Typically, H.R. works with a hiring manager to set the series of short-list candidate interviews within a contained time frame, usually two weeks at the most.

Determining the best times to schedule your job interview requires understanding the psychology of hiring managers.

Because their #1 priority as a manager is “Getting work done through others,” making the right hiring decisions is a matter of professional survival.

On these days interviewing becomes the manager’s focus, and interviews can start as early as 7AM and go as late as 5PM.

Hiring managers tend to be technically competent, highly analytical and forward thinking, and because they are always pressed for time, tend to have excellent time management and organization skills. All these considerations play into your choosing the best days and times to interview.

Is It Better To Interview First or Last?

When the opportunity of an interview comes up, one of the first questions you ask is about the time span for interviewing all the short list candidates. To do that, say something like this —

“We are pretty jammed with a deadline right now in my current job, so any flexibility you can give me will be appreciated. What is the time frame for interviewing everyone?”

Once you know, for example, that all the interviews will happen between the 1st and 10th of the month, you want to shoot for the 10th.

If you go in first, their memory of you dims with every other candidate who is interviewed. And, the interviewer has ten days to forget or confuse you with another candidate.

On the other hand, if you are one of the last to be interviewed, their memory of you will be freshest. Additionally, over those ten days, the interviewer has had time to refine his or her needs.

If your answers are followed by questions that demonstrate your real engagement with the guts of the job, your stock soars.

More: How to Reschedule a Job Interview

What Are the Best Days to Schedule Your Job Interview?

Sometimes an interviewer will say “please list 2-3 dates and time ranges that you could do an interview” – how should you respond?

Monday morning is hell on wheels for everyone so never, ever interview on Monday morning.

I, like you and most smart professionals, try to keep meetings to a minimum on Monday so I can get a good start on the week’s top priorities. So whenever possible avoid Mondays entirely as it is everyone’s busiest day of the week.

Avoid Mondays! Scheduling on Monday maximizes the chance of your interview being disrupted and the interviewer’s recall of the interview being more fractured.

Almost as bad as Monday morning is Friday afternoons, because that is when everyone is trying their damnedest to get out of Dodge and have a life. This basically leaves us with Tuesday through Friday at lunch time.

Are there other considerations for time of day? You betcha…

What Times of Day Are Best to Schedule Your Job Interview?

Managers tend to be highly efficient, which means they have developed good time management and organization skills. This means that mornings and into early afternoons, a hiring manger is likely deep into their #1 priorities. They could be either distracted or the meeting interrupted by questions from staff or direct reports.

But, come 2 PM whatever is happening that day is already in flow, the pressure is less, and therefore the interviewer will be more psychologically ready to give you his or her full attention.

Now, the good time management and organization skills that make multitasking possible, require that the last 30 to 60 minutes of the day be devoted to the Plan-Do-Review Cycle. This is basically a personal performance review and planning exercise:

• What went well today that carries over to tomorrow?
• What problems arose today that we need to fix tomorrow?
• Following these two priorities, what else should we aim to get done tomorrow, and who will do it?

So assuming the workday ends at 5PM, you want to make interview appointments starting between 2 and 3 PM, whenever possible.

If an interview for an experienced professional goes well, it can go longer than an hour. Most interviewers prefer a break between candidates, so when you hit the 2-3PM slot you’ll likely be the last candidate interviews that day.

Pulling It All Together for the Best Time to Interview

Aim for 2-3PM interview start times on Tuesdays through Thursdays, and as close to the end of the selection time schedule as possible.

If it has to be Friday, avoid the afternoons, I’d suggest 11AM, because if things go well there is a greater chance it may result in an invitation to carry on the meeting over lunch.

If your job involves entertaining vendors or customers, then you can expect one of those interviews to include a lunch or dinner to examine how you engage professionally in social settings. You aren’t going to represent a multi-national if you use your knife like a dagger or talk with your mouth full of food.

Another reason to make this, where possible, on Friday lunchtime, is that you want to get out of Dodge and get on with your weekend too.

More on Successful Job Interviews

• How to Reschedule a Job Interview
• How to Cancel a Job Interview
• Convert That Job Interview into a Job Offer!
• The Top 4 Job Interview Success Tips
• Lunch Interview Success Tips
• Smart Answers to Interview Questions
• 50 Good Questions to Ask in Job Interviews
• 45 Questions You Should NOT Ask in a Job Interview

About the author…

Successful careers don’t happen by accident. Professional resume writing expert Martin Yate CPC is a New York Times best-seller and the author of 17 Knock Em Dead career management books. As Dun & Bradstreet says, “He’s about the best in the business.” For FREE resume-building advice and to view Martin’s resume samples, visit the Knock Em Dead website. Join Martin on Twitter at @KnockEmDead.
More about this author…

The post Best Time To Schedule a Job Interview appeared first on Job-Hunt.

Whenever recruiters search for resumes, job titles and skill sets from the formal job description make up their primary search terms.

Here are five secrets that will dramatically improve your resume’s results.

Rewards for Keyword Placement

As much as possible, front-load crucial keywords at the beginning of your resume.

Resume database search algorithms reward words near the top of a document, because they are seen to help determine a document’s relevance. This affects the discoverability of your resume.

Relevant keywords at the top of the document also impacts the speed with which your resume communicates critical skills to a knowledgeable reader.

A recent retinal-scan study showed that once a resume has been pulled from a resume database, recruiters spend an average of 6 seconds on a first-time scan.

Consequently, we continue to recommend a Target Job Title followed by a Performance Summary of no more than six lines.

This Performance Summary focuses on the abilities you bring to the target job. In turn, this focused opening to your resume should be followed with a Professional Skills section that lists the skills required by your target job.

This gives a recruiter plenty of time to see the skills you bring to the table in that first six-second scan.

Rewards for Keyword Frequency

A resume database search first finds all resumes with even just one of the requested keywords.

The search engine next prioritizes those key search terms based on their proximity to the top of the document and then on their frequency of use throughout the document.

A Professional Skills section near the top of your resume, as we recommend at KnockemDead.com, delivers this, though there are also other benefits.

NOTE: We are not recommending that you “stuff” your resume full of keywords. That usually results in the resume being ignored.

Rewards for Keyword Prioritization

Ultimately, your resume will be read by a hiring manager who really knows what’s a “must have” and what’s a “nice to have” in this job.

So, organize the list of skills based on their importance and relevance to the job. Start with the most importand (must-have) skills and end with the nice-to-have skills.

The easiest way to explain this is with an example. Awhile back, we did a resume for a dental assistant (it’s a job that sadly we have both had exposure to) and she gave us a list of the important technical skills of her job.

We put her list of skills into three columns (for visual accessibility) and gave it a Professional Skills heading. Then something jumped out at me: her list started with “Teeth whitening” and ended with “Four-handed dentistry.”

What was so terrible about this? In the West, we read from left to right and top to bottom, so common sense says that the most important skills for a job should come before the less important skills. We immediately prioritized her skills based on their importance to the deliverables of the job; so that “Four-handed dentistry” came first and ‘Teeth whitening” came just about last.

By prioritizing skills you are subtly telling the hiring manager, that you have a firm grasp of the relative importance of the necessary skills of your work.

This adds to the clear focus and power of the opening first half page of your resume that will show that:

• You can do the job
• Your skills backs up your statements of ability
• Your use of prioritization shows your understanding of the relative importance of the component parts of the job.

Rewards of Recognizing the Six-Second Scan

The result of following these directions is that in the top half page of your resume, and well within the time constraints of a recruiter’s six second scan, you have told a clear and concise story of your ability to do the job.

This goes a long way towards earning your place on the short list of candidates who will be brought in for interview.

Rewards for Keyword Repetition in Context

The first half page of your resume is built to make your resume discoverable in database searches and pass the six-second scan test. The balance of your resume needs to support these claims and put them in context for a discerning hiring manager.

A step that most resume writers forget is to repeat the skills employers see as critical within the context of all the jobs in which you have applied them. Repeating your relevant professional skills like this helps you in two ways:

1. It helps the hiring manager see those skills in context, and that helps her see a more complete picture of the professional you.
2. It increases the frequency of keywords, and as a result the discoverability of the resume.

Get Inside Your Customer’s Head

Look into your work history from the POV of an employer who wants to fill a specific job. Build your resume around the skills you have to make you competitive for the position. And remember that where and how you place this information is relevant to both the computers and the people who will be evaluating it.

More About Resume Keywords and Resume SEO:

• Understanding Keywords
• Developing the Best Keywords for Your Job Search
• The Top 25 Keywords for Your Job Search
• Your Most Important Keywords

About the author…

Successful careers don’t happen by accident. Professional resume writing expert Martin Yate CPC is a New York Times best-seller and the author of 17 Knock Em Dead career management books. As Dun & Bradstreet says, “He’s about the best in the business.” For FREE resume-building advice and to view Martin’s resume samples, visit the Knock Em Dead website. Join Martin on Twitter at @KnockEmDead.
More about this author…

The post Keyword Secrets to Get Your Resume Noticed appeared first on Job-Hunt.

The reason is surprising — it’s because they are recitations of everything the resume writer has done and thinks isimportant.

Let’s look at why this doesn’t work.

The Resume Database – a.k.a. the “Black Hole”

Resumes today rarely go straight to a recruiter’s desk; typically they go into a resume database.

Understand that no one ever reads resumes for the fun of it

Before anyone actually reads your resume, it must first be pulled from that database by a recruiter who is focused on filling a specific job opening and who is naturally doing so with the priorities and language of that job description firmly in mind.

So, you can see that, if your resume is a gumbo of everything you’ve ever done and of everything that you happen to think is important (without reference to what your customers are actually buying), it is never going to work.

Understand Your “Customer”

The first lessons a professional learns in any job are that, “the customer comes first,” and “understand your customer’s needs and sell to them.”

We all know this, yet when it comes to creating the most financially valuable document we’ll ever own, this most basic of professional lessons flies right out the window.

In the same way that corporations tailor products to appeal to their customers’ needs, you need to create a resume tailored to your customers’ needs.

A resume works best when it tells a compelling story that matches your skills and experiences to the responsibilities and deliverables of a specific target job.

This means your resume must focus on how employers — your customers — think about, prioritize, and describe the job’s deliverables.

A resume focused on a specific target job, and built from the ground up with the customer’s needs for that job in mind, will perform better in resume database searches. It will resonate far more effectively with recruiters, whose eyes are already glazed from the tedium of reading resumes.

It’s All About Credentials, Not Potential

When you are changing jobs, you will invariably be hired for a job that you can already do, a job for which you have the credentials.

Writing a resume that targets a job you’d like to do, but for which you don’t have the experience/credentials, will put you up against other candidates who all have the experience and the credentials for that job, and this reduces your chances to the negligible.

Jobs you pursue because of your potential are usually landed within the context of a job you already have and a company where you are a known quantity.

How to Decide on a Target Job Title

With just a few years’ experience in the professional world, most people reach a point where they have experience that qualifies them for more than one job.

Right now, there are probably two or more jobs you can do, but with the way recruitment works today, you have no choice but to go with a resume that focuses on a single target job.

So your first task is to look at all the jobs you can do (they are all probably closely related in many ways) and choose which one will give you the best chance of reaching your goal.

You can make this decision on many unique criteria, but assuming your main goal is to get back to work, or leave your current job, your best bet is to go with the job you can nail. This is the job that you can make the most convincing case for on paper, the strongest argument for in person, and the job where, when you hit the ground running, you won’t trip over your shoelaces.

Once you’ve decided on your target job, build your primary resume around this target job, the one that offers the greatest odds of success.

Resumes for Those Other Jobs You Can Do

Those other jobs you can do? The layout and much of the data from your prime resume will remain the same: all you’ll need to do to create these additional resumes is understand how employers define them and then, replacing the Target Job Title, edit each new resume version to reflect your credentials for this specific option.

More About Getting Your Resume Read

• Why a General Work-History Resume Doesn’t Work
• Guide to Personal SEO – the Right Keywords for Your Resume
• Keyword Secrets to Get Your Resume Noticed
• Supercharge Your Response to 6 Key Phrases
• How to Triple the Value of Your Resume
• Catch the Recruiter’s Eye with a Great Cover Letter
• Beating the Spam Filters with Your Email
• 147 Action Verbs for Your Resume (Examples)

About the author…

Successful careers don’t happen by accident. Professional resume writing expert Martin Yate CPC is a New York Times best-seller and the author of 17 Knock Em Dead career management books. As Dun & Bradstreet says, “He’s about the best in the business.” For FREE resume-building advice and to view Martin’s resume samples, visit the Knock Em Dead website. Join Martin on Twitter at @KnockEmDead.
More about this author…

The post Why 95% of Resumes Never Get Read & How to Get Your Resume Read appeared first on Job-Hunt.

It is a big mistake to omit the critical step of understanding exactly what the customer is buying and customizing what you have to offer to their expressed needs.

Your resume goes into resume databases that can have over 30 million other resumes against which yours has to compete.

A resume that’s simply a recitation of all you have done in your career is too unfocused to work well in this environment.

Here’s how a resume database search works for the recruiter. Like a Google search, the recruiter puts in keywords from a specific Job Description, and up pop the resumes that match based on the frequency of the relevant keywords they have used.

Analyze Job Requirements to Develop Your Targeted Resume

So what can you do to create a resume that competes in this fierce environment? You can develop an understanding of what employers want when they hire someone like you, how they prioritize those needs, and how they describe them.

1. Focus on the single target job title that captures what you can do best.
2. Analyze how employers think about and describe that job.
3. Collect at least six job postings for your target job.
4. Deconstruct those job postings, creating a composite job description for your target job:
   • Prioritize the common requirements.
   • Capture ALL the specific words and phrases used to describe those requirements.

From this analysis you can say, “This is how employers think about and describe the job I want.” Now you know the story your resume needs to tell, and the words that will maximize its visibility in resume databases.

Now you know the story your resume needs to tell and the words that will maximize its visibility in resume databases.

Leverage your new understanding of employers’ prioritization of skills and the words they use in describing your target job.

Then, apply this knowledge to what is emphasized in your resume and the words that are used to do so.

Highlight Important Keywords in a New Section of Your Resume

You will want to include a Professional Skills or Core Competency section that lists all your professional skills as they apply to your target job.

This usually comes at the top of the resume, in this order:

• A target job title
• A short paragraph capturing all the most important skills, often referred to as a Performance Profile.
• A Professional Skills or Core Competencies section that lists your skills.

You can help your resume’s performance further by making sure each of those key professional skills you listed in a Professional Skills section are repeated within the context of the jobs in which they were applied. This increases keyword count and puts skills claims in context for the reader.

The most productive resume focuses on your abilities to do one specific target job, so the days of the old unfocused resume are gone.

Today you need specifically targeted resumes for each different job you pursue.

This is not difficult: simply create a composite job description for each target job, then make a duplicate of your prime resume, saved under another title, and edit it to meet the requirements of that alternate job goal.

[Related: Keyword Secrets to Get Your Resume Noticed and Guide to Personal SEO.]

Bottom Line

Your resume is the most important document you will ever create. The effort you put into it is going to be reflected in your earnings. Today, focus your resumes on the employers requirements and languaged used so that your resume clearly matches the employer’s needs.

And, don’t forget to keep your LinkedIn Profile in sync with your resume, including using the “right keywords” in the “right places” in LinkedIn.

More Tips for Resume Succese:

• Why 95% of Resumes Don’t Get Read
• 4 Killer Tactics to Get Your Resume Read
• Supercharge Your Response to 6 Key Phrases
• Catch the Recruiter’s Eye with a Great Cover Letter

More About Resume Keywords and Resume SEO:

• Understanding Keywords
• Keyword Secrets to Get Your Resume Noticed
• Developing the Best Keywords for Your Job Search
• The Top 25 Keywords for Your Job Search
• Your Most Important Keywords

About the author…

Successful careers don’t happen by accident. Professional resume writing expert Martin Yate CPC is a New York Times best-seller and the author of 17 Knock Em Dead career management books. As Dun & Bradstreet says, “He’s about the best in the business.” For FREE resume-building advice and to view Martin’s resume samples, visit the Knock Em Dead website. Join Martin on Twitter at @KnockEmDead.
More about this author…

The post Why a General Work-History Resume Doesn’t Work Now appeared first on Job-Hunt.

Hiring managers similarly want to hire someone as quickly as possible and get back to their work. Your resume is the tool that gets you in the door.

What recruiters and hiring managers despise is an overabundance of self-praising descriptors: superior, excellent, team player, detail-oriented, thought leader, self-motivated, hard worker, and the like.

When recruiters see a resume filled with adjectives unsupported by skills and achievements, they read a phrase like, “Excellent Accounts Receivable skills; detail-oriented” and mutter, “I’ll be the judge of that!”

Understand Why Jobs Exist

What recruiters and hiring managers want to see are resumes that show relevant skills and how you applied them on the job. How do you do that?

No job gets added to the payroll unless it helps the employer make money, save money, or increase productivity. This holds true for all jobs, at all levels and in all professions.

Consequently, jobs exist to identify, anticipate, prevent, and solve the problems that prevent the company from making money, saving money, or increasing productivity.

Put another way, every job exists to prevent and solve problems within its area of expertise and thereby contribute to company profitability.

Consider the deliverables of an Accounts Receivable (A/R) job – perhaps boring, until you realize that unless the people in Accounts Receivable do their job, the company won’t be able to pay its bills and your paycheck will bounce. Thought about this way, A/R jobs are not about tabulating the income derived from trouble-free paying customers, they are focused on actively bringing in revenue.

This means that an A/R candidate is hired because she knows the professional landscape of the job well enough to identify, anticipate, prevent, and solve problems by bringing in the receivables, and in the process effectively dealing with late-paying customers, and so contributing to profitability.

So, demonstrate to the employer that you have the skills needed by sharing your relevant accomplishments.

Why Skills and Achievements Rule

Regardless of profession or title, employers want to see a resume with skills applied to the identification, anticipation, prevention, and solution of the typical problems that crop up every day of the week in that job – and they want to see the results of these efforts. So, in a resume, our A/R specialist will talk about skills and the results of their application:

4 years’ A/R experience: Excel, Quickbooks, ZenCash

• Reduced 30 day+ payables by 20%
• Reduced 45 day+ payables by 18%

In those 19 words, we know the candidate has experience, understands the job’s deliverables, has the tools to do the job, and can point to the results (achievements) of their application.

Much more powerful than, “Excellent Accounts Receivable skills; detail-oriented”!

Sell to the Customer’s Needs

The first lesson learned in our professional lives is: The customer is always right. The second lesson is: Find out what the customer wants and sell it to them. Combined, these lessons tell you that you need a template for the story your resume must tell.

Here’s what you do: Collect a half dozen job postings and pull them apart to find the common experience requirements and skills employers seek when hiring someone like you. This is called Target Job Deconstruction (TJD). Once you know what potential employers want, you can determine skills and accomplishments you need to show yourself in the best light.

How to Identify Your Achievements

Employers look to what you have achieved in your work as an indication of what you are likely to achieve. It might help you recall relevant skills and contributions using CAR:

• C = Challenge (Think of a challenge you faced or problem you had to resolve.)
• A = Action (What actions did you take?)
• R = Results (What was the result of these actions? What was the value to your employer?)

You can apply CAR to the following questions. When you think about results, try to think in terms of percentages and amounts:

• What gives you pride in your work? How does this relate to the success of your job?
• Did you increase sales, save money, or otherwise increase productivity?
• Did you meet an impossible deadline through extra effort? What was the benefit to your company?
• Did you conceive, design or (help) launch a new product or program?
• Did you assume new responsibilities that weren’t part of your job?
• Have you completed any special projects?
• Did you introduce any new or more effective systems, processes, or techniques for increasing productivity?

Remember these stories for your job interview. When answering the infamous “greatest strength” and “greatest weakness” questions (and most other interview questions), have your CAR examples ready.

Tying It All Together

Recruiters and hiring managers’ needs are simple – they want to fill a job opening as quickly as possible with someone who will do the job well. A resume that replaces empty adjectives with skills and achievements will get you interviews and immediately set your candidacy apart.

More About Successful Resumes

• The Secret for Standing Out When Employers Review Your Resume
• To Change Industries, Make These 5 Tweaks to Your Resume
• New Requirements for Resume Success
• Why a General Work-History Resume Doesn’t Work Now
• Do You Need a Resume AND a LinkedIn Profile?

About the author…

Successful careers don’t happen by accident. Professional resume writing expert Martin Yate CPC is a New York Times best-seller and the author of 17 Knock Em Dead career management books. As Dun & Bradstreet says, “He’s about the best in the business.” For FREE resume-building advice and to view Martin’s resume samples, visit the Knock Em Dead website. Join Martin on Twitter at @KnockEmDead.
More about this author…

The post What Recruiters and Hiring Managers Want in a Resume appeared first on Job-Hunt.

These six transferable skills are important to understand: Communication skills, multitasking skills, works closely with others, creativity, critical thinking skills, and leadership. They are so commonly used they are often dismissed as meaningless.

[To learn more about transferable skills and why they’re important to hiring managers, read What Are Transferable Skills?]

Far from being meaningless, they represent a secret language that many job hunters never really grasp. The ones who do “get it” are also the ones who get the job offers.

The Foundations of Success: Transferable Skills

These six key phrases represent the skills that enable you to do your job well, whatever your job may be.

Consequently, they are known as transferable skills because no matter the job, the profession, or the rank, these skills make the difference between success and failure.

For example, when “critical thinking” or “problem-solving skills” are mentioned, it means the employer is looking for someone who knows his or her area of responsibility well enough to identify, prevent, and solve the problems the work naturally generates every day.

While “works closely with others” refers to being a team player and all that that involves, it also embraces the communication skills you employ to work effectively with others in your area of expertise.

Talk of “communication skills” always means verbal, written, and listening skills, but to an employer, it also refers to the supporting communication skills of:

• Technological literacy
• Dress
• Body language
• Social graces
• Emotional maturity.

Together, these components of effective communication impact the power and persuasiveness of all your interactions with others.

When you possess these transferable skills, and when you can express in your resume and cover letters that you possess them, you can dramatically increase the number of interviews you get.

Moreover, when you understand how these skills affect your daily work, and can tell interviewers about your work in a way that highlights your application of these skills, you will be one big step closer to turning interviews into offers and succeeding on the job.

Listing Transferable Skills in Your Resume

In a resume, you might decide to highlight such highly relevant achievements with a Performance Highlights or a Career Highlights section right after your Professional Competencies section.

A Performance Highlights or Career Highlights section will comprise a short sequence of bulleted statements, each addressing one of the company’s stated requirements in the job description and, thereby, emphasizing the fit between employer needs and your capabilities.

Illustrate with an example if you can do so succinctly:

Performance Highlights

35% increase in on-time delivery + 20% reduction in client complaints.

Effective Operations Management demands understanding of every department’s critical functions and time lines. Building these considerations into daily activities helped:

• Finance & Supply Chain save $55,000 in last three quarters.
• Increase productivity with a 35% increase in on-time delivery.

These on-time delivery increases were achieved with improved stakeholder communications, connecting Purchasing, Supply Chain, Customer and Customer Service

• Delivered 20% reduction in client complaints.

Describing Transferable Skills in Your Cover Letter

In a cover letter, where there is more space, these words and phrases might appear with a company’s job-posting requirement noted in quotation marks followed by an achievement in that area:

“Analytical Skills/Critical thinking/Problem-solving skills”

• Thorough knowledge of the issues that impact productivity in Operations; have enabled a 35% increase in on-time delivery.

“Work closely with” and “Communication skills”

• Improvements in on-time delivery also made possible by improved communications with stakeholders: Purchasing, Supply Chain, and Customer Service. This delivered a 20% reduction in client complaints.

“Multitasking”

• Effective Operations Management demands understanding of every department’s critical functions and time lines. Building these considerations into daily activities helped Finance & Supply Chain save $55,000 in last three quarters.

Every time you see a job posting use the six transferable skills/key words and phrases, think how that skill is applied in each aspect of your work. Then, recall examples that illustrate how you used that skill in the identification, prevention, and solution of the daily problems that are the meat and potatoes of your average day.

Using Transferable Skills to Get the Job

Understanding the secret language of job postings can supercharge your resume, your cover letter, change the way you think about your work and how you prepare answers to interview questions. Subsequently, when you apply the transferable skills to the challenges of your work every day, they can change the trajectory of your professional life.

Looking for more skills to make your resume stand out? Read Best Skills to Put On Your Resume (Examples).

More Resume and Cover Letter Tips:

• Why 95% of Resumes Don’t Get Read and What You Can Do About It
• 4 Killer Tactics to Get Your Resume Read
• Resumes for the Unemployed and Overqualified
• Keyword Secrets to Get Your Resume Noticed
• To Change Industries, Make These 5 Tweaks to Your Resume

About the author…

Successful careers don’t happen by accident. Professional resume writing expert Martin Yate CPC is a New York Times best-seller and the author of 17 Knock Em Dead career management books. As Dun & Bradstreet says, “He’s about the best in the business.” For FREE resume-building advice and to view Martin’s resume samples, visit the Knock Em Dead website. Join Martin on Twitter at @KnockEmDead.
More about this author…

The post 6 Transferable Skills for Your Resume and Cover Letter appeared first on Job-Hunt.

Most people express no regrets about taking a career hiatus to provide elder care for a loved one.

But once their parent transitions, they are faced with a lot of questions about how to re-enter the workforce.

These are seasoned professionals, but they may have been away for an extended absence.

How do they explain this absence to an employer and still be competitive in a job search?

Have Realistic Expectations

As the working population ages, elder care has become increasingly common — the good news is that employer awareness is rising.

How you navigate your return depends on the length of absence.

A year or two isn’t that much of a problem, but a longer absence will make it more difficult to sell yourself as “current” with your job’s skill requirements.

So while I do not feel an elder care absence means going back to an entry-level position, by the same token, it is sometimes unrealistic to expect to step back into the level of job you once held.

  Goal: Catch Up with Your Profession  

The immediate goal should be to get back into your field of professional experience PDQ.

While you have every right to throw your hat in the ring for opportunities at every level, a speedy return is more likely to be achieved by pursuing a title that is a step or two back.

Even if the position is beneath your skill level, it will allow you to get up to speed as you become acclimated to new technology and a changing work culture.

  Target: Small or Medium-Sized Employers  

You can pursue your target job with any size company, but with small or medium sized employers your greater experience will be more appreciated and allow you to wear different hats as needs arise, which will in turn increase your visibility and credibility.

Management could well see your background, even with the break, as offering more potential, signifying a mature professional who can get up to speed quickly and who’s already made all the usual beginner mistakes on someone else’s payroll.

Another reason not to overlook smaller companies is because they get fewer applications because of most candidates’ desire for the prestige of association with a well-known name.

This increases your odds for both interviews and getting hired, then later also improves your chances of gaining added responsibility.

Explaining Career Gap on Resume After Caring For Parent or Elderly

The issue: How do I account for a caregiver absence on my resume?

To begin with, create a job-targeted resume that showcases the variables and special skills you can bring back to work.

A resume for your situation is a complex project that will include the following components:

• A summary that shows you clearly have the skills for the target job.
• A professional highlights section that offers specifics about your capabilities in the areas of critical importance to the job.

Take the time to deconstruct your target job so precisely that you can demonstrate your possession of all the critical skills clearly and succinctly.

If the dates of your employment history didn’t start till the 2nd page, you will be more likely to have an interested customer by then.

The big question, and there is no consensus on the answer, is: what do you say about an extended elder care gap, and where do you say it?

I suggest these options:

• List employers on 2nd page in a block of employer names and dates without details of job.
  
  The accomplishments and skills all having been described on the first page that focuses on skills, but not when they were developed. Sometimes a strong first page has been known to help readers skip over the dates issue.
• Identify the break from work, as work, for example —      Elder Care (2014-2020)One sentence that puts personal elderly parent care of mother (or father) in terms of elder care in general.Then, describe all your ongoing activities, courses, and certifications as developed skills.

These are options. They have all been tried. In some cases, they have worked and, in others, have failed. So, your mileage may vary, but ignoring the gap is not usually successful.

[Read Resumes for the Unemployed and Overqualified and How to Handle Employment Gaps on Your Resume.]

Put Your Network to Work for Your Job Search

To get things moving, let all your local professional contacts know you are looking.

Don’t talk about your ideal job. Talk about the work you can do, and the opportunity that will most easily get your foot in the door.

Even when you see a job posting, go for the personal introduction through your contacts first. You’ll avoid getting lost in resume databases, and qualified insider referrals are invariably considered as a courtesy. So this is a very good way to get your foot in the door for an interview.

[Read Shortcut to a New Job: Tap an Insider and How to Make Employee Referral Programs Work for You for more details.]

Temping: A Foot-in-the-Door Option

As a parting thought, you might also consider getting some temp work as this will immediately give you current skills. It is okay to specify the kind of work and company, and also that you are interested in employers that are looking for temp-to-perm hires.

[Read Job-Hunt’s Guide to the Temporary Work Option and Guide to Freelancing and Independent Contractor Jobs for more information and options about untraditional jobs.]

More About Beating Unemployment:

• Resume for a Job Seeker with Gaps in Employment
• Job-Hunt’s Guide to Beating Unemployment
• Hiring Manager Tips for Escaping Unemployment
• 5 Options to Fill that Unemployment Gap by recruiter Jeff Lipschultz
• Overcoming the Unemployed Bias by recruiter Jeff Lipschultz
• Best LinkedIn Title When You Are Unemployed
• Leverage LinkedIn Smartly When You Are Unemployed
• Managing Employment Gaps on Your Resume
• How to Manage Resume Red Flags
• Explaining Your Gap in Employment in Job Interviews

About the author…

Successful careers don’t happen by accident. Professional resume writing expert Martin Yate CPC is a New York Times best-seller and the author of 17 Knock Em Dead career management books. As Dun & Bradstreet says, “He’s about the best in the business.” For FREE resume-building advice and to view Martin’s resume samples, visit the Knock Em Dead website. Join Martin on Twitter at @KnockEmDead.
More about this author…

The post Returning to Work After Caring for a Parent appeared first on Job-Hunt.

Now, when you have a wealth of experience, the problem has reversed itself.

The challenge now becomes what to do in a job search when you are rejected, not for lack of experience but for too much experience.

Almost every problem with a troubled job search can be traced back to a resume, and this problem is no exception.

Me vs. You

You know that the customer is always right, and that whatever your job, finding out what the customer wants and giving it to them is the surest path to success. You have known this your entire adult life, yet when it comes to writing a resume, these two critical lessons fly right out of the window.

You sit down to create the most financially important document you will ever own,

You write a document that tries to capture everything you think is important and of which you are proud.

You strive to give it as much breadth as possible to widen the range of opportunities for which you might be suited.

The result is a one-size-fits-all document, and as you know from bitter personal experience, one-size-fits-all-never-fits-anyone.

Writing an old-fashioned general resume does not work. It will disappear into the resume databases and never be found because it lacks focus.

Even if you do manage to get that resume in front of a headhunter, recruiter, or hiring manager, no one likes reading resumes because they turn a brain to mush in short order.

Writing a resume without the needs of the customer firmly in mind is a recipe for disaster and a waste of everyone’s time. If your matching skills don’t jump off the page in the first 30 seconds, you are history.

The Customer-Focused Resume

The resume that works is one that focuses on what employers state in job postings as important. It delivers the information that qualifies you for this job.

Today, you don’t write a resume about all the wonderful things you can and have done. You write a resume that addresses your ability to do just the things that the employer is asking for.

Give your resume a headline, right after the contact information at the top of the first page. That headline is the Target Job Title you are pursuing.

Everything that follows the Target Job Title is focused on your skills, experiences, and ability to deliver on the requirements of that job title.

This is the story you tell, nothing more and nothing less. Do this and your resume’s performance in database searches will dramatically increase, and your matching skills will jump off the page in the first few seconds of reading.

Right-Sizing Job Titles

We seem to spend much of our lives striving for bigger and better job titles, because society attaches so much prestige to job titles. That is until age and wage discrimination sets in and the problems begin.

For example, you might face the problem of going after an individual contributor job after years of holding a management title. Just as that would give you, as a hiring manager, pause for concern, it will give potential employers the same concern.

The solution builds on the idea of focusing on required skills rather than presenting yourself as a superhero.

For instance, I have owned my company for thirty years, so I am a president, CEO or whatever over-blown title comes to mind. But with a small company of less than a dozen people, I’m also the chief cook and bottle washer. We write resumes and coach people, so I spend a lot of time doing one-on-one coaching with people all over the world, and doing webinars.

Consequently, were I to pursue a job in training, which is my professional background, I could honestly give my company name and dates of employment followed by my job title as Training Specialist or Training Manager – whatever would be closest to the target job:

KnockEmDead.com1997-Present
Global performance training company
Training Manager

I wouldn’t be lying, this would be true and defensible. It would also be infinitely more productive in a job search than:

KnockEmDead.com1997-Present
Global performance training company
CEO

I have had one or two people over the years express a concern here about references and potential problems of downgrading a job title.

Mostly references are concerned with dates of employment and leaving salary, and I have honestly never heard of a job offer being retracted because someone minimized their achievements rather than exaggerating them.

Dates & Technology

Dates of employment are also part of the “overqualified” quagmire, but there is help here too. A resume that goes back more than 20 years can begin to speak of age, big money, old dogs, and (no) new tricks. This can also make you look like a know-it-all who might be tough to manage, and no one wants to hire someone who might be a management problem.

Opinions vary on this with some career people saying not to go back more than 10 years, but that can under qualify you for many jobs. My personal persuasion is to go back no more than 20-25 years. If the resume shows 25 years of work history, the Performance Summary that follows your Target Job Title will read “20+ years’ experience.”

Not going back throughout what might be a long work history is defensible because of changes in technology. Every job in existence has changed beyond recognition in the last 20 years. Therefore, not listing experience prior to 20 years ago is defensible as being irrelevant to the skills necessary for the job. This is especially true if you are trying to keep the resume tight, succinct, and as short as the story you need to tell will allow.

More About Handling Unemployment in Your Job Search

• 5 Options to Fill that Unemployment Gap by recruiter Jeff Lipschultz
• Overcoming the Unemployed Bias by recruiter Jeff Lipschultz
• Best LinkedIn Title When You Are Unemployed
• How to Leverage LinkedIn Smartly When You Are Unemployed
• Managing Employment Gaps on Your Resume
• How to Manage Resume Red Flags

About the author…

Successful careers don’t happen by accident. Professional resume writing expert Martin Yate CPC is a New York Times best-seller and the author of 17 Knock Em Dead career management books. As Dun & Bradstreet says, “He’s about the best in the business.” For FREE resume-building advice and to view Martin’s resume samples, visit the Knock Em Dead website. Join Martin on Twitter at @KnockEmDead.
More about this author…

The post Resumes for the Unemployed and Overqualified appeared first on Job-Hunt.

The first place you begin to establish a professional brand is with your target job title – where you consciously decide on the job that best allows you to package your skill-sets and create a professional brand.

Target Job Title and Brand Statement

Your target job title and brand statement following it give the reader a focus on your resume’s purpose and goal.

The brand statement is a short phrase following the target job title that defines what you will bring to this job. It says in effect, “These are the benefits my presence on your payroll will bring to your team and your company.”

Notice how the following brand statements focus on the benefits brought to the job, but do not take up space identifying the specifics of how this was done. Professional brand statements often start with an action verb such as “Poised to” “Delivering,” “Dedicated to,” ” Bringing” ” Positioned to” “Constructing.”

Pharmaceutical Sales Management Professional

Poised to outperform in pharmaceutical software sales repeating records of achievement with major pharmaceutical companies

Senior Operations / Plant Management Professional

Dedicated to continuous improvement ~ Lean Six Sigma ~ Start-up & turnaround operations ~ Mergers & change management ~ Process & productivity optimization ~ Logistics & supply chain

Mechanical / Design / Structural Engineer

Delivering high volume of complex structural and design projects for global companies in Manufacturing / Construction / Power Generation

Account Management / Client Communications Manager

Reliably achieving performance improvement and compliance within Financial Services Industry

Marketing Communications

Consistently delivering successful strategic marketing, media relations & special events

Administrative / Office Support Professional

Ready, willing, and competent, detail-oriented problem-solver, consistently forges effective working relationships with the public

Senior Engineering Executive

Bringing sound technical skills, strong business acumen, and real management skill to technical projects and personnel in a fast-paced environment.

Consistent Brand Messaging

You will integrate the building blocks of your brand, your professional strengths, into the resume as you write it. When you review and edit the complete resume, check that all the messaging supports the central concepts of your brand:

• Performance Profile
• Performance / Career Highlights
• Professional Experience

Closing Brand Statement

As we discussed earlier, you will occasionally see a resume close with a third party endorsement:

“I’ve never worked with a more ethical and conscientious auditor” Petra Tompkins, Controller.

Such an endorsement acts as a closing brand statement: a bold statement clarifying the value of the product (that’s you, the brand). It’s a great way to end a resume. If you have just the right kind of supportable quote, use it.

You can achieve an equally powerful effect with a final comment of your own, a comment that relates to your professional brand and is written in the first person to make it conversational and differentiate it from the voice of the rest of your resume. Most resumes are written in the third person, allowing you to talk about yourself with the semblance of objectivity. Moving into the first person for a final comment at the resume’s end acts both as an exclamation point and a matching “bookend” for the brand statement at the beginning. For example:

“I understand customer service to be the company’s face to the world, and treat every customer interaction as critical to our success; leadership by example and conscientious performance management underlies my department’s consistent customer satisfaction ratings.”

A True and Truthful Brand

You have to be able to deliver on the brand you create. It must be based on your possession of the technical skills of your profession, those transferable skills and learned behaviors that you take with you from job to job, and the core values that imprint your approach to professional life.

It is all too easy to over-promise, and while the employer might be initially attracted by the pizzazz of your resume, whether or not you live up to its value proposition decides the length and quality of the relationship.

If a box of cereal doesn’t live up to the brand’s hype, you simply don’t buy it again; but sell yourself into the wrong job with exaggerations or outright lies and it is likely to cost you that job, plus the possibility of collateral career damage that can follow you for years.

About the author…

Successful careers don’t happen by accident. Professional resume writing expert Martin Yate CPC is a New York Times best-seller and the author of 17 Knock Em Dead career management books. As Dun & Bradstreet says, “He’s about the best in the business.” For FREE resume-building advice and to view Martin’s resume samples, visit the Knock Em Dead website. Join Martin on Twitter at @KnockEmDead.
More about this author…

The post Integrating Your Personal Brand into Your Resume appeared first on Job-Hunt.

Today, an effective resume cannot simply be a recitation of your work history.

This isn’t your father’s resume, because that strategy no longer has traction.

Why Someone Is Hired

No one is added to the payroll for the love of mankind. They are added to make a contribution in a particular area and in a very specific way.

When employers add someone to the payroll, the job title and its responsibilities have been analyzed, justified, and budgeted months before that position opens up.

Every job, in its own small way, is there to help a department, and in turn a company, make a positive contribution to the end goal of profitability by delivery of either product or service.

So, when an employer looks at your resume it is with a very specific objective in mind:
Does this resume reflect a person who can help me deliver on these specific challenges?

From this question, we get employers conceiving a job in terms of its deliverable, rather than solely in terms of education and years experience required, etc.

Goal: Survive the Resume Screen

For any employer, the resume screening process is one of the most mind-numbing steps of the interview cycle.

Typically, if resumes are found in the employers’ applicant tracking system (“ATS”), resumes get a first time screen by a human that spans no more than 30-45 seconds with the majority of that time spent on the first page.

Remember that the human reader is looking solely for people with specific experience related to the needs of a carefully defined position.

Read How Top ATS Systems Analyze Resumes, Understanding Keywords for Job Search, and 10 Tips for Stronger Resume Branding for more information.

Page One Must Connect You to the Job’s Deliverables

The first page of your resume needs to pack a knockout punch, and the best odds for achieving that is with a clear focus on a target job.

Only with a clear focus can you demonstrate your understanding of a job’s deliverables, along with your experience and achievements in each of the deliverable areas.

Obviously, a generalized/unfocused resume will not stand out in the resume screening process. Most likely, an unfocused resume will be ignored, and, in fact, will likely not be seen by a human because, lacking the relevant keywords, it will not make it out of the ATS.

Focus Your Resume for Success in 3 Steps

This means that for your resume to be effective, it must begin with a clear focus on — and understanding of — the deliverables for a specific target job. Only when you have this focus can you begin to look backwards into your work history for those experiences that best position you for the target job, and enable you to tailor a killer resume.

  1. Research to Understand the Job and Your Target Market  

If you are new to the professional world, engaged in a career shift, or just want to be sure that you are on target, you might want to execute a little research to ensure your resume has the proper focus:

• If you want clarification on a target job, analyze job postings, like those Indeed.com, currently the largest job board in the world.
• Visit the Occupational Outlook Handbook pages at BLS.gov, which gives you detailed analysis of hundreds of jobs.

Then, analyze the people:

• Talk to people who are actually doing the work. Have them deconstruct the job for you. If you already work in the field, think about the best people you have known doing this job. Analyze what they did, and how they did it.
• Apply the same analysis to people who have failed in the job. What did they do? How and why did they fail?

This kind of strategic thinking will give you the focus you need. Yes, work is involved, but the payoff will make the time invested worthwhile.

  2. Apply Your Analysis to Your Resume  

Experienced professionals have to be fully conscious that employers are not looking for Swiss Army knives. They are looking for someone with critical “must have” skills to apply in a specific area.

Those additional “nice-to-have” skills are just that, and they don’t need to be in a resume (beyond presence in a keyword section) because they will take focus away from your primary thrust.

  3. Resist the Instinct to “Generalize” Your Resume  

As the years pass and you gain more experience, the analysis described above becomes increasingly important as a tool to keep you on track.

The reason for continued observation and analysis? After just five years in the professional world, there are usually two or three jobs you can do; and when you get fifteen and twenty years down the road you could have twice that many professional options.

The Bottom Line

Often resumes that attempt to reflect great breadth of experience can seem unfocused. And, an unfocused resume is — today — an ineffective resume.

More About Resume Success:

• Why 95% of Resumes Don’t Get Read and What You Can Do About It
• 4 Killer Tactics to Get Your Resume Read
• How to Create an Achievement Resume
• Why a General Work-History Resume Doesn’t Work Now
• Integrating Your Professional Brand into Your Resume
• What Recruiters and Hiring Managers Want in a Resume
• Understanding Keywords for Job Search
• 10 Tips for Stronger Resume Branding

About the author…

Successful careers don’t happen by accident. Professional resume writing expert Martin Yate CPC is a New York Times best-seller and the author of 17 Knock Em Dead career management books. As Dun & Bradstreet says, “He’s about the best in the business.” For FREE resume-building advice and to view Martin’s resume samples, visit the Knock Em Dead website. Join Martin on Twitter at @KnockEmDead.
More about this author…

The post New Requirements for Resume Success appeared first on Job-Hunt.