[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.
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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.
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