horrendous, I rarely comment on format). But it occurred to me as I was typing up my comments today that I am often repeating myself. It’s not that I’m getting lazy, it’s that I see the same kinds of mistakes being made again and again. So, as a procrastination move because it’s 98 degrees out and much too hot to pack for the trip I will be taking shortly, I’ve decided to put together some of the suggestions I’ve offered this year, as a kind of who’s who on resume strategy.
Objective Statement
- “Instead of using an objective statement, use the title of your target job. It’s okay to change it each time you send your resume out, but if you aren’t sure about the target yet, its premature to write your resume.”
Profile/Summary
- “Consider your resume as a marketing document, you have to write with a particular audience in mind, and you have to know what it is you are selling them.”
- “What is your ideal next company? Is it a mid-sized firm who is looking to take their enterprise infrastructure to the next level of integration and needs a Business Analyst who can bridge the language and thinking of business and technology? Is it a consulting company who helps other firms? What are you particularly good at, and who could use those skills? What ever it is, take the time to define your audience (if you have more than one, you may need different versions), and get really clear on their pain points. Then, write a summary that speaks to their pain points and demonstrates why your background and experience makes you the ideal candidate to solve their problems. In total it should take you less resume real estate to say than it did for me to explain it.”
- “It can be tempting to try to keep your resume general so that you can use it for several different positions, but this strategy will work against you. If you have several different interests or opportunities, then tailor a different profile for each of them.”
- “In today’s job market, everybody is describing themselves as a dynamic, problem-solving team player. It’s the equivalent of ‘new and improved’ in product marketing – nobody buys it.”
Skills
- “Your list of skills should only include things that are directly relevant to the target job.”
- “Put together a list of ten or twelve terms and phrases that describe your expertise – look at sample job ads to make sure you are hitting to top keywords”
- “Make the skills focused on your target job only – somebody who is hiring an IT sales guy doesn’t care that you are good at desktop publishing unless their product or target client is related to desktop publishing.
- You have 26 skills here, and the important stuff is getting lost. See if you can get it down to the top ten. Start by skipping the fluff, because your reader almost certainly will”
Education
- “Since you did a master’s degree, I’m guessing that there was a master’s project, this would be a good place to describe it (one or two bullets at most)”
- “The fact that you are a certified reflexologist is of no relevance to your career goal as an accountant. No, it doesn’t demonstrate your commitment to continuous learning, and no, it doesn’t show that you have a lot of interests other than accounting. Get it out there.”
- “Have your credentials, degrees and professional development in the same section, or at least close together, or a hiring manager may not notice that you have your PMP, MBA and CGA”
- The important part here is the degree that you obtained, not the school you went to. Make sure *that’s* the thing that jumps out.
Experience (New Graduate)
- “Instead of dividing your experience between volunteer and professional, divide it between Relevant Experience, Additional Professional Experience, and Community Involvement. For the items that fit under relevant experience, indicate whether you volunteered or were paid”
Experience (Seasoned Pro)
- “You’ve committed a lot of resume real estate to laying out your responsibilities, but there is nothing attention-grabbing here. Your resume should tell a good story of your career. What was your mandate when you came on board, and how did it change over time? What was happening in the company when you came on board, what challenges did you have to face, what kinds of problems did you help solved. Who did you help, and why did it matter?
- “As you consider what to write here, keep the target in mind, and ask yourself so what, because they certainly will.”
- “No idea what this means, and that’s a bad thing. Give a brief description of what you were actually doing, emphasis on brief. All these ten bullets can be consolidated into one tightly written description – leaves room to focus on accomplishments”
- “You held two different positions with *****. Was this a promotion? If so, its worth showcasing this point – why did they pick you?”
- “This is not a five-verb accomplishment. By over describing it this way, you are diluting it’s impact”
- “Read your resume out loud. Does it sound stilted when you say it? That’s the way it will be perceived by somebody else. Too many adjectives, adverbs and four-syllable power words makes it hard to read, and can come across as ostentatious. Remember, your goal is to make the reader’s job as easy as possible. “
Dated/Non-Relevant Experience
- “This takes up a lot of resume real estate, and unless this is an area you want to get back into, you can cut the details out and summarize this into “previous experience includes four years as a ***********. This will make room for more information/accomplishments on your more recent jobs.”
IT Skills
- “It’s going to be the rare hiring manager who cares that you’ve used Windows 95.”
- “Go through this list with a ruthless editing pen and leave in only the software, hardware, middleware, and methodologies that are in demand for your target job – unless your target company is one with out-dated systems, in which case, leave it in.”
Associations
- “Separate out the professional associations from the philanthropic ones.
- “For the professional associations, did you just pay the annual membership fee, or were you actively involved. If involved, briefly describe how.”
Other Interests
Knittingreadinggardeningwalks on the beachstamp collectingphotography- “International travel: Asia, South Africa, Brazil, Eastern Europe *** this is good to keep in if your target job could require business dealings with other countries”
- “Three-time Ironman competitor (2nd place and 4th place finishes) *** I like this. It demonstrates your drive to succeed and ability to set and achieve goals”
I will continue to provide free critiques, and I will continue to do them one by one, in detail, no template statements. But chances are that if the candidate wasn’t thinking like a marketer when they wrote their resume, my feedback will include some of the points above.
The Passion Myth
If you google “find your passion” you will get 39,000,000 hits. Go to the self-help section of any bookstore and you will see 50 or more volumes on finding your passion, following your passion, living your passion. Every other twitter bio or LinkedIn bio has a reference to “passionate about.” Passion, as they say, is the new black.
So I was hardly surprised when a young friend came to me for career advice, and started the conversation by saying “My job sucks, I’m bored to tears. I just can’t figure out what my passion is”. She spoke as if somewhere, out there, is a single career-related purpose that, if she could but find it, would lead to eternal fulfillment. This was her fifth “it sucks” job in three years, and it was clear that she had fallen for the passion myth.
Myth # 1: I’m not making enough money, so clearly I’m not on the right path.
Reality Bite – Passion does not equate with income.
If you are lucky, you have a passionate interest that feeds your soul and gives lightness to your day. But if you look outside yourself for affirmation or compensation for your passion, you may be in for disappointment. Don’t believe me? Watch the auditions for American and Idol or So You Think You Can Dance, and you’ll see thousands of people hoping that their talents will make them a star. For all but a handful, that dream will be crushed. Many of those crushed enthusiasts will be too embarrassed to ever sing or dance again and that, to me, is tragic. If you are passionate about singing, then sing. If you are passionate about dancing, then dance. But do it because you love to sing and dance. Not because you crave the applause.
Nearly every self-help book or website mentions turning your hobby into a career. Stories abound of people who did exactly that and made millions. Less often told, but exponentially more numerous, are the stories of people who tried to turn their hobbies into an income stream and things didn’t work out the way they expected. The woodworker who stopped getting any joy out of his art because all of his commissions were boring pieces for clients with no imagination. The cooking enthusiast who never got to do any cooking because they spent 95% of their time dealing with the mundane business details involved in running a restaurant.
More practical advice would be to “Find a Job that Pays Reasonably Well So That You Can Afford to Follow Your Passions Outside of Work – but that wouldn’t be a very sexy book title.
Myth #2: ‘Following Your Passion’ is doing work that has meaning instead of being a mindless worker ant.
Reality Bite – All work has meaning – even the boring stuff.
Stop approaching passion as if it were something that you can “find”, like the perfect lifestyle accessory, or something that you “do”, like saving the world. Start thinking of passion as a way of being, a quality that you can and must cultivate.
When it comes to our work, we choose to be passionate. Or not. We choose to be actively engaged. Or not. We choose to be conscientious. Or not. We choose to treat customers and colleagues with courtesy and consideration. Or not. We choose to give more than is expected. Or not. We choose to see ourselves as part of the big picture. Or not.
People who can manage to be engaged, conscientious, courteous, considerate, giving and enthusiastic even while slinging hashbrowns or counting widgets *have* passion. And that passion gets noticed. And that notice results in new opportunities to do something more challenging and interesting. You are only a mindless worker ant if that is how you choose to see yourself.
Does That Mean I Shouldn’t Leave My Horrible Job?!??!
Of course not. But take the time to honestly figure out what makes the job horrible. If the problem is your attitude, your expectations, your need for applause, your passion myths, then chances are good that the next job you find isn’t going to be any less horrible than this one, and you are not going to be one inch closer to finding your passion.
Meet Karen Siwak
An award-winning Certified Résumé Strategist, Karen has crafted top calibre career transition packages for thousands of clients. Her specialty is helping people identify and articulate their unique brands and value propositions, and she is passionate about empowering clients with the tools, strategies and confidence to take control of their career search. Read more...
Menu
Recent Posts
Listen to Karen Siwak
Online Career Resources
