An Advanced Approach to Resume Writing

When it rains, it pours.

Monday, the first post in my weekly career blog at U.S.News was published: Job Market Predictions for 2013 and Beyond.

That day, I got a call from Pam Kruger, editor-in-chief of AOL's job channel asking if I'd write a separate weekly career blog for AOL. My first post there, on an advanced approach to resume writing, was just published as the main article on AOL's job channel.  If by the time you click on it, it's no longer the main story, here's the permalink.

I'll be posting on U.S. News every Monday and on AOL every Tuesday. For your convenience, I'll post a link to each week's post here.

On Career Counseling and College Counseling

This morning, I was interviewed for an article or series on my thoughts related to career and college counseling. Here are a few ideas you might find helpful:

• Hiring a resume writer is no more ethical than a high school student hiring a professional to write his or her college application essay. Imagine you were looking to hire someone, even if it was a job working with their hands. Wouldn't you appreciate being able to judge how well the applicants organize their thoughts? When an applicant hires a resume writer, s/he gets an unfair advantage--the employer sees the resume writer's thinking and communication skills, not the applicant's. Resume writing is an unethical profession.
• It's far more valid to pick a career or job based on its meeting your career's non-negotiables (e.g., primarily using words, working at home, non-profit work, whatever) than by trying to come up with some career that matches your skills, interests, values, etc. An attempt at the latter usually fails for a variety of reasons (I've written about them HERE,) whereas the former succeeds far more often.
• High school counselors and college admissions people would be far more ethical if they stopped pushing nearly every inquirer to go to college. (They feel particular pressure to do so for "underrepresented" minorities.) Instead, using success-rate statistics as available, they should help the student decide whether s/he'd most likely be successful and happy at a four-year college (which by the way, usually takes much more than four years,) two-year college transfer program, short-term community college training program, apprenticeship, on-the-job learning, or self-employment.
• Career counselors would add far more value if they did not focus on helping people find a career or land a job. Instead, they should focus on helping people succeed in the current job, and learn how to be master users of Google--a window to so much information--if you know how to time-effectively access it.
  

The First Honest Resume

The standard resume helps neither the candidate nor employer to find the right match:

• Job seekers, often with the help of a resume-writing whore, excise or put makeup on their warts and pad their accomplishments more than a flat-chested hooker pads her bra.
  
• Employers are routinely deceived by resumes and at minimum learn little about what the candidate is really like. That's also true of job interviews but I'll save that for another post.
  

Wouldn't a candidate be more likely to be hooked up with his or her right employer if, for example:

• She said she's not a "team player who delights in exceeding customer expectations." Rather, she's motivated by meaningful projects that require her to work by herself, and her resume included a quote from her last performance appraisal that indicates that.
  
• Rather than saying how fascinated he is with the company's widget, he said he doesn't care either way about the widget. He cares mainly that he's working with smart, ethical people and that he gets moderately difficult projects in moderate quantity.
  
• Rather than saying she left her position because the company changed direction, she said she got fired from her job because she couldn't stand her boss who insisted on micromanaging her even though he had half her IQ. She included a quote from her co-worker that attests to that.
  
• Rather than saying, "I'm open to new opportunities," he said, "After three years of sitting in front of a computer all day I've had enough of that, I'm eager to use my people skills."
  
• Instead of filling her resume's employment gap with a series of BS consulting assignments, she said she took two years off to care for her new baby. (Bosses unsympathetic to hiring mommy-track employees will rarely give parents the flexibility and lower workload that involved parents often want.)
• Rather than hiding that he's 60 years old and weighs 300 pounds, he includes a current photo with his application. If the employer doesn't want an old fatty, s/he won't give him the job anyway. The employer would have wasted his time and an interview slot and the job seeker will have wasted the time and energy to prep, go to and through the interview. The right employer will be impressed with that applicant's integrity.
  

I am well aware that many employers will reject an honest resume but if you send out enough of them, the right employer for you will be more interested in you than someone who falsely claims to be a "team player and a dynamic self-starter who delights in exceeding customer expectations."

My 90-Second Video on How to Write a Resume

Ahead-of-the-Pack Resumes is one of a series of 90-second career musts videos I did recently as part of my work as Contributing Editor for career matters at U.S. News & World Report.

Today's Winning Resume

Today, for your app to end up top-of-the heap: 

1. Your need a separate resume for each job, with a customized job objective and summary.

1a. It must tell a story, using paragraphs if necessary, that make clear that you're a better problem solver in your niche than anyone else.

1b. So the employer's resume-selection software picks out your resume, it needs to include all the right keywords. Get them from the job ad you're responding to as well as to other similar ads, which you can usually find on indeed.com, simplyhired.com, or other job site containing ads for your kind of work.

2.  If you can look natural and relaxed on camera, create a video resume, for example, at CareerBuilder, which offers dos and dont's, and it's free. Include the link to it in your text resume.

3. You need a cover letter that powerfully explains why you'd love to work for that employer. 

4. Both resume and cover letter must avoid job-seeker jargon; for example, "self-starter," "team player," "delights in exceeding customer expectations," "uniquely qualified." Those sound like B.S. canned phrases that came from resume software or a resume writer. Also, those terms are distancing; you want to create connection.