Day: May 9, 2015

6 Dumb Things People Do When Submitting Their Resume

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There are a thousand and one dumb things people do to sabotage themselves and their job search. Here a few of the most egregious mistakes people make.

1. Stupid file names for their resume .  I received a resume this week from a technology executive who should have known better. He has a good background but named his resume file some like, “His Name cut and paste August 2009.”

Why would you ever include the expression, “cut and paste” as part of the file name for any document, even if it is true?  It just tells the reader that you threw something together quickly. Is that the message you want to convey to an employer or recruiter you want to be impressed by you?

2. Including a cover letter as a separate attachment. No one opens a cover letter file because it is a waste of time. Why? Because most people don’t know how to write a good cover letter so why bother?

It is far better to write what you might consider a cover letter in the message are of your email, instead of doing that. Don’t do the kind of addressing and salutation you might if you were writing a formal business letter. Use the space to make the case for how your experience fits what they are looking for.

3. Embedding your name, address and contact information as an embedded header at the top of your resume. This one is a subtle one and would require you to understand how corporations and recruiters work.

When organizations and recruiters import data about you into their systems, they don’t manually type your information into their systems, they use parsing software to read it and populate fields. With many types of this software, embedded headers will interfere with the software doing that and your information having to be manually imported.

Who has time for that? The result is you will miss out on opportunities.

4. Mass emailing your resume in the “TO:” field of your email. Why would you want to tell people that you’ve emailed your resume to 165 employers and recruiting firms?

5. Not spell checking your resume. I understand that certain words will go through a spelling checker even though they might be misused.

For example, for years, the words, “NOVEL” would pass through a spell checker even though the intended word was, “Novell.”in particular, visually check any professional term carefully to insure that your resume does not have misusages or misspellings.

6. Submitting the Same Resume Over and Over Again to Every Job as though your one resume will make the case for every job you apply for.   Everyone knows the expression, “The broken watch is right twice a day yet people violate that simple true statement by emailing the same resume over and over again to every job they apply for as though every job is identical.

Tailored resumes help people receive good results. Flipping the same resume over and over again like burgers at a fast food restaurant will give you poor results.

Isn’t showing care when you submit your resume worthwhile?

 

 

 

© 2008 all rights reserved.

Everyone Should Know You Are Looking

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I sat with John Sampson last week for an hour and talked with him about the importance of networking. If you don’t know John, he is a technology manager in New Jersey who rums a large networking group called MIS Network Associates as an act of giving back (I know, I suggested ways he could make it more profitable and he rebuffed the ideas, saying it was an act of love for all the help he has received.

Beyond helping people develop their elevator pitch (you know, the 30 second commercial about your work), John encourages members to tell everyone that they are looking for work and what kind of job they do.

Can your wife explain what you do in 30 seconds or less? Make sure they can!

He told a wonderful story about how one of his members has being pushed by their cleaning person for a resume. Eventually, the man’s wife told him, “Give her the resume so I can get her off my back!”

It seems that the woman’s husband managed a function at a large employer in the area and hired him for a terrific job.

Have you told your mechanic, doctor, hairdresser, accountant, lawyer, best friend, pastor, rabbi, monk, priest, nun, shoemaker, former boss (gasping for air) that you’re looking for a job?

Tell everyone and tell them what you do!

© 2009 all rights reserved.

Be Careful With Your Privacy Settings on Facebook While Job Hunting

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Early in the week, I was on Facebook and noticed an old friend online who I had not spoken with in more than a year so I thought I would contact him through Messenger and get caught up.

I heard a terrible story from him that I think should be shared with you.

It seems he was up for a consulting assignment with a firm and received a call from the party that trying to use his services.

It seems that he was connected with a number of people on Facebook at the potential client who then decided to dig a little deeper to get a feel for him prior to using it services.

One of the things they found was a photo that they judged inappropriate (I won’t go into details because what is inappropriate to some is fine with others) and it was causing them to have second thoughts about his judgement and using his services.

Imagine being in a job search, interviewing for weeks, feeling like you’re about to receive a job offer when someone goes to Facebook, Twitter, Xing, Google or LinkedIn and with very little effort finds something questionable about you?

Firms ARE looking at all sorts of publicly available information when deciding to hire someone.

Don’t make it easy for them to disqualify you.

© 2010 all rights reserved.

Self-Promoting Yourself Into a Job

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If you’re like most people, you’ve never written a press release to call attention to a success you’ve had.

And rightly so.

But some of you should be sending out press releases or encouraging your company to promote things that you and your group are doing because they are significant.

And most of you can be doing the next best thing to a press release:

The periodic note

An old friend of mine would mail a note to all of her friends bring them up-to-date on the things that were going on in her life, her professional successes, accomplishments and, occasionally, the frustrations. It allowed her to stay in contact with lot of people who would offer her advice, suggestions and jobs.

Today, with email, it is much easier than before.

Every 6 months, send an email to all of your friends, acquaintances and former colleagues to bring them up-to-date. Skip the complaints about your boss. Former colleagues may be in contact with them and you don’t want to generate problems.

It’s easy to add people to Outlook and other products like it; you can also use services like Tempo or any other schedule/calendar app on your phone to schedule the calls.

Any way you look at it, since only 22% of positions are filled by recruiters and fewer than 6% via job boards, your connects and their ability to think of you will go a long way to helping jobs land in your lap.

©2006, 2010, 2015 all rights reserved.

The Easiest Time of the Year to Network

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Many people I speak with do very poor or limited networking. They think sending out LinkedIn connection requests to strangers is networking even though they do nothing to take advantage of the connection or even offer to help out the person they have connected with.

That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Does it make any sense to you?

As I write this, we have entered the “Thanksgiving to New Year’s End of Year Bonanza” period when the biggest jerk in your former professional life will be open to networking and offering some help.

It’s easy . . . send a holiday card to re-connect. Do it early in December to open the door to recognition and a smile. The card can be sent as an ecard to save on cost (use www.Greetings123.com, one of the few remaining free sites) to send out holiday greetings and best wishes.

A week or two later, place a call to the person to check in on life, the universe, everything . . .you know . . . chit chat. Tell them about family and re-kindle the connection. In this call or in one more, you open the door to asking for help with your job search.

Most people will be friendly enough and well-mannered enough to listen and re-kindle the relationship. Nothing may come of the networking effort but networking will never work without the personal contact of a connection like this, especially with people you already know.

© 2010 all rights reserved.

Using Informational Interviews in Your Job Search

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When people join social networks, it seems like all they do is try to add lots of people. They never consider there are actual ways to use the social networks to help meet employers and make USEFUL connections.

Informational interviews were very popular many years ago as a way to learn about an employer, industry, career change or something you wanted to learn. They are a way to pick someone’s brain, create a favorable impression, learn, ask for a referral and a host of other things that can facilitate being hired.

When you target an employer, go to the firm’s page on LinkedIn and see whether there is someone you are already connected with who works there or if one of your university alumni works there or has worked there.

Search Twitter for mentions or Twellow for people who list the employer in their profile

On Facebook, try BranchOut as a way to hook up with people.

If the person is not local, see if you can arrange to call or skype them for a few minutes of time.

How should you reach out to them?

Give some thought as to what you might want to learn from them. If you are someone reaching out for advice about a career change, your questions might be pretty obvious– How did you start out? Did you have a plan to get to where you are and what was it? What training did you receive and how did you get it? There a million possible questions you can ask but distill them to the important ones for you.

If you are job hunting, you might want to speak with them about the function they perform, how the department is structured, the nature of the work, who runs the function . . . again, a million possible questions.

See if you can find out about the entry point to the firm. Everyone will send you to HR or a website but that is often useless. See if they can point you to the person who manages or is the Director of the function.

Just get to the point quickly and don’t waste their time.

Remember to follow up and let them know the result of using their advice or referral.

Social networking isn’t about “the scoreboard of connections.” It’s about using your connections and helping your connections.

Informational interviews are a great way of doing that.

© 2012 all rights reserved.

Google+ and Your Job Search

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Are you one of the millions of people who have signed up for Google+?

If you are, you have seen what has the potential for being a power communications platform that can be incorporated into a job search.

G+ can already be incorporated into your search.

1. Create Circles

Circles are one of G+’s additions to social networking. It is the idea of creating small; (or eventually) large groups of people who you want to tell about certain aspects of your lilfe, work or share information with. Google offers Friends, Acquaintances, Family and a few others.

Create them for colleagues at work because, you kinow, they will eventually change jobs and this will let you stay in contact with them easily (even if they are not on G+, Google emails them).

2. Huddles

Huddles is a video chat service that lets you create adhoc chats. I think of this is a great collaboration tool for job hunters to support one another. Imagine there are four of you who meet at a networking event who want to stay in contact and support one another. Create a huddle for these four, meet online regularly and create a mini networking/support group with one another between meetings of your bigger group.

3. Sparks

Although Google+ initially offers Sparks around a few categories, you can create Sparks around different topics of interest for you. Sparks will deliver information on those topics to you. It’s like having a mini RSS feed or mini news service available to you.

Tools like G+, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are tools to help you, not just during your current job search for the next one and the one after that. Like investing money, it can become a long term asset that can support you for years to come if you take the time to make regular deposits.

© 2011 all rights reserved.

Who Do You Work For? The Affects of Branding

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We are all influenced by brands and I can prove it to you.

When you by detergent to do your laundry, I bet you don’t read the list of chemicals from one brand, compare it with three others and say, “Hmm. The combination of these in this brand will probably be far superior to the combination in these other three.” You never say that, do you?

Instead you assume they’ll all do the same job and buy one as opposed to another because it’s on sale, you have a coupon, or has no scent or maybe your wife, husband or mother specified what they wanted. You do anything other than figure out which will actually make your laundry cleaner.

When companies hire and when recruiters screen resumes, we’re also influenced by brands. We see names we know like a large company or a “hot” company or a recognized leaders in our market area and we believe this person is better than someone at a company we’ve never heard of. Right or wrong, that’s human nature.

What can you do if you work for a small company or a “no-name company?” What can you do to create a better impression?

The answer is to define it for the recipient.

For example, a person works for Jillie Jack Jay Consultants (I made that up), what do you write? You might write something like 32 person regional strategy and operations consulting firm focused on the hospitality industry.

If you work for Benoit Fashion (again made up. Any similarity between this name and a real one is accidental), you might say that they are a $50 million dollar swimwear firm. Get the idea?

Leaving a company that few have heard of to stand on its own does little to create a positive impression. Defining it gives people a better opportunity to understand it, understand your experience and be interested.

© 2006, 2011 All rights reserved Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

Brand Yourself to Avoid Being Laid Off

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As someone who has spent several years building a  brand that offers me an advantage, I am quite aware of how easy it is to develop a brand these days.

Why is it important to build a brand? It can help you avoid being laid off and help you find a job more easily.

Here are some ways to create space in peoples’ minds that will give you an edge.

1. Become the resident expert in something or some skill. Being an expert causes people to regard you highly (It may also cause you to become “stuck” but that’s a topic for another day)

2. Become a resource for one and all. Becoming a connector for one and all makes you valuable to people. If losing you means losing contacts that are needed, it is less likely you will be fired.

3. Constantly build your network. Two years ago, more than a year before the. world economy collapsed, I wrote that the labor boom times were about to end and that you needed to have your network in place. For a job search, 22% of jobs are filled by recruiters and 6% by job boards. How do you think the rest are filled? Your network! Building your network leaves you well prepared.

4. Use the social networks to make your brand ubiquitous. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Xing . . . even groups using Ning allow you to make people aware of your experience and knowledge. Becoming an expert is as easy as posting some messages from time to time.

5. Create content. Many years ago, when a friend was trying to advance his career, I encouraged him to write articles for trade magazines and become a speaker. He was an AVP with a bank at the time and within ten years was hired as a partner at a large professional services firm. Today, blogs, ezines and online groups make becoming an online celebrity and/or resident expert much easier.

Blog about how to best do certain things. Post in groups on LinkedIn. Just remember that if you blog something “humorous” that someone could interpret as being “stupid” or “risque,” it can come back to hurt you.

For example, the proprietary trader (or prop trader) whose online message that he had lost a lot of money and was looking for a system that would be better than what he traded by, was refused an interview that would have exposed him to their secret trading models because they found his message via Google.

6. Help people with endorsements. Too many people have developed a closed mindset where they refuse to help people with testimonials, particularly on sites like LinkedIn. People there who ask me for testimonials often don’t know me and I certainly can’t vouch for their work or performance.

I will write something supportive of those I can actually vouch for . Try to help your current and former colleagues, subordinates and friends, even if it means just writing about their character.

© 2009, 2010, 2015 all rights reserved.

The Best Way to Look for a Job

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If you are like most of my subscribers, you are actively looking for work. In social work language, you are “in crisis” in that you can only remain out of work for a very finite period of time before dire consequences occur.

And, in fact, you picked the worst time to be looking for a job, not because of the economy but because there is a bias in the recruiting profession and among corporations about “active job hunters.”

The bias that exists is that people who are out looking for a job are not “the best” people– a firm chose them for a layoff and held on to “high achievers,” their better talent, their “stars.”

Given what you know of yourself, it is pretty ridiculous, isn’t it?

But this isn’t just “agency nonsense” but part of the beliefs of people on the line and in corporate HR.

I am sorry to say that I was part of the creation of this “Myth of the Passive Candidate” thirty or so years ago at a time when I could not afford an advertising budget and needed to differentiate myself from the bigger agencies that were spending tens of thousands of dollars every week.

I would market myself to firms and say, “I don’t just try to locate the best candidate who is reading ‘The New York Times’ on Sunday looking for a job. I try to find the best candidate.”

That distinction worked wonders for me and, as I taught others about its power it became part of agency culture and ingrained in corporate thinking even though times have changed and firms release superior talent all the time.

What can you do?

Not a heck of a lot.

But after you find work,I want you to shift your mindset.

You see, most people who have found a job think they don’t need help.

“I have a job I’m happy with. Leave me alone. I have work to do.”

Some people respond to recruiters with emails that seem to be yelling.

“How did you get my email address, you spammer (Uh, you left your resume up on a job board. I found you using Google or a research-oriented website)!

And then the next crisis hits and these people contact the same recruiters they have yelled at and expect them to have forgotten the rudeness (you think we don’t log that behavior in our applicant tracking systems).

What I want you to do in the future is think of yourself is always looking for work.

While President Clinton was President, his staff used the term, “the continuous campaign” to describe how they were always running for office and could not afford to become, “fat, dumb and happy.” They needed to always be selling the voters.

I am not suggesting that you keep your resume up on Monster and other job boards. In fact, take them down immediately!

I am telling you that LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing (if you are outside the US), Facebook and Doostang are the playpens of companies and recruiters who are looking for “passive job hunters.”

So regularly update your profile and treat it like a resume with quality keywords that describe what you do professionally.

If you receive an email or phone call from a recruiter or an email from a recruiter from a firm, treat them with respect and listen to what they offer.

Evaluate the recruiter what the recruiter has to offer. Ask questions. Answer their questions. Remember, they may record their experience of you in their tracking system so sell to them. Create a great impression.

Then make a decision as to whether to continue discussions.

DO NOT CLOSE THE DOOR WITHOUT LISTENING!

Offer a referral if you know someone who might be qualified and you aren’t interested.

Whatever you do, remember that the likelihood of your job lasting until retirement is small and it is better to look for a job when you have one than when you don’t.

© 2009 all rights reserved