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One-Size-Fits-All Doesn’t Work For Clothes or Resumes
by Jan Cannon - www.CannonCareerCenter.com
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.
Jan's own web site is at http://www.CannonCareerCenter.com
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