Knock 'em Dead Resumes

A Killer Resume Gets MORE Job Interviews!

Martin Yate

• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781440596193
• eBook ISBN: 9781507201572
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business General

Expert advice on building a resume to get the job you want! Your resume is the most important financial document you'll ever create. When it works, so do you. Drawing on more than thirty years of experience, bestselling author Martin Yate shows you how to write a dynamic, effective resume that:

• Stands out in a resume database
• Builds a strong personal brand employers will want on their team
• Passes recruiters' six-second scan test
• Speaks to exactly what employers are looking for

The new edition of this classic guide includes dozens of sample resumes as well as cutting-edge advice on resume-writing tactics. With Knock 'em Dead Resumes, 12th Edition, you'll grab employers' attention--and score the job you want.

CHAPTER 1
YOUR RESUME—THE MOST FINANCIALLY IMPORTANT DOCUMENT YOU’LL EVER OWN

Read this book with a highlighter—
it will save time as you refer back to important passages.

YOUR RESUME IS the most financially significant document you will ever own. When it works, the doors of opportunity open for you. When it doesn’t work, they won’t.

No one enjoys writing a resume, but it has such a major impact on the money you earn during your work life, and consequently on the quality of your life outside of work, that you know it needs to be done right.

You didn’t come to this book for a good read. You came because you are facing serious challenges in your professional life. The way the professional world works has changed dramatically in the past few years, and nothing has changed as much as corporate recruitment. When hiring practices have changed beyond recognition, your approach to getting hired needs to be re-evaluated from top to bottom.

In these pages, you are going to learn very quickly how to build a resume that works. But you’re going to learn something more. Since my approach to resumes is part of a larger strategy for achieving long-term career and personal success, everything I teach you about developing a kick-ass resume will apply to the broader challenges of the job search, interviewing, and career management.

In other words, not only will you leave this book with a killer resume, you’ll leave it with critical job search and interview strategies, and even some amazing insights into winning raises and promotions.

Self-Awareness: The Key to Professional Survival and Success

Understanding what employers want and need from a specific job title, and how they express and prioritize those needs, will tell you what it takes to win and succeed in that job. It will also give you some hints about the story your resume needs to tell in order to get your foot in the door.

Employers Just Want to Make a Buck

Employees only get added to the payroll to help make a buck, to enhance profitability in some way. Think about this: If you owned a company, there just isn’t any other reason you would add workers to your payroll. So it is implicit in any employment contract that your job contributes to profitability in some way.

Depending on your job, you can help an employer make a buck by:

• Making money for the company
• Saving money for the company
• Saving time/increasing productivity

No matter what your job, no matter how impressive your title, at its very core, your position exists to help an employer maintain and increase profitability by:

• The identification of problems within your area of responsibility
• The prevention of problems within your area of responsibility
• The solution to problems within your area of responsibility

No resume gets read, no one gets interviewed, and no one gets hired unless someone somewhere is trying to solve a problem. That problem may be finding a quicker way to manufacture silicon chips, speed up the accounts receivable process, leverage social networking for brand management, or any one of a million other profit challenges.

The only reason your job exists is because your employer needed someone to identify, prevent, and solve the problems that regularly occur in this area of professional expertise; it exists because not having someone like you is costing the company money.

Problem solving—the application of critical thinking to the challenges within your area of expertise—is what you are paid to do. It is why every job opening exists, and why every job gets filled with the person who seems to have the firmest grip on how to identify, prevent, and solve the problems that make up the everyday activities of that job.

Why No One Wants to Read Your Resume

You may think that resume writing is a tough job, but only if you’ve never had to read them. Go to the resume samples section at the end of the book and try to read and understand six resumes in a row. Your brain will first go numb, then start to melt, and by the sixth you’ll understand why no one is really that anxious to read your resume.

No one reads resumes unless they have to, so when your resume does get read, it means that a job exists: a job that has been carefully defined, budgeted, and titled, with a salary range that has been authorized and for which funds have been released. Whenever a recruiter searches a resume database or reads a resume, she is doing it with a specific job and the language and priorities of that job description in mind.

Why a Hiring Manager May Never Get the Chance to Read Your Resume

The ongoing impact of technology on our world of work causes the nature of all jobs to change almost as rapidly as the pages on a calendar. Resumes today rarely go straight to a recruiter’s or manager’s desk (though I’ll show you how to make this happen); more often they go to a resume database.

This means that before anyone actually looks at your resume, it must first have been pulled from that database by a recruiter with a specific job and the language and priorities of that job description in mind. Keep in mind that some of those databases contain more than 35 million resumes.

With this in mind, you can see that if your resume’s just a jumble of everything you’ve ever done, or of everything that you happen to think is important (without reference to what your customers are actually buying), it is never going to work.

Understand Your Customer

“The customer is always right,” “the customer comes first,” and “understand your customer” are phrases that underlie all successful business stories. In the same way that corporations tailor products to be appealing to their customers, you need to create a resume tailored to your customers’ needs.

Your resume works when it matches your skills and experiences to the responsibilities and deliverables of a specific target job. This requires that your resume focus on how employers—your customers—think about, prioritize, and describe the job’s deliverables: those things you are expected to deliver as you execute your assigned responsibilities.

A resume focused on a specific target job and built from the ground up with the customers’ needs in mind will perform better in the recruiters’ resume database searches, and it will resonate far more with human eyes already glazed from the tedium of resume reading.

This Is Not Your Last Job Change

In a world without job security, when job and even career changes are happening ever more frequently, being able to write a productive resume is one of life’s critical survival skills.

This is probably not your first, and almost certainly won’t be your last, job change. You are somewhere in the middle of a half-century work life, a span during which you are likely to have three or more distinct careers and are statistically likely to change jobs about every four years; where economic recessions come around every seven to ten years and age discrimination can begin to kick in around age fifty.

Enlightened Self-Interest

When I started to talk about these issues of personal survival twenty-five years ago, I was called a communist and asked how I could suggest that Americans be disloyal to their employers. History has shown that it is the corporations that broke the employment contract, yet today we still hear of companies demanding unblinking loyalty from their employees. If you accept this double standard, your life and the lives of your loved ones will suffer.

Wake up! Times have changed. You need a tougher, more pragmatic approach to your professional life. You still need to do your best for your employer and your team, but you also need put yourself first, because you need to survive and, hopefully, prosper in life. To do that, you need to find a more sophisticated approach to managing your professional life and guiding your destiny.

Start to think of yourself as a corporation: Me, Inc., a financial entity that must always plan and act to ensure its economic survival. Like any corporation, Me, Inc. constantly has new products and services in development. These are the ever-evolving skill bundles that define the professional you. Again, just like any corporation, these products and services are branded and sold to your targeted customer base: employers who hire people like you.

The success of Me, Inc. depends on how well you run your company, and like every successful company, you’ll need initiatives for Research and Development, Strategic Planning, Marketing, Public Relations, and Sales:

• Research and Development: Every company is continually involved in the identification and development of products and services that will appeal to their customers. You must have similar ongoing initiatives. This translates into skill building in response to market trends, which you do by connecting to your profession and by monitoring the changing market demands for your job on an ongoing basis.
• Strategic Planning: The development of career management strategies. You’ll begin to think of your career over the long term, of where you want to be and how you are going to get there. How you will stay on top of skill development, and how you will develop and maintain a desirable professional brand.
• Marketing and PR: The effective branding of Me, Inc. as a desirable product requires establishing credibility for the services you deliver and positioning these services so that the professional you becomes visible to an ever-widening circle. You want to make yourself known within a company, to encourage professional growth, and within your profession, to encourage your employability elsewhere.
• Sales: Me, Inc. needs a state-of-the-art sales program to market your products and services.

Your new resume is the primary sales tool for Me, Inc., the company you embody. It is the most financially important document you will ever own, and you can learn how to do it right, starting right now.

CHAPTER 2
YOUR CUSTOMER KNOWS WHAT HE WANTS—HOW TO GET INSIDE HIS HEAD

“THE CUSTOMER IS always r...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction The Facts of Life
• Chapter 1 Your Resume—The Most Financially Important Document You’ll Ever Own
• Chapter 2 Your Customer Knows What He Wants—How to Get Inside His Head
• Chapter 3 Your Resume Is a Garbage In/Garbage Out Proposition
• Chapter 4 How to Define and Build a Desirable Professional Brand
• Chapter 5 Resume Formats
• Chapter 6 The Simplest, Smartest, Fastest Way to Write Your Resume— Keep It Simple, Stupid
• Chapter 7 How to Give Your Resume Punch
• Chapter 8 Resume Customization, Alternative Resumes, and Formats Needed for an Effective Job Search
• Chapter 9 Ready to Launch
• Chapter 10 The Resumes
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright