Effectve Resumes

Job hunters who email their resumes to employers may be doing more than just saving on postage. They also will have a clear advantage over their competitors for the same position. According to a recent survey by OfficeTeam, an online job search company, the number of hiring managers who prefer to receive resumes electronically has shot up 44 percentage points in just two years. Nearly half of the executives surveyed (48%) prefer the email route compared to snail mail. Perhaps the speed with which business is conducted and labor shortages are making employers more decisive. In 1998, for example, 64% of respondents had no preference in how they received a job candidate’s resume. By 2000, only 19% expressed similar indifference.

First of all, let’s review the general rules for writing a resume, whether it’s electronic or traditional. A savvy resume follows certain rules that increase the possibility that the resume will be read.

Most of these rules relate to a series of deadly resume errors reported by employers. The most common mistakes occur when job candidates fail to keep the purpose of their resume in mind. Most errors kill a resume even before it gets fully read. The resume is literally "dead upon arrival." At best, these errors leave negative impressions that are difficult to overcome at this or any other point in the hiring process. Remember, recruiters have two major concerns in mind when reading your resume:

a) They are looking for excuses to eliminate you from further consideration.

b) They are looking for evidence to consider you for a job interview; in other words, how much value you will add to their operations.

Concentrate, instead, on providing supports for being considered for a job interview. Make sure your resume is not "dead on arrival."

To ensure against this, avoid these most 20 common electronic/traditional resume errors reported by employers:

1. A resume that is not related to the employer’s interests or needs with experience irrelevant to the position under consideration. This means that you need to customize your resume, the cover letter, and your career objective for each job you’re applying for.

2. A resume that is too long, short, or condensed. One of the biggest advantages of an electronic resume is that the traditional 2-page limit is useless. Capitalize on your experiences by telling short stories about your successes, not just your time on a job.

3. Poorly designed format and an unattractive appearance in the resume. This is very important in building an electronic resume because you have no idea what the size of the monitor of the recruiter who will be looking at your resume. Keep your margins very wide.

4. Misspellings, bad grammar, and wordiness are killers. Use your spell and grammar checker before sending anything. Send your electronic resume to a friend to edit it before sending it to a potential employer.

5. Poor punctuation distracts a recruiter from concentrating on your experiences, skills, and talents. Use very little punctuation or fancy bullets in your electronic resume.

6. Lengthy phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. Use a separate keyword section to emphasize your technical and people skills. You can find keywords in the job description, company website, and hundreds more in my book, NetWork, that is available from www.1stbooks.com in an online version.

7. Too slick, amateurish, or "gimmicky". Use the templates for professional electronic resumes in NetWork.

8. Too boastful or dishonest. A little puffing about your accomplishments is okay, but make sure that you can document your accomplishments, education, certifications, memberships, etc.

9. Critical categories, experience, and skills missing. There is a peculiar amnesia that overcomes folks over the age of 40. They tend to minimize their skills and achievements for some strange reason. Ask your mother, minister, spouse, and/or lifelong friend to reinforce all your wonderful qualities and attainments and incorporate them, where applicable, into your resume.

10. Poorly organized, hard to understand or requires too much interpretation. Decide from the beginning whether you’re going to use a functional resume or a chronological one. Blending the two is a recipe for disaster.

11. Unexplained time gaps. Be honest about layoffs or firings that you’ve had. In this day and age, employers have come to expect some gaps. They’ve probably had some themselves. Describe why these gaps occurred and what you did during the interim. An employer will be impressed if you took a sabbatical for more education, cared for a baby or elderly family member, volunteered in an organization, etc.

12. Does not convey accomplishments or a pattern of performance from which the reader can predict future performance. Your objective should explain succinctly what you’ve already achieved and what your aspirations are so the reader will clearly understand the flow in your resume of experiences.

13. Text does not support objective. This is why it’s very important to customize each resume you submit so that your experiences emphasize your objective.

14. Unclear or vague objective. Too often I read platitude statements that job hunters write such as "proven professional who wants opportunity to grow." Carefully read the job description and paraphrase it in your objective.

15. Lacks credibility and content; includes lots of fluff and "canned" resume language.

16. Appears over-qualified or under-qualified for the position. Do your research on the company by using www.vault.com, www.hoovers.com, as well as reading every page of the company’s website. Online business journals, www.fortune.com, www.usworks.com and www.forbes.com also have tons of information for you to determine whether the company is right for you and whether you’ll be joining at a level where you’ll be challenged in a healthy fashion.

17. Includes a photo and lots of personal information, such as height, weight, and age. HR folks are scared stiff of being involved in discrimination suits. They are not allowed to know your race and age so don’t give it to them. This means that you should remove dates of your previous employment.

18. Lacks sufficient contact information (i.e., telephone or fax number) or appears somewhat anonymous (uses a P.O. Box for an address). Use any one of the popular free email services if you’re employed and have a company email address that you’d rather not reveal. Juno, rocket, hotmail, yahoo each have good email services for job hunters.

19. Constantly refers to "I" and appears self-centered; fails to clearly communicate what he or she will likely do for the employer. Incorporate into your comments about previous employment how you reduced costs or improved productivity.

20. Includes "red flag" information such as being fired or incarcerated, confessing health or performance problems, or stating salary figures, including salary requirements that may be too high or too low. These are very convenient reasons for your resume to hit the bit basket or the garbage can! Don’t ever state salary figures even if the ad asks for them. Be prepared to answer that question at an interview, after you’ve researched salary ranges. Check out www.usworks.com for salary information on a city and regional level. Salary.com, monster.com, wetfeet.com are also very helpful resources.

Avoiding these 20 deadly sins will lead you to the top of the pile in consideration by potential employers. In summary, here’s what your electronic resume should look like:

To: the email address in the job posting

Subject: Write out what the job is

Cover letter: Include a short cover letter that describes which position you’re applying for and how to matches with your career objective.

Signature: Use a signature file that includes your email address

DO NOT ATTACH YOUR RESUME; simply copy and paste it below your cover letter.

Contents of the electronic resume:

Objective: Write a specialized objective for this particular job

Keywords: Use nouns, verbs, and short phrases to describe your experiences, people skills, educational background, etc. Separate each of them with a space. Use up to 50 keywords.

Experiences: Write short phrases about each of your previous job experiences and emphasize your accomplishments.

Other information: Note your computer skills, foreign languages, personal interests, certificates, licenses, memberships and involvement in professional organizations, etc.

Next month we’ll look at more tips in writing an electronic resume and using keywords effectively. Feel free to contact me re questions or concerns about using the Internet in your job search. I can be reached at jlommel@WorkforceAssociates.com Happy job search!