MyVoile - Employment Facilitators

So imagine the Super Bowl without commercials….I bet you can’t without snickering. If we fully exploit the Super Bowl commercial metaphor, then you know how critical the Monday morning reviews can seem. Don’t kid yourself; the review of your resume is similar.

If you have exceptional talent but fail to communicate and brand yourself appropriately in your resume, your exceptional talent is lost to those professionals focused on matching talent to opportunity.

So what goes into a resume? That is the easier question. Without getting into the granularity of which headings to use, most experts agree that a resume should include:

1. Profile Summary or Objective Statement: The profile is the preferred inclusion. However, for jobseekers with a general background or who are in the process of changing careers, an objective statement can provide insight about what you are looking for in a career. Typically, we suggest that anyone who uses an objective statement should likely have multiple versions of your resumes with objective statements matching the focus area.

2. Professional Work Experience: The work experience is the area that you chronologically list your professional experiences beginning with the present and working back. The important staples of this section include date of employment, title, area of responsibility, and achievements. The single largest resume turn off is a list of responsibilities that do little to tell the reader how those responsibilities or achievements translated to value for previous or current employers. Take the extra time to list value rich statements and commanding action words.

3. Education: For job seekers with the appropriate credentials, this is an easy part of the resume to cover. For job seekers who lack accredited degrees, consider listing training, certifications, and time spent in pursuit of a degree. Better to list your efforts here than to omit the section altogether.

4. Military: You served your country. Let your service provide value to you. As a fellow former reservist, I can confirm the inclusion of your service to country is a big differentiator. For those service members transitioning to public/private sector careers, be careful to review all sections of your resume and make sure you connect the dots from your military references to civilian jargon.

5. Affiliations and achievements: Remember that your resume, commensurate with experience, should not be longer than two pages. For those with less tenure, try to keep it to one. If you have the room, listing achievements or leadership roles is a clever way to close your resume document. If you list not-for-profit organizations on your resume, you run the risk of disclosing details about your personal beliefs that can clash with those of your prospective new employers. Your choice…job seekers report that this was either a nice segue to conversation in an interview…or a deal killer.

A better question might be to ask what should not go into a resume. A survey of recruiters revealed this top ten 86 list:

1. Misspellings
2. Pictures
3. Personal disclosure statements
4. First person voice
5. Inappropriate email addresses
6. Inaccurate statements about experience - puffery
7. Unnecessary page count
8. Different fonts or over styled resume
9. Graphics
10. All Caps

Make sure you check your resume for compatibility issues. It seems like common sense, but it is an often-overlooked mistake. A word doc is emailed and the formatting is lost or the font is not compatible. The result is not a good one. Lastly, get a professional to help if you are not comfortable with your own resume writing skills. Would you cut your own hair? If the answer is no, it probably stems from the fact that you worry about how your handiwork will make you look to others. You should have the same worry with your resume.

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Amen

I learned the hard way that a resume that is finished too fast and without enough scrutiny on my part is the kiss of death. I got word from a recruiter that even though my background made me look like a decent candidate my resume lacked the pizazz that would net me an interview -- that I just was not a stand out on paper. I have learned from Voile that the paper up front in the form of my resume is the first and maybe only shot I have to move to the next level with an interview.

Eduardo Garcia , March 15, 2009

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