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By the Numbers: Why Professional Resumes and Profiles Are Essential

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Today I thought I would share some interesting statistics about job searches. The following statistics come from a variety of sources, including Glassdoor, Jobvite, and CareerBuilder.

While Jobvite lists career sites (27%) and job boards (19%) as the most frequently used source for applicants, that leaves over half of recruiters and hiring managers using other sources, such as referrals, internal hires, and agencies. Do not make the mistake of thinking that a savvy, immediate boss will be the one reading your resume—instead, prepare your resume so that anyone, including an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), can understand the value you bring to a company.

An ATS will discard well over 50% of the resumes it processes. The ATS searches for keywords and selects the resumes where they appear for further review by hiring managers and recruiters. You should study job postings and advertisements carefully for keywords—skills and knowledge the company is looking for—and use those words honestly in your resume.

Online sites have a strong influence on hiring. Most hiring managers and recruiters (73%-87%, depending on the site) have searched social media for candidates; and almost all candidates (over 79%) use social media to search for jobs. To stay ahead of the competition and attract hiring managers and recruiters, you should strengthen your LinkedIn and other professional profiles and keep your posts on sites like Facebook and Instagram strictly professional.

According to CareerBuilder, 41% of employers use text messages to schedule an interview. Make sure your contact information is clear, professional, and correct. A small error in your email address—or the inability of a company to tell if you meant 1 or l (one or el), 0 or O (zero or oh) might mean you never hear from them. The best email address uses your full name.

According to the 2017 Jobvite Recruiting Funnel Benchmark Report, the time between recruiting and hiring and is tightening: down to 39 days from 43 days in 2015. So keep those resumes flowing even if you feel you have a great chance at a job. If you haven’t heard from a company in over a month, they have probably filled the position.

According to a council of Human Resource executives from Fortune 100 companies, you increase your chances of being hired by 80% if you have networked to the job. You must pass the ATS for these jobs since according to several sources, over 99% of jobs listed by Fortune 500 companies are screened by ATS systems. Those statistics all show the high value still placed on resumes and the importance of professional social media profiles.

My job as a professional resume writer is to make sure your resume and social media profiles are not only well-written but capable of rising to the top in any search by hiring managers, recruiters, or ATS. Contact me today.

New Goals vs. Old Resume: How to Align Them

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Are you rethinking your career? You may find a looming gap between current career goals and your current resume. Many college graduates find themselves considering careers that do not align with their degree. People returning to the workforce after a break may find the skills that they acquired in the past are no longer relevant. Other job seekers may be deliberately seeking a new career path for any number of reasons; they might want to explore new interests, have better chances for advancement, or move to a place with fewer openings in their field.

Whatever your reason, there are several ways to handle that career/resume discrepancy on your resume and to prepare yourself for bridging the gap between where you are now and where you want to be.

Handling the Discrepancy on Your Resume

Hiring managers and recruiters do insist on a certain level of skill for most positions, but they are also interested in how skills are used. Review your past career to find transferable skills. These skills may be soft skills (such as leadership or communication) or hard skills (such as data analysis or sales). Then show how you used those skills to benefit employers. Within certain boundaries, it doesn’t matter if you sell shoes or cosmetics; great sales skills are always appreciated.

You should also consider organizing your resume so that you show your most relevant experience first, regardless of date. You could, for example, begin with a section titled “Relevant Experience” or “Career Highlights” before you offer a chronology. You could divide your career into two parts, listing non-relevant jobs under “Other Experience.”

Bridging the Gap to Where You Want to Be

If you see a career transition in your future, start preparing now to make yourself more marketable. Compare advertisements and job postings to see what top three or four qualifications appear over and over again; concentrate on meeting those specific qualifications. Read carefully, without regard to the job title. You may find that your ideal job (or one close to it) is available but not under the title you expected.

Take courses in your chosen field, volunteer those rusty skills to sharpen them, and work freelance, contract, or part-time jobs in the industry you are targeting to acquire current and relevant experience.

Attend networking events and gatherings where you will meet people who already work in your goal career. Even if they do not know about current openings, they can help you gain insight into what will make you more appealing to hiring managers and recruiters. When you are transitioning your career, you may want to talk to a career and transition specialist or a professional resume writer. I am qualified in both fields. Please contact me today.

Proving Your Soft Skills on Your Resume

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In an earlier blog post this month, I mentioned the need for hard facts in describing your career. But how do you provide hard facts about soft skills? Soft skills include relationship building, communications, problem-solving, team building, leadership, and change management, among others. Those soft skills are valuable in any field and at every level of an organization.

How does your resume prove that you have valuable soft skills?

The most important proof occurs when you give examples and details from previous positions and experiences. For example, did you work in a team that crossed functions or geographies? What was the size of the team and what did it accomplish? Did you contribute to customer satisfaction by figuring out a way to measure it or building a website that attracted more customers or solving a customer problem face-to-face?

Your soft skills are evident when you show that you overcame obstacles such as continuing to work through a merger or change in leadership. Any workplace change automatically requires such soft skills as adaptability and flexibility. You might have faced specific obstacles, as when you needed to merge two departments or convince an executive team to move the company in a certain direction or train a sales team to close more sales.

Another way to demonstrate soft skills is to show your ability to innovate with new products, processes, or procedures. Make sure you share the results of your innovation in terms of time savings, reduced costs, increased revenue, or productivity. Innovation is a sign of creative thinking, but companies also want to know that it added value.

As indicated throughout this post, the best way to describe soft skills is by providing specifics. Calling yourself a “team player” is fine—but what did you do and what did you achieve that demonstrates that ability? Saying you have “great communication skills” means a lot more if you gave presentations, wrote reports, or interacted with others to reach a goal.

If you have problems determining and writing about your soft skills, please contact Robin’s Resumes®. You want to make sure your resume gives you justice.

Bad Santa’s Advice for Writing Your Resume

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I am continually astounded at the bad resume advice handed out by the “bad Santas”: resume writers who have no professional credentials or well-meaning friends and family.

Bad Santa Advice from Resume Writers

Many so-called resume writers, without credentials, training, or professional affiliations, will give you bad advice, like telling you to alter facts on your resume. For example, they will encourage you to simply forget about a short-term position or period of unemployment and modify dates to cover the gap. They will tell you to say you have skills that you do not have rather than be upfront about skills you are willing to get. They will tell you to lie to make yourself more attractive.

These clueless helpers will also tell you that you need to keep your resume to one page—regardless of your years of experience and achievements—and that cover letters or emails are no longer necessary. They advocate unusual formats as though the format will impress hiring managers more than the content. They ignore applicant tracking systems which have difficulty with unusual formats, even though most large companies today use an ATS.

Their bad advice can lead to your being fired for lying or to your resume being suppressed by the applicant tracking system before you even begin.

Bad Santa Advice from Family and Friends

Some bad resume advice comes from family and friends who have your best interests at heart, but do not understand the current job seeking environment. They will tell you to be more modest or more boastful than your achievements warrant. They will tell you to add words like “hard working,” “loyal,” and “interested in furthering my career,” which take up space that could be used to quantify your achievements.

The absolutely worst advice these good-hearted people can give you is to write your own resume because no one knows you as well as you. The truth is that most job seekers find it difficult to assume the viewpoint of recruiters and hiring managers; and yet a resume has to appeal to that audience, not best friends or relations or to the job seeker’s own internal critic. Over and over again, I have worked with job applicants who overlook the basics of stellar resume writing: clear, concise, accurate, and focused. Instead they come up with a generic resume that describes their past more or less but has absolutely no chance of getting them the job they want now.

Good Advice from Robin’s Resumes®

To avoid the Bad Santas, whether unprofessional resume writers or your well-meaning support system, research carefully to find a professional resume writer with credentials, experience, and references. You will find all three on my website. I look forward to hearing from you.

Hard Facts in Resumes

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You have probably searched on line for a product or service and been hit with phrases like “fast delivery” or “best in class service” or “competitive rates.” Those phrases give you very little information when you are searching for anything from pizza delivery to an airline flight. What you want are hard facts: how fast, what range of service, at what cost?

Rely on Facts, Not Adjectives

Unfortunately, many resumes rely on generic adjectives and adverbs rather than hard facts. Hiring managers and recruiters are tired of hearing about the “top-rated, proactive salesperson with incredible close rate.” They are looking for solid facts like “ranked 4 out of 30 salespeople, exceeding sales quota by 5% year-over-year.” Not only do those facts reassure them that this person has the skills they need, but the details make the person stand out: how many applicants can equal those specific claims?

The facts you provide do not have to be dramatic. Maybe they include the size of the company you worked for, the size of the team you participated in or led, your selection as employee of the month (even if it was only once), or your ability to increase customer satisfaction scores a small percentage. Yes, multiple Presidents Club awards are impressive but all achievements are memorable if they are backed up by facts.

Provide the Facts That Companies Actually Want

Most job postings and advertisements include specific information about desirable skills, experience, and education. Be sure to include that those facts in your resume if they align with your experience, skill set, and education.

Hard facts do have one limitation: If you are in a technical field, it is important that you show your resume to a nontechnical person before you load it with details that only professionals understand. Your resume has to be clear and interesting to hiring managers and recruiters who may lack the technical or industry background you have.

Put Your Facts in Context

Always remember to put your facts—technical or not—in the context of achievements: your knowledge is important but how have you used it to benefit the companies you work for? That context will make the information easier to understand.

Finally, the hard facts that you provide in your resume should be backed up by the information that appears on your online profile(s) and by the information you provide during the interview. If there is any disparity or uncertainty, hiring managers and recruiters will question it. Make sure your facts, from your college degree to the amount of revenue you generated, can be backed up.

As a professional resume writer, I can help you find the hard facts that will make you and your resume stand out. Contact me today.

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