The second edition of Carole Martin’s excellent book, Boost Your Interview IQ, is out and it’s a must read for all job seekers. Carole is one of the most dynamic interview coaches and presenters I have ever met — if … Continue reading
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Boost Your Interview IQ by Carole Martin
Your interview begins BEFORE you arrive at the company
For those of you who believe that the company’s radar is focused on you solely at the face-to-face interview, you are sadly wrong. More importantly, you may have harmed yourself in ways you can’t possibly overcome even before you reach the hiring manager’s office.
How is that possible? you ask.
First, there’s your social media presence. Are you a Facebook fanatic, posting about every mishap and embarrassing moment in your life? Do you live for those off-color tweets you send to your followers who may be re-tweeting them?
Guess what – employers have access to the Internet and look at those posts too. Could be someone on their admin staff happened to come across your rants AFTER you were called in for tomorrow’s interview. Rather than face a hassle by cancelling the scheduled meeting, the hiring manager will meet with you, but won’t hear a word you say. His or her mind will keep returning to that FB rant where you vented about your last employer.
Even if you have a pristine online presence (and you should if you want to advance in your career), you still face the hurdle of that phone call where you’re being invited to interview. If there’s chaos in your house during the call (children screaming, dogs barking, you yelling for everyone to shut up) that won’t bode well for your candidacy.
Expect that every call is going to be from a potential employer. Find a quiet place to answer the phone. Swallow whatever’s in your mouth before you pick up the call. Be prepared. Sound professional. Listen carefully. Don’t be so excited or harried that you’re continually interrupting the caller. It’s rude and it will be remembered.
There’s no perfect time to prepare for an interview. You should always be ready to take the initial call with answers in hand to the most frequently asked interview questions. Sometimes that happens with the initial call because the hiring manager doesn’t want to bother to bring you in if you don’t meet certain qualifications.
So be ready and be professional well before you meet your next employer in person.
When your past – or lack of it – comes back to haunt you
Recently, there was an article about Yahoo’s CEO Scott Thompson padding his resume. (http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/07/living/resume-padding-scott-thompson/index.html?hpt=hp_c2)
The article stated: “The discovery that Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson does not have a bachelor’s degree in accounting and computer science (he has a bachelor of science degree in business administration, with a major in accounting) makes him the latest executive to be targeted for falsely claiming to have a degree.”
Have you ever been tempted to bend the truth on your resume? Many individuals have. When you’re close to the right fit for an organization, but not quite there, it may seem like a small leap to take and to embellish your resume a bit.
Before social media, you may have been able to get away with it. Now?
It’s unlikely.
If you post your resume on LinkedIn or any other business-related site, your information is exposed to thousands of other professionals, many of whom have attended the same college and have been employed at the same companies as you. All they have to do is come across your LI profile and read it to see that what you state there isn’t what happened in reality.
You need to be scrupulously honest. If you weren’t the team lead on a project, don’t say you were. Even if you were only five credits away from your BA, don’t fudge and say you have that document. Someone is certain to know. Someone is certain to find out.
Your credibility will take a huge hit. You may never recover professionally.
That’s not to say you have to put negative information on your resume or LI profile. Everyone has something less than stellar in their past. The idea is to highlight your strengths, which minimizes any deficiencies.
There’s no need to embellish. It’s a risk to do so. In terms of your resume and social media profile, honesty is the only policy.
Don’t Shortchange Yourself with a One Page Resume
Over the years, there has been a lot of advice centered on the perfect length for a resume. Some experts have claimed that one page is the best. Keep it brief and to the point, they say. Others advise that two, three or even four pages is acceptable, depending upon the circumstances.
As a resume writing expert and a hiring manager, I don’t believe there is one perfect resume length for all candidates. I like to take the common sense approach in this. And that is, a resume is as long as it needs to be PROVIDED the data it contains is germane to the current job search and nothing extraneous is included.
That means that your resume may be two pages, while your colleague’s may be one. It all depends upon your background.
In addition to page length being debated, how far a candidate should go back is also argued about from time to time. In my view, anyone in IT shouldn’t go back farther than 10 years. The industry is changing so quickly, the technology is outdated quickly. Therefore, listing what you used 20 years ago isn’t going to impress anyone as that technology isn’t popular any longer. For those outside the technology fields, it’s best not to go back farther than 15 years. To do so might invite age discrimination. What’s more, a hiring manager is most interested in what you’ve done recently, not way back when.
The only time you would go back to the beginning would be if you’re reentering an industry you left in the early years. For example: You began in finance, then moved on to information technology, and now you’re returning to finance. The early experience must be on the resume. It’s all that you have in terms of expertise in the field.
Whenever you’re at a crossroads as to how long your resume should be or what it should contain, just use common sense. Is the data you’re providing:
1. Proving you’re the best candidate for the position?
2. Showcasing skills, knowledge, abilities that meet the job requirements?
3. Painting a positive picture of your candidacy?
If the answer isn’t ‘yes’ to each of the above, then the data has no business being in your resume. Once you’ve included only that information which belongs there, that’s the length of your resume.
It’s as simple as that.
Why it’s important to target each resume and cover letter
On average, I see about 20 resumes a day from candidates who want to work for ResumeEdge. As the Managing Editor and hiring manager, I’m tasked with finding the best writers.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve opened a cover letter that stated “Dear Sir”. Considering that the candidate didn’t bother to check out our site or my name, that didn’t bode well.
I’ve had others who used the correct salutation, but after “Dear Darlene” the letter then stated the following:
“I read your ad about the ESL opening, and I want to assure you that as a teacher, I have the credentials and experience you need.”
Given that I hire writers to write resumes, and not teachers to teach English as a second language, I moved on to the next candidate. After all, if this individual didn’t read the cover letter before submitting, or didn’t care enough to personalize the cover letter’s contents to the position I had open, then this person wouldn’t be a good fit in our organization.
And that brings me to a hard truth all job seekers should understand. You have only one chance to wow a hiring manager. You do that by:
1. Using the individual’s name in the cover letter. No ‘Dear Sir’, ‘Dear Sir or Madam’, or ‘To Whom It May Concern’. Find the person’s name. Use it. You’ll be glad you did.
2. Tailoring the cover letter to the job being sought. Trust me, if the hiring manager is looking for someone to make widgets and you boast about your ability to made whatnots, you won’t be considered.
3. Tailoring the resume not only to the job being sought, but also dovetailing what you’ve done/accomplished to the position’s requirements. In other words, spoon feed your credentials to the hiring manager who most likely is hurried, harried and can’t take the time to shift through your documents to find what s/he needs.
If you don’t follow this advice, if you make it hard on a hiring manager to know what you can do, or if you write one cover letter/resume and shoot it out to everyone hoping for the best, you’re going to be waiting and hoping for a very long time.
“I Want My Resume to Pop”
Having worked with clients for more than eleven years, I often hear them state that they want a ‘wow’ factor in their resume. They want it to ‘pop’.
In questioning what they mean, candidates often say that they need their resume to stand out from the scores of others out there. They want their document to make it to the top of the pile.
Some believe adjective heavy descriptions will achieve that. Others are certain that a certain format, page length or writing style is exactly what’s needed.
For a hiring manager, a resume that has a wow factor or pops simply means this:
1. The candidate has the exact skills needed for the position.
2. Accomplishments prove the candidate has and will achieve at the new company.
That’s what hiring managers want – core skills and evidence that these skills have been used in the past to enhance the company’s profits by either making it money or saving it money.
Fancy fonts won’t do that. A dazzling template might catch the eye, but if there’s little substance in the data, the hiring authority will move on. Grammatically correct language is a must. Prose that would make Dickens sigh is not.
A resume is a marketing tool with you as the product. It should prove you have the skills, knowledge, abilities to get the job done and to exceed beyond expectations.
It’s as simple as that.
Don’t waste your time worrying about which font to use. Keep it simple – Arial or Times New Roman. They’re universal and are easy on the eye. Template choice should only matter in that its appearance matches your industry (eg: conservative for banking; more of a flair for a creative), it has an appropriate use of white space and is organized for quick reading. As to page length: A modern resume is as long as it needs to be provided it contains only that information germane to the new job search. Anything that’s not relevant should be excluded.
Follow these guidelines and your background/skills/abilities will wow the hiring manager.
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Resume Help Blog
Don’t Wait Until the Last Minute to Update Your Resume
We’re all procrastinators. We have so much to do on a daily basis that we often push off those duties/problems which can be addressed later.
Don’t let that happen with your resume.
Let’s say you’ve been looking for a job for six months to a year and you’ve finally landed one. You’re breathing a sigh of relief. You can relax. Or can you? Remember when the layoff happened at your last place of employment? Or when the company went belly up in the awful economy? At that time were you scrambling to update your years-old or decades-old resume? Want to go through that panic again?
Or how about this – you’ve been at your present company for many years. It’s not going anywhere, and you hope you’re not going anywhere either. But can you really be certain of that? What if it’s sold off or absorbed by another company? What if the owners decide to retire and shutter the enterprise? Again, do you want to be caught with a dated resume that is in no shape to be submitted to new employers?
Whether you feel comfortable in your present position or you just won a new job, it’s always wise to keep your resume updated on an ongoing basis.
Use it as your diary in your current work. Did you accomplish something that saved your company money or made it money? Record that on your resume.
Were you promoted? Or did you assume additional duties from a co-worker who was either retiring or let go? Again, add that to your resume.
By keeping tabs of what you’re doing, your resume will be filled with data vital to a hiring manager. And when the time comes for you to be looking for new employment (and we all face that from time to time) all you’ll have to do is polish your resume and start handing it out.
Who Knows Best – You or Your Resume Writer?
As a professional who has written thousands of resumes and dealt with thousands of clients, I’ve found the best results are obtained when a customer allows the professional to do what he or she does best.
I’ve heard of clients who’ve hired resume writers only to get the completed document and have it critiqued by their spouse, parents, English teachers from their high school or college days, friends, you-name-it. Each of these individuals has an opinion as to what’s wrong with the resume…what they’d like to see.
The problem with that thinking is that these individuals aren’t resume writers or hiring managers. They mean well, but their advice will only serve to confuse or to weaken your document.
For example: An English teacher may tell you that your resume is grammatically incorrect because it has nothing but fragments in it – not complete sentences. Technically, that’s true. However, a resume is a marketing document (with you as the product). Marketing copy is meant to hold and capture your attention in the shortest period possible. Maxwell House Coffee’s “Good to the Last Drop” – should read “It tastes good (or it is good) to the last drop.” That’s a complete sentence. It says the same thing but it takes longer to get the point across. And what about “Got milk?” from America’s milk producers? Yes, it’s a fragment, but it speaks volumes.
A resume needs to do the same. You have, at most, two pages to capture and hold the hiring authority’s attention. If you use complete sentences, your document will sound stilted – worse, it may sound as if English is your second language. We simply don’t convey ideas in a stuffy way. Resumes, as with most marketing documents, are conversational and fluid, like language.
Another aspect of resume writing that well-meaning amateurs don’t understand is organization of data. A resume is not a novel, nor is it a biography that relates everything you’ve ever done. It needs to be focused, targeted, succinct and to provide only the most relevant information as it relates to your current job search. Going back more than fifteen years isn’t advised, yet I see it all the time with the candidate explaining that their spouse, mother, father, BFF, thought it was a good idea.
If you do hire a professional resume writer or coach, let them do their job. They’ve helped hundreds, perhaps thousands of individuals reach their employment goals. They can’t do that if you don’t trust their efforts or if you seek advice from well-meaning amateurs.
Resume Strategies to Fill Gaps in Employment
If you have a gap in your employment history, you may have concerns about how to explain this on your resume. Keep in mind that many people step away from the workplace each year to raise children, care for ill/aging … Continue reading
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