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Your Resume: Are Your Qualifications Clear?

Dec 10 2017

You know that you are qualified; does your resume back you up?

Here is what you can do to make sure your resume shows the hiring manager or recruiter what they need to know: that you are the perfect candidate.

Study the company’s website and its job posting or advertisement to understand—at a minimum—what the company does and where you would fit into its structure. That information should translate into keywords and skills you embed in your resume.
Include in your resume the key skills that you have and that companies are looking for in someone with your background. Those skills should appear as part of your accomplishments but also as part of a skills list.
Make sure your skills are targeted: yes, you can play the oboe but that is not generally a skill required by either a carpenter or Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
Remember that soft skills may be just as important as hard skills. Soft skills include the ability to work in or lead a team, communicate with stakeholders and board members, develop talent, manage change, develop a customer-centric vision, encourage diversity, spark innovation, and so on.
In your summary, stress the ways that you can help a company solve its problems, whether through increased sales, better customer relations, improved software, re-organization—or wherever your skills and experience will make the most impact.
Accomplishments are vital for making your qualifications clear. They show that you not only have skills but know how to use them to the company’s benefit.
Give education, both post-secondary and continuing education, the emphasis it deserves in your field. Achievements like a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), a black belt in Six Sigma, or training in negotiation, coaching, or leadership are valuable additions to your qualifications.
Make sure you mention any awards you received from your customers, peers, bosses, or the industry at large.

When your resume is written around your specific qualifications, you stand out from the other candidates. Your competitors may also be qualified in their own way, but they cannot possibly share your unique combination of skills, accomplishments, education, and awards. Let Robin’s Resumes® help ensure that employers and recruiters see you as the new hire they have been searching for.

Keep Your Resume Positive

Apr 23 2017

Your resume is a marketing document—it markets you. You want hiring managers and recruiters to come away from your resume feeling positive about you as a candidate and potential employee. Here are six ways you can help ensure that:

Remove negative facts about your career path. Your future employee does not need to know that you had personality conflicts, problems meeting sales or other goals, a difficult boss, or health issues.
Remove any information that ranks you below other candidates. For example, if you are a recent college graduate and barely passed; if you ranked in the bottom half of your sales team; if you failed to get a promotion that you should have received—do not share that information.
Do not compare your achievements to anyone else’s. Maybe everyone in your office became “employee of the month” at some point; your award is still your achievement. Maybe President’s Club status was easy for you to achieve compared to your peers; that doesn’t lessen its impact on a resume.
Do not pan your former employer with statements about “unrealistic expectations,” “confusing lines of authority,” or “unethical behavior.” You might state that you offered steady leadership through many changes in owners, for example; that you collaborated across silos; or that you finished a project that experienced multiple delays. But be very careful to watch the boundary between your achievements and your former employer’s short-comings.
Do not focus on skills you lack as a candidate. Instead, present them as skills you are capable of learning, as you have learned so many skills in the past. This is particularly important for those in technical fields where postings may include an exhaustive (and exhausting) list of preferred skills.
Focus on your positive accomplishments as an employee. Your resume is not your life story. You are allowed to focus on the achievements that make you proud, not the moments that led you to seek another job. Negative moments are over and done with. Hiring managers and recruiters want to hear what you are good at, not what you need to improve.

Robin’s Resumes® makes sure to do like the old song says: accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative. We give you a resume that introduces you to hiring managers and recruiters in the best possible way.

Testimonials and Your Resume

Sep 13 2015

Testimonials in your resume—or on LinkedIn or similar social media sites—puts you steps above competitors. Testimonials that focus on your skills and accomplishments highlight your potential as an employee.

When choosing testimonials, you are looking for:

Short testimonials. It may be tempting to include long-winded accounts of your skills, but it’s important to choose quotations that are brief and pointed, to increase their impact as much as possible. Plus you need that space to describe your achievements and skills.
A maximum of about three testimonials. No potential employer has the time to read a novel of testimonials, nor are they likely to find any groundbreaking information about your skills five testimonials in.
Testimonials with strong content. What a past coworker, mentor, vendor, customer, or boss has to say about your strengths is more important than whether or not they were president of your company.
Testimonials that are attributed. It is best to use a full name and position but you can use initials and position or, if necessary, position alone. But make sure the testimonial comes from a real person.
Testimonials that are positive. Avoid negative language in your testimonials. (For example, you can edit testimonials taken from annual reviews using ellipses (…). In that case, “Jack is reluctant to talk with customers but is the most creative engineer on our team” might become “Jack is…the most creative engineer on our team.”)
Testimonials that are honest. If all your “testimonials” are negative, do not use them. If the only testimonials you have are from your best friend who never worked with you, skip them. Resumes are fine without testimonials.
Testimonials that reinforce, but are not redundant. Use different testimonials to elaborate on your most important strengths and achievements, not to mention your impressive people skills for the third time.
Testimonials that are unique to you as a candidate. Avoid basic statements like “great guy!” Instead, use testimonials that help you to stand out from competitors.

Here is an example of a successful testimonial: “I worked with Jane on the ABC project and she was a wonderful mentor and leader, who inspired me and the rest of the team to bring the project in on time and on budget, making a difficult client very happy.” J. Smith, Engineer

Testimonials will support your value as a candidate if they are short, strong on content, stress the positive, are honest, reinforce your strengths and achievements, and are unique to you.

What Is a Hiring Manager?

May 24 2015

In these blogs, I have often mentioned “hiring managers and recruiters.” Hiring managers are the individuals in a company who review job applicants. They may work in a company’s Human Resources department or may be the manager you would report to if hired. Hiring managers often work with recruiters to find quality job applicants. Recently I took a look at the capabilities and qualities that companies value most in hiring managers. This information about hiring managers will reveal some important information about your job search.

Most companies expect a great hiring manager to:

Ask lots of questions in-house about the ideal candidate, the demands of the job and the company’s needs. The result should be an accurate, detailed job description and job posting.
Move quickly from recognizing that an employee is needed to starting the actual employee search.
Be familiar with online technology and its use in finding candidates.
Weed out inappropriate candidates and present the best candidates for the position.
Make sure that the chosen candidates have the information they need to make a decision about whether they want the job if it is offered.

Since the job postings by hiring managers list what the job and company need most, you must be sure to mention your skills, education and achievements that meet those needs. Companies move quickly and you should, too. Make sure your resume is ready to go when you find that ideal job posting but do not hang around waiting for an offer; keep looking. The more you feel in control of your job search, the better you will come across in an interview.Since hiring managers are looking online, you need to have an online presence. When you meet with a hiring manager, you should feel free to ask questions about the job so that you can correctly determine your own fit and interest. But you should research the company first so that you ask intelligent questions.

But most important, because hiring managers are weeding out inappropriate candidates, you must make sure that your resume shows how very suited you are to the job and the company. Robin’s Resumes® is here to help.

The Dangers of Applying for “Any Job”

Feb 03 2013

As anxious as you may be to return to work after a layoff or to improve your working situation, you will hurt your chances if you set out to find “any job.” Here are four ways that an “any job” attitude undermines your job search:

You cannot possibly research, write, and maintain strong resumes for “any job” that comes along. Resumes should be targeted for the job, using the keywords that appear in a company’s job posting and stressing the skills and education the job posting stresses.
No matter how much you try to tweak your specific skills, education, and experience to fit any job, companies will see where they fall short.
When you network you need to send a clear message about what your interests and abilities. The “any job” mentality muddies that message and makes it hard for your network to help you.
No one can honestly show enthusiasm for every job in the world. Some studies suggest that a candidate’s enthusiasm during the interview is a determining factor in whether the candidate gets the job.

As a Master Career Director, Certified Electronic Career Coach, and Job and Career Transition Coach, I can help you focus your job search and your resume. Email me today.