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Personal Data and Job Search

2007-10-08T08:56:00.001-05:00

Privacy in the job search. With job search going global, online databases, and networking sites, how do you find a job and protect your privacy at the same time? Many job seekers are experiencing this conundrum and, unfortunately, there is not a really good solution. The big job boards all promise they will do their best to protect your privacy but when it boils down to it, it’s up to you to be diligent.

Be careful what you reveal – NEVER, ever give anyone your Social Security number, driver’s license number or date of birth to anyone during your job search. So many people, especially those with a non-US background or of the older generation, still include their birthdates on their resume. Not only does this go beyond the line of the fair hiring laws in the US but it also gives identity thieves a place to start.

Be careful what you upload - Believe it or not, we once had a prospective client send us his 2006 federal tax return by accident. This could have been a fatal error if the client had uploaded the file by accident to a resume database for the entire world with a password to see.

Be careful to what you respond – Spammers, phishers and other online conmen are trolling the resume databases hoping for a lucky bite. If you are ever asked to download a file, complete something and email it back, or otherwise provide information, do not do it. Real employers do not ask for your information up front.

Expect spam – Offers for jobs doing commission-only work or financial services abound and the spammers are using the databases for harvesting your email address. What can you do? Complain to the job board and use the delete key. Do not respond to spam offers.

Google Earth is scary – If you’ve never used it, give Google Earth a test drive using your own address. When you put your resume out on the worldwide wed with your address on it, anyone can find your house. They can determine if you live in a nice neighborhood, if you have close neighbors, if you have a security fence, if you have dogs outside, etc. Now, do you really want to post your street address out there on the web?

Google yourself – I guarantee employers will be Googling you so do so yourself and see what pops up. Try it on Google Images, too. It makes you wonder if Big Brother hasn’t arrived, just in a different form than what Orwell imagined.

Wasted Time – Lost Opportunities

2007-09-21T15:33:00.001-05:00

“I think it’s time to get my resume professionally prepared” is a phrase we hear fairly often. It is usually uttered by someone who has been in the job search for about six weeks or more and has had few interviews. I cringe when I think of the time the job seeker has wasted while trying to “do the resume” himself. Job search itself is a lengthy process, especially at the executive level of our clients so doing ANYTHING to actually make it take longer puzzles me.

So what makes people delay? Several things:

Budget – Time – Astuteness

The job seeker has a $100K education and twenty years experience in business; he’s embarrassed to admit that he, who knows himself better than anyone, has trouble writing his own resume. Reality is that smart executives know when to outsource something. You outsource when it’s cheaper, smarter, or when you just don’t have time to do it.

Let’s start with cheaper. If you are making $100,000 a year, you are averaging around $50 an hour. I’ve had clients tell me they’ve worked every night for a week on their resume and it still doesn’t work. Let’s say the job seeker spent 21 hours working on the resume (3 hours a night for a week). That would be $1050 of his time spent on something that doesn’t gain interviews for him. You can do the math – we’re cheaper, especially if you consider that “evening work” the job seeker did as “overtime” or “family time”. Lawyers hire other lawyers to represent them. Doctors hire other doctors to treat them. Smart execs hire Get Interviews for a new resume.

Next comes smarter. How often do you job search? Every three years is the national average so sometimes it’s more often and sometimes it’s less often. If you do something (write a resume) once every three or more years, are you going to be very good at it? No! Imagine if a computer programmer only wrote code for software once every three years! That software would be out-of-date, buggy, and not very professional. We write resumes every day so we know the market, know the trends, and know what employers are seeking.

Finally, time comes in – that precious commodity that you can’t purchase and you can’t retrieve. I recently saw a study that noted Americans spend more hours working than even the Japanese. Our home-time and family-time is extremely precious. Why waste it struggling to capture your professional value in a document? Rather than spending 21 hours, how about spending about 2 hours instead on your resume? That’s about the maximum time it takes for you on your side when you are working with our firm to develop the resume.

Time Gaps

2007-09-21T13:28:00.001-05:00

Do you know anyone who has worked for the same company for thirty years? I don’t either, personally, but I occasionally still see them come my way when they are retiring or the company “downsized” to save on costs. It is fairly unusual for someone to have a continuous chronology of job experience these days. The average job lasts something like three years before there is a layoff or the employee moves on to greener pastures.

Another part of the “new employment order” is time gaps in employment. Most of the time, when someone is downsized, a date gap occurs, especially if the downsizing was a surprise. How many people have resumes that show a time gap after 2001 when the recession hit in the wake of 9/11? A very large proportion! It’s not unusual to see high level execs who started their own businesses at that time due to a layoff and who are now selling that business or retiring. Date gaps are not necessarily harbingers of doom and gloom!

There is also the “Sandwich Generation” – those of us who are in our forties who are “sandwiched” between raising children and caring for aging parents. Many people in this situation have no other choice than to take a leave of absence or some time away simply to be able to care for mom and dad. A date gap on the resume for family leave is quite common.

Many professionals take a year or eighteen months off to return to school for an advanced degree and that creates a gap in employment. Is it detrimental? Of course not!

So how do you handle date gaps? First of all, while you are doing whatever it is you are doing during the gap, make sure you keep up to speed on your industry. This is most important for technology professionals who get left behind by their peers if they simply take too long in the bathroom. It applies to other professions, too. If you want to change fields, you can take advantage of family leave to start working in a new direction – studying, volunteering, etc. The key is to not just “sit still”.

Second, don’t be afraid of them. Everyone has date gaps but that doesn’t mean you weren’t doing anything. You might be doing something VERY important during that period such as an internship or maybe traveling to a foreign country for immersion language training. You might just be staying home with dad to make sure he’s well-cared for, too. Whatever it is, you are doing something important so don’t be ashamed.

About the only date gap that I think is difficult to overcome in a job search is a prison term. That, too, seems to be failing further down on the list of “detriments to the career” if you watch the famous people making the news these days. I wonder how Martha handles her “date gap” on her resume?

The Retirement Job

2007-08-18T07:29:00.001-05:00

Most of you reading this are in the prime of your earning potential. You are making good money, you are climbing the career ladder at a steady pace, and retirement seems like a distant mountain on the horizon, miles and miles away. Some of you are nearer that mountain than others and it looms tall in your field of vision.

With the stock market taking a beating lately, many people are watching their retirement funds and chewing their fingernails. If you watch any of the cable news channels or business channels, it seems like every other commercial is from a financial management organization touting retirement funds management. Let’s face it – we have a huge population getting ready to hit retirement age and wondering what the heck they are going to do.

Recently, I’ve heard a new term being bandied around – the retirement job. If you retired ten years or longer ago, your idea of a retirement job was driving a golf cart to the next hole or traveling to the Grand Canyon in an RV. I’m not seeing that happening as much now. People are starting second careers when they retire (or even third or fourth careers).

I recently had a client who was 65 who was in a full-force job search. He had a second family with young children and he was adamant that he was good for the workforce for another 30 years. I don’t know if he was an optimist or in denial. We still rarely see 95 year olds in the workplace but we do see 70+ year olds out there working.

Usually, these “post retirement” workers are doing what the rest of us would call “fun jobs”. I recently took a trip to Hilton Head Island and met an interesting couple who operated a deep sea fishing boat. They had retired from their “real” jobs at retirement age and were now doing what they really wanted to do in a location that was very beautiful. They were having a ball not to mention making some pretty good income.

With Social Security being insecure for those of us borne by the Depression Era Kids and the Baby Boomer generation, maybe we should all start thinking about a “retirement job”. What do you want to do when you retire? As hard as our generation works, I suspect that after about a month of sitting on our sofas doing nothing but watching TV, we’ll all be itching to find something that exercises our brains and our bodies. By that time, kids will be out of college, houses will be paid for (hopefully) and we won’t be in the race to make tremendous amounts of money. We can do something fun.

What would your retirement job be? Here are a few ideas I’ve actually seen being executed by retirees: bookstore/coffee shop, bed & breakfast, organic vegetable gardening selling to specialty stores, boat concierge, luxury boat pilot, general aviation pilot, real estate agent, interior decorator, tour guide, furniture maker, gunsmith, and tutor.

Include Me – Please!

2007-07-26T08:16:00.001-05:00

Eagle Scout – 1973

Mensa Member

Science Club President – Smithville High School

Marathon Runner

Elder – Christ Episcopal Church

What do all these items have in common? They are all irrelevant to the ability of the job seeker to do the job. What else do they have in common? They are all items that might result in the exclusion of the candidate from consideration for an interview! Time and again, I see these type facts included on executive resumes and I always have a “DOH!” moment.

Job seekers writing their own resumes routinely include information in their resumes that has no bearing on their ability to do the job and could actually result in their being excluded from consideration. The gatekeeper in a hiring situation is facing a “stack” (albeit electronically) of resumes often topping 600 for a single online job posting. The first task at hand is to eliminate as many as possible. Most job seekers write their resumes with an eye toward inclusion when that is actually not the gatekeepers primary task.

You might say, “Well, Eagle Scout is a big accomplishment!” Yes it is – for a seventeen year old but it has no bearing on how a 40+ executive will perform as CEO. “But being a Mensa member is pretty exclusive!” you say? Also true, but Mensa has a popular reputation as being a group of individualists rather than team players (I’m not saying that reputation is accurate). “Science Club President shows ability to lead!” Really? Or was it a high school popularity contest? “Marathon runner shows you are in good health!” It also shows you will not be available a good many weekends of the year if travel or overtime is needed. “Elder shows gravitas and high ethics.” Goodness, how I wish that was still true in our society but sometimes elders of churches have proven to be the most twisted and criminal individuals in our midst; elder does not hold that pedestal place any longer.

Do you see where I am going with this? Job seekers use all sorts of arguments to justify the information they include on the resume but often the information included will just result in the EXCLUSION of the resume from consideration! We always try to look at information from the readers’ points of view and eliminate any exclusionary or “red flag” information from the resume. Sometimes that means we have to do some education of our clients about what is important and what is not. Clients sometimes have a hard time letting go of things because they are so emotionally attached.

You stay seated firmly in your job seeker’s chair and let us sit in the chair of the reader or hiring manager. We know what is important, what needs to be brought forth, and what needs to be left out to make sure you are NOT excluded from consideration from the very beginning!

The Reader

2007-07-13T14:37:00.000-05:00

If you’ve read through our articles are previous blog entries, or have even had your resume critiqued by a member of our crack team of Resume Analysts, you have probably heard us refer to The Reader as our primary audience. While we work for our clients’ benefits and we strive to produce documents that will win interviews for our clients, our clients are not the audience for whom we write. We write for The Reader.

Who is The Reader? The Reader is the person who will be making one of several different decisions. The Reader will either be the person who conducts the “weeding out process”. Remember, resumes are not INCLUDED but rather EXCLUDED based on the content as judged by The Reader. The Reader may be the hiring manager, a recruiter, or even an admin assistant at the exclusionary stage of the game (the first hurdle).

The Reader may also be the interviewer(s) who structure the interview questions based on what they see on the resume. While most candidates are asked basically the same questions, the interviewers base specific questions upon the resume and use that to expand the interview session. For example, the interviewer might say “I see here on your resume that you have had experience working with Microsoft. What do you think you learned there that you can add to our company as a benefit?”

The Reader may also be a network contact who would be passing your resume on to a contact within the company. If The Reader in this situation sees a bad resume, he or she won’t endanger his/her reputation by making a recommendation for you. You might be told by the network contact that your resume was passed on when in reality it was round-filed. (It’s easier to fib and pass the buck than to tell a friend or colleague that his/her resume stinks.)

Ultimately, The Reader is the person making the hiring decision. Not only does the resume have to pass the earlier crowds of Readers but must support the hiring decision for the most important Reader – the one who makes the decision to hire or not.

It is for The Reader, or the crowd of Readers, for whom we write. Sometimes, clients don’t understand this and question the strategy we’ve used to include or exclude certain information. We realize the client has no objectivity and no concept of what The Reader wants or needs to see on a resume. We know what the Reader is seeking, though. It’s our job to know what The Reader wants to see and what will sink the client with the Reader if it’s included on the resume. While that Eagle Scout honor is huge in the mind of the client, more than likely The Reader could care less about it. We know that so sometimes we have to remind clients that we don’t write for them. We write for The Reader.

The Decision-Maker

2007-06-21T16:29:00.000-05:00

Everyone talks about getting the resume to the decision-maker. Prior to the hiring decision, though, other decisions have to be made. The first concern should be the decision made by the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper is the person doing the resume screening, either an administrative assistant or perhaps a recruiter. If your resume doesn’t pass their scrutiny, it will never make it to the decision-maker. A resume has to pass two tests, not just one.

Let’s examine the first person, and ultimately the most important person – the gatekeeper. This person is someone who has been given the task of searching Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) or online resume databases for a certain set of keywords that match qualification requirements for candidates. Depending on if it’s a traditional employer or a recruiting firm, it may be an administrative assistant or it may be the recruiter.

The gatekeeper is looking first for keywords so it’s important that the resume have the correct industry buzzwords so the search technology will pick it up. Next the resume has to be viewed. A search on Monster’s database on a single keyword may bring up literally thousands of resumes; therefore, the gatekeeper narrows the search by using Boolean search techniques and stringing together several keywords. Candidates must have all the keywords to be “caught” by the system. The gatekeeper has now narrowed the pool to several hundred.

The next step is to sort the pool. Usually, the sort is done by hit counts or by how recent the resume was uploaded. Once caught, the resume has to pass the 45-second human-eye visual skim by the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper is influenced by initial appearance first of all (after all, he/she IS a human and we all like things that look neat and professional). Next, the gatekeeper glances at location of the candidate (especially if searching for local candidates). The summary is read first and then the rest of the resume gets a fast glance with job titles, years, special skills and education all getting attention.

It is now decision time. If the resume has what it takes – all the right factors and is persuasive in that 45 seconds – the gatekeeper will place it in the “consider pile”. The field narrows. At this point the road may fork and the entire consider pile goes up the ladder a step or the gatekeeper goes back and refines and narrows the field further with more careful study of the resumes in the “consider pile”.

A contingency recruiter usually is asked to present three to five candidates to the employer for consideration so the recruiter starts making screening phone calls. Many candidates dismiss these “screening calls” as non-interviews but look how far you’ve gotten to make it to the screening call! That call from the recruiter is pivotal and should be afforded ample preparation and treated as the first interview.

Once you get past the gatekeeper, you move on to the other key person in the process – the hiring manager. This person or persons (the decision may well be a group consensus) will interview selected candidates. Generally, the interview process involves several meetings or subsequent interviews to narrow the field. Then the final decision is made on which candidate gets the offer.

This is a long process and many candidates do not understand the time involved. The hiring process can actually take several weeks. Throughout the entire process, the resume has to be doing its job – selling you, the job seeker. That is a big order! A professionally prepared resume can make the difference between making it from that sea of millions in the online database to the offer letter that arrives via FedEx.

2007-06-13T10:00:00.000-05:00

Here’s a story for you. A senior executive decided he had had enough of the rat race and decided he was going to ditch everything and go for a menial job that had no stress. He looked around and thought the hospitality industry seemed low stress so he applied for a job that paid $8 an hour as a desk clerk. During the interview, he was honest with the interviewer and said that he was looking for a menial job where he could relax and just do the required work. He admitted he had chosen the hospitality industry because the employees of the high-end hotels where he had always stayed on business did not seem stressed so he figured it was as good a place as any to start. He was offered the job but at a rate of $6.50 an hour. He proceeded to get upset and pointed out that the job was advertised at $8 an hour. The hiring manager pointed out some important things to him:

The advertised rate was a range and $8 an hour was for someone with at least three years experience. Since he had no experience, he had to start at the bottom of the range.

It appeared the executive had no concept of work ethic or customer service, both very important aspects of the hospitality industry, since he was leaving a high-level job for one where he could “coast”. That attitude essentially put him in the “warm body” category and warm bodies only rated the beginning rate.

The hiring manager pointed out that all jobs have stress related to them. A desk clerk would definitely say he had a stressful job on a high season day when there were 250 check-ins and 180 check-outs plus two conferences in progress. The hiring manager felt the executive would bail after his first experience with such a “non-stress environment” and therefore did not want to invest much in the hire.

The hiring manager was offended by the superior attitude the executive took about the hospitality industry and his belief that it consisted of menial jobs. The hiring manager had spent twenty years in hospitality working his way up through most hotel positions until he knew the industry inside and out. The last thing he needed was a supercilious and lazy desk clerk with a bad attitude.

Finally, the hiring manager gave this senior executive some good advice. He said “All jobs will have stress, but if you find what you love to do, the stress turns into challenge and is stimulating rather than handicapping. Stop looking for an “easy job” and start looking for a job you love.”

Are you doing something you love? Why not? Many people go through life measuring their success against a scale set by other people. Success is generally measured by income levels, net worth, types of “toys” possessed, and how much “stuff” can be accumulated. It is often measured by titles, power positions, and ability to manipulate others. What would be your measure of success?

At my local public library, there is a nice seating area in the front lobby near the circulation desk where there are comfy chairs and a coffee bar. Every time I go there, there is an older gentleman sitting there reading. He has a portable oxygen tank with him and wears a navy hat with USS Indianapolis on it. He’s obviously a WWII vet. I look at him and think – now that’s where I want to be when I’ve “made it” or retire. Just park me at the library with my oxygen, a book, and a cup of coffee and life will be sweet.

Scannable or Text?

2007-06-05T08:12:00.000-05:00

Just this week, I’ve had three clients become confused on the difference between a scannable resume and a text format resume. Most people seem to think the two are one and the same but that is incorrect. A scannable resume is always a text format but a text format may not be a scannable resume. Every job seeker in today’s employment world needs two resumes – a regular Word version and a scannable resume. Assuming everyone understands what a Word version is, let’s concentrate on the scannable version.

What is a scannable resume?
A scannable resume is a form of the resume that is designed to meet specific organizational and formatting rules that make it both palatable to resume databases and friendly to the human eye. It is important for the scannable resume to work for both computers and the reader. The computer will store it, search it, select it, and display it but the human being (the reader) is the one who will make the decision to contact the job candidate for an interview. People seem to forget that last part and somehow think it’s the computer making the “call, don’t call” decision. I often hear someone say “It’s getting a lot of hits, but I’m not getting calls.” Hits come from the database picking up on keywords. Calls come from recruiters being persuaded the candidate is a strong contender.

What is the difference between a scannable resume and a text format?
There are lots of differences and the least of them is the file format. A scannable resume cannot have bullets, underlining, bolding, centered text, etc. A scannable resume follows certain guidelines for character width by page and should have particular attention paid to keyword richness. Think of it this way – compose a resume on an old typewriter. There are no options for making fonts bigger or smaller or even different. You can’t use bullets because there aren’t any on the keyboard. Centering can be done but it involves counting characters and dividing so it’s easier to just left-justify. What you would come up with on an old typewriter is basically what a scannable resume would look like visually. Bullets would be asterisks. Bold would be ALL CAPS. Now put that plus all the other scannable formatting rules in an electronic format and save it in ASCII/text format and you have a scannable resume.

Why doesn’t a scannable resume need a keyword category?
When Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) and resume databases came about, the technology was fairly primitive and computing power was much more limited. Because of these issues, the early databases would only search the top 5 lines or so of the resume for keywords specified by the searcher. It saved on computing power to search only part of the resume rather than the entire document. Keyword categories at the top of the resume had a purpose – to catch those search efforts.

Technology advances exponentially, and since the nineties when the first HRIS systems came about, computing power has exploded. HRIS and resume databases now search entire resumes for keywords rather than just the top third. If a resume is written powerfully with lots of industry-specific buzzwords and job-specific nouns, keywords are automatically incorporated into the content of the resume so keyword categories are no longer needed.

How are resumes searched?
Have you ever thought about this? Most people don’t so they fill their resumes with useless words like “goal-oriented”, “excellent communication skills”, and “multi-tasker”. Think about it. Recruiters are not going to be searching on these terms or other “soft-skill” terms. They are going to be searching on industry- and job-specific nouns. A strong resume will be filled with such words to automatically be “keyword rich”.

Why do I need both a scannable and a regular version?
Let’s face it – job search is now electronically based. Resumes are uploaded to databases, stored in HRIS systems, and emailed to companies or recruiters. It is logistically impossible for companies to handle paper-based resumes anymore. Many, especially those with employee counts over 75, will actually refuse to accept paper resumes mailed the traditional way. Recruiters aren’t really thrilled to receive them either because they, too, use resume management systems to handle the tons of resumes they receive. You need a scannable version to send for the benefit of the resume databases and you need a Word version for the recruiter to print or for you to take as a hardcopy to interviews. A smart job seeker sends both versions to recruiters or to employers via email.

What DOES NOT Go on an Executive Resume

2007-05-21T12:38:00.000-05:00

I recently read an article by an “expert” in resume writing that touted inclusion of hobbies on an executive resume. The author suggested including hobbies that are related in some way, however vaguely, to the executive’s career. I’m sorry, but this is WRONG advice.

Hobbies do not appear on an executive resume. While inclusion of related hobbies might be relevant to a new graduate’s objective of landing an interview, they simply waste space on an executive resume. An executive candidate has much more important information--information that might actually contribute to winning the interview--to include in the resume without wasting space including information about coaching youth baseball or fly fishing.

Another issue that I’ve seen touted as a “must” on executive resumes is including the dates of education. Again, that may not be advisable for some executives. Age discrimination, while not rampant, is alive and well. If an executive graduated with a four-year degree in 1968, what benefit does listing that date on the resume bring to the goal of winning an interview? None. The only possibility is that it will contribute to the candidate being eliminated. Try to never include any information on a resume that has only negative potential.

Some writers, and I’ve seen this on many resume templates used by the big boards, have a Career Achievements section or similar at the top. The separation of this information from the individual jobs in which they were accomplished takes what would otherwise be terrific information totally out of context for the reader. Because of being pulled out of context, the wording loses impact. Let me give you an example. Here’s a typical achievement that someone might pull out to include in a Career Achievements section:

- Won largest account ever in company history, increasing market share by 15%

That sounds impressive and would be justified in being included in a Career Achievements section. Its meaning is in the connotation. If the person worked for IBM, that would be huge! If the person worked for Joe’s Tire Shack, it would have a different connotation. The numbers would be significantly different for these two situations. The connotation would have more power when linked with the appropriate position rather than pulled out separately.

References never appear on any resume, especially executive resumes. The old “References upon request” tag line is no longer used either. Ditto for objectives. These are old resume tactics that have passed from use and are not longer part of an up-to-date job search.

Pictures or images don’t belong on an executive resume. I am continually amazed when people include their pictures on their resumes. This is something that has not been done on a resume in thirty years – not since discrimination in hiring lawsuits has gained traction. Pictures can cause the resume to be eliminated immediately so don’t even go there.

You are an executive. You have spent years and countless amounts of investment in building your career. Why consider making a misstep on advice that does not apply to someone at your level?

High Negatives on the Resume

2007-05-15T17:59:00.000-05:00

It is only mid-2007 and already the political campaigns and rhetoric are in full swing. I’m already tired of hearing about it and just wish we could get it over with! Watching the news, I’m becoming more and more acquainted with politico-speak words and phrases, about many of which I could really care less. One phrase that caught my attention, though, was “high negatives”. One candidate was described as “high in popularity but also has high negatives”. I started thinking of that and realized that the term “high negatives” might be applied easily to resumes. A job seeker may have good experience and education but have high negatives that cut into those good things.

First of all, I’ll define “high negatives” as pieces of information or aspects of a resume that raise negative images or reactions in the mind of the hiring manager or recruiter that are contrary to the benefit of the job seeker. An obvious high negative issue would be a reported stay in the local penitentiary. That is easy. But there are other, less-obvious high negatives that may well appear on YOUR resume and you don’t even realize they are working against you. I’ll go over a few:

Job-hopping – Short periods of employment that don’t show increase in career level. Sometimes, a job seeker may have several short periods of employment but each successive move is a step up. That’s not job-hopping; that’s meteoric rise in career path. Job-hopping comes with lots of lateral moves within a short period of time. Employers don’t like to see this pattern because it communicates instability.

Functional Format – The granddaddy of all high negatives, simply the USE of the functional format communicates the job seeker is trying to hide something. It’s an automatic red flag. People who use the functional format are shooting themselves in the foot.

First Person Narrative – Resumes are not novels, letters, biographies, life stories, or other forms of literature describing a career. They are marketing documents! Sales brochures for your career! They should never be written in the first person, voiced style where personal pronouns are used. “I”, “me”, “my”, “our”, or “we” should never appear on a resume.

Overuse of Tired Phrases – In trying to communicate their soft skills, most people fall back to trite phrases such as “results-oriented” or “good communicator”. Such phrases fall flat on a resume. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience – the recruiter or the hiring manager. You’ve just read 99 other resumes and every one of them claims to be “results-oriented” and “good communicator”. Finding a resume that is not loaded with these fluff phrases is actually refreshing!

Dubious Past Employment – Think about what you include on the resume. If you are targeting a senior executive position, it is not necessary to list every job you’ve ever held on your resume. For instance, if you are targeting a VP of Operations job and you include your stint as a store manager for Subway fifteen years ago, what are you saying about your ability to communicate in a relevant way? Sometimes, good people have done questionable jobs in the past just to meet the bills. Such jobs (and I’ll let you come up with a mental picture of what a “questionable” job might be) can and should be left off a resume if at all possible.

Name Dropping – Name dropping is mentioning names of prominent people in your industry with whom you have an association in an attempt to elevate your status in the eyes of the reader. Rarely does it work. If you have to drop names, you’ve just proven your inadequacy. A similar occurrence sometimes happens with schools that people have attended. For instance, one resume I saw started out with “Top ten grad from XXXX, nation’s number one graduate school of business and family’s fourth generation undergrad from Ivy League XXXX.” Okay, if this was the resume of a brand new graduate this might be a horn to toot but it was a job seeker who had earned his MBA fifteen years ago and attended the Ivy League school in the seventies. Do you think he was proud of the two pieces of parchment? Do you think he stopped to think that maybe the person who would be making the decision to hire him worked his way through both undergrad and grad school at a medium-ranked institution and might not hold a very high opinion of his snooty presentation? In the real world where the rubber hits the road, it’s not always where you went to school but what you’ve done with the learning since then.

TMI – Have you ever been seated on a plane next to someone who just won’t shut up? Some people have the same loquaciousness problem in writing and their resumes turn into huge masses of irrelevant information. Ranging from high school activities to volunteer belly dancer at the nursing home, there is just some information that has no business being on the resume. And it’s not so much the fact that the job seeker did this activity in the first place, but as an executive or professional, he/she should have enough skill in communication (that’s PC-speak for common sense) to know not to include it on a resume!

The Job Search Secret Weapon

2007-05-03T15:28:00.001-05:00

With life becoming more frenetic by the day and with technology seeming to take over our lives (remember when you could go fly in a plane without having to turn off all your electrical devices first?), little courtesies and niceties seem to be going by the wayside. We are in too much of a hurry these days to concern ourselves with birthday cards or gifts. We send e-cards and gift cards by email instead (if we send anything at all). I note the number of Christmas cards I receive seems to drop by two or three every year. If it can’t be sent by email or Blackberry or instant message, we just don’t do it.

Because of our indifference toward courtesies that were once considered the norm, those same courtesies now stand out and mark us as “different” when we do them. In the context of job search, I’m thinking primarily of thank-you-for-the-interview notes or follow up letters. According to the Hiring Manager panel at the annual conference of the Professional Association of Resume Writers in Dallas, Texas, fewer than 10% of the candidates the panelists interviewed wrote a follow up or a thank you note. Remarkably, of those 10%, 90% of them were called back for subsequent interviews.

In a survey conducted by DayTimer® over 70% of respondents to their poll on communication said sending a handwritten note was friendlier, “demonstrating special effort to communicate”. These results have direct impact on job search. As the hiring managers mentioned above confirmed, follow-up or thank you notes had a definite impact on the success of the job search process for those candidates who went the extra step. With all this data that supports use of follow-up or thank you notes following an interview, why aren’t more job seekers making use of this easy yet powerful step in their job searches?

Potentially, the issue of writing of something by hand may be a hurdle. First of all, it takes time to sit down and write a handwritten thank you note. Few of us are practiced at this lost art and generally have no idea how to phrase what we want to say without sounding trite or corny. Secondly, those of us who do most of our communicating via a keyboard these days, our handwriting really stinks. The muscles in our hands that control the formation of letters are out of practice and the result of pen stroke on paper is fairly pitiful. How many of you think occasionally “Gosh, I used to have decent handwriting when I was in college…” We are out of practice both mentally and physically when it comes to writing with a pen.

The same study by DayTimer® also noted that women appreciated handwritten communications more than men. 54% of women had positive feelings about receiving a handwritten letter. A good percentage of men also appreciated it – 42%. That’s an interesting viewpoint about something most of us ignore these days – courtesy communications.

So what can you do to take advantage of this little-used secret weapon of the job search if you have trouble composing thank you notes and your handwriting is worse than a first-grader’s? Easy – add a thank you letter to your repertoire of professionally developed career documents. Tweak it for each interview or interviewer. Print it on nice stock paper and mail it (gasp!) through the snail mail. Yes, spend money on a stamp even! And here’s a little secret about the secret weapon….handwrite a postscript below your signature. Make a note of something that was discussed during the interview that pertains to the position. You may have to practice a bit with a pen first to get it legible but if it’s short, it won’t be that bad.

Using this combination, you hit several key job search actions: follow up, courtesy, that 10% minority who went to the trouble, the women interviewers and 40%+ of the men interviewers, and something handwritten – all in one action!

What’s in a Word?

2007-04-13T18:06:00.000-05:00

I imagine Don Imus could answer that question pretty well right now. Badly chosen words resulted in a career downfall for him. While I’m hopeful that those of you reading this don’t suffer from the same foot-in-mouth disease, it does serve as a good example of how choosing words carefully can affect your career path. No where is that more true than in your resume.

Most people don’t consider the wording of their resume. Most just sit down and write down what they do – “Managed team of six”, “Designed reports based on quarterly data”, “Supervised programs and plans”. Then you have the small minority that go far overboard on their wording and border on the comical – “Rose above circumstances to rescue failing program from fatal tailspin.”

Choosing the right wording is so important in resume writing. Good writing is clear, powerful and succinct. Good writing doesn’t have to involve flowery phrasing, three-dollar words, or complex compound sentences with highly technical data. In fact, those three writing styles will significantly hurt your candidacy.

The worst problem is the fluff writing or flowery phrases. For some reason, some people seem to think the more adjectives they throw into their resume the better. “Aggressive, self-motivated, enthusiastic, and upstanding senior professional…” is a common offender. That is five adjectives strung together to modify a vague noun that tells the reader nothing. “Senior professional” could be anything from Donald Trump to the manager of the local drive-in.

Fluff writing and over-writing are both signs of poor writing. Some people are just poor writers just as some people are poor at math. Unfortunately, good writing is more in demand in our society than good math skills. We have calculators and spreadsheets for math but Word doesn’t do much with sentence construction. Word won’t tell you when you are coming across too low-level or you sound like you are making things up to fill up page space. Word doesn’t tell you when you are writing in passive voice or when you have created a data dump instead of a resume.

Fortunately, there are some really good writers out there who can help you. Now, if I could only figure out my taxes….

Hot Pursuit

2007-04-02T16:04:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend, I watched the movie “The Pursuit of Happyness” with Will Smith. If you are looking for an entertaining, relaxing flick, let me tell you – this is not a good choice. I spent ninety-nine percent of the movie with my teeth clenched as the main character just kept getting hit by one disaster after another. It was exhausting.

But it was also one of those movies that you can’t get out of your mind afterward. If you don’t want to know the end, stop reading now. Basically, the movie is about a fellow who works his way up from the bottom to a multi-millionaire on Wall Street. The obvious lesson from the movie is “keep trying, you can do it”, but there were many other lessons that were more subtle and have a great deal to do with job search and the climb up the ladder.

First of all, what defined this man’s happiness was economic increase and stability. The entire movie revolves around his striving toward economic success on one hand while dealing with total economic disaster on the other, including being homeless. I wonder how many Americans are just one paycheck away from similar situations. On one hand we are striving for financial success while on the other hand we are up to our eyeballs in debt. Something to think about.

Another lesson that was more subtle was the role this man’s education played in his career. He only had a high school education but the viewer is given clues throughout the movie that he had a natural talent with numbers. He could solve a Rubik’s cube when no one else could. He mentioned he devoured math books in school. He used this talent to win an opportunity to start a new career as a stock broker. He did not treat his lack of a college degree as a handicap that automatically disqualified him from certain jobs.

A third lesson was that initiative, innovation, and just plain guts go a very long way in making opportunities arise. What seemed like a failure when he didn’t land the big wheel’s account became a bigger success when he landed all the big wheel’s friends’ accounts. All because he took the initiative to go the extra mile. He did something that no one else did and had the guts to go for the big fish.

A fourth (but not final) lesson was he had confidence in himself. First of all, he bought into a medical device that he had to sell by cold calls – a product that was overpriced and had little true value. He trudged the streets making calls on doctors and in the end he sold them all! He had the confidence in himself to show up at his Dean Witter job interview after a night in jail, dressed in paint-spattered clothes and no shirt because he believed in himself. He had the confidence in himself to study long hours, put up with unimaginable hardships and deal with both financial and personal disasters to finish something he started because he believed in himself.

How many people give up in their job search or simply don’t get started because they feel they are too old, too young, not the right race, don’t have a degree, not from the right background, etc.? How many people don’t excel in their work because they don’t believe deep down they can do it? Are you one of them?

Red Flag Issues

2007-03-25T19:45:00.000-05:00

Nearly everyone has something in their career background that they really don’t want to appear on a resume. It may be something innocuous like a mediocre college GPA or it may be something significant such as a prison term. A resume should be written to highlight the value of a candidate and downplay bits and pieces that would play against the candidate. That is why strategy is such a huge part of designing and writing a resume. Most people don’t think about strategy when they are writing their own resume; they are simply thinking “Did I get down what I do?” Strategy is key, though, and using strategy to your advantage is what a winning resume is all about.

I have seen resumes where people have taken pains to try to hide things in their past that they don’t want prospective employers to be aware of in the selection process. Some issues are truly “red flag” issues while some are more “mountains out of molehills” and are only significant in the minds of the job seeker. Some true red flag issues include the following:

Prison Term – I know you keep thinking I’m harping on this issue but I’ve seen many professionals who messed up at one time or another in their life and now don’t want to trumpet their mistakes to the world. One client in particular stands out in my mind. He was a pharmacist who ended up with a significant prescription drug habit following a bad car accident. He was downing the inventory and the authorities got wind of it so he thought burning down his pharmacy was a wise decision. He spent five years in the can for it. He was out of prison, clean and sober, when he came to us and wanted to start a new career in IT. Dealing with that five years and a career change on a resume was a challenge.

Job Hopping – Frequent job changes are considered a red flag issue to employers. It could mean many things, not all of which are negative. The negative causes could be the candidate is incompetent in his job, is difficult to get along with, or just jumps at any offer of a slightly higher salary. Employers sink a great deal of money and time into new hires and they would like to get their money back in productivity before the employee moves on so they steer clear. A possible positive cause of job hopping is that the candidate is a rising star – someone who is extremely talented, well-known in the industry and highly recruited.

Time Gaps – Time gaps are best handled by telling the truth. If you’ve taken time off to raise children or care for elderly parents, say so! By trying to hide it, you make it into a red flag issue.

Education – The same holds true for education, especially lack thereof. Many people will leave off the education section altogether if they don’t have a college degree even if they have 25 years of experience with all kinds of training. Leaving off the education automatically draws attention to it and creates a mountain.

Notice I haven’t listed age as a red flag issue. That’s because like lack of a college degree, it’s a molehill rather than a mountain. Sure, age discrimination exists as does nepotism and gender bias and every other kind of bias you can think of. It’s not rampant, though. In fact, with the Boomer generation retiring, there is a “wisdom drain” occurring in the job market and those who have “been there, got the t-shirt” are looked at as good investments.

1995

2007-03-14T15:40:00.000-05:00

I was thinking this morning about time and how quickly it passes. It seems like just yesterday I was using an IBM WheelWriter typewriter and I thought that was great because it had correction tape built in so I didn’t have to erase or use correction fluid. Now we have computers with my favorite key – the backspace key! The backspace takes you back so you can change things, fix things, say something differently, or choose not to say anything (often the wisest choice).

The first PC I ever used was an Apple IIc and I really cut my teeth on the IIgs. When I moved up to the “pizza box” Mac, I was in high cotton. The first computer I actually purchased was a Pentium I. I also purchased a laser printer at the time because of the quality of the printer over dot matrix. I was stylin’! Of course, I was not hooked up to the Internet at that point but I did have a couple of dial-up bulletin boards I checked daily and then there were user groups on Usenet which was sort of the Internet. I can remember the first time I logged on to the real information superhighway at a speedy 2400 baud. Wow! And when technology migrated from 5.25 inch floppies to 3.5 inch disks – man, what an improvement! No more “Insert Side B to continue”.

Hopefully, by now you are wondering what in the world this little “blast from the past” has to do with your job search or resume. Let me connect the dots for you. Does anyone still use any of this technology daily? No – it’s in the Smithsonian. (Except for my trusty laser printer which is still chugging along believe it or not) No one uses this technology and none of you care that I learned the skill of typing from dear Mrs. Chumbley back in 1982 rather than keyboarding. So tell me – why do you think information from that far back in time has any relevance to your job search today? There must be a reason because you keep putting all this old information on your resume even though employers don’t need it and really aren’t interested in it at this point in time. I see resumes everyday that go back twenty or more years in time. I saw one the other day that listed jobs all the way back to 1963! I kid you not.

Keep the information on your resume relevant to today’s job market. Everyone’s career is built in layers. You start out at one level and then build on what you learn. At some point, the earlier layers need to disappear off the resume so more space and attention can be focused on what is recent and most relevant to today’s market. Employers generally want to see the past ten to fifteen years of experience on a resume. If there is information from before that point that has relevance to your current goal, there are some strategic ways to bring that into the resume.

People get attached to achievements in their lives, achievements that are long past their prime (very much like my old laser printer), and they don’t want to let them go. Inclusion in a resume of scholarships won thirty years ago or an Eagle Scout designation from your teens is emotional rather than logical. One of the benefits of having a professional develop your resume and cover letter is the objectivity that comes along with the expertise in developing marketing materials that really sell you. As an objective party, we can see what is relevant, what needs to be included, what doesn’t need to be included and what needs to be emphasized. It’s called strategy and it’s the first step in writing a great resume. Without good strategy, you just get a listing of layers.

Scannable Not Text

2007-03-11T17:06:00.000-05:00

Remember the days when the only format choice you had for your resume was whether it was done in Pica or Elite type and if it was typed on white or ivory paper? Boy, that’s a blast from the past! Things are a lot different now than they used to be. Now, you have a myriad of design choices – hundreds of fonts, graphics, elements, embedded keywords, scannable or fully formatted, Word, PDF, HTML or text. It can be a little confusing, especially if you are not familiar with what all this means.

One of the most common confusions is the difference between text and scannable. Many of our clients ask if we prepare text format resumes. The answer to that is yes and no. We prepare scannable resumes that are in a text file format. Text is a file format whereas the term scannable refers to a way a resume is laid out to be easily read by a computer and a human. Many people think that a text format is just the regular Word document saved as a text file, but that’s not correct. Technically, you can do that but have you ever seen the end result? It’s awful!

A scannable resume is a resume that is designed to follow certain rules for spacing, elements, character width, etc. so that the resume is not only compatible with resume databases but can also be read by a human being. To prepare a good scannable resume, changes in paragraph layout are often needed, and wording sometimes needs to be slightly honed for keywords and to be more noun-based. Scannable resumes should not only be readable by a computer but must be readable by a human in terms of flow, visual organization, and design. Strategic use of text-friendly design elements such as all caps, asterisks, and other characters you see lurking on your keyboard can help the human eye make sense of what is a fairly ugly document.

When the scannable resume is prepared, it will sometimes have additional keywords added or have some sentences rewritten to be more noun-based. Resumes are searched on noun phrases such as “Quality Control” or “network design” but resumes are written as verb-based documents for the most part. A bit of tweaking to the content of the scannable can make it more effective in the search process.

Quick – pop quiz. What is the difference between a text format and a scannable resume? A scannable is saved in text format but follows certain rules of design. Do you need a scannable resume in your job search? Yes!

CV or Resume? What’s the Difference?

2007-03-02T19:29:00.000-05:00

Many people believe that a CV and a resume are the same document but that is far from accurate. “Back in the good old days”, which means in the last century, a CV (which stands for curriculum vita or “life book”) was used by all white collar professionals when applying for a job. Slowly, many professions went to a shorter form and called it a resume. At the end of the nineties, most professions were using a resume for job search with only academics, medicine, scientific research, and attorneys still using the CV format. Seven years into the new century, and even that is now starting to change in the United States.

So what is the difference between the two documents? Where do I start? Let’s consider geographies first. In the United States and Canada, a resume is used 99.9% of the time for job search, even by those in the professions mentioned specifically above. In Europe and other countries, a CV is still being used for the most part but the resume is gaining ground in western countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia. Many job seekers who are not in the US but are seeking employment here do not realize that a CV is not appropriate for a US job search and are hurting their job searches by using one.

The next difference between the two documents is the type of information included in each. In a CV, it is common to list personal information such as date of birth, marital status, children, health details, etc. CVs often include a photograph of the job seeker. All of this directly violates US hiring laws and can cause employers to shy away from the candidate out of fear of a lawsuit for hiring discrimination. A resume should never include personal information or a picture.

CVs are very long documents, often stretching to six or eight pages. The term “life book” applies because everything, whether relevant to the current job search or not, is included in a CV. Education details, publications, articles, speeches, presentations, detailed job histories, references – all are commonly seen on a CV. On a resume, the information is kept focused on the goal. The award of Eagle Scout would be listed on a CV but not on a resume.

CVs are written in a very “vanilla” language. They are meant to be life histories rather than a marketing document. A resume is written to sell the attributes of the job seeker that qualify him/her for a position. Phrases are shorter, written with stronger language, and a strategy is imposed to position the job seeker as THE best candidate for the job.

Employers in the US expect a resume from job seekers. The resume and cover letter combination are written and designed to not only present experience and background but present it in a way that markets the job seeker well. A CV is a listing of events and experience without consideration for positioning. It’s analogous the comparison between an encyclopedia and a marketing brochure. The brochure is designed to sell while the encyclopedia is designed to inform.

Telecommuting as a Resume Benefit

2007-02-26T18:33:00.000-05:00

Everyone wants to work from home these days and with technology being what it is, it is very possible for many to work from home offices with only a couple of days “in the office” a week. Work from home is a big draw to employees and companies who offer that opportunity are in demand. Of course, there are always the “work from home” scammers but I’m referring to real companies that provide their employees the opportunity to work from home offices. More and more companies see the benefits of telecommuting both to productivity and to overhead costs.

We work with many clients who note they would like a telecommuting opportunity and we work with many more who actually do work from a home office. Often these clients are in positions that require a great deal of travel such as sales or project management, but sometimes they are more core business positions such as accounting. Everyone wants to know how to find these jobs but the easiest way to find a telecommuting job is to have already proven you can work productively from home.

Have you thought about making the fact that you work from home an asset that is highlighted on your resume and in your cover letter? Savings realized by telecommuting can add up to thousands for the company per employee. If you can bring experience working from home that shows you can do so successfully, it could be a deciding factor in interviewing.

It’s scary for companies to find employees for a telecommuting position. Most of the time, they are filled from within because the company already has an idea how the employee works unsupervised and self-guided. Hiring a new employee where telecommuting could be an option is risky. By showing that you have been a successful telecommuter in the past and produced well for your employers in a telecommuting situation, you take some of that risk away.

It’s also important to evaluate your work habits objectively before accepting a telecommuting position. I personally know someone who works from home who really struggles to keep to a schedule, stay organized, stay focused, and work productively. She usually rushes at the last minute to meet deadlines because she hasn’t been able to use her time wisely in her home office. Working from home is not for everyone and should not be considered as an option for everyone. Companies know that and if you can show you have been successful working from home in the past, you are more likely to find a similar telecommuting position in the future.

When in Doubt – Ask!

2007-02-23T16:42:00.000-05:00

Is your resume working for you? Are you getting a good stream of first interviews? Great! Now, for the next question—are you getting second interviews? Many job candidates will go through a first interview (usually a telephone interview) and be left with the impression that they are going to be handed on up the ladder for a second interview. The telephone interviewer said all the right things, was positive about your background, and said you had the qualifications they were seeking. You are now all excited because it looks promising.

A week passes. Nothing happens. Ten days – still no word. What do you do? Hopefully, you are following up with the person who called you. You DID get that person’s name, email, and telephone number, right? Get in touch and follow up to find out where they are in the hiring process. The hiring process is really a Crock Pot issue but most job seekers want it to be a microwave affair. It takes a lot longer than you think to hire a qualified candidate, especially someone at the executive level.

The same goes for recruiters. In over thirteen years in business, I’ve never heard a recruiter tell a job seeker anything OTHER than “You have a great background” after receiving the resume. It’s akin to “Would you like fries with that?” It has no true intent behind it so don’t take it that way. Some recruiters even say they are going to forward your resume on to an employer but then drop off the face of the earth. If a recruiter has promised to pass on the resume to an employer, stay in contact with that recruiter. You’ll know soon enough if he was fibbing just to make you feel good.

Okay, let’s say you make it through to an in-person interview and that goes well. You are told you are a contender. What do you do then? Same thing – you stay in touch with the person with whom you interviewed. If you are told you didn’t make the cut, ask some questions:

What part of my experience did not fit your requirements?
Do you have any suggestions on how I can improve my candidacy for other prospective employers?
Was there anyway I could improve my personal presentation?
Can you tell me where I’m weak in either my experience or education?
Was there a particular skill set that you were seeking that I did not have?

All these questions are non-threatening, informational questions. Hiring managers usually won’t mind answering these types of questions, especially if you made a connection in the interviewing process with them. They realize you want to improve and they can provide feedback to help you. People like to help other people.

If you are working through a recruiter, feel free to ask him/her these questions after an interview that didn’t morph into a position. The recruiter only gets paid if he can place you. If you are messing up in an interview or don’t have a particular skill, he helps himself by helping you correct yourself or your approach.
Ask questions. The interviewing process is not an interrogation process. You get to participate!

An Equal-Opportunity, Self-Imposed Glass Ceiling

2007-02-20T14:20:00.001-05:00

Everyone has heard of the term “glass ceiling” originally coined by the Wall Street Journal to describe the hiring/promotion discrimination against women in corporate America. With the notoriety of the term, companies started paying more attention to their promotion and hiring practices where women and minorities were concerned. While most would agree that the glass ceiling still exists to some extent, things have improved.

To be honest, I haven’t thought of this issue in some time because I’m an entrepreneur and believe that there is no ceiling; how far up I go depends solely on me. Not everyone is an entrepreneur, though, so I occasionally get reports from clients that they feel their _________ (age, gender, race – you fill in the blank) is causing them to hit a glass ceiling or at least making the next step on the career ladder almost impossible.

The most common worry we see as far as hiring discrimination is the fear of age discrimination. As the Boomers start to near retirement age, they are often concerned that they will be seen as people looking for a “smooth landing place” for a job that will ease them into retirement or that employers won’t hire them because they are above a certain age. For the most part, this is a myth. Employers are seeking experience, something the Baby Boomer generation has in abundance.

A dynamic, do-it-our-way generation to begin with, the Baby Boomers are simply looking for more challenge. Many have imposed their own glass ceiling. They have accomplished what they want and now they are seeking something “fun” to do or something that will contribute to society. Often that means a lateral career move or even a step backward. Some are changing career fields entirely in order to pursue something other than money, prestige and standing while they still have the drive and energy to do so.

Another self-imposed glass ceiling I’ve seen on a couple of occasions lately is education related. Many otherwise highly qualified job seekers feel they get passed over in hiring or promotion due to a lack of a certain degree or educational level. I am the first one to encourage education but I believe there is a large gap between education and knowledge. Smart employers hire knowledge and promote wisdom while short-sighted employers predicate all hiring on having a certain degree for executive level jobs. Knowledge is always more important than education.

Are you imposing a glass ceiling on your career by not going after a secondary degree? In certain industries, yes. Finance and banking tend to promote only if that MBA has been achieved. That doesn’t hold true so much in other industries. I talked to a job seeker last week who was the manager of a mine in South America (American expatriate). He had spent 25 years in mining and had worked his way up to the top job. Now he was concerned that because he never attained his undergraduate degree, he would not have a chance to advance further in his industry. I started thinking “What school teaches what he now knows after 25 years working in nearly every position in mining? There is no such school.” I didn’t see how a degree would make any difference in his career. That’s the difference between knowledge and education.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that only 20% of college graduates actually work in the field of their major after graduation. What does that tell us about the disconnect between education and knowledge?

Education vs. Knowledge

2007-02-13T20:20:00.001-05:00

Two of the most common concerns that we see among our executives clients are the fear of age discrimination and the fear of not having a degree. Both concerns, while legitimate to some degree are given more weight than they deserve in the effects these two issues actually have on job search.

Today, I want to look at degrees – both the importance of them and the impact of lack of them. We see clients from both ends of the spectrum where this issue is concerned. We work with senior researchers who have more than one PhD to their names and then we work with C-level executives who never finished college. And we work with clients who are everywhere in between in terms of education.

For many years of the past century, especially in the first six decades, the most common goal of education was a high school diploma. If you graduated high school, you were pretty well assured of being able to attain a job that would support the average middle-class lifestyle. As the twentieth century came to a close, that had changed significantly. Now, most people consider a four-year degree to be the lowest bar needed to achieve the average middle class lifestyle.

Institutes of higher learning have really “sold” the value of an MBA over the past twenty years, so much to the point that now an MBA doesn’t hold a lot of weight because it is a common degree. There have been several studies that indicate that the money spent on an MBA is not always recouped in higher wages. (Equate it over-improving your house for the neighborhood—you may not get your investment back.)

My question is – can you be highly educated but have little knowledge. I think the answer to that is a resounding yes. Knowledge comes from study but it also comes from experience and between the two, experience wins the battle. Think about your own experience in college. How much of what you learned do you actually use now? Remember that ballroom dancing class you had to take for a PE credit? How about that college algebra class?

Success is not predicated on a college degree. We have plenty of highly successful entrepreneurs to prove that correct – Michael Dell, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to name three. At the senior executive level, there is a higher percentage of people who have earned their degree at the School of Hard Knocks which is harder to obtain and more expensive that a Harvard degree. No real college teaches the lessons learned at good old SHK. Those lessons, or that knowledge, if you will, can only be taught by life – experience.

Companies that are seeking senior executives are going to be looking at experience. They want to hire a leader who has been in the trenches and won’t be blown about by the winds of the business world. They want someone who has the T-shirt and knows the answers before the questions are asked. They are not going to find that knowledge in an educated twenty- or thirty-something who has very little real world experience.

Does that mean you won’t get an edge if you have a degree? No. Having the experience and the degree may very well give you an edge but again the employer is going to be looking at the whole package. If you have the experience, the great track record, and are the right fit, not having that degree will probably not eliminate you from the running.

Want a great book to read while you are snowed in over the next couple of weeks? I highly recommend “The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy” by Thomas J. Stanley and William D Danko. (Both have PhD’s by the way). You will be amazed at who the rich people REALLY are and how they got there!

Delay Can Be Deadly

2007-02-07T13:50:00.000-05:00

We all delay expenditures to fit our budget. Sometimes we are saving up for something special like a vacation or sometimes unexpected things happen that make us rearrange our monthly budget plans. Unfortunately, sometimes when we delay investing in something, the final expenditure is higher than the original cost.

For example, a friend of mine recently purchased a used car (I think they are now called pre-owned). He had the opportunity to purchase a bumper-to-bumper, three-year warranty on the vehicle for $500 and have it meshed into the total payment but he opted not to do so. Three months later, the fuel pump bit the dust and the repair cost him $725. That $500 warranty looked pretty good in hindsight.

Occasionally, we will have a job seeker who views a professionally developed resume in the same light. Shelling out several hundred dollars for a resume may not “compute” in his mind. These individuals have a very short-sighted view and often come back to us several months after we first discussed a resume with them to go ahead and have the resume developed. What they didn’t “compute” at the beginning was the loss they risked by NOT investing in their career.

Let’s look at some numbers. Let’s say a person is making $100,000 a year. That computes roughly to a gross of $50/hour. In one 40-hour week, gross salary would be approximately $2000. Now, let’s say this person is targeting a job at the $125,000 mark. That computes to about $62.50 an hour or $2500 a week. If this person’s job search takes 12 weeks instead of four, he has lost $4000 in potential earnings. That’s $4K that could have gone in his pocket simply by using a more effective resume that won interviews more quickly and more effectively than a poor, self-written resume.

Keep in mind that we are only talking base salary in this scenario and not benefits, commissions, or stock options. We also are not considering cash flow issues that occur when a downsizing has occurred. What was $4K in potential lost earnings for the job seeker looking to make a step up the career ladder skyrockets to $30,000 when there is zero income for someone who has been laid off. Of course, being out of work is the worst time to have to invest in a professional resume so we always recommend having a resume ready and up-to-date. Think of it as a will for your career – you don’t want to be caught without one.

Makes that few hundred dollars spent on the resume look rather paltry, doesn’t it.

Could Your Spam Filter Be Sabotaging Your Job Search?

2007-02-03T15:44:00.001-05:00

Here at GetInterviews, we send out a lot of emails and I mean a LOT. We don’t have a subscription list for a newsletter or anything, but 99% of our business is completed via email from initial contact to final delivery. We are not spammers and never send out bulk emails in big batches. In fact, we don’t send out bulk email at all. Everything that goes out through our server is what I might refer to as “person to person” rather than “person to masses”.

Over the past few months, our battle with spam filters has grown more heated. A good estimate is that approximately 20% of our emails get “eaten” by spam filters of the big commercial services such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, and Earthlink. We have job seekers who request a free resume critique to whom we respond -- only they never receive our response. Often we try responding multiple times with no luck getting through. That leaves the job seeker thinking we are unresponsive and us feeling extremely frustrated.

Keep in mind that we are in a service business so we go the extra mile to reach customers and provide them with the information they need for a successful job search. Recruiters and hiring managers, on the other hand, are not so considerate nor do they care. If they send an email to you (most respond first by email) and they do not receive a response, they just move on to the next candidate. They don’t waste the time to chase down job candidates when they have 200 other resumes of qualified candidates before them.

The large commercial email providers such as I mentioned above have proven to be the most vicious in their spam filtering according to our experience. Earthlink has even added a second step where the sender has to log in online and tell what the email is about so it can be approved. This narrow opportunity expires very quickly so if the sender doesn’t respond almost immediately, the original email is tossed out. That can be tough if you send out an email at 4:49 on a Friday and don’t get back to your computer until Monday morning at 8:00. You have to start the process all over!

When you are starting a job search, consider NOT using one of the free email services just because of the potential for multiple missed job opportunities. If you have high speed service through a provider such as Comcast, Hughes, Time Warner, or your telephone provider, you probably have the ability to have multiple email addresses on your account. Set up an email on that service just for your job search purposes rather than going the freebie route. Sure, you are going to get spam but you are going to get spam anyway, no matter what kind of email service you are using. What is less likely to happen is that real, important messages WILL NOT be filtered out, and thus you won’t miss the opportunities you are seeking in the first place.

Why You DON’T Need More than One Version of Your Resume

2007-01-14T08:54:00.001-05:00

“I’m interested in taking my career in a couple of different directions in at this point. I think I need two different versions of my resume.” That was the comment from John, a new client who had a fifteen year career in sales and marketing with an increasingly responsible career progression.

John had started right out of college as an account executive with a company in the consumer products industry but had progressed up the ladder through technology and pharmaceutical sales until he was at the point where he was ready for a significant management position. Basically, John could sell anything and he had proven it. Now he wanted to target a national sales manager position or a sales training position but he was open to any of the three industries where his experience fell or even a new one. Because of the different responsibilities associated with both his target positions, he felt he would be better served by having two different resumes.

With a little questioning, I came to find out that John had arrived at this conclusion through the recommendation of a friend in HR and through reading a couple of articles he found online. The truth is John had been misinformed. Unless a job seeker is targeting two very divergent jobs (say financial analyst and veterinary technician), one strategically written resume serves perfectly to land interviews.

In discussing this issue with John, I explained to him the reasoning behind why our firm only recommends one resume. First of all, the job seeker has one career history and it’s in a set order of time. The resume will be written in reverse chronological order since that is the format that 99% of all hiring managers and recruiters prefer. The order of information within those jobs or the information that is include/excluded is set by the strategy of the document. Since John had both managed others in sales throughout his career and trained others also, he had the background throughout his career that qualified him for both targets.

In conducting his job search, we recommend that the resume remain the same but what needs to change is the cover letter. The cover letter is what should be changed and targeted to the specific position in question because it is the “introduction” that accompanies the resume and speaks directly to the recipient. The cover letter is a great tool for zeroing in on specific skills that make the job seeker uniquely qualified for the job. Changing a few sentences around in the resume or maybe changing a few words in a summary has little to no effect on whether the resume is going to win interviews.

Do you need two resumes? Rarely. Do you need a customized cover letter? Always.