resumes – Page 2 – Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter's Blog

What Does and Doesn’t Go Into Your Resume | Job Search Radio

April 11, 2017 by Jeff

[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSe-TqeUxuM[/svp]
What goes into a great resume? Is it a lot of facts a figures or something else?

Jeff speaks with Gabe Heillig of Action Resumes about what you need to put into your resume and not put into it so that you can attract attention for all the right reasons.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a coach who worked as a recruiter for what seems like one hundred years. His work involves life coaching, as well as executive job search coaching and leadership coaching.

JobSearchCoachingHQ.com offers 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.

START A 7 DAY FREE TRIAL

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

Are you interested in executive job search coaching, leadership coaching or life coaching from me? Email me at JeffAltman@TheBigGameHunter.us and put the word, “Coaching” in the subject line.

Resume Pet Peeves | No BS Job Search Advice Radio

February 4, 2017 by Jeff

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter offers effective resume advice that will keep you from annoying the people screening your resume. No jokes. No B.S..

[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 is a job search and leadership coach who worked as a 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.

NOW WITH A 7 DAY FREE TRIAL

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

Kill Blocky Resumes! | Job Search Radio

January 25, 2017January 24, 2017 by Jeff

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter gives you some No BS Resume Advice by encouraging you to think of the reader when you write your resume.

[spp-transcript]

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

Please give “Job Search Radio” a great review in iTunes. It helps other people discover the show and makes me happy!

Resume Pet Peeves

January 23, 2017 by Jeff

From The Archives

[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aCciyoeVUA[/svp]
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter offers effective resume advice that will keep you from annoying the people screening your resume. No jokes. No B.S..

[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 is a job search and leadership coach who worked as a recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.

NOW WITH A 7 DAY FREE TRIAL

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.”

What Makes A Great Resume? (VIDEO)

December 25, 2016 by Jeff

[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReIaFYJgibw[/svp]
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter offers concise advice about what goes into a great resume.

[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.

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.”

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

July 13, 2017December 8, 2016 by Jeff

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

[spp-transcript]

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.

[/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.

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)

November 20, 2016 by Jeff

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

[spp-transcript]

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.

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

November 8, 2016 by Jeff

[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.

[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.

[/spp-transcript]

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.

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

You Are a “Manager,” Not a “Manger”

October 15, 2016 by Jeff

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter encourages you to not be lazy and to spell and grammar check your résumé.

[spp-transcript]

I want to talk with you today about not making some of the common mistakes I see in resumes. Here is what I see time and again.

People don’t use the spellchecker with the result being that they describe themselves as “mangers” instead of “managers.” They are the “liason,” instead of the “liaison” for their firm or department. They “lead,” when they should have said “led.” And then there is my personal favorite one. They “asses,” instead of “assess.”

From a grammar perspective, people make a lot of mistakes as well. They use, “your,” instead of, “you’re.”

My point in all of this is not to be obnoxious but to point out that every time that you make a mistake in your resume, there are hairs on people’s next that bristle. You’re trying to make a good impression on someone. They start to asked themselves, “What’s going to happen when this person comes on board and you’re not trying to make a good impression. Where the screw ups going to occur?”

I want to encourage you to use Microsoft Word’s spellchecker and grammar checker. Spellchecker is perfect; grammar checker sometimes depends on the context.

When all is said and done, you want to make sure that the resume that you submit comes across perfectly. And that there are no grammar mistakes. Sometimes you have to make a visual examination of the resume because, in some of the examples that I gave, there were no spelling mistakes. Your usage mistakes as in the example that I gave of, “mangers,” versus “managers.”Manger would probably go through because it’s spelled correctly; managers the word that you intend to use.

So be conscious and you make a visual scan of your resume to make sure that no mistakes go through because certain words are spelled correctly but are being used incorrectly. Definitely, run the grammar checker. There are times that you may use a bullet point, for example, that isn’t the full sentence. Thus, you want to visually check the language to make sure that everything is accurate. This way you will make a great first impression by comparison to the lazy people who don’t do this.

I have to say lazy because what’s the big deal! You are running a spellchecker and a grammar checker. Is this so difficult to do?

[/spp-transcript]

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.

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.”

Functional Resumes?

October 14, 2016 by Jeff

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter speaks about functional resumes.

[spp-transcript]

let’s talk about functional resumes. I am not a fan of functional resumes. It is the problem with functional resumes – – they suggest that you’re hiding something. They suggest that the relevant experience that’s causing you to apply for this role is old. They’re suggesting that you are hiding large gaps in your employment history. Thus, even if you have the relevant experience, I’m not going to call you. At best, I’m going to send you an email that says, “Please send me a chronological resume.”

Why is that? Time is precious and you are obviously trying to hide something. You are obviously trying to hide gaps or that the information was old. Why else would you send a functional resume? Because you did this work last week? Of course, not. The fact remains that people use functional resumes regardless.

The only time a functional resume makes sense is if you are changing careers and your resume leads off with training that you have had that is relevant to your new role. Then, I can see functional resumes working.

Beyond that, all you doing is obscuring certain information that we need to know anyway and, if you think employers are any different, you’re kidding yourself. They aren’t. If anything, they won’t even stop and ask. They’re just going to hit the delete key.

I was involved with the CFO search not too long ago and received a lot of functional resumes for the search. I respond back with an email to those that demonstrate vaguely relevant experience and ask for chronological resume. Every single time, the relevant experience has been years old and the relevant to my client because what you been doing most recently is most pertinent to what matters to them. If you been away from the CFO function for a number of years because you can running a business and now it’s going out of business and now you have to go back to a CFO role, they aren’t interested in interviewing you or bring you on board.

Let me simply say “Ditch the functional resume!” You are not kidding anyone. All that you’re doing is wasting your time and other people’s time. Just don’t bother.

[/spp-transcript]

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.

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.”