resume advice

3 Things to Never Put on Your Résumé | No BS Job Search Advice Radio

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Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter discusses three things job hunters should never put on their resume yet commonly do.

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I want to talk with you today about 3 things to never put on your resume.

1. Objective. “I want to work for a progressive organization where I can rise through the ranks and reach my…” Cut it out! No one reads objectives.. If anything, they are only used to disqualify you for being stupid. Get rid of the object.

2. References are available upon request. It is filler. Everyone knows it is filler. You are trying to balance out the appearance of your resume and had nothing else to say. Get rid of it. We know the references are available upon request. You don’t have to tell us that.

3. This is a biggie especially for you senior people. Get rid of the stuff from 20 years ago. As a matter of fact, in most cases you get rid of the stuff from 15 years ago. It is extraordinarily unusual. If you are ever going to be hired based upon things that you did 15 or 20 years ago.

If you are, in most cases, you want to keep it a secret. After all, you will be taking a huge step backward professionally. Instead, focus in and give the most space to the current work. The further that you go back in time, the less information that you want to provide. Frankly, the older it is, the less valuable it is to the employer.

From their perspective, how much do you think they believe you really remember from 15 or 20 years ago? Next to nothing, of course. Why submit your resume for jobs that require experience that you had from the Stone Ages?

Firms aren’t going to care for it. They are not going to believe it. Get it off your resume altogether!

Maybe you have a sentence or 2, but you are not going to try to really find work based upon stuff (let me use an example of an IT person) work that you did as a programmer back in The Stone Ages… You don’t remember how he did it. You could reconstructed and they don’t have the technology from 20 years ago. Get rid of it.

So, no objectives, no “references are available upon request,” and certainly nothing from 15 to 20 years ago.

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Do you really think employers are trying to help you?

You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell you as much as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com changes that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

You can order a copy of “Diagnosing Your Job Search Problems” for Kindle for $.99 and receive free Kindle versions of “No BS Resume Advice” and “Interview Preparation.”

Don’t forget to give the show 5 stars and a good review in iTunes

 

The Easiest Stupid Résumé Mistake to Fix (VIDEO)

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Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter discusses the stupidest resume mistake people make and how easy it is to fix it.

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I want to talk with you about 1 of those stupid resume mistakes that people make time and time again.  It is incredibly frustrating. It is so avoidable.  It’s ridiculous that people don’t avoid doing it more often.

Here’s how to fix it. Ready?  Spell check your resume.

This should go without saying, but it is not done.  You think your resume is perfectly typed. Sometimes you have “fat fingers.”  Sometimes, you just don’t know how to spell the word.  Just spellcheck your resume.

I saw a statistic recently. One spelling error can cause a resume to to be rejected.  Personally, I wouldn’t do that; I would investigate the person more thoroughly but I’m wondering where else this person got sloppy.

I know clients to think the same way that I do. They’re not necessarily going to reject someone, but they will put that person through a bigger meatgrinder of an interview because they want to make sure that sloppiness is not part of the pattern.

After all, this is where you are trying to create a great impression. If you’re consciously trying to do that and you are not spell checking your resume, what’s going to happen when you are not consciously trying to create a great impression?

Again, take a minute.  It isn’t hard.  All word processing software has.

Spellcheck your resume. It’s a stupid resume mistake. If you don’t.

Last week, there was not a day they went by where I didn’t have 5 to 10 resumes that had spelling errors in them.

By the way, if there is unique language in your field (for example, in information technology or engineering) and our products and services that are unique to your field, visually check the spelling just to make sure.  Sometimes in misspelling the term, the misspelling is a correct word but not the word that you want to use.

[/spp-transcript]

Do you really think employers are trying to help you?

You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell you as much as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com changes that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

You can order a copy of “Diagnosing Your Job Search Problems” for Kindle for $.99 and receive free Kindle versions of “No BS Resume Advice” and “Interview Preparation.”

Don’t forget to give the show 5 stars and a good review in iTunes

Your Resume Is Not a Tattoo

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[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7pL0pIISEA[/svp]
With credit to Jenny Foss of TheMuse.com for coining this phrase, I think people make this mistake, way too often and cost themselves opportunities.

feedback

[spp-transcript]

Today, I want to talk with you about your resume.  There are a lot of people I know to create these beautiful documents and hire people who do great work for them. Then, they send the same resume out over and over again, blaming the resume for the problem.  The resume is the problem, but. The resume is not the cause of the problem.

I want to give Jenny Foss at TheMuse.com credit for this title. She used the article that she did called, “Six Job Search Tips That Are So Basic That People Forget Them.”  It is a good article. And, she is right in saying that it is basic stuff.

The basic stuff I want to remind you about is (this was one of her headings) your resume is not a tattoo.

What Do I Mean, “Your Resume Is Not a Tattoo?”

It is not something that is in ink that can never be changed (by the way, you can change a tattoo, but that’s a different conversation).  We tend to think of a resume as being a document — period.  The same is true of your LinkedIn profile, too.  But there are times to change a resume because you want to emphasize one component of your experience or another. This will be true of your LinkedIn profile, too, if you want to draw in certain types of work.

Don’t just treated it as A DOCUMENT. If anything, what you should be doing is uploading this enormous one onto job boards and, in the more recent years, emphasize things that you have done into greater length

and minimize the older work. After all, how interested are you going to be in doing work that you did in the Stone Ages? You want to be doing work like your more current work.

Focusing on the current stuff. Make it very long and detailed. Uploaded it to a job board. Then, when you are submitting a resume for a job, when you are a hunter applying for positions or networking with individuals, you want to tailor your resume to what that firm or hiring manager is looking for. Turn your resume into a living breathing document, rather than having it become a “one-size-fits-all” document – – because one size doesn’t fit all in resumes.

You may have heard me say many times that, like the broken watch that is right twice a day, you will get some interviews from that one resume but miss out on far more. That’s because you know what you’ve done and your resume doesn’t say clearly enough for anyone else to know it.

After all, the reader doesn’t know you and if you have done X for that firm, you have probably done Y too, unless you tell them, unless you put it in your resume.  Unless they can find that doing keyword searching in your resume or on your LinkedIn profile, they are not going to believe you have that experience.

Make the fit obvious.  Adapt your resume to particular needsand then send it out.

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Do you think employers are trying to help you?

You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell you as much as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com changes that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

You can order a copy of “Diagnosing Your Job Search Problems” for Kindle for $.99 and receive free Kindle versions of “No BS Resume Advice” and “Interview Preparation.”

Don’t forget to give the show 5 stars and a good review in iTunes

How to Proofread Your Resume

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You know you have to proofread your resume. What is the best way? In this video, Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter discusses the best way to proofread your resume.

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I want to give you some advice about proofreading your resume. Everyone thinks their resume has no spelling or grammar mistakes, no punctuation errors, no misused words. I know that’s true because they would be sending their resume to me if they believe they had any of these mistakes in them.

But I read so many resumes that have mistakes in them – – words that are incorrectly used like “there” and “their.” I know some people can catch the difference but sometimes software jumps the word or letter and no one notices and he gets through.

Here’s my advice for proofreading; I know it’s a lot of quirky but I know it is effective.

I want you to read your resume from the end to the beginning. Start with the last sentence. We did. Is it correct. Is it correct grammatically correct. Is the spelling correct. Good. Go to the next sentence above.

Start of the end and work your way up to the beginning.

I suggest this for a few reasons. The first is that is the exact opposite of what you would expect to you will see things that you wouldn’t otherwise notice. You’ll see things freshly, instead of in the way that was constructed.

Habit says that we tend to skim when we see things in a familiar way. This is not a familiar way of doing things.

The third reason is because I see more errors at the end of the resume that I do at the beginning. It seems that the later you get into the job history, the more likely it is that you make a mistake because you start rushing a bit.

So, start at the end and work your way out. Last sentence to first sentence, look at every sentence of your resume. Make sure there are no spelling or grammatical errors. Make sure there are no misused terms. Look for specific words that might be in your resume that, if misspelled would also be correct.

Let me give you an example using old technology. Often, the term, “Novell” (that’s an IT term) would be misspelled as “novel.” Maybe someone’s keyboard stuck and only one L came out. Whatever the reason was, that was a common misspelling. Spellchecking software wouldn’t recognize it because the word “novel”is a correctly spelt word.

Look for terms like that they might exist in your resume, that if misspelled, might get through the spellchecker (for you accountants, think of the word gap and GAAP).

If you follow this advice your resume won’t have those dumb errors that cause people like me and hiring managers to go, “Huh? What was she thinking?” Or, “what was he thinking?”

[/spp-transcript]

Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Stop With the Superlatives!

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Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter encourages you to stop using superlatives to describe yourself in your resume and/or LinkedIn profile.

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I want to talk with you today about a certain peeve I have about resumes. This extends to LinkedIn profiles as well, but, I was reminded of it when I was interviewing someone for Job Search Radio last week who laid it out so beautifully.

When you read a resume or LinkedIn profile and the person describes themselves with superlatives of any kind (it doesn’t matter if there is one or 15; they are people who describe themselves with 15), when you describe yourself as a “visionary leader” with “extraordinary capabilities to enhance leadership ideas,”… No one believes you!

You just show yourself to be a fool. If anything, minimize your terms; being a minimalist when describing yourself is far more effective than these terms that are thought of as being BS. Why use the fluff when they do nothing to enhance the impression you give in people’s minds about you and instead caused them to think worse of you?

One of you done that was so visionary anyway? Let’s get practical about this. You’re going to be interviewed and they’re going to ask you, “What have you done this so visionary?”

What’s your answer? Nothing. You have nothing that is visionary in your portfolio. It was all BS, they knew it and called you on it.

So, cut the crap and get down to the brass tacks. Tell people what you know and what you’ve done. What you’ve succeeded in and how much money you help your firm make or save. Get the metrics in there (remember, if you work for a public company, you need to be careful with sharing some of that information to avoid revealing something proprietary or confidential).

[/spp-transcript]

Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Keep Your Résumé Up-To-Date

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Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter discusses the importance of keeping your resume up to date even after you start a new job.

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Right now, you are aggressively looking for work but I want to plant a seed with you. You’re going to find a job; it may not happen as soon as you like but you are gonna find a job.

Normally, in human nature seems to suggest that you exhale deeply and relax and you stop being open to other things.

If the recession has taught you anything it is that you need to be prepared at all times because you never know when you’ll need to look for work again.

Even if you’re happy, you never know when you’ll find the right opportunity land in your lap with someone calling up and saying, “I’ve got this great opportunity; we talked for a few minutes.”

My encouragement for you is to maintain an up-to-date resume. Every three or four months, sit down with yourself, take about 30 to 40 minutes, and jot down some notes about what you’ve accomplished during the previous three months.

This serves a couple of purposes. First, if you remained with your organization for years, great! During that time, you will get reviewed. Sometimes people are reviewed by new hiring managers or new managers have just taken over a group and don’t really know what the person has done over the year.

Some people freak out under those circumstances and panic. They are ill prepared for the review meeting and this will allow you to be prepared. Again, it’s a habit. Set an alarm in your phone or in Outlook. Set it up in a way that every few months you sit down with yourself, write down what you’ve done and update your resume.

Next, if you get that proverbial knock on the door on the shoulder that says, “I’ve got a great opportunity,” you aren’t starting at that point trying to construct a resume you might be busy or anxious.

Again, someone’s knocking on your door or tap you on the shoulder; you don’t want to stand be writing the resume because love other things on your plate. Better to be ready at that point because you’ve been doing your homework assignment and have treated yourself like a business of one, looking out for your interests, just like your employer is looking out for their interests.

You always want to be ready for that tap on the shoulder so that you are not then taking a few days to write your resume and risk losing out on an opportunity.

The fact of the matter is, if you say you’re going to take a day or two to write that resume, the next person who is called may not be taking a day or two. They may be getting in the door ahead of you, creating a great impression and locking you out of an opportunity.

Do yourself a favor. When you lay on this job, set up an alarm in your phone, in Outlook, or whatever system you use to remind you that every 3 to 4 months you take the time to update your resume so that it is no big production when you need one.

[/spp-transcript]

 

Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Want to Convey More Information? Here’s How.

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Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter explains how to give more texture and information in your resume without making it too long.

 

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I want to give you some no BS resume advice to help your resume stand out, particularly if you are veteran professional, a person with a lot of experience and want to talk about some of the things that you’ve accomplished in greater detail than what resume would normally afford you.

Convention (and I think it’s a smart one) is that resumes to go longer than two MAYBE 2 1/2 pages under special circumstances. I don’t believe in one page resumes you are a novice or looking for an entry-level position.

I want to help you get more texture into your resume if you are someone with more experience.

Let’s say your manager, a director, a VP or a C level professional, and you are submitting your resume for possession. You want to talk about what you’ve done but you also understand that you need to keep your resume to particular length what do you do?

Hyperlinks.

Since you are submitting your resume through an electronic medium anyway (it’s not like you sending a piece of paper anymore), what you can do, for example, to use an example from IT, his let’s say you work on a project and want to go into more detail in your resume will allow space for, underneath the project name that you work for, including hyperlink that can go to the video that you created for you too, a more detailed description of what it is that you stepped into we took over the project and the things that you accomplished,.

You can tell stories and video. You can tell stories and text.

Obviously, this needs to be well written and/or well acted. You may need to do these a couple of times and have people look at it before submitting it to organizations.

But why not use the power of the web? Why not use the power of mobile to connect the document with more detail about the work that you’ve done?

As I’ve said before, stories are extremely powerful. Think of how you describe this project or this task that you’ve been did in an interview. You would share a lot of texture about it. You would describe what it is that you stepped into, what you accomplished, the money you saved for your firm, the money you earned your firm, the technology utilized, the numbers of people who report to you… All the story for this project would be told.

It will be a lot of space to use an individual document but if you’re using video, if you’re using a podcast, you can use a service like freeconferencecalling.com or freeconferencecall.com to record an audio to share with the firm, to talk about what you stepped into. A printed version of this would work as well.

So, again, it has to be well-prepared and well-rehearsed, as well as well-executed for it to work.

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Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Do You Want the Best Résumé You Can Write or . . .?

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Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter poses a dilemma for job hunters . . . Do you want the best resume you can write or the best resume?

 

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Do you want to use the best resume you can write or do you want to have the best resume?

99.9% of the time there’s a big difference between what you can write and what a professional can write. You may be the best person at what you do and when a friend comes to for advice about it, you can recognize there an amateur by comparison to you. A professional resume writer is like that for you.

They can construct a great basic resume. The neck to be able to write a resume for every single job you want to apply for. They are, you can tweak the resume that they construct two-tailed for the job you’re going to apply for. They will give you a good basic resume to be affected far more often and be far better than what you can do.

It will take them a lot less time and you can tweak it a little bit once you get it back from them to make it perfect in your eyes.

When all is said and done, do you want to write the best resume that you can do or do you want to have the best resume?

If you want a few recommendations of resume services, email me at thebiggamehunter@Gmail.com. I’ll send an email to you with a few recommendations of services that you can use.

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Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions. JOIN NOW BEFORE THE PRICE INCREASE ON SEPTEMBER 5TH

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Posting Your Résumé on the Web

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Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter explains the importance of not just uploading a resume to job boards but suggests a free alternative that allows recruiters to find your resume for free.

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SUMMARY

A lot of people use job boards. They shouldn’t be the only tool in your quiver but their great tool.

Here’s another tool to use.

Instead of just putting your resume upon a job board, why don’t you set up a website purely for your reume? You can use a service like wix.com and creaEte a one-page website (wix allows more),keyword optimized, SEO optimized so people can find it through Google.

Wix is free to there’s no excuse for a financial standpoint not to do this. All were talking about is taking your existing resume and putting it up on the web for people to find it for free.

Now if you make changes to your resume and other places, you will also need to change it on wix.

You know about LinkedIn and making sure your profile is set up well so that it is also keyword and SEO optimized. You need to do the same with your resume on wix or any other site you put your resume on.

The only cause that you will have is if you want to get your own domain. Otherwise they will issue one like jeffaltman.wix.com (that is not my real address. If it is a website is up your accident). That address is fine but you wait may want something specific to you and your taste. It would cost $10/$14 to get a custom domain.

Since you are giving it out to anyone it doesn’t matter if you have your own domain or not.

[/spp-transcript]

Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.

Connect with me on LinkedIn