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Leverage Your Unique Strengths
Your resume is your calling card to success. It is the one document that tells how qualified you are, what you can do, where you are going. It is your personal statement and no one can put it together the way you can. By defining your strengths beyond simple career or skill descriptions-the way a resume service or template might, you can distinguish yourself and customize the resume for the kinds of work you want. You build your own future the way you want it to be.
The process defined on this site shows how to assess your future, mold your strengths and interests into the right targets and shape resumes and cover letters that will have you stand out on your own.
As a college student you may be asking: what can I do? How do I communicate my limited experience, translate my personal values and interests to many employers? In over 400 college visits we have shown the way to make a resume with special power and marketability. If you are willing to put in a couple of hours on your own you can do it.
Action: Take the time to make a customized resume that works for you.
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Beware of Broadcasting
When on-campus interviewing and job fairs and haven't struck gold, you might be tempted to turn to the net for your job search. The Internet is one tool for preparing and distributing your resume. Unfortunately, it is also full of dangers with sometimes false and extravagant claims of unlimited resume distribution to millions of job openings. WARNING. There are few privacy protections from many such sites, and your detailed work history and contact information can end up in the hands and hard drives of thousands of organizations you've never heard of- professional or unprofessional. It may also cost you financially.
Use the power of the Internet to help build the best possible resumes and to support a selective distribution of your credentials to only those companies you want to reach. Manage your own digital job search to capitalize on its power and avoid some serious hassles.
Action: Use only those services that can guarantee you control of your data.
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Start With Your Future
Even though you may not as yet have answered one of life's tough questions: 'What do you want to be when you grow up?', it's time to start building a future that connects the quality of your (future) life to the quality of your work. To avoid shooting in the dark for the companies and positions you want, focus on your selected job targets before preparing your resume. This will help you have a clearer picture of a future that will meet your values and use the best in you. For many who miss this step, future careers can be compromised and produce a lack of fulfillment.
In good times and bad, over a million jobs change hands each month in the USA. With the additional effort of focusing on your ideal future, custom crafting your resume and adding the power of the world's best search engines, you can start a trajectory that leads towards passion, meaning and rich rewards.
Job targeting correlates your values with your skills and competencies. Formal testing and assessment are good, but look into your own life experience first.
Action: Target a future that meets your personal standards for a quality of life beyond the paycheck and have your resume push in that direction.
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Penetrate the Hidden Job Market
A job seeker can creatively use the vast power of the Internet to discover job opportunities not yet advertised or posted. Understand and use the Hidden Job Market Principle: at any given moment 80% of the available opportunities in the nation are not publicly advertised! With the proliferation of digital resumes it is more important than ever to go for the unadvertised jobs: those that are the part of internal growth, new processes and new priorities. Remember: less than 7% of total hiring comes from web job services.
In using the Internet to research the hidden job market, track all media and pay attention to industry news, contact the authors of papers or articles, tap industry sources and find ways to stay ahead of the curve as companies plot their futures.
Action: Find out about opportunities in organizations before the jobs are posted or perhaps even well defined. Create your own private job market. Don't rely only on campus recruiting.
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You Are Not Your Job Title
The most common resume format is the Chronological resume: start with your most recent job: employer, dates, job title and competencies and work backwards in time. It is easy to write, easy to follow and for many, easy to keep you pigeonholed in the work you are doing or have been doing. For a graduating student there is often little work experience to make much of a chronology.
To sharpen your mobility substantially, learn a variety of formats and how to use the best ones for your particular needs. Not knowing how to do this constrains your flexibility in a market that demands it.
If you have questions about which formats will suit you best, use our Resume Calculator on this site for a free assessment and detailed description of formats, or go to The Ten Steps To Your Perfect Resume Section for more details.
Action: Use the resume format that suits your situation best.
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Google Your Resume
For college students and others the most useful tools for perfecting your resume are Google, Yahoo, Inktomi and other terrific Internet search engines. These engines will give you access to a broad set of resources for preparing a resume.
Start with a job target. (See 10 Steps to a Perfect Resume in the detailed information section) Simply enter the title, Fitness Trainer on cruise line, for example. In seconds you will be connected to hundreds of descriptions, positions, stories, postings and more. With these you can note skills and qualities required in this work, names of people who can give you insider information (salary, working conditions, pet peeves), the names of organizations that do the hiring and perhaps even the people whom you will ultimately want to contact.
Use this data to build a foundation for your resume so that when you do apply, what you have collected about yourself is powerful and relevant.
Action: Play around with your search engine and your skills and job targets. You will expand your understanding of your field enormously.
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Deadly Mistakes
A single advertised position might bring a few hundred to a few thousand responses, so even when filtered digitally, a recruiter has to review a large stack. This means that she first wants to "screen out" as many resumes as possible so that she has more time to analyze the 10-20% that remain.
If you were qualified for the position, how would you feel if your resume hit the reject pile because of a misspelling, or because the organization was sloppy or inconsistent?
According to recent information from The Robert Half Organization a high number of otherwise competent candidates get rejected simply because he or she has published their resume with avoidable mistakes.
A few of the most obvious mistakes: grammatical errors, knowing little about the company, their business, or the kind of people they hire, taking four pages to communicate two pages of information, complaining about earlier employers.
Action: Have your resume "double edited" before releasing it, by 1/ someone in your field and 2/ by someone who has a good eye for writing errors.
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These Resume Tips are provided to you free of charge by Your Perfect Resume
© 2003 - 2004 Tom Jackson
For additional information on how to build a powerful resume go to www.careervictory.com
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