Resume Fixes

In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I describe the most common flaws in my clients' resumes and how you can avoid them.

A Workover: "Do I Need to Be Completely Honest on My Resume?"

Here's the latest edited transcript of a Workover on my radio program. The caller asked if one needs be completely honest on a resume.

The Ethical, Effective, and Chemistry-Building Resume and LinkedIn Profile

Most people's resumes and LinkedIn profiles are sterile if not downright not credible. My PsychologyToday.com article today shows how to create a more effective one.

The Case for Job Seekers Practicing Radical Honesty

There's understandable temptation for job seekers to stretch the truth in their resume and interviews. But in my PsychologyToday.com article, I argue that not only is that unethical, it's likely to backfire. HERE is the link.

Creating a Strong, Ethical Resume, Fast

You're dreading writing your resume. My post today on USNews.com and republished on Yahoo!.com: How to create a strong, ethical resume, fast.

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.

Should You Be Living With More Integrity?

Is this too sanctimonious?

 

Job Hunting Advice for a Midlifer

One of my clients is a midlife guy whose resume makes him look unqualified for the position he aspires to: operations manager at a 10-50-employee high-tech company.

Here are a few of the strategies I offered him:

• With your networking contacts, use a one-page bio rather than your resume. The bio allows you to highlight your strengths. Your resume lays too much bare for everyone to see.
• Like most geek types, indeed most men, you've put all your work effort into working and into getting more skilled, and no time building what alas seems more required than ability: a network. So rather than continue only to tap your existing network, which you describe as having already been queried enough, you must take the time to build a new network, which includes, not just formal networking events, joining clubs, taking positions on small boards, etc, but making conversation with people you meet everywhere, from the supermarket line to the people waiting at the barber shop.
• Having limited experience in your aspired-to job, you must do some reading and informational interviews with respected people in those positions. That way, you'll be able to discuss how the job is well-conducted. For example, as an operations manager, you should be able to richly discuss the ways in which you'd manage upward and downward, your approaches to getting buy-in on technical implementations from the not-very-technical people who will be using it, etc.

Alternative to a Resume: a cover letter with credibility and heart

A client asked me to review his resume. Here is its summary.

• Energetic executive and project manager.
• Goal-oriented, multidisciplinary professional with superior communication ability.
• MBA with experience in international commerce.

Reading that reminded me of how unhelpful resumes are. What he wrote was, like most resume verbiage, unlikely to make his application rise to the top of the stack. And on reflection, even the "ahead-of-the-pack" resume strategies I tout are often insufficiently powerful.

So I suggested my client go home and draft a radically different kind of "resume" -- a one-page narrative that tells the true story of his career, including his failures, successes, detours, dreams, doubts, plus interests and skills that have nothing to do with career. Rather than a resume, it's more like a cover letter with credibility and heart.

Of course, many employers will be turned off, but I'm wondering whether it will result in the right employer being turned on. Such a narrative will reveal the person's true self, which means that if the boss likes that person, the candidate is more likely to be successful and happy on the job than if hired based on the usual obfuscatory resume. Besides, very few employers with a good job opening would be turned on by the standard cliche-filled resume unless it includes words like "Harvard" and "record-breaking" and shows a meteoric rise through the ranks culminating in being perfectly ready for the subject job opening.

Have you tried something like that? Or, if you're an employer, would you consider this Cover Letter with Credibility and Heart a plus or minus if submitted instead of or in addition to a resume?

Some Favorite Career and Life Tips

In preparing for a radio show, I've reviewed hundreds of my previously dispensed career and life tips. Here are some I'd like to highlight for you:

LIFE TIPS
When your child errs, express disappointment, then ask the child "What should we do?" Only if those too rarely work, use rewards and/or punishment, but never corporal punishment--that only teaches the child that violence is an appropriate response.

Is Facebook worth your time?

If you wonder why someone gets so much more done than you do, ask if you might shadow him/or her for a few hours.

On the continuum from parasite to host, where are you? Want to change?

Losers think, "What's the least amount of work I can get away with?" Winners think, "How can I get as much done as possible?"

My oft-repeated favorite tip: When I asked my dad, a Holocaust survivor, why he rarely talks about the Holocaust, he said, "The Nazis took five years from my life. I won’t give them one minute more. Martin, never look back; always look forward.” We’ve all had bad things happen to us but nearly all the successful people I know refuse to wallow. They always ask themselves, “What’s the next positive step I can take?”

SUCCESS ON THE JOB
Leadership is making time when there's no time.

In meetings, sit in The Focus Spot: where the person you most want to impress usually looks, usually a bit left or right of straight-ahead.

Even my highest-level clients (e.g., Fortune 50 C-level execs, physicians, big-time lawyers) so appreciate praise.

The most important thing a good manager does is take the time to recruit the bright and intrinsically motivated.

To motivate your supervisees, inspire and praise more than use money and formal evaluations.

Anchor your talk's core ideas with a compelling story and memorable visual. That will up your talk's chances of staying in the audience's brain and thus of changing their behavior.

Judd Apatow: "I am always driven by the terror of humiliation. My shrink calls it unhealthy but she can't argue with its effectiveness."

RUNNING YOUR OWN BUSINESS
Don't innovate; replicate. Find a successful business and copy it. For example, I'd find some busy food trucks and incorporate their best features into mine, of course, placing mine in a great location.

Some low-risk business ideas:

• Clean out people's garages and basements. Once you have the system down, hire and train others to do the work. You build the business.
• Buy an apartment building that has been ruined by the tenants. Rehab it and sell it.
• Plant and remove "For Sale" signs for Realtors. Again, once you've learned how to do it well, hire others to do the work. You build the business.
  

Key to being successfully self-employed: Be cheap, for example, "How can I get space for free--How about a friend's apartment that's empty during the day?"

FINDING A CAREER
Ask yourself, "Is it worth trying to change the world, with results unlikely and/or invisible, or be, for example, a haircutter, where you constantly see positive results of your efforts?

In choosing a career, if you want to consider the job market, don't focus on what's hot. A better question is, "What's the supply/demand ratio of job seekers in this field?" For example, solar engineering is hotter than petroleum engineering but far fewer people aspire to the latter, so it may be easier to find jobs in that field.

A photographer client of mine said, "I’m worn out on 'follow your passion.' I crave a plain ol' good job." Career contentment mainly comes from within your personality, plus whether you have a decent boss, coworkers, an ethical workplace, a workload that's moderate in difficulty and quantity, a reasonable commute, decent pay, and job security. It's usually easier to find those in a non-sexy job because competition for such jobs is less fierce.

LANDING A JOB
If I were homeless and wanted to launch a good career, especially if I was trying to get by on soft skills, I'd be a salesperson in a busy retail establishment in an upscale area and schmooze customers.

Today, unless you have an A+ job history or superstrong connections, your job hunt must be A+. From initial query to final negotiation, all need be ahead-of-the-pack.

Interview target employers for an article you're writing for a trade/professional publication or for your own Internet radio show/podcast. Those are easier to pull off than you may think and will give you access to top-quality employers as well as boost your career credentials.

How to work a conference or trade show: Be a presenter or at least a volunteer. The exhibit area trumps sessions: you get access to lots of top people; session content can usually be acquired on the Net. If you want to talk with a session presenter, be last in line. Walk the presenter to his car or invite her for coffee or a meal. Wine & cheese mixers trump other recreations.

How to prepare to write a resume or cover letter: List what you'd say to the hirer for your target position that would make him think, "Damn, this person is good,"

Updated daily, Employment Tracker lists employers doing significant hiring.

Negotiate an internship's job description upfront. They're getting you cheap or for free; that means you deserve meaningful work and to get quality mentoring.

To Help Your Resume Rise to the Top of the Pile

Unlike when the economy was stronger, I must admit that I am not having great success in helping average and below-average candidates land decent jobs.

It's not easy even for excellent candidates, but these strategies are helping their resumes rise to the top of the applicant pile.

Focus on what would make you better than your competitors for the desired position. Examples:

• Critical skills not held by your competitors. For example, I had a supply chain manager stress his expertise in sourcing not only from Beijing and Shanghai but also from even lower-cost suppliers: inland China, Viet Nam, and Thailand.

• Quotes from customers or from your latest performance review. For example, "Jane Jones has the rare combination of brains, great work ethic, and being fun to work with." (from my most recent performance review.)
  

• Evidence that you not only have experience critical in the target job but excel at it. Examples:

-- In each of my four past performances reviews, I received the top rating: "Exceeds Expectations."

-- A PAR (problem-approach-resolution) story(ies) that demonstrate your excellence: Our employees were unhappy with our desktop support. I created the concept of "Your Personal Geek," in which our IT staff were assigned to specific employees so a relationship could be developed. Satisfaction with desktop support has jumped.
-- Not a broadbrush statement like, "Spearheaded efforts that saved the company 20%." Even if that were true, few readers would believe you could attribute that solely to your efforts. Better: "Located better sources for components for the XPR video card, lowering the cost 9%, a saving of $64,000, while retaining its low MTBF rate."

You want a concentrated, not a dilute resume. Minimize the number of statements that don't present an important advantage you have over competing applicants: non-critical details, attributes that some of your competitors likely have, and redundancies with statements already in your resume.

Highlight your most compelling advantages over the competition. The top of your resume should usually include a highlights section with three or four easy-to-understand, one-line descriptions of your most compelling advantages over your competition for the desired position. Alternatively, present a one-or two-line summary that makes the case.

As always, I welcome your comments, for example, your favorite strategy for ethically helping your resume rise to the top of the pile.

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.

Storytelling: A Great Tool for Getting Hired and Getting Ahead

Many employers wonder how much BS is contained in resumes and cover letters.

Yours will be more credible if they embed stories of your successes and failures.

Senior career counselor at the Oakland Private Industry Council, Maureen Nelson, gave me a heads-up on a forthcoming book: Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get a Job and Propel Your Career.

Here are types of stories you can embed in a cover letter and resume :

- Stories of early interest in your career path and determination to reach your career goal.

- Stories that depict your motivation, enthusiasm, and passion for the job you seek.

- Stories describing specific projects you've led or collaborated on, including results.

- Stories detailing problems you've solved for your employers.

- Stories describing other accomplishments and successes.

- Stories that reveal your personality.

- Stories describing long-term interest in, knowledge of, and admiration for the organization you're targeting.

- Stories that describe how well you fit in with the organization's culture, values, and mission.

- Stories -- for new graduates -- of how your education has prepared you for the targeted job.

- Stories that touch the heartstrings.

- Stories to back up your claims about yourself.

- Stories that tell how you are uniquely qualified for the targeted job.

- Stories that capitalize on networking contacts.

- Stories to explain unusual or potentially negative situations.

- Stories to explain a career change.

- Future stories that address employer needs and challenges and tell how you would address those issues.

See how to deploy all these types of stories at: www.quintcareers.com/cover_letters/

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. 

Amazing Resume Software

I just got a copy of the latest version (version 15) of ResumeMaker. ($29.95) In addition to being a superior tool for creating or revising your resume, it

• helps you create cover letters
• automatically posts your resume on 80 major job sites
• blasts your resume to a zillion employers (Actually, very occasionally, you can get a job that way--and because the risk is so low, why not try--unless you need to keep your employer or others from knowing you're job searching.)
• Prepares you for your interviews with a video tutorial in which you can record and listen to your practice answers.
  

Candidly, I have not yet had time to try this latest version out and am swamped, but I'd bet anything, it's well worth the $29.95.

If you've tried ResumeMaker, feel free to post your reviews as a comment here.