Most resumes are transmitted these days by email. Paper resumes are used at interviews or upon request by recruiters. But what about cover letters? When you send your resume by email, the content of the email itself serves as the cover letter. Due to the nature of email communications, however, it is necessary to be succinct and to the point in your communications. Hiring managers do not want to read long email messages before opening the attached resume.
When emailing your resume in response to an online posting or advertisement, you should always reference the job title and position number (if one is given) in the subject area of the email. Do not use the word “specialist” in the subject area or other words that may be subject to spam filtering. (“Specialist” will get filtered out because of the word ‘cialis’ that appears in the middle). Do not get cute with subject lines like “I’m the one your are searching for!”. Keep it professional.
In the body, reference where you saw the ad (such as Monster or Career Builder, etc.) and give three fast, hard sentences that describe why you are qualified for the position. When coming up with these sentences refer to the job ad. Most job ads have two sections of required qualifications – the ones that are ‘must haves’ and the ones that are ‘we’d like to have’. If you have all the “must have” requirements, note that in a sentence such as “I meet all the requirements of your core qualifications including…” Use the other two sentences to detail any of the “would like to have” requirements.
You should also note the best ways to get in touch with your during the business day in the body of the email. If you are conducting a confidential job search, be sure to note that so the prospective employer will not contact you at work. Provide a cell phone number (personal, not provided by your employer) and a good time to call. If you prefer to be contacted only at home, state that.
Thank the reader and provide your complete name and contact information in the closing. Remember, email is not expected or desired to be wordy communication. Keep it brief, to the point, and polite. Be upbeat and positive in your tone. Tone is one of the most difficult things to communicate in an email so you should be very careful in crafting your words.
The key to an email cover letter is brevity and relevance of information. Keep it short and to the point while maintaining polite tone and communicating confidence.
Posted by Administrator on August 31st, 2005 | No Comments
One of the most common questions posed to professional resume writers is “How long should my resume be?” The answer to that question is “As long as it needs to be”. For years and years, there was a rule that resumes should not be over one page in length. That worked just fine when career paths were predictable, usually within one industry, and may have involved one to two employers. Career paths are different now and employers are looking for different qualities and experiences. To effectively market the potential of job seekers, it is usually necessary to go beyond the old “one page rule”.
A general rule of thumb for a modern resume length is two pages, but that is not set in concrete. There are instances where the job seeker has special experience or skills that require a slightly longer resume. In some cases, a page and a half will suffice to cover the material needed to position a job seeker as the best candidate. For entry-level job seekers, a one-page resume is probably the right choice unless there are extenuating circumstances such as extensive, target-related volunteer experience.
Many job seekers who write their own resumes make the mistake of using large words and complex sentences to express simple ideas. This is a writing habit that was learned during high school and freshman college composition courses – the more words the better. Essays had to be a certain length and students who wrote reams on a subject tended to get higher marks. Job seekers who attempt to write their own resumes feel it is necessary for the verbiage to be flowery and obtuse in order to give the impression of intelligence or status.
On a resume, succinctness wins points. Use of powerful but simple words is key. Getting the point across in a direct way rather than through use of Faulkner-like phrasing is most effective. A resume gets approximately 45 seconds of attention before the hiring manager decides to accept or reject the candidate into the hiring process. Long, flowery sentences are resume-killers in that short period of time.
One page? Two pages? The length should be sufficient to achieve the goal of positioning the candidate in the best light without over-doing it with detail. It’s a delicate tight rope that professional resume writers walk every day. Knowing what to include, what to leave out, and how to powerfully represent in words what needs to be in the resume is the job of the professional resume writer. One or two pages is not the issue; crafting a great resume is.
Posted by Administrator on August 30th, 2005 | No Comments
Are you considering a career change? If so, you are not alone. Statistics show that the American worker will change jobs at least 11 times in his/her lifetime and will change complete career fields three times. Whereas 20 or 30 years ago, workers went to work for one company and stayed with that company until retirement, workers now change jobs and even entire fields much more frequently. Career paths have moved from the rigidity of railways to the free-wheeling nature of an ATV; instead of a straight path in one direction, people are following opportunities and interests over sand dunes in every direction.
A career change brings many challenges, many obvious and some not so obvious. Retraining or obtaining new education is something that usually occurs with a career change. New approaches to problems may be called for. But how do you handle a career change in your resume? Two words – transferable skills.
Transferable skills are skills that you have used in the past with success and which will be needed in your new career field. For example, if you are a realtor and you are making a career change to a mortgage broker, your knowledge of home financing will be a transferable skill. Other transferable skills might include attention to detail, ability to work well with numbers, creativity, and sales skills. All these will be of benefit to you in your new career and can be framed in the resume.
A well-crafted resume can make your career transition much easier. Knowing what to showcase to bring to light your suitability for your new career field is the job of a professional resume writer. What you may see as a skill that is totally unrelated to your new career field, a professional resume writer will see as fodder for good marketing of your skills and abilities.
Posted by Administrator on August 29th, 2005 | No Comments
If you have explored our website, you will notice there is a Job Search Checklist that we provide to help you in getting organized in your job search. Part of the checklist involves homework on companies to find out who is hiring. Many job seekers are flummoxed by this assignment and do not know how to go about researching companies. They do not know where to start or what to do.
Researching companies is a lot like detective work – you start with what you know or think and work outward. For example, Joe Jobseeker is looking for a managerial position in the heavy construction industry. He would like to stay within a commute distance of his home and avoid a move if at all possible. Because he has experience in this field, he knows the names of the heavy construction companies that lie within this commute radius. What he does not know is if they are hiring. What can he do?
A few helpful steps:
Ask around. Since he has experience in the field, he has colleagues in the field who may know more about these companies than he does. He should talk to someone in New Accounts or Business Development because those people are required to know the competition when vying for new contracts. They will know which companies are doing well, which ones are doing poorly, and which ones have good prospects. Joe can do this asking around discreetly without tipping his hand that he’s in the market for a new position.
Check the numbers. If a company is a publicly-owned company, its stock performance and profitability can give you an idea of the company’s stability and growth factors. If a company is growing, it may well be hiring.
Search the boards. An Internet search on some of the larger job boards may turn up open positions the company has. Sometimes, an open position in one location may actually mean the same position is open in another location, especially if the company opens positions to internal hire. A current employee may apply/receive the open/advertised position, thus leaving a correlative position open in another location.
Watch the papers. Companies will often publish news of new contract awards as part of their public relations campaigns. This would be an indication of new hiring. Promotions are also sometimes publicized. If you see that someone has been promoted out of a position you would be interested in winning, send a resume to the promoted. He/she may be hiring his replacement!
Lurk in public meetings. Attendance at some of those otherwise-boring meetings such as local business groups or civic meetings often generates information concerning new plans and growth, thus new hires.
Posted by Administrator on August 24th, 2005 | No Comments
The Education and Training section on a resume often provides a hurdle to job seekers but it is really the easiest section to create on a resume. The question of GPA arises as does what training to include and what training should be excluded. Should seminars and conferences be included? What about individual classes?
The entire Education section of a resume must be viewed in terms of relevance. Is the information relevant to the current career target? For example, a CEO with thirty years experience in banking and a Master of Science in Finance should not list his GPA for his Bachelor’s degree. It’s not relevant. A new graduate of a four-year college would list his/her GPA on a resume (if it’s high enough) since it is relevant to performance in the career target.
Long listings of training seminars from years ago are not relevant on a resume. It does not matter if you took a class in Windows 95 ten years ago. It is not relevant to today’s workplace. What would be relevant today? Perhaps classes in security or real estate investing or Chinese would be relevant to today’s workplace. As a rule of thumb, look at the last three years of your educational experience if you are an experienced professional in the workforce. In those three years, decide which classes, seminars, conferences, or training programs that you have taken are relevant to your current career target.
New graduates should only include the GPA if it is a benefit and not a negative. Depending on the field of study, GPAs from 3.2 to 4.0 are usually eligible for a mention plus any honor societies, scholarships, etc. that apply. If you do not have a high GPA, do not despair. Many hiring managers actually prefer a lower GPA coupled with real-world activities such as part-time jobs because it shows a more well-rounded graduate rather than a book worm.
Continuing education units earned through classes or conferences should be noted if they have occurred within the past year. Special certifications or licenses should be noted, too, if they apply.
Posted by Administrator on August 22nd, 2005 | No Comments
Dear Career-Resumes®,
I have gone through two interviews for a position as a Branch Manager and now the prospective employer has asked for my W2 form from ’04. Why does he want it and should I provide it?
Puzzled
Marion, IN
Dear Puzzled,
You did not say what you would be a Branch Manager of in your post if you take the position. It is not unusual for recruiters or hiring managers who are interviewing candidates in sales or other commission-type work to ask to see a W2 in order to better judge your career record. It is easy to say “Grew territory by over $2.5 million” but if your commissions do not show it, it might be a red flag.
If you were not on a commission- or part-commission basis in your previous position, the hiring manager may want to see your W2 in order to decide if your salary expectations are in line with their budget. If you were making significantly less or significantly more in your last position than the position for which you are applying, you can expect the W2 to raise questions in the mind of the hiring manager.
The best course of action is to ask the hiring manager why he/she needs the form. If they are uncomfortable answering that question, then you are justified in stating you are uncomfortable in providing that information unless you understand their intent.
There is a great resource on how to handle all salary negotiation questions, including this one. It is called “Negotiating Your Salary: How to Make $1000 a Minute” and it is written by Jack Chapman. I highly recommend it for finding the answers to the tough questions and for negotiating compensation packages.
Posted by Administrator on August 19th, 2005 | No Comments
Since the age of personal computers and spell-check features, most people have gotten lazy about proofreading their writing. If the computer doesn’t catch it, then why worry about it? The staffing service Accountemps recently conducted a survey of hiring executives and found that the most common mistake seen on resumes was typos. Sometimes, lenient hiring managers might allow one typo to pass but two typos are deadly.
Here are a few of the most common spelling typos:
Pubic – This is a correctly spelled word and will not be caught by the spell-check. It is also the most common misspelling of the word “public”. So if you write in your resume, “Managed over $3 million in pubic funds,” the spell-check will pass it with flying colors. And the color of your face will be bright red after the employer reads it and round-files your resume.
Specialist – This is not exactly a typo but rather a word that spam blockers misread. If you notice in the middle of the word ‘specialist’ there is another word – ‘cialis’. Most spam programs are set to weed out the words ‘cialis’, ‘viagra’, ‘levitra’, ‘free’, and so forth. If you use the word specialist in your resume, and especially in the subject line of an email, there is a good chance the recipient’s spam blocker will weed it out.
Manger – Again, this word is spelled correctly. A manger is a box that horses and cattle eat from in a barn. It is the most common misspelling of the word “manager”. To make things really bad you could describe yourself as “Manger of pubic funds.”
Besides spelling goofs, there are other typos that can hinder a resume’s prospects:
No email or phone number – What do you expect, the employer will MAIL you a call for an interview?
Fonts too small – Remember, hiring managers are commonly over 35 and print tends to shrink after that age. One trick is to set your document to open in 150% view window on a computer, automatically enlarging the print on the screen.
Spacing goofs – If you learned to type on a typewriter, you learned to put two spaces after end punctuation. That isn’t necessary on a word-processor so get out of the habit of hitting the space bar twice at the end of a sentence. Those two spaces will throw your resume out of alignment and waste precious space.
Too many bullets – If all your information is bulleted, you are wasting ammo. You should limit bullets to about 3-5 per job. More than that and you lose the eye-catching effect of the bullets and the text becomes hard to read.
Posted by Administrator on August 18th, 2005 | No Comments
One of the hardest arguments we professional resume writers have with job seekers is the argument that a professional resume is a good investment. Most of our clients have college degrees and/or work in white collar positions where writing memos, reports, and analyses is part of their daily jobs. It is difficult to jump the mental hurdle that a resume is a different type of writing, and thus, should be left to the professionals.
In college, most students are required to take two full years of English. The first year is composition and the second year is literature. Generally in composition, students learn the basics of research, how to build a report, and some creative writing. These skills are the necessary skills they will need for other classes in their studies such as history and sociology. What these classes do not teach is resume writing, direct marketing writing, or copy writing. They leave the resume writing instruction to the career center who provide a one-hour instruction course on Saturdays once a semester. A student may or may not take that course during their senior year. If the student attends, they have one hour to learn how to write marketing copy that will sell their hard-earned, expensive four years of college to prospective employers. Doesn’t really make sense, does it?
Professional resume writers write resumes every single day. Part of their job is to look objectively at a job seeker’s career history, take into consideration the immediate and future career goals, and craft a hard-hitting marketing document that will win the interview. They do this eight to ten hours a day, not just once in a lifetime. Their abilities are top notch.
I once heard the analogy given that hiring a resume writer was like hiring an electrician to rewire your house. Given a few books and a great deal of time, you could probably figure out how to rewire your house but you would not have much confidence in the job that you did. Your lack of experience could mask a great many mistakes that you don’t recognize but which could result in disaster like a house fire. You would wince every time you turned on a light.
Writing your own resume is like that. Do you know enough to recognize the mistakes you make in your resume? Are you confident when you send it out or do you cross your fingers and say a prayer? Can you afford to spend the time that is needed to learn all the ins and outs of resume writing or would it be more fiscally astute to hire it out? Think about it and give us a call.
Posted by Administrator on August 15th, 2005 | No Comments
In Part One, we outlined the basic job description of a recruiter and how recruiters are paid. We also mentioned that working with recruiters is often a matter of numbers since the types of jobs for which recruiters source vary from day to day. A recruiter might be given an assignment to source candidates for an electrical engineer one day and then three weeks later they are assigned to find a financial analyst. At any point in time, a recruiter might or might not have a placement assignment that your qualifications fit.
It’s important to stay in touch with recruiters without being a pest. You may be an electrical engineer and the recruiter to whom you send your resume may not be sourcing for electrical engineers at that particular time. In two weeks, though, he may be given an assignment for an electrical engineer that is a perfect match for you. Recruiters keep databases of candidates’ resumes and the recruiter might well check the database to see if there are any resumes that match. However, if you have stayed in touch on a regular basis and established some kind of rapport, the recruiter is more likely to remember you and pull your resume directly. That is why it is important to work with recruiters with a full understanding of how they operate rather than expecting them to work for you.
Make sure the recruiters with whom you work actually work in your industry. Many recruiters specialize in different industries. If you are a nurse and the recruiter only works in the software field, you are probably wasting your time and the recruiters. Do a little homework before sending out the resume.
How do you stay in touch without being a pest? After sending your resume to the recruiter, send an email to him/her to confirm that he received your resume and reiterating your interest in working with him. After that, limit yourself to an email to the recruiter about every three weeks. More often than that and you start to become a pest.
It is also wise to ask if the recruiter has anything on the table for which you may be able to refer someone else. A recruiter may not have a job that matches your needs, but you may know of someone who matches a job the recruiter is trying to fill. Helping the recruiter is an excellent way of establishing a rapport.
If you want a fast, effective way to contact multiple recruiters in your industry, check out our resume distribution services at ResumeMachine.com.
Posted by Administrator on August 12th, 2005 | No Comments
Most job seekers we work with do not have a fundamental understanding of how executive recruiters (also known as headhunters) actually work. Most people are under the wrong impression that executive recruiters work to benefit the job seeker. Because of this assumption, job seekers get upset when they do not get speedy replies or feedback from recruiters after sending them resumes.
In reality, recruiters work for the employers. Companies hire the recruiter to find, screen, and pre-qualify candidates for specific positions. Recruiters are paid by the employer based on either the salary of the candidate (contingency basis) or on a flat-fee basis (retained). Most recruiters are contingency recruiters who are paid anywhere from 15-30% of the candidate’s salary; therefore, a recruiter who successfully places a candidate who makes $100,000 will make between $15,000 and $30,000 for that placement.
Since the recruiter is paid by the employer, his/her loyalty naturally goes to the employer in all negotiations and activities. It is a recruiter’s job to find and place the best possible candidate for the job. That means working very hard to find candidates that meet 100% of the employer’s requirements. Job seekers who do not have all the requirements will not get attention from the recruiters. This means that many times, well-qualified job seekers who meet most, but not all, of the requirements of a position will sometimes feel snubbed by recruiters.
There is one way recruiters work to benefit the job seeker. Recruiters will try to negotiate the highest possible salary for candidates because it means more in their pocket due to their contingency percentage. That is why it is important to be very clear and open concerning your salary requirements with recruiters. You should also be very clear concerning issues such as relocation. Recruiters need to know how much you want to get paid and where you are willing to work so they can be most effective in their role as middle-man between the job seeker and the employer.
In general, recruiters do not work with entry-level or blue collar workers. Because it is expensive for employers to use recruiters for hiring, companies tend to use them only for executive or management positions or positions that might be difficult to fill. It is not cost-effective for companies to use recruiters to fill entry-level positions because these candidates are easy to find and recruit through the human resources department.
Because recruiters are dealing with sourcing candidates for multiple positions for multiple employers at any one time, they do not have time to follow up on resumes that do not fit their exact criteria for current open positions. If you are a Sarbanes-Oxley expert and you send your resume to a recruiter, and that recruiter does not have any positions at the present that require Sarbanes-Oxley expertise, your resume will be filed for future reference. That is why it is important to play the numbers when working for recruiters. You might send your resume out to 500 or so recruiters but only 50 of those might be sourcing for your type of position at any one time.
Posted by Administrator on August 10th, 2005 | No Comments
