Writing a Resume
On November 19th, 2008 I was invited to help out at the HiTech job fair in Toronto run by CareerDoor. There were over 20 employers present and over 800 job seekers job hunters attended.
Attending the fair were project managers, system administrators, programmers, product managers, business analysts, etc. The job hunters attending had between eight years experience and twenty years experience. Some currently had jobs, but most did not.
I was asked to run a resume review desk for the day and must of reviewed two hundred. There were two of us at the table and we started at 10:00 and went to after 4:00. At no time were there less than 10 people lined up, many didn’t bother lining up because of the delay.
I asked the people how much they expected to make. The answers were between $40,000 and $100,000 with the majority in the $60,000 to $75,000 range.
All the job hunters had at least one degree, many had multiple degrees.
What surprised me most was that these educated professionals was that most did not have the basic skills to market themselves. I consistently saw the same mistakes in marketing in the resume over and over again. When I pointed out some of the changes required and why, they quickly understood why these mistakes needed to be fixed.
A resume and an advertisement are the same thing. They are intended to sell something by using words. The resume is selling a person to an employer, the advertisement is selling a product or service. The people who write advertisements have a whole set of techniques that have been developed over the last 80 years of modern advertising.
Remember, the person doesn’t buy because of the advertisement, they need to go out and take the purchase action. In the same way, you don’t get hired from the resume, you get a job interview from the resume.
Let’s look at the five mistakes.
The resume and cover letter package must be treated like a sales letter. The resume and cover letter package has one point and one point only. Its purpose is to get you the job hunter into a job interview. A job hunter who wants a job worth $50,000 or more, needs to have a resume that t reflect its value as a sales letter. A resume and cover letter will lead to a job that pays $200 a day for somebody earning $50,000 a year.
The objective or skills summary doesn’t show how you solve a problem. Almost every resume had an objective section that read like this: “I am a highly motivated self starting team player who is looking for an exciting career where I can learn new skills and contribute to the growth of the company”. There were some variations with the most exciting one having included the number of years of work experience.
Writing an objective like this is a total waste of time.
The objective section is the headline of an advertisement. It must do two things – it must solve a problem and make a promise. The problem you must solve is the potential employer’s problem and the promise is what you can deliver in your job.
Here are a few examples of some objectives I developed during the day.
* “To provide System Administration function delivering above average uptimes in a mixed Windows and Linux server environment”. ”
* To manage a customer service operation that delivers customer service satisfaction of 84%”
All these objectives were achievements made by the job hunter buried deep in the resume.
You must connect your objective to a problem that you can solve. The rest o tthe resume must then support the promise you make.
You should have lots of different resumes, with slightly different objectives and slightly different wording. Each stressing something different just like advertisers do have different advertisements for different customer needs.
Write your resume for the person employing you. When I right advertising copy the first thing I do is picture in my mind the person I am writing for. I then write down everything I can think about this person. What they are worried about, what they do to solve their problem, how they spend their day.
This is the standard process for every good copywriter. It is the first step and most important step in writing any good content.
For the job hunter, here is what you can do. Pick one of the toughest bosses you have ever had. Write the resume like you would a report or a presentation to that boss. Include in your resume the material and content that boss would be interested in.
Get rid of material that is unimportant. Who cares what you did in 1995? Do you care what I did back then? Then why should the employer? It was ten years ago and hopefully you have moved on from it. Only include content that is directly relevant to the promise or the problem in your objective.
Make entries as simple as company name, title, and years you worked at the location.If there was a substantial project that can be relevant today, then include it.
For example, if you are applying for a tech job at a bank, including projects of financial nature are important, but only the minimum amount of information for any job over five years ago. The world has changed, and the only thing relevant from five years ago, was that you were working and not in jail. There is exceptions to this rule, but make sure your situation is really an exception. Getting rid of extra stuff will make more room on the resume for material that is relevant and interesting.
Read your resume out loud line by line. Copywriters have people read their content out loud to them. They read their content out loud as a proof reading method to find simple mistakes. But even, more important, they want to hear what it “sounds like” in the readers head. If it doesn’t sound right, it won’t sell the product. Reading out loud as fast as you can, because thats how fast people read. Reading will find silly repetitions, identify vague sentences,
You need to think about the value of your resume, Here is a simple series of questions I use to help make it clear. “How much is you car worth?” I am usually answered between $3,000 and $21,000. I then ask “How much do you spend on maintaining the asset worth this much a year? The answer is about $300 a month. I then ask one last question, “Your resume will bring you $50,000 a year, how much time and money should you be spending on the resume and job hunt?”
These are some of the ideas I apply in my course “LinkedIn For Job Hunters”, a full day course helping job hunters leverage the 30,000 million people on LinkedIn to find a job.
A bonus sixth mistake – make sure you are specific. Instead of saying “Increased substantially customer response time” you can say “Customer response time went from 1 day to 3 hours with a reduction of 17%. Find a number that quantifies the achievement. If you don’t know the number up, make an approximation and be able to explain that it was an approximation and how you came to calculate it in the interview. Don’t ever lie. The more important the number, the less you should approximate it. If it comes up in the interview, it was important.
Take care
Zale
www.ZaleTabakman.ca
