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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
The Internet is a powerful tool for preparing and distributing your resume - however it is fraught with dangers for those who do not know its pitfalls, and are pulled into its false promises and extravagant claims of unlimited resume distribution to "millions of job opportunities".
Not only can your identity get ripped, you can find yourself wasting time waiting when you could be doing much more productive work on your job hunt. There are few if any protections from public resume distribution sites that will keep your detailed history out of the hands and hard drives of perhaps thousands of organizations - professional or unprofessional - with proposals to sell other services or even more unsavory purposes; nor can you retrieve or cancel out your file once it is distributed.
Action: Use only those services that can guarantee you control of your data.
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Start With Your Future
If you want to build a future that connects the quality of your life to the quality of your work, sit back and start targeting your future life several years beyond your present search, and then back down the work direction to the immediate quest. This is not a complex process and is one that is highly supported by the information available to you on the net.
A job targeting process correlates your values, interests and passions with the skills and competencies to make them real. Although formal traditional testing is available at a number of sites, the first place to look is into your own experience. Think of fields, locations, business styles and basic comparisons. Set your current job goals and resumes with the future target in mind, or perhaps, go for that satisfying future right now.
Action: Target a future for yourself 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 that are not advertised or posted. Set aside your reliance on the conventional digital flesh markets long enough to 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 rampant proliferation of digital resumes it is perhaps more important than ever to go for the unadvertised jobs: those that are the part of internal growth, new processes and new priorities. Especially given that hiring from web job services is less than 7% of the total.
In using the Internet to research opportunities not yet announced, or only known internally you watch different 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.
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You Are Not Your Job Title
The customary and easiest resume format to put together is the Chronological resume-Start with you most recent job: employer, dates, job title and competencies. So logical and so ordinary: easy to write, easy to follow and unfortunately for many, so easy to keep you pigeonholed in the work you are doing or have been doing, when what might really be best for you now is to adjust your work targets to something more contemporary, more in demand and relevant to your own growth needs.
To sharpen your mobility substantially from a resume point of view, 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 seems to demand it.
Action: Use the resume format that suits your situation best.
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Google Your Resume
There has rarely been as useful a tool for perfecting your resume as Google, Yahoo, Inktomi and the other high-powered search engines available on the Internet. Good search engines give you access to a broad set of resources, for the preparation of a variety of resume formats.
Start with your targeted job title. Simply enter the title, say, 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 spec out considerations and qualities useful or 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 information to build a foundation for your resume so that when you do apply, what you have organized about yourself is powerful and relevant: the format is right, the qualities are directly related and your experience is organized to put yourself in the best posture for the position.
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
Since a single advertised position might bring from several hundred to over one thousand responses, even when filtered digitally, a recruiter has a large stack of responses to review. This means that her frame of mind is about "screening out" as many resumes as possible on the first pass so that she can spend more time analyzing the 10-20% that remain after the first quick scan. If you were a qualified candidate for the position, how would you feel if your resume got put in the reject pile because of a misspelling in the second paragraph, or 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 the candidate has published a resume with avoidable mistakes.
Here are 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 - 2008 Tom Jackson
For additional information on how to build a powerful resume go to www.careervictory.com
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