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Your Past Employers: What New Employers Need to Know

Your resume is, in part, a history of your career to date. The companies you are applying to want to know if you have a track record of success in their industry, customer base and geographic reach.

Often job applicants seem to expect hiring managers and recruiters to be familiar with every company on the planet. It is much better and more realistic to assume that no one is familiar with the companies you worked for in the past.

You should include the following information about each company where you previously worked:

  • What they do (manufacturing, service, construction, healthcare and so on)
  • Their size ($5M revenue, 25 employees)
  • Their market (4 regions, global, EMEA)
  • Whether they are still in existence (formerly known as…, merged with…)

Most of this information you can find online with a search on the company name.  You should keep your description very brief. For example:  “Provider of analytical engineering solutions, with 6000 employees across 10 countries.” A large company may have many different divisions, projects, programs and markets. Focus your brief description on the areas that directly concern your job search.

If you made a significant contribution to the health or growth of a company, you should provide before and after figures or a percentage of change. Projections are also acceptable for recent accomplishments (“Acquired five new clients, projected to bring in $4M each over the next year”).

As always, make sure you use the current version of the company name (Wal-Mart is now Walmart), include the location where you worked and provide the dates when you were employed.

You should not offer the following information: reasons why you left, the name of your supervisor and the amount you earned, unless you are applying for a federal government position and the information is required.

Robin’s Resumes® helps job seekers like you with clear, accurate and concise resumes that show their full potential to employers. Contact us today.

Technical Resumes: Five Steps to a Better Resume

Many technical resumes suffer because engineers, developers, researchers, and other technical job applicants have trouble communicating what they do. Many of them are more at home drawing a diagram than writing; and many are used to communicating with their peers at a level where a hiring manager or recruiter is simply lost. Still, the hiring managers and recruiters are the ones who will ultimately examine a resume and decide whether a candidate should move forward to an interview. Here are five steps you can take to help ensure you are one of those candidates:

  1. Make sure you understand the type and level of technical knowledge the company is interested in hearing about. The company’s website is an excellent resource for clear, concise, and accurate descriptions of the company’s technology. The job posting will have been written to clearly describe the specific holes the company wants to fill in its technical knowledge and technical staff. Armed with those descriptions, you should write your resume with the same level of clarity.
  2. Go beyond listing your areas of technical expertise; explain how your knowledge helped the company you are working at now. By placing your technical skills in context, you are helping hiring managers and recruiters understand what you do and its potential value to the company. Or to put it another way, any programmer can learn C++ eventually; what you did with C++ is your unique achievement.
  3. Define your terms. Many technical acronyms have slid into the common language, such as SaaS, but others are still obscure. This is probably true of any terms created by your current company or division. Some common acronyms such as CBM have multiple meanings (coal bed methane; condition-based maintenance, etc.) depending on the industry. Make sure you define terms that can be misunderstood.
  4. Use standard grammar. Follow this rule: If a sentence does not make grammatical sense, it cannot make technical sense. Do not try to justify poor grammar (or spelling) because you are relaying complex technical information.
  5. Hand your resume to a technical peer and ask if he or she understands your resume and would hire you. It is easy to assume that your technical peers will understand everything you write. If your resume fails that basic test, then you definitely need to rewrite.

As a graduate of MIT and a long-time practicing chemical and production engineer, I know the challenges faced by candidates for technical positions. If you need help with your resume, contact me today.

Proofreading Resumes on Paper

I have often ranted about the complete uselessness of electronic grammar checkers and mentioned the need for manual proofreading, rather than relying on electronic spellcheckers, but I am also against proofreading a resume on the computer instead of printing it out. Here are my top five reasons for advocating manual proofreading, with paper in your hand:

  1. No matter how carefully you look, onscreen you are going to miss the tiny details like a double period at the end of a sentence or a word that is partially bolded and partially unbolded. With a hard copy, you can proofread the resume looking for those details in particular.
  2. If you have a two-page (or longer) resume, it is very hard to keep the pages consistent if you only view them onscreen. You might write dates as 2001-2008 on page 1 but 2001 to 2008 on page 2 or you might have justification on one page and ragged right margins on the other. A hard copy makes cross-checking easy.
  3. When you are proofreading on a computer you automatically add missing words, especially two-letter prepositions, even though they are not there. When you proof word-by-word on a hard copy—or better yet, read it out loud—you catch those missing words.
  4. The computer hides flaws, such as a change in font (for example, there is very little difference onscreen between Arial and Tahoma) or problems with line spacing or word spacing. Because even layout views are not exact online, the computer masks problems that only become apparent when you print the resume.
  5. Formats that look great on the computer may not print well. But if you are selected for an interview, your interviewer will be looking at a paper copy of your resume, not at the computer screen. Your resume needs to print easily and look professional in hard copy.

An added benefit of a paper resume is that you can hand it to an objective party and ask them to read it just as a hiring manager would read it during an interview. If any statement is unclear or confusing, you can correct it before the resume goes out.

Robin’s Resumes® is dedicated to creating professional resumes that help give job applicants the edge, both in content and format.

How Resumes Have Changed over the Years

Resumes have changed over the years and are still changing. Thirty or forty years ago, for example, a resume commonly led off with an objective such as “seeking challenging job in publishing industry.” Now the resume starts off with a summary or profile of the job seeker’s strengths.

It used to be that resumes concentrated on skills and responsibilities. Now they concentrate on achievements (how those skills were used) and the value the job applicant brings to the position.

In former times, a “one size fits all” resume was acceptable. Now the emphasis is on a resume that uses keywords targeted to a particular job, company, and/or industry.

Job applicants used to include information on their resume that laws now prohibit employers from seeking, such as marital status, or information that employers are no longer interested in, such as hobbies. However, that information and more may still be found by employers who search LinkedIn, Facebook, or other social sites if the job applicant participates in those sites. Aligning your social media with your resume is now an important part of any job search.

While the need for a cover letter has remained the same, submission techniques have changed (from mostly mail to mostly electronic), so the cover letter is often a cover email.

The old fashioned resume was usually one page and written on a typewriter, making the format a minor consideration so long as it was professional looking. Nowadays a resume of two or more pages is fine, if the content justifies the length. Word processing provides a wealth of opportunities for design, but applicants should keep in mind that automated resume screening software may not be able to read an overly designed resume. In addition, too much design—multiple fonts, lots of bold and italic, complex graphics—may actually diminish the professional look of a resume.

Times have changed for resumes, and professional resume writers make it a point to keep up with those changes so that your resume has the maximum impact. Contact Robin’s Resumes® today for a resume that is professional, up to date, and filled with the information recruiters and hiring managers are looking for.

LinkedIn Profile Versus Resume: Do You Need Both?

Your LinkedIn profile and your resume have the same goal: to get you an interview for the job you want. To do that, they need to support each other because most employers will look at both. In fact, some recruiters and employers search LinkedIn profiles to fill job openings that have not been announced or that you might not be aware of.

Over the decades, the format for resumes has changed and so has the delivery system. Recruiters and employers are much more likely to ask job applicants to provide an electronic version of the resume, not mail in a paper version. They are more accepting of resumes with two or more pages (provided the content demands the space). Applicant Tracking Systems have become more prevalent as a way to find resumes with the skills, experience, and education employers want.

All those changes mean that an online LinkedIn profile has become as valuable as a resume—but hasn’t replaced it.

At Robin’s Resumes®, we help you tell a compelling story on both LinkedIn and your resume, one that will appeal to recruiters and hiring managers no matter how they first hear about you.

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