Career Change Resumes

January 15, 2010

The Pitfalls of Unsolicited Resumes

Filed under: Career Change Resumes — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 11:08 am

Your mind is set on a company and a position that you want. This could be your dream job, but the company is not hiring. Before crossing your fingers and submitting your resume, consider the some of the risks that accompany your unsolicited resume. Your initiative in pursuing your dream job may actually sabotage your employment search.Unsolicited resumes are those received by a company when no employment openings are available. These resumes carry some baggage that will not benefit you in the job search. Despite your best intentions, an unsolicited resume has little chance of landing you an interview. Unsolicited resumes carry some stigma for a number of good reasons, but we limit this discussion to three.1. Unsolicited resumes are an irritant to Human Resource personnel when the company is not hiring. The HR staff has a multitude of duties aside from those related to hiring. They will not spend time examining resumes for positions when the company is not seeking employees.

2. These resumes are seldom read, but go straight into a file for a specified period of time before finding their way into the shredder and finally the recycle bin. When the company is hiring, H.R. will begin from a pool of current resumes rather than from a file of stale unsolicited documents. Unlike wine, your resume does not improve with age.

3. Calling the HR office to follow-up on your unsolicited resume may tag you as a “stalker.” This slang refers to unwanted calls from individuals seeking employment when the firm is not hiring. These people are in effect, “stalking” the company while waiting for an opportunity that does not exist. You may feel that you are showing tenacity in seeking employment. It is much more likely you are alienating yourself from those in the hiring process.If you have been searching for some time, you may begin to feel frustrated and perhaps a little desperate. It is natural to feel that way and many people have experienced those feelings. But, do not allow your feelings to provoke you into rashly submitting a batch of unsolicited resumes. This practice is unproductive and will set you up to feel worse when your “shotgun” approach fails to produce calls from excited hiring managers eager to schedule an interview.

Landing the right position requires strategy, timing, skill, and a little bit of luck never hurts. But, those who properly prepare often make their own luck and that is your goal. Map out an effective job search strategy that will work for you and your circumstances. There is not a one-size-fits-all solution, but there are effective job search strategies that will work for you. Develop your job search strategy and you are going in the right direction.

December 26, 2009

A Great Resume Is Your Key To Getting The Job You Have Always Wanted!

Filed under: Career Change Resumes — Tags: , , , , , , — admin @ 11:00 pm

The purpose of a resume is to get invited to a job interview by an employer. The resume is the first and most preferred way of introducing yourself, so it should highlight all of your achievements.

Actually a resume is a media through which you are marketing yourself to the employer to get your desired job and it is the first point of contact between you and the employer. A great resume doesn’t have to follow any particular pattern, rather it should be tailored to the position you are applying for.

This can be done by following some basic principles of writing a highly effective resume. If you write with an intention to create interest, to persuade the employer to call you, your final product will be very different than if you write to inform or catalog your job history. If you realize that a great resume can be your ticket to getting the job you want, you can produce a real masterpiece.

Why You Must Have A Great Resume?
The resume is an advertisement, nothing more, nothing less so the sole purpose of having a great resume is to win an interview. A great resume represents you in the best light and it convinces the employer that you have what it takes to be successful in this new position or career

A great resume should be pleasing to the eye and make the reader want to pick it up and read it. And also it should stimulate interest in you and encourage the employer to want to know more about you and eventually inspire the prospective employer to pick up the phone and ask you to come in for an interview.

Your resume is not about your past, it?s about your future so it tells the employer what you can do and then prove your claims with specific achievements. It also puts your training, skills and expertise to succeed in the right place so that you will get noticed easily.

Other Reasons To Have A Great Resume
To pass the employers screening process based on the requisite educational level, number of years experience, skill sets etc.
To give basic facts which might favorably influence the employer based on your political affiliations, racial minority, companies that you have worked for etc.
To provide contact information, like up to date address and telephone number.
To give some information to the employers like professional references, background.
To establish yourself as a professional person based on the content presentation of your resume with a high standard. As well as being excellent, clear, well organized, well written and well designed on the highest professional grade of paper.
To put your resume in employers personnel files.
To help you to clarify your direction, qualifications, strengths, confidence to start the process of committing to a job or career change to the employer.

December 25, 2009

How To Write A Resume – Objective Vs. Summary Statements

Filed under: Career Change Resumes — Tags: , , , , , — admin @ 11:27 am

It’s hard to write a resume. Most of us are not “born salespeople.” Just mentioning the word “sales” usually sends a shiver of fear up our spines. Add to this the fact that we are taught from childhood that it’s not polite to brag about ourselves it’s no wonder that when you’re asked to “sell yourself” on a resume you freeze up like a deer in the headlights.
So instead of panicking let’s take a resume apart piece by piece and explain how to write an effective resume. Hopefully this will eliminate some of the fear involved in “selling yourself” on paper.
RESUME BASICS (what every resume MUST have)
Your name, address and phone number (obviously). But also your email address.
Email addresses are where most people tend to go wrong. I have a friend with an email address called “1hottiger” (one hot tiger). While this might be cute among friends, to a prospective employer it shows poor taste, and a lack of maturity (since she’s in her late 40’s). If you don’t have a professional sounding email, create a new one just for your job search. You can get free email addresses on Google, Yahoo or Hotmail.
Example of a BAD email address:
ImAPartyGirl@email.com
JennysMom@email.com
2Hot2Handle@email.com
Example of a GOOD email address:
MaryMartin@email.com
M.Martin@email.com
Mary.A.Martin@email.com
STYLE
When you write a resume avoid using fancy fonts or colored ink. This just makes you look immature. Plus, statistics show that if someone has to struggle to read something they won’t. Which means you’re resume is guaranteed to hit the trash faster than most if you use a script font.
Try to make your resume look like a nice letterhead. One thing I do when I write a resume is condense lines. In the header I put my name to the left and my phone number all the way to the right. Then below that I put my full address (on one line) on the left and my email all the way to the right on the same line. Then I separate it all with a nice line to look like professional stationery.
When To Use An Objective Over A Summary
The Objective Statement
An objective statement is for people who are either just starting out or changing careers. Your resume should state your desired job and field (engineering for instance) and demonstrate that you have the skills or education (if not the job background) for the position.
When you write your resume make sure that you use “action words” in your objective statement. Just like they sound they convey that you are a person willing to get to work and do your best. It should state your skills, your desires and what you want to do FOR the employer.
The WRONG Way To State An Objective:
Looking for a position with a dynamic company that will recognize and use my talents. I am seeking a company that promotes from within and will recognize and reward hard work and talent.
This statement is all about YOU. It gives the prospective employer no information about yourself that makes you stand out from the crowd. When you write your resume try to think from their position. They want someone that’s gonna get in there and work hard to make THEM money. How will you do that?
The RIGHT Way to State An Objective:
To apply my knowledge acquired through my Masters degree in Graphic Design and internship at ABC Advertising Company to an entry level position in the art and marketing department of a major magazine.
The Summary Statement
A Summary statement is for people that have been working for a while. It “sums up” your skills and positions using strong “action words” and states your qualifications up-front. It’s a way for a prospective employer to “glance” at your resume and determine if it’s worth reading further. It should outline briefly your skills and background and anything you feel you did that was “above and beyond” the nature of the job you held.
BAD Summary
Department manager for 15 member department in large marketing firm. Managed schedules and oversaw daily department duties and workflow.
The reason this is BAD is that it’s generic. Lots of people have jobs like that. What set you apart? Let’s try again:
GOOD Summary
Accomplished department manager with 10 years experience. Created highly synergistic department of 15 creative marketing employees that generated over $5 million dollars in annual sales through applying teamwork and incentives/rewards.
This is just a sample but you should have 3 to 5 strong sentences like this. When you write a resume show the results your efforts made whenever possible, whether it was saving the company money and/or time, or bringing in sales.
Please keep in mind that these lessons are for the person just entering the job market or in entry-level or lower-level management. If you’ve been in the workforce for a while and are on the rise in your field then you definitely will want to consider hiring a professional resume writing service.

November 5, 2009

How To Format A Career Change Resume

Filed under: Career Change Resumes — Tags: , , — admin @ 12:07 pm

If you are seeking to change careers, the best resume format to use is the combination resume. This resume format is not chronological nor functional. It combines both. It is extremely flexible and allows you to use strategies in a way that would normally be considered wrong.
The difference between the combination format and the chronological format is that the chronological format resume is very easy to follow. The hiring manager will typically start to read the chronological resume at the bottom of the work history or professional experience section and will continue reading his or her way up towards the top to trace your career history. The heading depends on your career level.
If there are employment gaps, it will be obvious because it is difficult to hide breaks in employment using this resume format. This is why most hiring managers prefer the chronological resume format. It is easy to read and leaves little to the imagination. This can be a great advantage if you have been in the same type of position because it shows continuity and progression in your industry.
But what happens when you have held different types of positions across several industries? Some reasons for gaps in employment or holding too many or unrelated jobs include raising children, caring for a family member, illness, returning to college, corporate downsizing or merger, joining the military, and difficulty finding work for long stretches of time because of a tight job market or weak resume.
Hey, things happen. That is life. You cannot worry about the past. It is time to think about the future. So, the first thing you will need to do is toss your old resume. It will not help you to change your career. It is time to make a fresh start.
First, create a resume that clearly indicates at the top what type of position you are seeking.
Include a career summary section that highlights where you have been in your career, being careful to only mention what would be of most interest to this particular company. Emphasize your transferable experience and skills that match the qualifications of the position. If there is a job ad, study it and do your best to make a connection between the job requirements and what you have done. Do not use the exact wording.
Use a keywords section to list transferable skills so the reader can find them immediately. This is also important if the company uses resume scanning technology. This will ensure your resume is retrieved from the database in response to a keyword search.
Under your Professional Experience section or Work History. Again, it depends on your background. Then present your experience in functional sections such as General Management, Sales Management, Staff Training and Supervision, Budget Planning and Tracking, amongst many others.
Take all of the experience you have gained over the years and categorize it into skill or functional areas that the new position requires. If the company is seeking someone to manage budgets, and you managed budgets ten years ago and four years ago, but not in your last two jobs, then list the collective experience under a Budget category.
Continue this formula until each respective category has a minimum of four bulleted sentences or two two-lined sentences to support the name of the heading. It is a good idea to have at least three categories to show how well rounded you are.
Below this section, list the companies, locations, job titles, and dates. You can either create a separate section named Work History if you have already called the above section Professional Experience, or simply list the section without a main heading as part of the main section. It will be understood. Or, you can start the section off with the company names and dates followed by the functional categories. In other words, flip it.
The most common problem with this resume format is identifying where your experience was gained. But, that is the whole idea. If they are interested in what you can do, they will call you in for the interview. It is at that time you can explain the how, when, where, and why of it all. It will make for great conversation, which by the way, a job interview should be. A meeting between two people with a common interest, in this case the position, who engage in conversation in a professional manner.

Your Career Change Resume – Play To Win

Filed under: Career Change Resumes — Tags: , , , , , , , — admin @ 12:27 am

The distinction between the chronological format and the combination format is that the chronological format resume is extremely simple to understand. Hiring executive would normally begin to read the chronological resume at the bottom, where the record of your work or experience in the profession is placed and moves upward.
Handling Employment Gaps
If there are a few breaks in your employment, it will be extremely noticeable in the chronological format. This is a reason why majority of hiring executives prefer the chronological resume format. It is simpler to read – in addition, it does not leave much to the imagination. This could be a huge plus if you have been in the same position for a long time, as it gives an account of stability and development in your field of work.
There are many reasons for having breaks in employment. It could be due to raising a family, poor health or education. It could also be due to a layoff, military service or just generally having a tough time searching for work due to a stiff job market.
Whatever the reason, if you have gaps in your employment, you’ll want to use the combination resume – because it will allow you to highlight your skills, accomplishments and achievements, rather than how long you were out of work.
Link Your Skills and the Job Requirements Together
First, you must build a resume that plainly points out at the top what kind of position you are looking for. Put in a segment that has a summary of your career; what areas you specialize in and your career progression. However, make sure to point out all the things that are important to the company. Highlight your managerial experience and skills that match what the employer is looking for.
If there is an advertisement for a job, look at it carefully and make sure that you make a link between the requirements of the job and all the things you have achieved in your career. Use a “skills” segment to list of all your skills so that the reader will be able to locate it all in one place. In addition, this is essential if the company uses resume scanning technology. Using keywords and industry jargon will guarantee that your resume will be selected from the database in response to a keyword search.
If you are a career changer, writing a resume that wins isn’t rocket science – but it does take time and planning. By tailoring your resume to fit your specific situation and the needs of each particular employer, you will ensure that you get plenty of interview calls.

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