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