Part 3 (1/2)

Some Friendly Reminders About Your ”Pre-Google Resume”

1. If you're blanketing the Internet with that resume, be cautious about including any stuff on the resume that would help someone find out where you live or work, particularly if you're a female. No, I'm not being s.e.xist. It's just that there are some sick people out there. Sick in the head, that is. If I were you, I'd be sure to leave out my address and home phone number. Just an e-mail address should more than suffice.

2. If you are targeting particular employers, rather than or in addition to broad job-sites, keep in mind that a resume is best not sent solely by e-mail, particularly if it's an attachment, and not embedded in the body of the e-mail. Many employers, leery of viruses, will not even open e-mail attachments (and that includes your resume). Send it by e-mail if you must, but always send a nicer version of it by the postal service, or UPS, or FedEx, etc.

3. If you're going to snail-mail a resume to a target employer, pay attention to the paper you write or print it on. Picture this scenario: an employer is going through a whole stack of resumes, and on average he or she is giving each resume about eight seconds of their time (true: we checked!). Then that resume goes either into a pile we might call ”Forgeddit,” or a pile we might call ”Bears further investigation.” And what determines which pile? The feel of the paper. Yes, that employer's first contact with your resume is with their fingers. By the pleasure or displeasure of their fingers, they are prejudiced in your favor before they even start reading, or prejudiced against you. Usually they are not even aware of this. Anyway, this is why you want the paper to feel good. That usually means using paper weighing at least 28 pounds (a paper's weight is on the outside of every package). And you want it to be easy to read-so be sure it's nicely laid out or formatted, using a decent-sized font, size 12 or even 14, etc.

4. A resume should have a purpose, at least in your mind. It might be that you're posting it online, just to collect and organize all pertinent information about yourself in one place, so that when an employer Googles you they find this, nice and concise, in contrast to all the other stuff about you that Google will find, scattered all over the Internet.

5. Your purpose, for your resume, if you're targeting individual employers, is to get yourself invited in for an interview. Period. This truth, unfortunately, is not widely known. Most job-hunters (and more than a few resume writers) a.s.sume a resume's purpose is to ”sell you,” or secure you a job. It does happen. But mostly the purpose of a resume is just to get invited in for an interview, where it will then be time for you to sell yourself. In person. Face to face. Not on paper. So, read over every single sentence in your resume and evaluate it by this one standard: ”Will this item help to get me invited in? Or will this item seem too puzzling, or off-putting, or a red flag?” If you doubt a particular sentence will help get you invited in for an interview, then omit that sentence. If it's important to you, give yourself a note to be sure to cover it in the interview. And if there is something you feel you will ultimately need to explain, or expand upon, save that explanation also for the interview. Your resume is, above all, no place for ”true confessions.” (”I kind of botched up, at the end, in that job; that's why they let me go, as I'm sure they'll tell you when you check my references.”) If you want the interviewer to know that, in the interest of full disclosure, don't put it in your resume. Save true confessions for the end of the interview, and only if you're confident at that point that they really want you, and you really want them.

6. The same advice applies to discussing any non-visible or non-obvious handicap you may have. Generally speaking-there are exceptions-don't mention it as early as the resume. And even when you're in the interview, don't discuss right off the bat what you can't do. Focus all their attention, initially, on what you can do-that you can perform all the tasks required in this job. Save what you can't do for the moment when they say they really want you.

7. If you're coming out of some subculture that has its own language (military, clergy, etc.) get some help in translating your experience into the language of employers. For example, ”preached” should be replaced by ”taught.” ”Commanded” should be replaced by ”supervised,” etc.

8. ”Keywords” are important if you're posting your resume without specific employers in mind. A good article about keywords-what they are, how to insert them in your resume-can be found in SqualkFox's article, ”8 Keywords That Set Your Resume on Fire,” at tinyurl.com/d9k4ns.

9. Finally, don't include references on your resume. Some career counselors and resume writers will disagree with me on this, but I think references are better offered after prospective employers have had a chance to see and talk with you. And please, please, please, never list somebody as a reference, at any time in your job-hunt, without first getting their written permission to do so. Be aware that your references, if they are checked out, will often be checked out over the phone, rather than in writing. But in case you may need something in writing, if your references permit you to use their name, ask them to give the letter of recommendation to you. You want to screen your references, believe me you do! Don't a.s.sume they'll give you a raving recommendation. Some of your preferred reference writers may turn out to be people who are by nature brutally honest. If they've never actually seen you at work, for example, they may say so, and decline to say whether you'd be an a.s.set or not. That kind of ”recommendation” is honest, but it won't do you any good. You want to find this out before any prospective employer sees it. Then you can decide whether you want to use it or deep-six it, before you go into the interview.

10. Hard fact to learn, but you must learn it: some employers hate resumes. Why should that be any surprise? Currently, according to experts, 82% of all resumes have to be checked out, concerning the facts stated or the experience claimed. Lies are spreading like a plague, on resumes. Another hard fact: some employers love resumes. Unfortunately, it's not for the reasons you think. They love them because they offer an easy way to cut down the time they have to spend interviewing candidates for a vacancy. Don't forget this: for an employer, hiring is essentially an elimination game. Particularly where a lot of people are applying, they're reading over your resume looking for one thing: a reason-any reason-to eliminate you, so they can cut that stack of resumes down to a manageable number for face-to-face interviewing (say, three to eight). Surveys show it only takes a skilled human resources person about eight seconds to scan a resume (thirty seconds, if they're really dawdling), so getting rid of fifty job-hunters-I mean getting rid of fifty resumes-takes only half an hour or less. Whereas, interviewing those fifty job-hunters in person would have required a minimum of twenty-five hours. Great time savings-for them! No wonder employers invented resumes!

Where You Post Your Resume Makes a Difference.

This should guide you in your resume strategy, if you're going to post a resume to supplement what else they'll find online about you, with Google.

The number of interviews employers need to conduct to find a hire, stays pretty constant-around 5.4-once they've sifted through all the resumes or applications. So, to conserve their energy, they ask themselves, ”Where would I have to read or sift through the least number of resumes, before I decide who to do those 5.4 interviews with?” Fortunately, we know the answer. Somebody did a study.6 If employers post their vacancy on a job-board such as CareerBuilder.com or Monster.com, they have to look through 219 resumes from job-hunters who respond, before they find someone to interview and hire.

If employers consider resumes from job-hunters who come through social media sites, such as LinkedIn or Facebook, they have to look through 116 resumes, before they find someone to interview and hire.

If employers post their vacancy on their own website, they have to look through 33 resumes from job-hunters who respond, before they find someone to interview and hire.

If the job-hunter takes the initiative to find a very specific job, rather than waiting to find a vacancy, and does this, say, by typing the name of that kind of job into a search engine, then sending resumes to any companies whose name turns up, employers only have to look through 32 applications, before they find someone to interview and hire.

And if the job-hunter takes even more initiative, chooses a company where they'd like to work, and gets a referral (i.e., gets some employee within that company to recommend them), employers have to look through only 10 such candidates, before they find someone to interview and hire.

Summary.

Okay, one more time: ever since 2008, do you need a resume?

Well, no you don't, and yes you do.

You already have a kind of resume without lifting a finger, if you've been posting anything on the Internet. Google is your new resume. What an employer finds out about you simply by Googling your name, helps determine whether you get hired or not.

You've got to clean up what they'll find, before they find it. Edit, fill in, expand, and add to it, before they see it.

But that, alone, is not enough. You need to summarize and organize the information about yourself in one place, online or off. And that means, you need to write the old kind of resume, that you did pre-2008.

Once written, you can go two ways with it. The first way is just to post it everywhere on the Internet, which is akin to nailing it to a tree in the town square, where everyone can see it. You just post it as is.

The second way is to send it to particular employers whom you have targeted, hoping that resume will get you an interview. Here you will need to edit it, before sending it to any employer. You will need to weigh every sentence in it by one criterion and one only: will this help get me invited in, for an interview? If the answer is No, you must edit or remove that sentence.

Because, these are the most fundamental truths about approaching individual employers: The primary purpose of a resume is to get yourself invited in for an interview.

The primary purpose of that interview is to get yourself invited back for a second interview.

The primary purpose of the second and subsequent interviews there, is to help them decide that they like you and want you, once you've decided that you like them, and could do some of your best work there.

Wild Life, by John Kovalic, 1989 Shetland Productions. Reprinted with permission.

1. Of U.S. households, 71% have Internet access at home plus 9% elsewhere, for a total of 80%. But this is only the average. According to the latest U.S. census (2010), 99% of households making $150,000 or more have Internet access, but only 57% of households making $15,000 or less do.

2. Most statistics (up-to-date at the time of writing) in this chapter are from Craig Smith's wonderful monthly updates called ”Digital Marketing Ramblings,” found at tinyurl.com/d3ytpff.

3. For more on hashtags, see both tinyurl.com/c2862re and tinyurl.com/d5nt87.

4. This is adapted, with the written permission of my friend Tom O'Neil, from an original doc.u.ment of his, which was and is copyright protected under the New Zealand Copyright Act (1994) cv.co.nz 2001. You may contact Tom at b; Federal Resume Guidebook: Strategies for Writing a Winning Federal Resume by Kathryn Kraemer Troutman; and Knock 'em Dead Resumes by Martin Yate. Returning vets from Iraq and Afghanistan will find help on such sites as job-hunt.org (tinyurl.com/86a8rkn), Real Warriors (tinyurl.com/6u3vawm), and MyNextMove.org, maintained by the government's O*Net Online site.

6. From an a.n.a.lysis, released in April 2011, by Jobs2web Inc., of 1,300,000 job applications and 26,000 hires in 2010.

G.o.d grant me the serenity.

To accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.

-Reinhold Niebuhr (18921971).

Chapter 3.

There Are Seven Million Vacancies This Month.

The Good News: The Job-Hunt Hasn't Really Changed At All Since 2008.