resume tips

Resume Pet Peeves

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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.

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.”

What Do Hiring Managers Think of Resumes with Quantified Accomplishments? | Job Search Radio

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If my resume describes actions that “increased revenue by $1 million,” or “Increased productivity by 50%,” are hiring managers generally impressed, or do they assume the numbers are all made up? Do they want to see numbers like that?

[spp-tweet tweet=”Business is the language of numbers.”]

[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 leadership and career 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.

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.”

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

What Makes A Great Resume? (VIDEO)

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[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.

Advice about writing 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.

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.

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.”

 

No BS Coaching Advice

Instead of “Responsible for” | No BS Job Search Advice Radio

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EP 602 Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter offers words you can use instead of “Responsible for” in your resume so that you don’t bore the reader.

[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.

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.

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

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

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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.

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.

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)

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

oops

[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.

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.

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

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[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.

feedback

[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.

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.

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

Functional Resumes?

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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]

 

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.

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.”

Editing the Résumé That Is Too Long

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Jeff Altman , The Big Game Hunter explains how to edit an overly long résumé.

 

[spp-transcript]

Today, let’s talk about pruning their resume that is ridiculously long. I know in some fields and some academic settings, it seems essential to have a 10 page resume. In industry, that isn’t the case. You want to get your resume to two or 2 1/2 pages in length. Why? Because no one really cares about what you did of the Stone Ages except to see if you had a career progression.

Here’s what you need to do.

  1. Look at the most recent 10 years. That is the area to emphasize. Anything before that you can summarize by saying, “Prior experience was as a (fill in the blank) and (list two or three firms) between “list the dates). So what you’re doing is indicating what you did prior to 10 years ago with a quick summary.
  2. What if your resume is three or four pages and that’s just the past 10 years? Let me ask you a friend question. Will anyone care what you did nine years ago? Yes, you did it but will this relate to the kind of position that you are going for now? Is there any experience for any skill needed from 10 years ago that is pivotal for what you are going for today? Probably not. If there is, you have to include it and risk going to along resume. However, I must in all candor say that, in most fields, it’s completely irrelevant to  the kind of position you’re going for today and your ego is getting in the way.

You have to go in with a critical eye and ask yourself, “This is the kind of job them going for. What’s the background of people that they are looking for? Are the keywords going to pop up for what I did 10 years ago and not call me anyway or is this relevant to what I’m doing now?” If it’s irrelevant, get rid of it or minimize. You can do much shorter descriptions of your work or from anything in your past then what you demonstrate today.

When most firms evaluate someone to determine whether they will interview them are looking at just the past few years. The filler is the old stuff and, if you look at their behavior, they are not reading a resume. They are reading screenshots on a computer screen. It is rare when they print out a resume to read it. How many page downs do you think they do? Not a lot.

The most important work is the past few years. As you get past that it becomes progressively less relevant to them. Take a hatchet to it. Cut it down. You have to do it. Not doing it will only hurt you in the end.

[/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.

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.

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.”

How to Proofread Your Resume

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You know you have to proofread your resume. What is the best way? In this video, Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter discusses the best way to proofread your resume.

[spp-transcript]

I want to give you some advice about proofreading your resume. Everyone thinks their resume has no spelling or grammar mistakes, no punctuation errors, no misused words. I know that’s true because they would be sending their resume to me if they believe they had any of these mistakes in them.

But I read so many resumes that have mistakes in them – – words that are incorrectly used like “there” and “their.” I know some people can catch the difference but sometimes software jumps the word or letter and no one notices and he gets through.

Here’s my advice for proofreading; I know it’s a lot of quirky but I know it is effective.

I want you to read your resume from the end to the beginning. Start with the last sentence. We did. Is it correct. Is it correct grammatically correct. Is the spelling correct. Good. Go to the next sentence above.

Start of the end and work your way up to the beginning.

I suggest this for a few reasons. The first is that is the exact opposite of what you would expect to you will see things that you wouldn’t otherwise notice. You’ll see things freshly, instead of in the way that was constructed.

Habit says that we tend to skim when we see things in a familiar way. This is not a familiar way of doing things.

The third reason is because I see more errors at the end of the resume that I do at the beginning. It seems that the later you get into the job history, the more likely it is that you make a mistake because you start rushing a bit.

So, start at the end and work your way out. Last sentence to first sentence, look at every sentence of your resume. Make sure there are no spelling or grammatical errors. Make sure there are no misused terms. Look for specific words that might be in your resume that, if misspelled would also be correct.

Let me give you an example using old technology. Often, the term, “Novell” (that’s an IT term) would be misspelled as “novel.” Maybe someone’s keyboard stuck and only one L came out. Whatever the reason was, that was a common misspelling. Spellchecking software wouldn’t recognize it because the word “novel”is a correctly spelt word.

Look for terms like that they might exist in your resume, that if misspelled, might get through the spellchecker (for you accountants, think of the word gap and GAAP).

If you follow this advice your resume won’t have those dumb errors that cause people like me and hiring managers to go, “Huh? What was she thinking?” Or, “what was he thinking?”

[/spp-transcript]

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