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Are Your Skills Up to Par?

On Father’s Day, we celebrate the support that fathers give their children, including helping them prepare to find and succeed at a career.

Unfortunately, 42% of HR managers receive resumes from unqualified candidates, according to a survey by Robert Half Management Resources—not surprising, since 78% of professionals in the same survey admitted they would apply for a job despite not meeting the job requirements. I always urge job seekers to concentrate on positions where they can meet the job requirements. Otherwise, their job search will be mired in frustration.

Even if a company is open to training new employees (84%), the company wants to know that the candidate who is applying is very close in skills to the candidate they are hoping for. They also would like some evidence that the candidate is trainable. That is why it is essential that you:

  1. Read the job description or posting before you send in your resume. Make a list of all the skills mentioned in the resume and other qualifications such as geographic location. How many of them can you fulfill right now?
  2. Check that your resume highlights those essential skills and qualifications. A list of skills is not enough; you must show how you used your skills to benefit your previous and current employers.
  3. Rework your resume if needed to describe required skills that you may not have used recently or used only in volunteer positions. You might add a few bullet points to your summary to focus on skills that would otherwise not show up until much later in your career history.
  4. Find out if there are classes you can take to fill in any gaps. Even if you have not yet finished a course, attendance shows your willingness and ability to learn.
  5. Remember to cover soft skills that are critical for learning, such as communication, collaboration, and experience in Lean or similar programs that lead to new ways of thinking and working.
  6. Use the cover letter or email to reinforce your capabilities.

Meeting a company’s job requirements is essential if you want to move on to an interview and eventually get hired. If you are concerned that your resume does not adequately represent your skills and qualifications or if you are stymied by a job description that seems impossible to match, please contact me. I have years of experience designing resumes that help job seekers qualify for the jobs they want.

Resumes for Consultants

Many people believe we are in a gig economy, where freelance and contract work is more available and more appreciated than full-time work. The gig economy is beneficial for consultants, who provide specialized skills and services for contracted periods of time.

As a consultant, your resume must:

  • Stress outcomes. In past jobs, you were hired to achieve a certain goal in a given time. Unlike a full-time employee, you cannot base your resume on previous or upcoming successes, only on the exact outcomes that were expected from each engagement—choose the past jobs you discuss on your resume for their positive outcomes.
  • Give specifics. Make sure you know the situation you enter into at each engagement so that afterward your resume can emphasize the difference you made. For example, if a project was 3 months late when you are hired and you managed to bring it in only 1 month late, you made a significant contribution in speeding up the project.
  • Provide the facts hiring managers need the most. The company you send your resume to may be most interested in the size, location, or industry of companies that hired you before; or the size of the teams you led; or the exact revenue you brought in or costs you saved. Make sure that you understand the company’s priorities and that your resume emphasizes the information its hiring managers will look for.
  • Be selective. As a consultant, you have a great deal of experience in many different companies. But just as a full-time employee will be selective about achievements and accomplishments over the course of a career, you should be selective about which part-time and contract jobs you add to your resume. A full list may be overwhelming and provide little in the way of unique information.

Resumes for consultants should show that the consultant will get up to speed quickly; has a track record of meeting goals and delivering benefits; has the specific knowledge, experience, or skills the company needs; understands the company’s situation; and communicates clearly and succinctly.

As a freelance resume writer and consulting engineer, I have experience with the gig economy that will help create a strong resume. Contact me today.

References for Your Job Search

The following rules are important when considering references for your job search:

  1. Always ask a person for permission before you use them as a reference. You want to be sure the person you ask is not surprised by a call and that they are willing to give you a positive report. According to a survey by Accountemps, 34% of job candidates are removed from consideration for a job after their references are checked.
  2. Do not list your references (or “references by request”) on your resume. You want to shield your references from being bothered by every potential employer—they should receive a call only from employers who consider you a strong candidate.
  3. If a former or current boss is not a good reference for you, look for options: a different manager or supervisor in the company who is familiar with your work; a coworker; a vendor or customer with whom you worked closely; or someone who provided a recommendation on your LinkedIn profile. If you made a significant contribution as a volunteer in a nonprofit, you should be able to find someone there willing to act as a reference for your job search.
  4. Hiring managers and recruiters might ask your references about your strengths and weaknesses (38% of managers according to the Accountemps survey), so make sure your resume is accurate and that your references have a copy to refer to. You do not want to be caught in a lie or put your references in an awkward position at this stage of the process.
  5. Your resume can be used to provide “recommendations” in two ways. First, you can include information gathered from your reviews at work. For example, a reviewer might score you particularly high on collaboration with colleagues, a fact you can add to your resume. Second, you should list relevant awards, speaking engagements, and publications which show that you are respected by your peers and industry.

If you are concerned about any aspect of gathering and using references for your job search, please contact Robin’s Resumes® for help.

5 Minor Problems That Sabotage Your Resume

If you have been following my blog posts, then you should be up to speed on the major content, formatting, grammar, spelling, and style problems that could cause problems with your resume. But maybe you have overlooked these 5 minor problems that can sabotage your resume:

  1. You omitted page numbers or “continued” or any other method of alerting the reader to a second or third page. Even worse, you have omitted your name and contact information from the second or third page. The resume pages become separated, and if they ever bother searching for the missing pages, they are never sure they belong to your resume.
  2. You overused capital letters. For some reason, many grammar checkers believe that if you use the word “company,” than any word ahead of it is the company name. The grammar checkers capitalize “Insurance Company” in a phrase like “worked for the region’s leading insurance company.” When your resume is spotted with unnecessary capitals, it becomes difficult to read.
  3. You headed your resume “Resume of….” Resumes are clearly resumes. The heading on page 1 should consist of your name, perhaps followed by an honorific if that is important (for example, M.D. or CPA) and then your contact information. Recipients will know it is a resume.
  4. You eliminated all white space. White space on a page consists of those areas without any words or design elements; for example, the space after a period or between lines of text or the width of a margin. If you cram too much onto a page—narrow margins, small type, no space before or after headings—your resume becomes too daunting to read. If you want your resume to be read, white space is important.
  5. You never checked how your resume looks when it is the printed. Never forget that somewhere along the line a real human being will examine your resume. The typeface or colors (even shades of grey) that you chose may look impressive online but make the text unreadable when the resume is printed. Always print out your resume before sending it off to make sure that it holds up in hard copy.

At Robin’s Resumes®, we pay attention to every possible problem that could sabotage your resume—and in our decades of experience, we have seen and addressed them all. Contact us today for a resume you will be proud of online or in print.

When Verbs Lead Your Resume Astray

Verbs are a very important part of a resume.

Interesting, strong verbs emphasize your accomplishments: manage a team of 10 professionals; drive revenue; created new procedures; ranked #2 out of 150 sales reps. Weak verbs (is responsible for, was engaged in the process of) weaken your accomplishments and generally take up valuable space. See the difference here:

Responsible for the reorganization of two departments.

Reorganized two departments.

Past and present verb tense can easily become a problem. The only place for the present tense is in the job you hold now (“mentor three team members”). Descriptions for all previous jobs must be in the past tense (“mentored three team members”). So when you update your resume with a new job, move all descriptions of old jobs into the past tense. One verb that always causes problems is “lead.” The past tense of “lead” is “led.”

The future tense almost never appears on a resume, although you can address the future (for example, “on track to reach $3M in new revenue”). Just make sure that references to the future are still relevant. For example, if you were on track to reach new revenue three jobs ago, that goal was either met or not met—it is no longer in the future.

Verbs in complex sentences can also cause problems. For examples, “reduced customer complaints, number of returns, and satisfaction scores.” Right now, the sentence states that you reduced satisfaction scores. It should read, “reduced customer complaints and number of returns and raised satisfaction scores.”

Verb and noun forms of the same word are often spelled differently. For example, the noun is “startup,” but the verb is “start up.” So you start up a startup company. You also counsel a council and give advice when you advise them.

Many verbs sound similar to other words that have quite different meanings. The classic examples are compliment and complement, affect and effect, lead (the mineral) and led. Make sure you are using the right verb.

Robin’s Resumes® has decades of experience in making sure that every detail of your resume—including the verbs—is grammatically and factually correct and delivers a strong message.  Contact us today.

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