Archive for April, 2009

I see so many small businesses and individuals fail to reach the next level of success due to the people they associate themselves with most. In fact there is a saying that your income is in direct proportion to the average income of the top 10 people you spend most of your time with.

This makes sense. When you spend time with people, in order to maintain rapport, you have to adopt some of their attitudes and belief systems. Over time this takes over your mental processing and you start to filter information the way they do.

It’s not who you know; it’s who they know is really a fact. If you’re job searching or wanting to connect with such and such person, you can’t just rely on quantity of people in your network. You must have a quality network of people that have strong connections. Success breeds success; successful people associate themselves with other successful people and their combined power continues to grow on a daily basis.

If you build a strong network of people with genuine relationships, you’ll never have to job search again. Just look at some of the successful Fortune 500 executives. They’re always being solicited to come run another company while they hold top positions. One example is Paul Brown (former President of Expedia.com). Paul has managed his career very well. He has a top MBA from the Kellogg School of Management. He went to work for top consulting firms such as the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey. He then specialized in travel and became a well-known expert in the travel management industry. Later when he decided to leave Expedia, he already had another offer as President of Hilton Hotels.

Paul’s career is not random attempts of applying for jobs and great interviewing skills. Instead it’s a carefully crafted plan along with a strong network + mentors that are dedicated to his professional success.

If you want to succeed in your career, start building solid relationships. Work your way up and increase the quality of people you meet; network with connectors, connect to politicians and executives, attend charity events and meet the affluent.

As the saying goes 80% of jobs are recruited through networking and never make it on the job boards. Wouldn’t you like to get a job like that? What are you waiting for? Start networking today!

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Learn more about the author Paul Anderson.

I went to a Private Career Fair the other day hosted by a large bank that failed in Seattle and received over 100 resumes with various backgrounds (executive, project management, IT, finance, legal, etc). Apparently this failed bank is using 30 or so career counselors and are providing this service to their x-employees as a layoff package to help them become employed again. In my opinion they’re doing them more harm than good. I almost called this post “Why YOU SHOULDN’T Use Your Company’s Career Transition Services“.

I would no longer like to receive resumes that don’t fit the minimum guidelines below: (hopefully the career transition folks will read this and update their own skills before giving bad advice to people!)

Structure & Grammar

• Spelling: I didn’t see a lot of spelling errors on these resumes but I still review quite a bit of resumes with spelling mistakes. You can’t trust your spell checker because the word “Baked” and “Backed” are both valid but don’t read well in this sentence: “I baked up critical server data.”
• Grammar: At the minimum please pick 1 tense and focus on it. If you’re going to write 1st person, stick to it; if you’re going to write 3rd person, please keep it consistent throughout the document. Also make sure you have no sentence fragments because Microsoft Word underlines them with green marks and it doesn’t look good when the hiring managers open the document. They don’t read well and are distracting.
• Structure: If you don’t make it easy for hiring managers and recruiters to scan your resume, it’s not going to be read. I see a lot of paragraphs in resumes and to be honest with you, not many people read them. In this day and age where there is information overload, non-scannable resumes don’t have a chance. Make sure you have professional sections (education, career history, professional summary, etc), as well as bullets within the sections that make it easy to scan. In my Resume Writing 2.0 Seminar, I show different types of resumes and which are easier/harder to read.
• Pages: Have a 1 or 1.5 page resume if you’re a college graduate, not if you have 5 or more years of experience. I would like to see at least 2 – 3 pages of quality content for senior professionals. If you’re in technology, you can even go up to 4 pages but no more than 4 pages is needed. When I was a hiring manager, I once got a resume that was 17 pages long! This person had every certificate that was offered in the market and more. We simply didn’t choose to interview him. While shorter resumes might have worked last year, they don’t work that well this year because of the number of submissions that recruiters get for one job posting. Longer resumes are able to optimize for keywords therefore appearing higher in the search results. Shorter resumes don’t get to enjoy this and therefore might not be found.
• Contact Information: Please make sure you use a separate professional-sounding email address. Butterfly@email.com or cutie231@email.com isn’t appropriate on your resume. If you plan on relocating or job searching outside of your state, go ahead and drop your contact address because many resume search engines ignore out-of-state candidates. Please pick 1 or 2 phone numbers max. I once saw a resume with 4 contact numbers. Do they really need your 1-800/fax number?
• Education: I get asked “Should my education be listed on the top or at the bottom of my resume?” Let me ask you a question. Is it a prestigious degree/school? Did you graduate with honors? Hopefully that will help you decide.

Content

• Not Enough Information: I see so many resumes that are about 2-3 sentences long for 2-3 years of job history. Please tell me that you did more than 2-3 things at your previous position. What if you’re resume is already too long? Well, make sure those 2-3 sentences are the strongest sentences that are going to sell you to the new position.
• Too much Information: While some candidates don’t put enough information on their resumes, some put paragraphs upon paragraphs! Ask yourself this one question. What is the purpose of your resume? The purpose should be to highlight your experience to the prospective employer and sell you to the new position. If you write too much information, you overload the recruiter/hiring manager and they’re inclined to review the next resume because yours is too much work! Also, too much info applies to candidates with a decade or more of experience that is trying to get credit or list every position they ever held. Your resume is not a job application; it’s a sales tool. Make sure it’s selling you properly. In my Advanced Resume Writing Workshop we first go over your personal branding, define your career objectives, and then we start to craft a resume that highlights that path.
• Worthless Information: There are such things as “worthless information” on one’s resume. I saw a 1.25 page resume that highlighted a skill “Taught introductory Spanish lessons” back in the 1970s. The position he was applying for was accounting. I don’t see the relevancy here, do you? Also I see some candidates that put what they did as extracurricular activities that doesn’t show relevancy for the position they are applying for. Think of your resume as a marketing brochure. Ask yourself, what would you put on your brochure to get the customer to buy?
• Worthless Skills: I was surprised to see so many professionals that listed Microsoft Word, Windows, Typing, etc as their top skills when they were mid to senior level professionals. If you’ve been a Project Manager for 5 years and use Microsoft Project, I’m going to assume you know how to use Excel and Word. If you’re going to highlight technical skills, please make sure you list the strong ones. For IT Professionals this can be a little different. We actually want to see how many technical skills you’ve been in contact with. Make sure to categorize them under programming languages, networking, operating systems, etc if you have enough under each bucket.
• Objective: I get asked a lot, “Paul, should I have an objective on my resume?” I always respond “If it’s relevant to the position you’re applying for and it’s selling you to the job you’re applying for.” Objectives can come across as “This is what I want” vs. “Here is what I can do for you”. If you choose to put an objective, make sure it has the client in mind, not yourself. I personally avoid using objectives and instead rely on Professional Summaries. They’re cleaner and can highlight your expertise while keeping the client’s best interests in mind.
• Personal Information: Coaching your son’s basketball team, being on “Who wants to be a millionaire“, likes knitting at night is information you should probably put on your Facebook/MySpace page instead not on your resume.

While I can go on and on about resume writing tips, I’m hoping that this will give you an opportunity to review the basics on your resume and make sure you aren’t making the mistake the masses are making. If you only take away one point from all of this, it should be: Your Resume is a Sales Tool. Make sure it helps you STAND OUT!

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To read more articles on the 2009 job searching strategies, career development, psychology of interviewing, and resume techniques, subscribe to our RSS feed or get updates by email.

Learn more about the author Paul Anderson.

Just recently I’ve partnered up with the Puget Sound Business Journal to offer my career coaching expertise in a wider format (a.k.a Seminars). We’ve had a couple of great events already with spectacular feedback. I am very excited that through this medium we’re able to reach a larger audience in a shorter period of time and help them become employed quickly.

I’ll be posting snippets of our events here along with categories such as Resume Writing 2.0 (how to write your resume for today’s market), Job Searching 2.0 (how to use networking/social media for job searching), Psychology of Interviewing (how to speak the interviewer’s language and persuade them to hire YOU), among other topics such as organizational skills, personal development, among others.

I had a few articles written and wanted to post them here this weekend but my laptop crashed out of the blue. Now I’m using our 2nd computer to write this and I hope to get my new computer up and running so I can give you the information you need as a quickly as possible.

Due to sponsorship and good will, we’re offering some of our seminars at absolutely no charge. I urge you to attend an event or two to learn the new tips that can help you become employed quickly.

The registration page can be found here.

I look forward to meeting you and helping you with your next quest.

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To read more articles on the 2009 job searching strategies, career development, psychology of interviewing, and resume techniques, subscribe to our RSS feed or get updates by email.

Learn more about the author Paul Anderson.