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how honest should you be in an interview?

Thursday, February 16th, 2012 by Judi

How honest should you be when you’re interviewing? Unequivocally one hundred percent honest. But don’t confuse honesty with showing all your cards or not utilizing the power of presentation. Nor does honesty mean volunteering your dark secrets – perceived or otherwise – from the moment you walk through the hiring company’s door.

For far too many jop search candidates, honestly is one extreme or the other. Either the job seeker throws everything out there too early and unnecessarily or hides it because he’s defensive about whatever it is he doesn’t want to be honest about. Either way, it only causes trouble. Finding your perfect job does not mean giving all your power to the interviewing company.

This isn’t a process where you everything you say and do screams “Hire me, hire me, hire me!” When you confess to your interviewer, or conversely, hide as much as you can, that’s what you’re thinking and that’s the message you’re conveying. Consequently, the interview never goes as smoothly as it otherwise might.

If there’s something in your employment history that’s caused you problems in the past, there’s no reason to blurt it out. You’ll get no recognition or appreciation for that. In fact, the only thing you’ll get in return is…..dropped from consideration. Instead, examine the circumstances under which those problems took place and ask questions to make sure those conditions aren’t present in the job for which you’re interviewing. If they are, gracefully decline to continue the process.

Being fired, returning to the corporate world after self employment, and being unemployed for several months are just three instances that put candidates unnecessarily on the defensive. Flip it. Find the positive. What did you learn from being fired? What are your positive characteristics aside from what happened to cause the termination? And by the way, are you absolutely sure the termination was your fault? If it wasn’t, don’t say that outright! The phrasing of your presentation can convey the same meaning.

Recently a client asked me to critique his resume and cover letter. They’d just been done by a professional resume-writing firm, and he wasn’t comfortable with the result. He lives in one state and is planning on moving to another. They advised him to omit the locations of his previous jobs saying “the job is about you, not the location.”

They also advised him to get both a P.O. box and a phone number in his targeted city, then to enlist forwarding services. My question was, what happens when a prospective employer wants him to come in for an interview tomorrow…..because they think he lives only a few miles away? There’s a very easy way not to have the distance work against you so that you can search within an honest framework, but that’s another column.

Then, as if those two instances of duplicity weren’t enough, they tucked his self-employment time under a previous job.

Why walk into an interview crossing your fingers that they don’t find something out? How relaxed can you possibly be under those circumstances? And if they hire you and then discover the truth, you’re tainted, and everything else you do or say from that point on is suspect.

There’s one hard and fast rule that overrides any instance where you haven’t had to – or felt a reason to – provide what could be considered extraneous information. When you are asked a direct question, one usually designed to clarify, answer it directly, honestly and with a smile. Don’t lose your composure or get defensive. Handle it gracefully. Most situations aren’t the big deal so many candidates perceive them to be.

Keep the power within yourself. To find your perfect job, you need to know what you’re looking for. Your questions are designed to elicit that information, while your answers are designed to sell yourself, even as you’re processing what you’re learning. Remember, you have the power to make a choice too.

Tags: bad interview, career help, change jobs, interview advice, job advice, job seeker, job seeker advice, professional written resume
Posted in behavior/psychology, job hunting advice, resumes | No Comments »

resume advice: how not to write a resume

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011 by Judi

Does your resume profile read something like this?

Pro-active and solution-oriented person with proven ability to think outside the box and build collaborative relationships by engaging internal and external stakeholders while working in a cross- functional matrix environment. Critical thinker with exceptional track record of identifying win-win strategies, building concensus, and implementing change for bottom-line results.

It does? Then you sound like everyone else who’s looking for a job and you need some help writing your resume . Not only does it fail to actually convey who you are because the phrases are so generic, but it’s resume speak. It doesn’t make for an effective resume. It’s the same as saying blah blah blah blah blah.

By the way, I hope you didn’t pay someone to write that for you, because numerous professional resume writers, after they collect your money, are opening books they bought or checked out from the library. Other have professional resume writer designations, such as certified resume writer (CPRW) that they hope to impress you with, but they don’t impress me. Having seen over half million resumes in my career, I remain unimpressed at most professionally written resumes I’ve seen. In fact, I’ve redone a bunch of them.

Before you write your resume, or hire a resume writing service, think about who you are, what you’re good at, and why. A resume isn’t a list of bland job description and gobbledy gook, generic, overly used phrases – it’s a document that tells your story and conveys who you are as an individual. It illustrates how you think, how your career has progressed, why, your degree of motivation, how you make decisions, what you do better than others who have the same skills, and how you’ve benefitted your employers.

And it’s not just numbers and percentages about how you increased sales, increased production, reduced staff, bam bam bam, hardcore, cold statistics either.

Ask yourself these questions:

What are the top 5 skills that have contributed to your success?
What are the top 5 personality traits that have contributed to your success?
What makes you good at what you do?
What makes you different from the person that held your job before you, or the person who will hold it after you, or the person who has the same title working for the same kind of company down the street?

Now you’re starting to get the idea.

Here are pieces from several client resume profiles that will give you an idea of what you’re shooting for:

Effective and innovative training professional adept at creating and delivering courses in multiple modes that bring enthusiasm for change and result in new user proficiency. Extremely skilled at learning, analyzing and understanding new or upgraded software programs, breaking them down and putting together course materials based on audience needs and level of understanding.
Operationally focused and mathematically inclined corporate finance professional, able to synthesize seemingly disparate pieces into an integrated solution.
Skilled, forward thinking professional who pragmatically identifies opportunities to reduce expenses and scrutinizes financial records to pinpoint and correct errors. Precise, solutions oriented, and trustworthy, with an exceptional amount of common sense, and a positive “can do” attitude.
Recognized and published expert in human resource management with extremely effective listening and interpersonal skills, adept at identifying the real problem.

Do you get a sense of something about that person that makes them unique? And every bullet on your resume should illustrate the statements in your profile by showing what you did, the results and the benefit.

A resume that has a generic resume profile followed by a gloppy paragraph of resume keywords followed by bullets that say things like these examples….

Performed thorough and timely reference checking.
Acted as a liaison between the embassy and the international media, students and other private sector partners.
Led daily meetings with Oracle to define tasks, outline responsibilities, and form weekly agendas
Managed procurement of desktop hardware, software and contractor services with vendors
Involved in setting up customer’s project portfolio management system.

…….is not a resume. The above are job descriptions, not bullets. They go in a short paragraph by your job title, not bulleted under it.

Product brochures- cars, dishwashers, cameras, televisions – make sure to differentiate their product from the competition. You’re selling a product and the product is you. When your resume is your brochure, it should accomplish the same purpose.

Tags: certified resume writer, how to write your resume, preaparing a resume, professional resume writers, professionally written resume, resume advice, resume profile, writing your resume
Posted in job hunt tips, job hunting advice, resumes | No Comments »

Resumes: Capital Letter confusion & Ampersands

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011 by Judi

Over capitalization and a tendency to replace the word “and” with ”&” has sprung up. I don’t know where these trends came from, but they’re growing. And annoying.

Over capitalization is the tendency to capitalize words that seem to be proper nouns but aren’t. The &, of course, explains itself.

In the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries these practices were also the norm. I don’t know if it was considered a problem, but these days we have a plethora of grammar books, widely published and widely distributed, that provide distinct rules on when to capitalize and when not to. Here’s a comparison of then and now:

From a letter from George Mason, who conceived the Bill of Rights but did not sign, in a letter to George Washington about slavery (from the May 2000 issue of Smithsonian magazine):

“…that slow Poison…is daily contaminating the Minds & Morals of our People. Every Gentleman here is born a petty Tyrant. Practical in Actssof Despotism & Cruelty, we become callous to the Dictates of Humanity….And in such an infernal School are to be educated our future Legislators & Rulers.”

And from various resumes:

Develop solutions to ensure continuity of business services, execute change requests for Customer Router Configurations.
Biweekly reconciliation of all HRIS transactions for Payroll transmission.
Develop and maintain Marketing internal collateral library along with online web postings and all other internal & external communication activities.
…shadowed physicians & pharmaceutical sales representatives….
Examine statement of work, purchase orders & invoices from global & domestic vendors for authenticity
Created queries/reports of daily and weekly room lists, enabling Training Center to operate efficiently.
Safe and efficient delivery of Radiopharmaceutical products and associated Lab work
Coding and activisation for the month of May & Award Pearl for month of August & September.

I understand deciding if titles, departments or product names should be capitalized or not relative to classifying what – and what isn’t – a proper noun could be a little iffy. What I don’t understand is why someone wouldn’t look it up. For example, I just searched “capitalization in titles” and easily found a very comprehensive page:
http://data.grammarbook.com/blog/capitalization/capitalization-with-job-titles/

Next I googled “”ampersand, when to use” and immediately found this: http://www.betterwritingskills.com/tip-w002.html which says essentially what I tell my students in Perfect Job University when we’re doing resume work and it shows up (often, unfortunately):

The ampersand (&) is an often over-used abbreviation for the word and. Its use should be limited to a few situations……Do not use an ampersand in general writing simply to abbreviate the word and.

How you handle small things sometimes indicates how you handle bigger issues. If you don’t take the time to look something up and ensure it’s correct for your resume, maybe you’ll just take the shortcut, cross your fingers and hope, as an employee. If you take the lazy way out on your resume, maybe you’ll take the lazy way out as an employee.

Everyone should own two books:

The Elements of Grammar by Margaret Shertzer
The Elements of Style by Strunk and White

They’re not nearly as entertaining as other grammar books I have (7 total – among them Woe is I and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire), but they’re very comprehensive and when my books with the funny pictures and examples fail me, I turn to these two, along with my UPI style manual.

The ampersand issue would seem to be to be common sense. But obviously I’m wrong to some degree or its usage wouldn’t be so common.

The irony is that in a multitude of job board ads, one of the requirements is “Excellent verbal and written communication skills” and yet probably half of them exhibit these problems and others. That’s good news for you, because there’s about a 50% possibility that when the company looks at your resume, they won’t see these issues as a failure to meet that requirement.

On the other hand, there’s a 50% chance they will. Minor? Possibly. But when you can buy a book and familiarize yourself with a few basic rules, why not do it….and increase that 50% to be more in your favor?

Posted in Uncategorized, resumes | No Comments »

it all begins in your head part 2

Friday, July 30th, 2010 by Judi

in your head Part 1 is below this entry.

Last entry I showed you how and why your thoughts, verbalizations, and intents create what you experience. To quote Mark Twain: “If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you’re right.” So if you don’t like what’s happening with your job search, look to how you’re thinking and what you’re saying about the process, because your ability to find the perfect job is determined by your attitude and beliefs.

Those who are determined to find their perfect job know what it looks like and know it’s out there. Their paperwork invites interest. They sell themselves in a compelling manner. They know what they’re looking for. They eliminate anything that doesn’t fit and doggedly pursue what does.

By contrast, there are those who would rather play victim. “There’s nothing out there.” “I’m never going to find something that pays what I make now.” “I’ve been unemployed so long I’m going to lose my house!” “I got fired; I’ll never find a job now.” And after multiple interviews and no offers, comes the wail that perpetuates the situation: “No one’s going to hire me!”

It’s no coincidence that this group hasn’t made sure their cover letter and resume are eye-catching and worth reading, nor are they pro-active in their search. And because they don’t know what they want, they’re interviewing – and trying to get an offer – for any job that seems reasonable. They’re sending out blurry, vague intent. What do they expect back?

So if your search isn’t producing the desired results, how do you change it? You change your thinking. When you change your thinking, you change your intent, and what you say and do is a reflection of that.

Ever hear those lottery stories? Sometimes a family member or friend says, “He always said he’d win one day!” And then there’s the other side of that train of thought: “Oh, I play the lottery sometimes. But I never win!” When you think like that you might as well save your money, because you never will win.

By paying attention to your words and thoughts, you’ll begin to notice where you’re creating, perpetuating, and accepting negative energy, not only in your job search, but your daily existence. And then you can begin to make choices that create different results. The shorter the gap between your thoughts and the appearance of what you’re thinking about, the better you are at creating.

Pay attention to the words of other people that, out of habit, you agree with. Every time you say, think, or hear something negative, don’t accept it. Counter with the positive.

“Watch me screw this up” becomes “I choose to pay attention and do the best I can. If I make a mistake I’ll learn from it.”
Change “What a lousy day!” to “This rain makes everything so beautifully green!”
Don’t over dramatize a situation. When you catch yourself saying “I lost my keys again! I’m so stupid!” replace it with “No, I’m not stupid, but sometimes I’m forgetful, so I’ll create a specific place to put my keys, and I’ll know where they are.”

Simplified, it’s about choice. Things are what they are. You can choose to change what’s happening or change your attitude about what’s happening. It takes practice to stay conscious. But until you begin to make your choices conscious, you won’t realize how many of them have been unconscious. And if you’re not paying attention to that, you’re not aware of the consequences or benefits that come with each choice.

Only you are responsible for your life and where you are right now. You made the choices, and you created it. If you’re on a job search and aren’t satisfied with what’s taking place, no matter how outlandish this topic seems, why not choose a different approach? You just might find your perfect job!

Posted in behavior/psychology, cover letters, follow up, interviewing, networking, resumes, salary | No Comments »

keywords and resumes: don’t miss the point

Thursday, July 15th, 2010 by Judi

Keywords. The very phrase is enough to freak job seekers out. “Does my resume have enough?” “Is there any such thing as too many?” “Should I change it for every ad?” Conventional wisdom says a resounding YES for the last question. Consequently, job seekers end up with multiple resumes. The average number is 4. This week I had someone come to me with 8. Absurd. (And they were all poorly done, too)

Job seekers want to know what hiring authorites think. Since I’ve worked with hundreds of them over 22 years – I’ll tell you. They want to know your story. But first, they want to know if your story is worth their time.

Unfortunately, job seekers and professional resume writers think keywords are more important than - and will substitute for - the story. Too often the keywords are there and the story is missing.

First, the principle behind keywords is screening. Even in times of average unemployment there are people who apply for a job becuase they think they can do it, they’re willing to learn it, they did something like it……but they haven’t actually done it or anything close to it. When the unemployment rate soars – like now – the percentage of unqualified people soars. Keywords – or rather, the absence of keywords – weeds these people out.

Second, lately “professional” resume writers like to just plop a huge group of keywords somewhere on top of the resume, and tell you this is good….because they’re getting all your keywords in there! But more often than not, that section is overdone and takes up space. Keywords should be present in your resume via a STRENGTHS section on top but more importantly, used naturally throughout the resume within context of your career.

Third, resumes in general are usually poorly written and that includes many by ”professional” writers who proclaim their CRW (certified resume writer) status makes them an expert while they may just be looking at a bunch of different books and repeating what someone taught them. But keywords don’t take the place of a poorly written resume, and 99.9% of self -done resumes are horribly ineffective while many professional ones aren’t always much better.

Where does the story come in? A well-written resume isn’t a list of your employers and what you did in each place. Nor is it a brag sheet. Rather, it tells the story of who you are, what you can do, how you’ve made a difference, how you’ve grown, how you make decisions, what your level of motivation is – all within the context of your career. The companies for whom you’ve worked and what you’ve done there – typically boring job d escription stuff – is the least of it. With or without the keywords.

My point is – if your resume is well written, and tells your story thoroughly and effectively, both general and specific keywords will be present because it’s pretty hard to present your career without keywords. So on some level, it’s even difficult to write a resume poorly and not use applicable key words.

If you’re a medical device sales person, can you write a resume that doesn’t mention any of the following relevant to what you’ve done: medical device; territory; accounts; capital equipment, disposables, or both; physicians (and relevant specialty); the applicable hospital department….etc

If you’re an IT project manager, common sense says you list the hardware, software, and programs that you’ve experience with and whatever experience you focused on. You may have a poorly written bullet that’s a job description: Negotiated with vendors to procure best prices for hardware, software, and services or you may have a more effective, accomplishment-oriented bullet that tells how you benefited the company: Saved company over $15k by renegotiating vendor contracts as they came up for renewal. Either way – you’ve got negotiate with vendors in there.

What if you don’t have the experience? Then it’s very difficult to use the primary keywords, and you have to find something you did that’s parallel, utilizing general keywords. If you’re answering an ad for wholesale sales of men’s clothing but your experience is in wholesale furnishings, the primary keywords won’t fit – no matter how hard you try. Your experience isn’t in selling men’s clothing wholesale. So you better have bullets that relate not just your sales awards, but how you sell, if you build relationships, what your methodology and philosophy is. Although again, here is mostly where there’s only a job description and a list of sales awards. Something like

Sold home furnishings to Fortune 500 companies and developed key accounts.
Took territory from last place to first place 2008
2 sales person of 25 for northeast region
Cold called to develop new accounts

Keywords? men’s clothing, wholesale, Fortune 500, sales, territory, new accounts, cold call, key accounts. Good, right? Nope. No story. How do you sell? How did evolve the territory? If it was a new market base for you, how did you learn it? What was your selling method of cold calls to developing accounts? Who were your clients? What problems did you solve for them?

Do you see the correlation? The worry about keywords is not only overhyped and overdone, but misplaced. Keywords are about experience. And if you’ve got the experience, you’ve got the keywords. The real job – and the most effective use of keywords – is to make sure those keywords tell your story and your story encompasses the keywords. Without the full context, keywords might get you past the the first few cuts, but if your resume can’t substantiate your story and leaves it untold, you may not get past a phone screen. If your interview skills aren’t well developed, no matter how many keywords are on your resume, keywords alone won’t carry you through.

Tags: interview, keywords, new job, resumes
Posted in Uncategorized, interviewing, resumes | No Comments »

poor grammar, poor impression

Thursday, April 29th, 2010 by Judi Perkins

grammar I wrote the column below two years ago, but that’s irrelevant, because the situation continues. I tend to run it every few months, this time because I’m not only seeing it in cover letters, but several of us were discussing it on FB this week. I don’t care about casual communication between friends, but resumes, cover letters, websites……That there’s a plethora of applicants for almost every job is no secret. But a company needs only one reason to jettison you from consideration, and this one can be prevented easily.
___________________

I’ve become increasingly concerned about the ignorance of Americans – not those who have learned English as a second language, but native English speakers – regardless of race, income level, schooling or other determining factors.

The number of people who read seems to be decreasing in direct proportion to the number of kids growing up with portable DVDs, and iPods. Television has become the preferred babysitter for children and the most effective way for adults to anesthetize themselves after a day’s work. Teachers, overworked and underpaid, seem to be fighting a losing battle – or are some perpetuating it?

These days I see egregious (horrible, outrageous, astoundingly bad) grammatical errors on resumes and cover letters, web sites, signs, emails to me…..regardless of management or income level. Job hunters write asking me for “advise” (it should be “advice.” “Advice” is the noun; “to advise” is a verb).

Some of these are written by people who are in the job market hoping to be invited in for an interview, and their paperwork is full of punctuation and grammatical mistakes. Were they careless? Or do they not know? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the hiring authority doesn’t know the difference either.

The other day I saw the back of a company shirt that said: providing quality service since 10 years. A company shirt? How many were printed and are worn by employees who walk around advertising that that particular company has someone in an upper-level management position who didn’t catch the error or didn’t know the difference?

Here’s a sign I saw in a store a few weeks ago: We do not except credit cards. (It should be “accept”.)

Last week a senior level manager emailed me. He confused “its” and “it’s” in three different places. (”Its” is possessive. “It’s” is the contraction of “it is”.)

Here’s another example: I do product testing for a research panel. The product came with a slip of paper that said: “This commitment covers not discussing this product or it’s usage with others outside your home.” (It should have been “its”)

Here’s what really bugs me: the new rule that seems to have come into effect in the last year – if in doubt, add an apostrophe. So what’s happened is that people all over America have lost the understanding of the difference between plural and possessive (possessive gets an apostrophe, plural does not).

Your resume and your cover letter are not just a synopsis of your background. They are not just an introduction of you when you hope to be considered for an interview. First and foremost they are a brochure, and they are selling a product, and the product is you. If you wouldn’t go to an interview in blue jeans, don’t send your cover letter and resume with mistakes to a prospective employer.

If you were shopping for a new car, what would you think if all the Honda or Lexus or Toyota brochures had apostrophes in the wrong place? Or misspelled words? Or glaring grammatical errors? Would you know?

What about a flyer from your local grocery store? Or a promotional piece from your state representative?

On some level it’s going to make a difference as to what you think of that company or person. If they aren’t careful enough about their literature or sales material, what else don’t they pay attention to? Don’t rely on Microsoft Word’s ABC/Grammar checker. It isn’t able to discern if a word is spelled correctly but used out of context. The grammar checker won’t help you unless you have a fundamental understanding of grammar to begin with. In fact, if you defer to the grammar checker’s advice, you’ll probably increase your number of mistakes.

An excellent reference book – and a funny one – to keep on hand is The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed by Karen Elizabeth Gordon. It’s easy to digest, has clever illustrations full of personality, and the examples make learning fun.

Don’t tell yourself good grammar doesn’t matter. Don’t tell yourself that your skills are more important. Above all, don’t tell yourself that everyone speaks poorly these days and the hiring authority won’t know or care. The ability to communicate, written and spoken, is of paramount importance – certainly in business. And it only becomes more valuable as fewer people are able to demonstrate it.

Posted in cover letters, resumes | No Comments »

if career sales people need training, and job seekers are selling, then….a + b = c

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 by Judi Perkins

blah blah blah What do SALES SKILLS and RESUMES share? Well, besides the resume being a product brochure for you (you know what I say ad nauseum: you’re selling a product and the product is you!) the best way to sell is to communicate clearly and cleanly the benefits of the product. I call it resume speak, Art Sobczak calls it corporate speak. Same thing. And it needs to be thrown out the window – read this: (and then subscribe to his newsletter) because he’s a top sales trainer and you are selling you! While not everything will be relevant, much is absolutely applicable for job seekers.
http://www.telesalesblog.com/2010/04/26/do-you-use-corporatespeak-on-calls.html

Tags: follow up, interviewing, resumes
Posted in interviewing, resumes | No Comments »

resumes: the dreaded disease of one-page-itis (and those who perpetuate it)

Thursday, March 25th, 2010 by Judi Perkins

cooltext453530359 I coined this term in response to all that nonsense about how a resume has to be one page, which is as ridiculous as the reasons “experts” give for why it should be one page:

less is more
you’re sending it online
there’s no time to read resumes
they’re scanned so it’s just about the first-page keywords
It’s inconsiderate to make a busy hiring manager flip through pages; it sends the message that you consider yourself more important than the person reviewing your resume **
No matter how many jobs you’ve held or your qualifications, you can still get it all on one page **
(specific person’s name), however, reasons that a one-page resume is always the best; with a separate page for references.***

Just a few reasons why resumes “should” be one page. The ** quotes are from a guy who does a lot of consulting work with clients like Verizon and other well-known companies. But his emphasis is on fearlessness in the work environment. I read some of his blog posts, and I like his stuff.

BUT. On the flip side, his background, his focus, and his message give him absolutely no knowledge or credibility to make statements about resume length.

The *** quote is from a professional resume writer! And references should never, ever be part of your resume! (Present them at the end when an offer is imminent).

That’s what really irks me about so many “experts.” They don’t have the background to have a clue and it screws up lots of job seekers who assume that “expert” actually has some knowledge to say whatever it is they’re saying. Sometimes all they’ve got is a loose connection, like the ** guy above. Or they’ve read a few books and gotten an official designation that qualifies them as qualified. Or they’ve hired a few people so their advice is basically what they think.

What’s my license to say this stuff? I’ve seen over 500,000 (and climbing). I’ve discussed them with decision makers (CEOs, COOs, VPs, etc). And I rarely do them – I refer them to some people I’ve carefully screened. The ones I have done (when I took retained clients) consistently received compliments from hiring authorities and recruiters, though.

I liken the one-page resume debate to the one about cover letters. That debate is: no one reads cover letters so why write them? There are a lot of reasons no one reads cover letters and thus why they sometimes aren’t forwarded. Scanning is one reason cover letters are assumed to be not necessary, but also………………ta dah! 99% of all cover letters are generic or so poorly written they say nothing and therefore why read them? A point with which I agree.

Yes, resumes are scanned too, and yes, keywords are important. But people still read resumes. When they don’t read past one page it’s because the resume is awful. And I can honestly say that such a huge number of resumes are so awful – even many professionally written ones – why WOULD someone read past the first page anyway?

Because resumes aren’t even read, first of all. Three seconds will tell a hiring authority if they’re going to like it – the first decision is made visually.

Yet, when it comes down to it, as the process moves on and people are interviewed BY PEOPLE, resumes are read. They’re read and they’re compared. And recruiters – 3rd party or in-house – may let the software decide who comes to their attention, but after that – it’s the actual resume that functions to narrow the process.

So again, if the resume isn’t read much past one page, it’s because the resume wasn’t worth reading past one page for good or bad reasons.

In any case, it’s in individual thing, never a one-size fits all. Generally, not too long out of college and it should be one page. You don’t have enough to fit on two.

Beyond that, it ought to be two because otherwise you’ve neglected important information, or crammed too much on one page – which means virtually no margins and a teeny font. Or all of that. If you’ve done that – look at your resume. Really look at it. Does it look inviting to read? Do you really think someone is going to say “OW it makes my head hurt, but it’s one page! Let’s get this person in here!” Of course not.

Your resume needs to be as long as it should be depending on what you do and how long you’ve been around. And it needs to speak specifically about your accomplishments, not your job description.

Yes, nebulous advice, but this post was more about why you should avoid one-page-itis. If you want specific advice on how to write yours, you can check out my other blog posts, or google my name (because I have articles literally all over the internet) or email me, or sign up for my free newsletter which, in return, will get you a very detailed free report on resumes. Any of those will provide you with very specific help on how to do one.

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tighten ALL your job seeking skills and shorten your job search!

Friday, February 12th, 2010 by Judi Perkins

little red figure FREE preview class Wednesday for a 5 module class with 5 experts, including 2 recruiters and the Vault resume expert. The preview call enables you to decide if you want to take the class or not. If you do, you receive value-added services and products, handouts, and a recording of each module. Don’t miss this teleseminar if you want to get noticed, tune up your search and move ahead of the competition! Read on to learn more:

Getting to the finish line in your job search isn’t easy. There are myriads of hurdles along the way.

If you’re sending out resumes and getting very little response it might be the ads you’re answering.
Or it might be that you’re not fully utilizing all available resources.
Or it might be your cover letter.
Then again, it might be your resume….or your interviewing skills.

How do you tell what the problem is?
If you’re unemployed, you can’t afford to guess. And if you’re employed, the longer it takes to find something new, the longer you’re forced to stay in a job you don’t like, and the more you come to dislike it.

If you are getting some action, are you sure you’re pro-actively finding everything you could be? There are four available avenues for searching – most people use one or two, and not very effectively. If you knew what those avenues were and how to maximize them, you’d get more results.

Are you interviewing? No offers? Always the bridesmaid but never the bride, and consequently feeling confused and frustrated, on the verge of giving up? It’s not the companies, it’s you. Clearly you’re failing to communicate in a way that catches the company’s interest. Your interviewing skills are probably severely lacking.

Finding a job is a skill!
That it’s your career and you can search effectively by just putting your resume together and networking or answering ads is a fallacy. The average job seeker is operating at perhaps 30% effectiveness, and completely unaware of how you have the ability to leapfrog over the competition.

But it’s a process. In a market like this, your skills need to be cutting edge from start to finish. The market isn’t dead. Companies are hiring. If they’re not hiring, chances are it has nothing to do with the economy, your age, your industry or anything else. It has to do with you.

How to finally put it together so it works
Now, in a 5-module teleseminar of one-hour sessions created based on the questions and issues our clients are currently facing, you’ll receive that in-depth information. You’ll have access to the knowledge 5 career experts will be providing you.

FREE PREVIEW CALL WEDNESDAY, Feb 17 at 12:00 pm eastern (you can attend the preview call and THEN decide if you want to take the class)
Thursday, February 18: Judi Perkins – 4 ways to jumpstart your job search
Tuesday, February 23: Donna Sweiden – Optimizing your online presence
Thursday, February 25: Debra Wheatman – Building An Effective Resume
Tuesday, March 2: Jeff LeFevre – Understanding Recruiters for effective working relationships
Thursday, March 5: Melanie Szlucha – TODAY: A better way to prepare for job interviewsFor more information about each module (time etc) and each presenter, go here: www.JobAdviceMentor.com

Posted in interviewing, networking, other career coaches/experts, resumes | No Comments »

no path, no focus, no clue – is this you?

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 by Judi Perkins

no clue1 Thank you, Steven Coyne. I doubt it’s a coincidence that he’s a recruiter and I was one for 22 years as well. In any case, for those who periodically write me and tell me they think I’m nuts, here’s another person echoing every single thing I’ve ever said in any of my columns. Great blog post Steven!

http://thejobhuntergroup.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/3-reasons-i%e2%80%99ll-read-your-resume/