We all know how important it is to ensure the final résumé product is perfect. This is one area that cannot afford to be overlooked. Oftentimes, you review the document so many times it starts to blur and you can miss something glaring. Having someone else check your résumé and cover for you is a great way to make sure everything is perfect. Before you do that though, here is a checklist for you to follow on your own:
Spelling and Grammar: Perhaps the most egregious mistakes are made in these two areas. The following is some guidelines to make sure you are delivering a error free document:
- Use a dictionary / thesaurus when you write. If you are not certain of how something is spelled, look it up. I also recommend getting a copy of the Little Blue Book of Grammar.
- Be careful of tenses on your résumé. Your current experience should be in the present tense. If you are using a combination paragraph / bullet format the paragraph portion of the current role should be in the present tense; make all of your bullets in the past tense.
- Be sure to capitalize all proper nouns.
- Make sure you write numbers and dates in a consistent manner. Numbers one through nine should be spelled out. 10 and above should be written in numeric format.
- If you start a bullet with a number, that number should be spelled out.
Punctuation: Punctuation is another area where people seem to make a lot of errors. All punctuation should be consistent throughout the document.
- Whether or not you choose to use periods at the ends of the bullets in the résumé is not the issue. The issue is that if you use them, they need to be present throughout the document. CONSISTENCY IS KING.
- When writing quotes the punctuation goes inside the quote – not outside.
Consistency: Whatever you decide to do on your résumé you must present it in a consistent format.
- If you bold a title, all of the job titles should be in bold. If you write a date in the following manner: November 2007-December 2009, all dates should be written the same way.
- Make sure that the spacing of your document is the same throughout. Font size and style should also be the same to avoid the résumé looking scattered and disorganized.
- When using acronyms, first spell out the words and put the acronym in (parentheses). You can then use the acronym going forward.
Design and Layout: If you think that the design and layout of your document is not that important – you are wrong.
- Do not use a tiny font that people cannot read except with a magnifying glass.
- If you have enough compelling and relevant content to fill two pages, go for it. There is no law on the books dictating how long your résumé should be. My old college professor said a written document should be like a bikini – long enough to cover the topic, but short enough to remain interesting.
- Do not over use italics, underline, bold or other features that will make your résumé distracting.
- Put your name, phone, email and address at the top of the page. On page two your name, phone and email should appear. If the two pages are separated, the reader will know that the second page is yours.
- For physical copies you should use a high quality linen or bond paper in cream or white. The cover and résumé should be printed on the same paper.
Debra Wheatman, CPRW, CPCC is the founder and Chief Career Strategist of CareersDoneWrite, a premier career services provider focused on developing highly personalized career roadmaps for senior leaders and executives across all verticals and industries.
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The formula expressed in the title sounds so simple yet for some is difficult to achieve. So let’s together demystify the two elements for getting a job offer.
The Résumé
Because of the enormously large pool of job applicants nowadays, even a very good résumé may not get singled out when compared with the many outstanding résumés. It’s a competition for sure, and only, say, five résumés might be considered for invitations to face-to-face interviews. So, how does one put together an excellent résumé? That depends: if you have good writing skills, you can draft a résumé and then have some people whose proficiency and judgment you trust review and edit it for you until it becomes excellent. Consult career coaches, human resources professionals, or recruiters. Hopefully, you’ve developed good relationships with such people, who will agree to help by expressing their opinions.
If you are not skilled with language, I suggest you seek a professional résumé writer who has performed work for others and brought them success. This is a good investment, since otherwise, you’re merely spreading around a noncompetitive résumé that brings no action–and you will never find out why. Many people fall into that trap, and they therefore lose time and of course the opportunity to make money. So, how does one know whether one’s résumé is excellent? The answer is very simple: Excellent résumés get action. The rest don’t–or do only very rarely.
The Interview
Congratulations! Your résumé was attractive and intriguing enough to persuade a hiring manager to want a conversation with you in order to explore your candidacy for an opening, competitively with a few others. Now the real competition starts. All of those who have been invited to interview stood out too and could potentially take the job, meaning that they have the skills for it. But the hiring manager has another need to satisfy–and that is whether you fit and will be committed to the company. Ascertaining whether you fit is very much psychological on the part of the hiring manager, who is asking himself whether your future peers would accept you, whether you and he are aligned ideologically, whether his own boss would consider you a good hire, and whether you represent a promising investment. And there are other, similar questions, whose answers can be rather subjective.
The hiring manager’s final area of vital interest has to do with whether you seem committed to the job. He wants to ensure (1) that you have potential for growth within the company, (2) that you won’t move to a competitor if the company goes through some difficult times and someone else is offering you a fraction more compensation, and (3) that you deliberately targeted this company as an employer.
If you can convince the hiring manager that you’re the right choice, if you answer questions properly, and if you project positivity and energy, your chances for getting an offer are good. Good luck on your next job. Feel good about yourself. You deserve it.
Alex Freund is the founder of Landing Expert–Career Coaching. His Web site includes a current and comprehensive list of job search networking groups in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and the city of New York, and the site is visited by thousands of people every month. Landing Expert is a premier career-coaching service with the objective of preparing job seekers for interviews. Alex’s clients are gaining knowledge, receiving marketing material, and acquiring the know-how to beat the competition.
Alex can be reached at:
609-333-8866
Nobody likes to be a nobody, but unfortunately, that’s what you are at the beginning of the job search process, provided you’ve just joined the ranks of those in transition. Those who are the decision makers about your future do not initially know anything about you, so you have the chance to impress them, and you want to make darn sure it’s a very good impression.
So, how are you going to positively influence hiring managers, human resources folks, and recruiters? To start with, record brief greetings on both your answering machine at home and your mobile phone, and project a clear, mature, businesslike, and overall positive message. Your children are cute, I’m sure, but leave their greetings for sharing with family and friends and not potential employers. Next, get into the habit of answering your phone professionally. Answering with “Hello, this is John Doe,” with a friendly and inviting tone of voice, is best. Get into that habit even if you think you can identify the person via caller ID. Don’t make exceptions to the rule, because you’ll be sorry if you didn’t answer properly when it’s someone you really want to impress. You also want to make sure your e-mail address is nothing less than professional. An address like bigmama@yahoo.com or anything cute or sexy could be detrimental to that first impression.
Your next opportunity to create the right image is via your résumé. This is probably the single most important document you’ll be evaluated by, and it will determine whether the hiring folks want to invite you to an interview or not. Remember that the first impression is a lasting impression. This is an extremely critical stage because résumé readers typically review large numbers of résumés, and having only one opening to fill, their intention at this point is to reduce the number of résumés to three to five final candidates for interviewing. In fact, this process of reviewing the résumé is divided into two parts. The resume reader’s objective is to eliminate résumés that clearly seem to lack something. It might be something as simple as an unattractive appearance, improper use of language or grammar, lengthiness, overly detailed experience, or a lack of accomplishments.
On one hand, many résumés contain listings of job duties as described in job descriptions and not actual accomplishments. The résumé reviewer expects to read about accomplishments on the job. If your résumé doesn’t pass this 10- to 30-second scan, it’s likely that it will be set aside and never resurface again. Unfortunately, you’ll never find out that that was the case—except by the lack of any next steps.
On the other hand, if your résumé passes this first-blush review, it will be read thoroughly, along with another 10 or 12 others, and will be ranked on a competitive basis. Probably only three to five candidates will be called in for face-to-face interviews. With that decision, you move on to the next stage in the job search process, in which you have to get ready for the final test, which is to convince the hiring manager and others interviewing you that you are their ideal candidate. Good luck.
Alex Freund is the founder of Landing Expert–Career Coaching. His Web site includes a current and comprehensive list of job search networking groups in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and the city of New York, and the site is visited by thousands of people every month. Landing Expert is a premier career-coaching service with the objective of preparing job seekers for interviews. Alex’s clients are gaining knowledge, receiving marketing material, and acquiring the know-how to beat the competition.
Alex can be reached at:
609-333-8866
I know that the title I selected for this blog represents a near impossibility. Technology in the past decade has been developing at a furious pace, and from what I read it is expected to speed up even more. And that makes it even more difficult to stay abreast with. In this blog I want to limit my intent to two areas when I talk about technology. The first area is the technology in your particular profession. And regardless of what that profession is, new and technological advancements are parts of every profession. Companies are very interested in reducing costs, and they therefore embrace technology to keep up their levels of competitiveness with others in the same industry. The second area is the technology that evolved in the past decade in the area of social media.
It is highly advisable that while in transition you stay on top of technological developments in your particular profession. Hiring managers are more interested in hiring someone who’s up-to-date as opposed to someone who’s been out for a while and who lacks the latest technology skills and therefore whose learning curve will be steep and possibly prolonged.
Equally important, I see the need for people in transition to show potential employers their proficiency in using social media. At the very least, one should use LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook but also potentially some others. The aforementioned social media could give a job seeker a huge advantage by acquiring a personal brand and then promulgating it to would-be employers or other networking folks. As a career coach, I strongly recommend to my clients that they spend no less than one hour a day—and possibly longer—in learning the functionalities of these new and developing and ever-changing tools. Many recruiters and hiring managers take advantage of them, and so should you.
Alex Freund is the founder of Landing Expert–Career Coaching. His Web site includes a current and comprehensive list of job search networking groups in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and the city of New York, and the site is visited by thousands of people every month. Landing Expert is a premier career-coaching service with the objective of preparing job seekers for interviews. Alex’s clients are gaining knowledge, receiving marketing material, and acquiring the know-how to beat the competition.
Alex can be reached at:
609-333-8866
