resume preparation

Executives–Be Careful With Those Metrics!

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Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter points out how executives need to be careful when discussing metrics on the resume and in an interview.

[spp-transcript]

I picked up a great job search tip from Perry Newman (www.perrynewman.com) when I interviewed him for Job Search Radio recently.

Perry pointed at something that I’d forgotten and that I had not been emphasizing when speaking with people– if you’re a veteran professional, if you are an executive or at a C level for an organization, you have to be careful with the metrics that you reveal if you work for a public corporation.

If you provide real numbers, sometimes those metrics are way too revealing you are disclosing information that may not be public yet.

However, if you speak in terms of percentages instead of real numbers, they are not at risk of an employer looking at you and thinking, “Gee, that was confidential information I was just told.”

That information might give them a competitive advantage to your firm and reveal too much about your current employer and cause them to have an advantage in certain negotiations and in certain situations.

Again, for use in executive, you have a fiduciary responsibility to your current organization. You cannot cross that line. Firms will listen to you and wonder whether you will do that to them, too. You don’t ever want to be in those circumstances.

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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

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.

 

[spp-transcript]

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

Targeting Your Résumé

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Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter explains the importance of targeting your résumé when you submit it to an employer.

 

[spp-transcript]

I want to give you some advice about your resume. I’m not talking about the generic resume you put up on a job board for people to contact you about. Then resume should be as large and broad and inclusive as possible, particularly with regard to the last 10 years of your career or your most recent work experience.

Why?

Because it’s most likely would be hired based upon the last two positions (to be clear, I’m not talking about consulting assignments because those could be much shorter); think in terms of four or five years.

So in this resume in needs to be full, encompassing, particularly with regard to the last five years of your career.

With the resume that you are submitting to the employer directly, you can’t send that resume. Why? Because it carries a lot of extraneous things that this employer won’t care about.

Remember the 80-20 rule? 80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients?

What you want to do with your resume is focusing in on the elements of your experience that fit what this firm is looking for.

If you’re applying for a job based upon online listing, you have the roadmap right there! If you have referral to someone who’s hiring, and someone who is told you about this position, well, they know about the job you can ask them about it.

Then, tailor your resume to what’s important this firm and minimize (I didn’t say eliminate) the other stuff. Why? Because they don’t care. What they care about is what they are trying to find in the way of an employee.

Remember, when you meet with them didn’t want to talk about what you’ve done. They want to talk about what you’ve done that matters to them. They want to talk about your relevant experience for the problem they have that needs to be solved by hiring someone.

If you start by focusing your attention on that, I can assure you that you are going to get more interviews.

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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