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Resume Gone Wild

Apr 13 2014

Recently I rewrote a resume for a professional who knew she had a problem: Her resume was 6 pages long. Now a long resume is fine if the content justifies it, but this resume was a classic case of a resume gone wild. It had the following problems:

Wide margins and lots of white space. White space (the area of the resume without any typing in it) is important to make a resume readable; no one wants to read one great block of solid type from margin to margin. But 1-inch margins and too much white space made this resume look like the applicant was hiding a lack of accomplishments and experience by putting as little as possible on each page. I needed to give her resume a more professional, tighter format.
Too much history. Jobs held at the earliest point in a career are not usually relevant to current career choices. In this case, I needed to summarize the client’s earliest jobs under “Previous Positions.” The only critical facts to list for these early jobs were the company name and her title at each company.
Too much detail in the job descriptions. Some skills and even some achievements will be unimportant to hiring managers and recruiters and some will be identical from job to job. In this case, despite the fact that she was applying for an executive position, the client had detailed her long ago successes, such as reformatting a company’s proposals, that were probably not important any longer. I had to change the emphasis of her resume to match the job she wanted now.
Not enough focus. In truth, this is the cause of the previous two problems—too much history and too much detail. When a job applicant is focused on a particular job or career path, then everything in the resume works to help land an interview for that job and that career.

By the time I had finished with my client’s resume, it had shrunk from 8 pages to 3 but those pages looked professional and contained the information that made recruiters and hiring managers leap at the chance to interview her. Again, length is not a problem if content justifies it. If you are not sure whether your content is strong enough, please contact me today.

Describing Accomplishments: Why Is It So Hard?

Nov 11 2012

In past blog posts, I have emphasized the need to describe, not job duties (which anyone in your position could perform), not merely skills (which anyone can acquire), but accomplishments. Hiring managers want to know what you did with your skills and how you approached your duties to benefit the companies you worked for in the past.

Yet, job hunters uniformly have difficulty with describing their accomplishments. The reasons are varied:

They believe everything they do, even if it falls way beyond their job description, is all “part of the job.”
Even if they are proud of their work, they have not received any recognition for their accomplishments at their current job and are convinced a future employer will also consider their accomplishments not worth mentioning.
They believe accomplishments must include numbers like “increased sales to $1 million and ranked 3 out of 40 salespeople in customer satisfaction.” They do not realize that accomplishments can include coming up with new ideas, researching products and services, easing a boss’s workload, and many other items that cannot easily be measured.
They worked as part of a team and are reluctant to claim any of the team’s achievements as their own.

If you recognize any of these attitudes as your own, contact me today. We will partner in giving you a resume that accurately describes the value you bring to a future employer.

Fitting Small Company Experience into Large Company Opportunities

Feb 12 2011

Small companies have different structures from large companies. When you are looking to enter a large company, you may find that your job description is associated with a less impressive title. You may find yourself reporting to someone who holds the title you used to have in a smaller company.

This is not a demotion; it reflects the difference in complexity working for a small company versus a large company. A difficulty may also arise in presenting yourself as a candidate to a large company. Suppose the large company needs someone to supervise 80 people. From their perspective, if your last position was with a company of 20 employees total, you could easily be overshadowed by candidates from larger companies.

So what can you do if you want to move from a small company to a large one? These four strategies may help:

First, relax your requirements for a title. Concentrate on what is really important to you, such as opportunities for advancement.
Second, seek advice about positioning yourself correctly. When I counsel clients transitioning from a civilian role to the federal government, for example, I can determine their “level” based on the amount of control they had in their previous jobs (not just the title).
Third, make sure your resume highlights the breadth of your experience. Instead of worrying over the size of your current company, stress the size of your achievements.
Fourth, when you interview, carry yourself with confidence. If you know you can do the job, you will go far toward convincing interviewers.

You want the big guys to realize that your small company experience is exactly what they need.