Category Archives: Resume Tips

Creating a Focused Resume

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Tactics for Breaking Through Employer Screenings

Image extracted from: nuttakit photos

We all know the frustrations of applying for work – nearly a full time occupation all by itself. And with the advent of online job boards, competition among opportunities is becoming tougher than ever before. On average in the U.S., over 200 resumes are now submitted to each new opening. Although it may seem like a daunting task, there are actually a few simple tactics jobseekers can take to drastically improve their chances of breaking through employer screenings.

For one, it’s never been more important to tailor your resume and experiences for every job and writing a focused resume to each organization you apply to. In today’s world, no hiring manager or HR personnel spends more than 10 seconds reviewing a resume. And that’s only if you’re lucky enough to get your resume in front of human eyes. In other words, listing everything you’ve ever accomplished in life can inadvertently hinder your chances of being picked up for an interview. By not writing a focused resume, employers may question your interests and not want to invest time to onboard someone who can just as easily work somewhere else.

Secondly, the old adage of KISS (Keeping it Simple…) applies to job-hunting more so than anywhere else. Create an overly ornate resume, and aside from wasting massive amounts of time, you may have just jeopardized your chances. The majority of resumes nowadays get sucked into a database the second you press ‘Send’. By adding photos, specialty fonts and what-have-you, your resume may no longer be readable by the applicant tracking systems employers use to extract and scan candidate information.  So all your work in writing a focused resume was useless.

So – what’s a jobseeker to do? Tailoring your resume for each opportunity takes huge amounts of time, and you cannot possibly know what employers are searching for in a candidate? But all these problems are soon to permanently go away with a free job application tool aptly called RESUNATE, which allows jobseekers to automatically create a focused resume that highlights relevant skills and experiences for each of your job applications. This new webware publicly launching next month was created by a start-up, recently minted from both the research hub of Carnegie Mellon University and the prestigious East Coast technology incubator called Alphalab.

Feed RESUNATE your old resume and the job description of your dreams to watch it literally kick-back professionally tailored resume automatically.

At the core of this new application, a mischievously smart technology that understands employer search terminology, ensuring you (the jobseeker) gets noticed. And not just noticed, but called for an interview. In a recent study, the makers of RESUNATE found its applicants were 2X *more* likely to be called for an interview! Now, that’s a number that most of us would gladly work into our job hunt.

Get your resume on the fast-track today by getting a RESUNATE free account today! Go to: http://get.resunate.com

Spring Cleaning for Your Resume?

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Spring Cleaning for Your Resume

Image extracted from: www.heatherhuhman.com

Spring is here!  Flip flops, sunglasses and doing a spring cleaning on your resume?  The warm spring weather warrants a good hard look at your resume.  During the fall and winter, experiences may have changed what you know, learn, and what you want this spring and summer.  Your goals and achievements should reflect onto paper, blending what you have done with what you want to do.

Resume Shape-Up

Start your resume spring cleaning by thinking about any new experiences you may have had this fall/winter (internship, volunteer, study abroad, or new job).  Now, you need to advertise those experiences.  A resume is more than just where you worked; it is what you have learned and what skills you have built.  In addition to work experience, any academic skills or unique accomplishments are necessary resume builders. If you have had any distinctive experiences, these tidbits are like a bright neon highlighter across your resume.  They stand out and catch an employer’s attention.

Academic skills are just as distinctive, maybe a class on fundraising, professional writing or editing?  Although these may not seem like “skills” as most resumes highlight tangible training but they are “skills” in the sense that you can provide a service to a future job or internship.  This knowledge will help you along your career path and future employers will want to know!

Although these resume spring cleaning requirements may seem extensive, most employers or college career staff will tell you from college to 2-3 years after graduation, your resume is only one page long!  One page does not seem like a lot of room to have everything I have listed above, yet the key factor is to create a focused resume to an employer.  You do not need to include every job you have every done, if it does not relate to the application.  For example, once I had enough administrative experiences (jobs and internships) by my junior year in college, my high school fast food job got the eternal boot off my resume and this is one of the most important parts of your spring cleaning – deciding what is and what’s not relevant for a particular job.  The best way I can think of surmising these tips are in two questions to self:

“What are the skills this employer requires in the job I’m applying for?”

“What unique skills do I have that can be my resume highlighter?”

Wardrobe Refresh

Image extracted from: Fashion Law Wiki

A great excuse for shopping, a wardrobe refresh will help you clean out that closet for spring.  If you are preparing for an internship, job, or currently employed, doing a wardrobe refresh will help you fine tune what is work appropriate attire.  Another goal of a closet update is to organize clothes together, make outfits by hanging clothes side-by-side (pants – tops) or hang on one hanger.  This makes each morning free from the “what am I going to wear” routine. (Making outfits has shed at least 20 minutes off my morning routine!)  Don’t forget adding new pieces to your wardrobe allows you to discard outdated or ill-fitting clothes, donating them to a good cause.  This is a great roommate bonder, for me it was ordering in some pizza while we did a closet clean out.  My favorite places to donate are:

Goodwill at 5993 Penn Circle South

or

Salvation Army at 44 South 9th Street and East Carson

I hope these resume spring cleaning tips become your tools, much like your internship experiences, helping to move you in the direction you want to go!
Happy Spring!!

Adding Industry Experience to Your Resume.

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Straight Talk from a Recruiter

Image extracted from: careerealism.com

Over the last five years, I sourced for companies that wanted candidates with industry experience.  Companies such as Siemens, Grainger and Honeywell, are looking for candidates that not only have the capabilities, but come from the same industry.

When I am mining the internet for candidates, I search for industry.  For example, the positions I’m sourcing for now require automotive or consumer product goods (cpg) industry experience.  I’m not familiar with every single company out there and it is time consuming to look up company names to find out what industry it’s in.  I use keywords such as automotive, cpg, consumer product, medical device and others to find candidates within that industry.

Add your industry experience to your resume and show up in more search results.  You can add your industry keyword at least 2 or 3 times on your resume, the more the word is on there, the closer to the top of results it is.  That’s how search engine optimization (seo) works.  For example, you can mention the industry in your opening or branding statement, list the industry under each company and it’s mentioned in industry association and memberships.

It would be extremely helpful to me, as a sourcing specialist, to see what industry the company you work for is in, because I really don’t know every single company out there :)

On my resume, I have a section called Industry Experience, because it looks like this:

  • Information Technology, Engineering, Automotive, Packaging & Production, Construction, Finance and Accounting, Marketing/Communications, Manufacturing, Warehouse/Distribution, Retail, Supply Chain & Logistics, Insurance and Transportation Systems

The easier you make it for recruiters and sourcing specialists to find you, the better chance you have to securing your next opportunity.
Don’t have industry experience? Watch this related video on the RIC’s YouTube Channel.

 

Have Resume Gaps?

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Image extracted from: www.christopher-clark.blogspot.com

Internships to Gain Work Experience

I remember looking through the want ads after graduating college and seeing the phrase “experience required.” Luckily, I had worked during college and I did an unpaid, no credit internship just to have some experience behind me. I was able to land a job pretty quickly after I graduated college, which was back in 1992. Some of my other friends weren’t so lucky and as the months passed, it was harder and harder for them to find a job and explain the gap on their resume from graduation to their current situation. Employers wanted to know what they have been doing since they graduated and most of them were doing nothing which doesn’t send a very positive message about that graduate.

Unemployment = Resume Gaps

Today, people are facing a very similar situation. People have been laid off and stayed on unemployment for as long as they could. Some are still collecting and many people were lucky to benefit from the extension of unemployment benefits. The situation I am seeing is that job seekers have resume gaps from the time they were laid off until now. That resume gaps could be as short as a few months, but I have seen a lot of resumes with a gap of almost a year. Of course no one asked to be laid off and it was and still is a very difficult scenario for people to be in.

Job Hunting is a Full-Time Job

Unfortunately, these resume gaps from being unemployed is becoming a turn off to employers and recruiters. I have talked to several job seekers within the last few months that very non-chalantly say they took time off or have been looking for a job in between doing projects around the house etc. Employers are looking to hire motivated, energetic, and hard-working people who will help their company succeed. That message doesn’t come across if you have been riding out unemployment without doing anything else besides looking for a job.

Want to learn easy steps to avoid turning off recruiters? To offset resume gaps you can check out Cori’s advice on her next blog.

A Letter to Internship Applicants (From someone not too far removed from the application process)

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Not so long ago, my friends and I were the students applying for internships.  Updating our resumes, applying to every interesting looking position, and trying to leverage our still growing networks.

Lo and behold, after putting our time in, we are now the ones hiring interns, reading resumes and cover letters, and, quite honestly, finding ourselves being appalled and turned off by things like spelling mistakes and punctuation errors.  Stuff that when I was an intern, I knew was important, but didn’t quite understand how important until I was on the other side of the internship search.  Since I’m not too far removed from the process of applying for internships, and since these are issues I know not only I, but other employers deal with, I hope that the following advice will be useful to you as you present yourself in your applications.

Your resume

.  For starters, please, please, check for spelling and punctuation errors.  Your resume is not a tweet or a blog post and spelling matters.  Spelling errors make me think you’re too lazy or sloppy to pay attention to your resume.

Also, if you’re going to have an objective on there, please make it relevant to you and the position for which you are applying.  If it’s a vague general statement clearly pulled from a template, I’m going to consider it filler, and in my mind filler translates to lack of experience.  Since this is an application for an internship, it is completely likely that you may not have a lot of experience.  That is ok.  That is the point of internships; gaining experience.  Just please use a more creative way to make up for lack of experience than a stale boring objective.

Finally, pay attention to your formatting, and once everything is aligned perfectly, save it as a pdf, so that when I open it it’s not a mess.  I, and many of my colleagues, do not have the latest version of Office, and can’t open your resumes if saved as a word docx.  Pdf’s avoid all of these issues.

Cover Letter

.  Write one. I know it’s a pain, especially when you’re applying for a lot of different positions, but if you can’t take a few minutes to write me a cover letter, then you’re not really interested in my internship.

A cover letter gives you the chance to tell me things your resume does not.  For instance, going back to lack of experience, use your cover letter to explain to me, why you would be such a great fit for this organization, and I should hire you in spite of your minimal experience.

Be sure to personalize each cover letter to each different position.  I don’t need to read a form letter you’ve sent to 50 other employers (and yes, we can tell).  Also, when addressing your potential employer in the cover letter, never, never, never, use to whom it may concern. Find a name.  Finding someone to address it to, usually requires little more than visiting the company website.  If you really can find no name to use, simply say Hello, or Greetings followed by the company name, (e.g. Hello Coro Pittsburgh).

Visit our website

.  Use your awesome cover letter to explain to me why you are a good fit for this opportunity based on what you know about the work we do.  Show me you are excited not just to get an internship, but to get this internship, with this organization.  Flatter me.  It makes a huge difference.

Doing the necessary research can also save time for both of us. Learning more about the organization you’re applying to, may make you realize it’s not the right environment for you.

I’m a millennial too so I’m not clueless about social media

.  In fact, I use it every day. You can bet I internet stalk every one of my potential applicants.  Google, Facebook, Twitter, Addictomatic, etc.

I’m not digging for dirt.  Quite frankly, seeing pictures of you drinking with your friends on Facebook would not be enough of a deterrent for me not to hire you if you were qualified (although you really should detag yourself from those.) What I am looking for is how you manage your personal brand on line.

Since social media is a big component of what I do, and therefore what my interns do, I want to know that you already know how to use these tools, or have a willingness and eagerness to learn.  Also, having things like a blog or website gives you an online portfolio showcasing your communication skills, thoughts, ideas, and experience that will probably represent you much better than your resume.

If there is a field or organization you are really interested in, find a person working in that industry or for that organization, and ask if you can buy them a cup of coffee and chat for an hour.

Ask them how they got their position, what they like about it, what they recommend for someone wanting to do something similar, and if they know of any opportunities available.  At the very least, you’ll get some good insight into the job or industry you want.  At the very most you’ll get a contact who will remember and recommend you, or hire you if they’re able.  Most likely you’ll get something in the middle.  No matter what, you’ll get some positive benefits.

Keep interning.

Once you have done all of the above well, you have the opportunity to keep interning.  It is so crucial to intern as much as you can.  Once you’ve gained some experience, update your resume and portfolio and look for an internship that has more qualifications and responsibility.

Interning will give you experience and connections that you will need when you graduate.  It also teaches you what you like to do, don’t like to do, and can open the door to some industries and experiences you’ve never considered.

I know it can be exhausting.  I know it can mean holding down part-time jobs in addition to a full class load while living off ramen noodles.  I know it can seem like you are too busy; but truthfully, there is no reason you couldn’t graduate with 6-8 internships.  Aim for at least three.  Think of it this way, if you start interning as a sophomore, by the time you graduate you will be able to apply for jobs that are looking for people with 3 years of experience.  Interning is a great way to distinguish yourself from the other hundreds of thousands of graduates with a degree just like yours.

Good luck, and happy interning.

Resume Tips: To ensure you get a second look

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I have looked at A LOT of resumes and talked to a lot of HR recruiters throughout the past few years. I have seen and heard of a lot of resumes bloopers and would like to share them with internship and job seekers.

Sending your resume to the employer:

Even though your computer has the most recent version of Microsoft Word, it doesn’t mean that a perspective employer does. Be sure to save your resume as a Word 1997-2003 & 6.0/95 version so that anyone can open it. Also, be sure to save your resume as your name – i.e. don’t save it as “Resume,” save it as “Doe, John,” or “John D. Doe Resume.”

Thinking about what your email address and voicemail says about you:

For starters, make sure that you actually PUT your email address on your resume! I have seen a lot of internship seekers who do not include this on their resume. If an employer wants to email you, and you have no email address, they may simply toss out your resume. Give them the option to email or call you. Think about what your email says about you… Is it “Fratboy2009,” or “Partygirl01″? I would encourage any job or internship seeker to have a separate email account for job and internship search. This way, you will have a professional email address AND you won’t miss out on a prospective job or internship because your inbox is inundated with other emails.

Many people now have “ringback tones” on their cell phones, while I think this is pretty cool and shows your personality, some employers may be annoyed with this. Employers are people, and they might think that your ringback tone is unprofessional or they might not even know what it is and think that they have the wrong number. Secondly, think about what your voicemail says. Does it say, “Hi, its me, you know what to do and when to do it?” Be sure to state your name in your voicemail so that they employer knows that they have the right number. Oh, and PLEASE try not to fake out the caller by having your message seem like you answered the phone!

So, maybe it’s time to take a step back and have a resume update and, in some cases, a voicemail update, as well! Attention to detail and professionalism may just be what sets you apart from the competition.

White space on your resume:

Do have an internship to fill up that white space on your resume! Our website has new internship opportunities daily, if you are having a difficult time finding internships, contact Trisha Ross.

Begin volunteering with a local non-profit or charity. Not only will you give back to your community, but you will also fill up additional white space on that resume! Visit Pittsburgh Cares for local volunteer opportunities at www.pittsburghcares.org!