Resumes For Dummies

Laura DeCarlo

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119539292
• Edition: 8
• Topic: Crescita personale
• Subtopic: Carriera

Polish up that old resume—and land your dream job

We've all been there: it's time to apply for a job or internship and you have to create or revise your resume. Many questions pop in your head. What do employers want? What skills should I highlight? How do I format this? How do I get noticed? But resume writing doesn't have to be a daunting task.

The latest edition of Resumes For Dummies answers all of these questions and more—whether you're a resume rookie, looking for new tips, or want to create that eye-catching winning resume. In this trusted guide, Laura DeCarlo decodes the modern culture of resume writing and offers you insider tips on all the best practices that'll make your skills shine and your resume pop. Let's start writing!

• Write effective resumes that will stand out in a crowd
• Understand Applicant Tracking Systems and how to adapt your resume
• Keep your resume up with the current culture
• Position a layoff or other career change and challenge with a positive spin
• Leverage tips and tricks that give your resume visual power

In order to put your best foot forward and stand out in a pile of papers, it's important to have an excellent and effective resume—and now you can.

Part 1

Getting Started with Resumes

IN THIS PART …

Find out why resumes remain relevant and get an overview of how technology plays a role in your job search.

Mine the wide world of social media for job leads, networking opportunities, and self-marketing.

Discover the ins and outs of using smartphones and tablets in your job search.

Check out how employers gather information from your resume and see how formatting can affect this process.

Understand why it’s so important to be aware of your online reputation and know how to keep it in top-notch condition.

Recognize when you have to go the extra mile to network your way to job opportunities.

Chapter 1

Getting a Job in the Digital Age

IN THIS CHAPTER

Growing your career with truly terrific resumes

Blending human know-how with new technology

Staying on the leading edge in your job search

Are resumes outdated? Every few years an employment expert excitedly announces a so-called new discovery: Resumes are old hat and unnecessary. The expert advises job seekers to forgo resumes and talk their way into an interview. This advice rarely works in real life. Very few people are eloquent enough to carry the entire weight of an employment marketing presentation without a resume. Plus, employers expect some type of resume as a form of researchable and documentable proof.

One resume strategy depends not on verbal talent but on technology. In some situations, recruiting professionals encourage employers who’ve grown weary of hiking over mountains of resumes to decide who gets offered a job interview to replace them with rigid application forms on the web — complete with screening questions and tests.

Another scenario — also technology dependent — reflects the view that online profiles on social networking sites are pinch-hitting for resumes as self-marketing documents. As I point out in Chapter 2, online profiles are equivalent to generic resumes. Because prospective employers are likely to hunt down your LinkedIn profile, the ideal strategy is to make it as targeted as possible to your current job target.

Most recently, recruiters and employers are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as Mya and HigherVue to perform resume and interview screening. This development is yet another reason for having a strong and effective resume.

This book combines the details of creating a marvelous resume with various technological delivery options. In this chapter, you preview what’s ahead in this comprehensive guide to resumes and how to use resumes and other career-marketing communications to reach your goal in the great job chase.

Resumes Are Here to Stay

At some point in a hunt for better employment, everyone needs effective career-marketing communications. That is, everyone needs a resume — or something very much like a resume — that tells the employer why

• You’re an excellent match for a specific job
• The value you bring matters
• Your skills are essential to the bottom line
• You’re worth the money you hope to earn
• You’re qualified to solve the employer’s problems
• Your accomplishment claims can be believed (and verified)

Resumes that deliver on these decision points remain at the heart of the job search ecosystem.

Keeping Up with Resume Times

The ongoing need for terrific resumes doesn’t mean the job chase is frozen in time. Far from it. In this digital age — when 66 percent of young people (ages 18–24) are checking their social media updates when they first wake up, even before they go to the bathroom or brush their teeth — every job seeker needs to embrace the entire package of tools and strategies for getting a new job. The package contains new and traditional components:

• Digital tools that are rapidly altering the nature of how jobs are found and filled in America and across the globe
• Timeless know-how and savvy developed by the best employment giants over decades

Don’t think the digital age is just for the young. In fact, the number of people in the 55- to 64-year-old age bracket using social media has grown by 79 percent in the past few years with sites such as Twitter. Further, the 45–54 age group is currently the fastest growing demographic user of sites such as Facebook.

New technological ideas enhanced with historically proven smarts are a winning combination. Technology changes in a decade; human nature doesn’t.

Reset your concept of what you must know about resumes in the job chase. Writing great resumes is no longer enough. You must know how to distribute those resumes to people who can hire you or at least move you along in the process.

Targeted resume rules

Job seekers, brace yourselves: Navigating the job market is getting ever trickier and requires considerably more effort than the last time you baited your resume hook — even a short five years ago. The generic resume, which I refer to as a core resume throughout this book, is at the top of the list of job search tools on the way out. (Read all about it in Chapter 8.)

You probably have an all-purpose resume lying around in a desk drawer somewhere. What legions of job seekers everywhere like about the all-purpose resume is that it casts a wide net to snag the attention of many employers — and it saves time for those of us who are too busy getting through the day to keep writing different resumes for different jobs. I appreciate that. But your one-size-fits-all work of art is obsolete, and it’s getting lost in more and more recruiting black holes.

The core resume has been replaced by the targeted resume (which I refer to in this book as OnTarget), a customized resume tailor-made for a specific employment opportunity.

An OnTarget resume is a valuable marketing tool to convince the reader your work can benefit a specific employer and that you should make the cut of candidates invited in for a closer look. An OnTarget resume

• Addresses a given opportunity, showing clearly how your qualifications are a close match to a job’s requirements
• Uses powerful words to persuade and clean design to attract interest
• Plays up strengths and downplays any factor that undermines your bid for an interview

OF FRIENDS AND RESUMES

“The number one way to use your OnTarget resume is to find a friend to walk it into the hiring manager’s office or recruiter’s office with the friend’s stamp of approval,” advises Mark Mehler, cofounder and principal of CareerXroads and a long-time Internet job-hunting expert. His firm’s annual survey of how people get hired at major corporations shows that one out of three openings is filled this way.

Unfit resumes are zapped

The word got out, slowly at first. And then — whoosh! — millions of job seekers found out how easy it was to instantly put an online resume in the hands of employers across town as well as across the country.

Post and pray became the job seeker’s mantra as everyone figured out how to manipulate online resumes and upload them into the online world with the click of a mouse.

Resume overload began in the first phase of the World Wide Web, a time frame of about 1994 to 2005. It became exponentially larger and more frustrating as commercial resume-blasting services appeared on the scene. Almost overnight, it seemed, anyone willing to pay the price could splatter resume confetti everywhere an online address could be found.

The consequences of resume spamming for employers were staggering: Despite their use of the era’s best recruiting selection software (and now use of AI), employers were overrun with unsolicited, disorganized generic resumes containing everything but the kitchen sink.

And what about the job seekers who sent all those generic, unstructured resumes? They were left to wonder in disappointment why they never heard a peep from the recipient employer.

The answer’s in the numbers: A job advertised online by a major company creates a feeding frenzy of many thousands of resumes. Employment databases are hammered with such mismatches as sales clerks and sports trainers applying for jobs as scientists and senior managers, and vice versa.

Even when you use your OnTarget resume to apply to opportunities you find posted online, don’t hold your breath. Popu...