Interesting post and news this week on Monster.com and Microsoft Office Online, “Four steps to your next job,” creating a new partnership to help the active job seeker. In the example they start to cite a specific individual’s pain and launch into this combined marketing program. A suggestion is made to utilize the Microsoft Office templates to help develop your resume. Now, unlike many of my peers or other resume writing service providers, I am not opposed to this and thus writing a negative post. Nope, I think it’s a great idea if you have no resume to work with and/or can’t afford or are unable to seek out help.

Living in “the land of resumes” as the electronic age has provided to HR and recruiters alike, I can tell you that a resume DOES make a difference in your job search. Having just the right ingredients, as Greg Miller has pointed out in previous posts, makes all the difference in the world. Too much and it’s usually overlook, not enough and it’s overlooked. I say equally important are the style, format and key selling points.

Take for example sales people which I work with on a daily basis as one of our key niche areas. When a client looks to our firm to help hire a true sales professional they are looking for a resume and candidate profile that speak sales. Duh say most of you. Duh is right but how come I still see what accumulates to the hiring manager or client as a non-professional? No stats or highlights on their successful sales career, recent accomplishments, numbers, ranking related to peers or their industry, deals won, and so forth. What happens is a lot of time spent with me or my team in creating a separate document or re-writing their resume to reflect these highlights that all VP of Sales or CEOs are looking for in true professionals!

As I wrote about in both ATS issues and resume formats, having a very complex format or even the new Office 07 .dox can be detrimental if the recruiter or hiring authority on the other end is not able to open it. That’s it, game over, done. Well not quite as if you get your career coaching from me, follow-up, follow-up, follow-up! Would you rather start with a tool which helps your job search or a template which might inhibit it?

In short, templates are a great tool and how I got my first job as a recruiter coming out of the military with no resume (boy that was a sad resume), but I strongly suggest seeking guidance in some fashion to help put you ahead of the pack. The best templates are those with simple and standard formatting. The templates I would stay away from have text boxes, rows, columns, etc.

For assistance with your resume from Greg Miller and others on the staff visit
The Career Store or Get in Touch.

First and foremost, I recommend that you avoid a detailed resume that shows everything you did starting with your first job, unless you are relatively new to the workforce. The hiring manager will not be interested in what you did in 1993 (that was 16 years ago!) or 1988 (21 years ago!).

What to avoid: I know, your past is what made you what you are today, and it all flows in logical professional growth progression, but in the final analysis, potential employers will typically only look at the past 5-10 years. Don’t tell them that you play chess, ride your dirt bike on the weekends, and read in your spare time. The only exception to this might be if you have done some reliable research on your potential new boss, and can mention some of your personal information that matches with his/hers (he/she was an Eagle Scout, or plays hockey for a local club like you do, etc). There may even be civic involvement on the part of your potential new company that you are likewise involved with, and there is nothing wrong with that showing up on your resume discretely. Bottom line: confine your resume to 2-3 pages at the most….no more 8 page resumes! Another blog talks about what to include in your resume…take a peek at that one for more information.

Don’t hide anything, of course, and certainly don’t lie. It will eventually come out in the phone interview or subsequent face-to-face interview. If you were out of work for personal reasons (birth of a baby, tending to a family member in a situation that required your personal care for a period of time, etc.) go ahead and mention that on the resume. If you had to take a “non-career related” job for a little while during the job-hunting process, list it unless it was only a few months. Any more, most employers either have been in that situation themselves or know something close to them who has, so they are no longer shocked and amazed that you took a job or two that wasn’t directly related to your “real” work just so you could make ends meet. They are more interested in knowing that you are skilled, resourceful and a fighter, and are anxious to get back to your real expertise.

As usual, there are certainly times when seeking professional resume writing help is the prudent thing to do. It forces you to truly focus on the essentials of your resume and will help you include the things that are most likely to attract attention from potential employers. There is the topic of cover letters, but that is for another time!

For assistance with your resume from Greg Miller and others on the staff visit
The Career Store or Get in Touch.

So often, it is really hard to know what to include in your resume. This is especially true if you are in the IT or Scientific realm, because your world is very specific and detailed in terms of education and particular areas of expertise.  Both of these worlds are vast!

For new resumes, please keep it to two pages, and if you absolutely must (due to longevity in the workforce), three. For revised resumes, the same rule applies…2-3 pages. I have sat down with so many IT folks who live in a world of alphabet soup listings on their resumes: Operating Systems, hardware, software, proprietary applications, and various versions and Service Packs of any number of these, each particular to their specialty. Likewise, for Scientific resumes, I see a wide range of entries including: GMP, GLP, QA, QC, LIMS, IND submissions, in-vitro assays, and much more.  Unfortunately, that is only helpful later on in the interview process. What is crucial is to get the interview in the first place! Hiring managers really don’t and won’t wade through 8-14 page resumes. They simply don’t have time for that. They need a quick look – a fast summary that highlights your experience. They need to determine in less than one minute that your credentials look like a strong match with their job description.

What to include: make sure you highlight the basics: where you worked (company name, city, state), the dates you were there, your title(s), bulleted major responsibilities, and the same for particular accomplishments. I recommend that you not go into much detail for anything in the ’90s. After all, that was over 9 years ago! Employers really want to see that your skills are current. For example, 7 years ago you may have used what they now need, but they can likely find someone else more current than that.

Don’t sell yourself short on accomplishments, but do remember to keep the total resume to 2-3 pages at the most. I normally don’t recommend listing your hobbies and such, but including some items just might be helpful, such as Eagle Scout, local volunteer roles, etc. You never know who might decide that these things make you just a little different and desirable. Your armed forces background is a personal call.  For your jobs prior to 2000, list them, of course, but only give 1-2 bullets about what you did there. That way, you can show persistent skill usage, but not bore them with every single thing you did.

Resume writing can be intimidating at times. Don’t be afraid to seek help. It is well worth the advice and cost. I would love to hear about your resume, and how you deal with your vast background! We will talk about cover letters another time!

For assistance with your resume from Greg Miller and others on the staff visit
The Career Store or Get in Touch.

Leveraging the New Internet and Social Networking for your Career

It was not that long ago that the World Wide Web was only cool for chatting and checking out various static pages, job boards and some blogging for those looking to make a change in their careers. What happened? The WWW truly went worldwide and is now in the homes and on the laps of many of my beloved remote Alaskan family members. Now they can see the latest jobs we are working on, harass me real-time on Facebook, and even apply to my tweets on Twitter.

If you think your networking skills are a bit rusty, I am willing to bet that you may have very little or no internet social networking experience. Not to worry… you are not alone. Many of the clients I help are in the same spot: mid to late career professionals who have rarely had to present a resume, let alone now having to navigate the complexities of the latest in internet resources. The big question is, Where do I start?” Staying true to form, I will say “it depends.” It depends on: Where are the people in your industry hanging out, where is your personal network lingering these days on-line, who is hiring in your career niche and where are they putting their money and time on-line?

Before just jumping in and making real work of trying to be on every social networking site, job board and reading all the latest blogs, first sit down and try to answer the questions just asked above. Chances are good that you will find niche communities, groups and recruiters (internal and headhunters) on very specific sites or part of specific groups. In a short amount of time this can give you more exposure to a larger group of people than sprinkling yourself all over the web, taking hours at a time to monitor. Better yet, just start with your personal network and see where that takes you. People like to help other people and nowhere is this more evident than on the internet.

Here is another trick that a highly trained recruiter will be looking for…your resume or career highlights posted on various independent web pages, or key words from you on the profile(s) you do build on these sites. Take some time to build a thorough career profile on the sites you decide to be part of, as string searching the web will get traffic to your profile, thus putting your in-demand skills in front of the world.

For assistance with your Job Search from Chris Wellington and others on the staff visit
The Career Store or Get in Touch.

Microsoft Word 2007, MS Works, and PDF Resume Formats

Could Microsoft or PDF be hurting your job search?  The short answer to this question is YES.  We all know that technology has enhanced both the ability to directly seek out a new position as well as allow easier access for a hiring authority or recruiter to find you, but it is not error-proof!

The advent of auto-applying, auto-parsing, or auto-anything takes your beloved resume, that tool you put so much work and effort into, and automatically scans your information into an Application Tracking System (ATS) or mainstream job board. As you send out your resume or upload it into an on-line tool, there is a chance the format you use will not allow the receiving party to perhaps view it at all. Most systems have either not been upgraded to work with Word 07 or PDF’s and many have never been able to interface well with MS Works.

We have experienced this challenge ourselves at TWG. Our main tool to keep track of candidates, resumes, client needs and such works with PDFs, Word 2007, and MS Works format, but only if the user’s computer also has all of these tools. In other words, like most main-stream systems, we can see the true text version but, when going to the original format, you need to have that software loaded in order to see all the various formats available today. We see this as a short term challenge while we await the updates to our international tool to auto-convert the original document to the proper viewing format.

So, what is the solution to ensure that your resume does not get deleted, unsuccessfully parsed or just over-looked as the person on the other end is not able to open it? If you have access to Microsoft Word, I suggest that you save your resume in an older version of Word. For instance, if you have Word 07, go to file, save as, and select 97-03. If sending in PDF you might want to follow-up with a phone call to ensure they were able to receive and open your resume. If all you have is MS Works or some other word processing tool (MAC for instance) you may want to take the time to see who in your network can convert your resume to MS Word 97-03.

Better yet, when applying for the job and or asked to send in your resume, stop and ask, “What format does your system accept?”

For assistance with your resume from Greg Miller and others on the staff visit
The Career Store or Get in Touch.