One-Size-Fits-All Doesn’t Work For Clothes or Resumes
Customized résumés are probably more important today than
ever. It’s not enough in the competitive marketplace to merely catalog your
past achievements in laundry list fashion. Instead each job you apply for
should have a résumé customized to it.
If at all possible, have at least an informational interview to find out as
much as you can about the job requirements and the particulars of the
individual a company wants to hire – a description of the ideal candidate.
THEN write your résumé.
Instead of guessing which skills from your background might fit the job, you
know which ones to include on your résumé because of the information you’ve
gathered. If you can’t get a face-to-face meeting, try to contact the hiring
manager by phone. At the very least, study the job posting and try to read
between the lines. The bare minimum is to reflect the skills and experience
noted in the job listing.
While it’s assumed that anyone looking for a job today has some computer
skills – at least word processing and accessing the Internet – if you know
more than the basics, be sure to include them. Often a separate category
called “Computer Skills” is a prominent part of your résumé listing any
programming languages, networking, hardware or software that you know. For
IT positions, this category should be near the top; for all others it should
come after the education section. Special computer-related training can be
listed in the education section.
Many résumés are scanned into databases. It is imperative that important
skills and knowledge appear as keywords, either as a special section or
within the body of the résumé. These often are considered jargon by people
outside the industry – but critical to identify résumés of potential
candidates. Again, depending on the particular job you’re interested in, a
résumé clearly directed to a specific job might well mention skills and
abilities that wouldn’t ordinarily be part of a generic,
one-size-fits-all-jobs résumé. Just don’t get carried away and forget to
describe what you’ve done in plain English. Often a human resources manager
will be reading the résumé first and s/he needs to understand something
about what you’ve done, too.
If you’re applying for a job at a small company they might not have the
résumé scanning resources of a large corporation. For these jobs a
well-written résumé is key. Of course, a résumé free of misspellings,
awkward sentence structure and irregular formatting is important for all
jobs. No matter how a résumé is first screened, it will be read – probably
by 2-3 people.
Would you go to an interview with coffee stains on your tie or dress? Of
course not. Your résumé is the first time an employer meets you. One
misspelled word and it’s as if you had coffee stains. And this means more
than just using the spell checker – it won’t pick up homonyms (those words
that sound alike but are spelled differently) like “there, they’re and
their,” “site and sight,” etc. Have a friend read your résumé before you
send it out – via e-mail or snail mail – to catch any possible errors. Just
be sure the friend knows how to spell!
It’s important that you send a hard copy of your résumé each time you e-mail
one. Employers are taking more time in making hiring decisions these days.
Your e-mail résumé will arrive at one time and the hard copy at a later
date. In effect you get two opportunities to be “looked at” for the
position. The styles for a standard, paper résumé and a “cyber” résumé are
slightly different. All the formatting that makes a paper résumé look good
are gone from the cyber version. For more information about creating an
effective cyber résumé go to www.job-hunt.org and read the article on cyber
résumés by Susan Joyce of NETability, Inc.
If all this talk about résumés makes you uncomfortable, you can always seek
help in writing yours. There are several online resources where you provide
the basic information and for a fee receive a completed résumé in both
electronic and paper formats. You can build and post a résumé on many job
posting sites such as monster.com, flipdog.com, hotjobs.com, yahoo.com and
others.
One warning: Once your résumé is posted on the Internet it’s not so easy to
get it off. Be sure that you want the visibility and possible lack of
privacy of the Internet. More than one person has lost a job because the
company recruiter searched the Internet and found that employee’s posted
résumé. Oops.
Be résumé savvy and land yourself an interview for a great next job! Just
remember – one job, one résumé. One size doesn’t fit all.
Jan Cannon, MBA, PhD, has over 10 years of experience helping clients to
find work that they enjoy through career coaching and resume preparation. She
was an online expert with CIO.com and jobfindtoday.com and currently provides
online content to the Career Connection of the Boston Herald (
http://print.jobfind.com ).
Jan speaks to groups and leads workshops on making career choices, networking,
finding jobs, and staying motivated. She teaches courses on entrepreneurship
for those interested in starting their own businesses. Jan has Myers Briggs™
MBTI™ and FirstStepFastTrack™ certifications and offers Inscape™ DiSC
assessments.
Jan's book on senior job search will be published by Capital Press in
April 2005.
Career Tips
Career Books
Career Magazines
If you are a career coach, email
webmaster@chicagojobresource or
webmaster@ExecutiveJobResource for details on how to contribute to the
websites:
Chicago Job Resource and
Executive Job Resource.
Career Coach Institute - Want to become a
CERTIFIED career coach?
CCI has just unveiled an entirely new format for our career coach training, combining our one-of-a-kind self-paced core training, tele-classes,
and mentor coaching into a blended learning approach designed to fit your
changing needs.
Home | About | Links | Privacy | Search
