Everyone Needs a “Resume Coach”

Can you imagine any competition, serious endeavor, an Olympic athlete or top performer in any field where a coach, consultant or mentor is not employed to achieve excellent results?  Isn’t that why sports coaches, fitness coaches, executive coaches, sales coaches, career coaches, life coaches and experts are sought?   They provide the strategy, tactics and best practices quickly and easily to achieve the results desired.

Yet, on many of the career blogs, you will see that many people insist on doing their own resumes and their own interviewing without using any type of career coaching, usually to save a little money.   While this do-it-yourself approach may result in people finding jobs, in today's competitive world, it may also result in an unnecessary, longer job search or a less than optimal result.   And the question always remains in this buyers market is– How can I get a competitive edge?  How do I win this resume game?

Are you a job seeker  facing this new world -- a highly competitive world,  much more demanding,  much more focused and much more consensus-oriented than in the past?  Have you experienced how the new systems, technologies, procedures, and the economy have made the hiring process much more complicated, impersonal and time consuming in recent years?    Much to the job seeker’s frustration, it has become a distinct two stage competition – first: the resume competition  and second: the interview process. 

Perhaps you’ve tried to reach the hiring manager and tried to sell yourself into an interview?  Maybe you’ve left multiple messages to the recruiter in HR trying to follow up on the resume that you forwarded for the job? It's very difficult to get any personal response.  So your resume is forced to do your selling for you. 

So how can you get an “edge” using a “resume coach”?  Here are some facts:

• When thousands of resumes are searched by recruiters, if you’re not on page 1 or 2, you’re probably out.
• A poor candidate can have an elegant, professional looking resume while a stronger candidate can be left behind because of poor resume aesthetics or subpar presentation and no one will ever know.  It’s a one way street.
• If a poor resume will generate a 1/20 interview ratio, an exceptional resume will generate a 1/6 ratio.
• Resumes are often read with a negative bias: “what is this candidate missing?”
• As a long time recruiter, 50% of the resumes that I screened where poorly written.   About 40% were at least average and only 10% were effective selling resumes.   Most resumes are narrative, unfocused and are not “selling resumes”.  
• A well-crafted “Selling Resume” is at least 31% more likely to land interviews, 40% more likely to receive a job offer, and 38% more likely to be contacted by recruiters than the average resume. So in order get an edge in the paper competition your document can’t be just a resume  ----   but a Selling Resume!

Since most of us do not have sales experience, and are too close to the topic to really sell ourselves objectively, we need to consult a sales-oriented advisor, a “resume coach” to guide us in the presentation.   A selling resume is not about “you “, but about “how you can help solve a problem”.  Every hiring manager has a business problem that they need solved by brining aboard a new hire.  Your resume has to sell you as a solution.

There many sources of resume information, “misinformation” and outdated advice in the marketplace.  Poor results, even after spending a lot of money, are not uncommon.  Here are the choices:

• Free resources and resume templates that give routine results, rarely yielding an exceptional resume. In actuality, most of these resumes never clear the Applicant Tracking Systems used by recruiters and companies.
• Resume builders and free sources don’t care about quality or uniqueness.  They usually just want a resume for their primary purpose and agenda or it’s merely a “freebie” service leading you in to entice you purchase other products or services. 
• HR recruiters are limited to their own experience, agency recruiters simply can’t spend the time.  They take an average resume and try to present it with their own write ups - their own elevator pitch - in hopes of filling jobs that they will get paid for.   It’s easier than rewriting your resume and honestly, they don’t have a real investment in your career if it does not serve their immediate purpose.  Thus, opinions and misinformation about a good resume will be all over the place.
• When we do it ourselves, without specific coaching, we rarely create a selling resume because we are too close to the topic and too distant from the hiring process.  Are we the experts?
• A professional resume writer can produce good, average or poor results depending on the background of who you select and the result can be good or disappointing at any price.   The blogs are full of mixed reviews.
• Since this is a lifelong skill, the best alternative is for you to seek out the proper guidance and advice so that you can quickly and confidently acquire the expertise needed to craft and tailor an exceptional resume as you need it throughout your career.   A resume also becomes a branding tool for social networks where you are checked out and found by recruiters.

Who would be the best sources for a Resume Coach?  

If you want to win the resume game, your resume must be a selling document.  Therefore, a talented career coach or third party recruiter, who has a sales background and understands the recruiting process in your field is the most obvious choice.  Paying for their time, advice and guidance is so minor compared to the upside and the results it could yield.   Ask yourself --- if your job search is even 2 days shorter, your job offer is $2000 more, or the position obtained puts you on a faster track, is there a better  investment for your career?

Therefore a “selling resume” is more than an advertisement in today’s world. It is a marketing proposal for your services.   Get an edge. Get a sales-oriented coach to help you win the resume game. 

Twitter does the “Monster Match”

I know it’s closer to Mother’s Day than it is to Halloween, but this is appropriate regardless of the time of year, especially with all the vampire movies selling millions of tickets these days.  To paraphrase the old Bobby “Boris” Pickett & The Cryptkickers song,

“They did the match...they did the monster match…”

All silliness aside, this is a new and potentially very useful initiative from one of the biggest “Monster” of job boards and Twitter, a wildly popular “micro-blogging” site. That was just in case you had been under a rock for a while and hadn’t heard of twitter.  ;-)  

Monster has a new tool called Job Search Beta that uses Twitter to connect job seekers with job opportunities.  They’ve blocked off the time slots of 3-4 PM Eastern Time on Wednesdays and Fridays, which they’re calling #WorkWednesday and #HireFriday.  During those times, job seekers can tweet what position they’re looking for and where they’re looking to work, and Monster will respond with a suitable match. 

Here’s how it works:  Simply log in to your Twitter account, and create a new tweet.  Use @MonsterKAW and the hashtag #monsterlive together with a location and job title, such as the following:

@MonsterKaw looking for a business development manager job in Atlanta, GA #monsterlive

Then Monster will respond with something like:

@YourTwitterName XYZ Inc is hiring a business development manager in ATL.  More Results: http://mnster.me/283jzw #monsterlive

Why do this instead of just going to Monster’s site?  Well, one possibility is if your job search is in “stealth mode” and you are “working” during those times, at least that way visits to Monster.com won’t show up on your server logs and potentially be brought to the attention of your boss. 

Another option could be to use a tool such as SocialOomph to schedule your tweets in advance, and send out tweets during those particular times, with your target positions.  Then you can simply check your Twitter account and not even type in “monster” or anything else that could get you caught by the boss’s watchful digital eye.  Better yet, check Twitter on your cell phone (personal cell, of course) and don’t even leave any evidence on your computer. 

So what happens if you miss those days?  Of course you can always visit the main Monster.com site, or their Facebook page, where you can also post requests for job openings.

Or you could use one of the many services that has been using Twitter for jobs far longer than Monster has – they’re a little late to the game, but better late than never.  TwitterJobSearch is a job search engine for Twitter, TweetMyJobs has over 5700 vertical channels for specific job types and locations, and can also filter out the ones not relevant to a job seeker, and just send the suitable jobs as a text to their cell phone.  Pretty cool, huh?  They also have a service called TweetMyResume where you can tweet your resume to 90,000+ followers.  Sure, not everyone’s going to be ON twitter at that moment but the key is that it’s searchable.  JobShouts is yet another, that filters out the spammy “work at home” opportunities claiming you, too, can become a millionaire simply by stuffing envelopes in just minutes a day! 

From your friends at CareerOyster – Your Online Career Coach.  And remember...

The World is Your Oyster...Be the Pearl!

David B. Wright is Chief Marketing Officer and Partner of CareerOyster 

How A Header In Your Resume Can Give Your Job Chances The Boot

Many job seekers use a header in their resume.  This usually includes their name and contact information.  While this can help your resume look good in printed form, it’s really not the best way to format your resume. 

Here’s why: Headers & footers are often not read properly by the Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) used by many recruiters and hiring companies.  While technically the headers can be read by most of these Applicant Tracking Systems, the problem is that it usually takes an extra step to make sure the information in the header is captured and stored in the ATS.  The real issue is that most recruiters just don’t have the time to take that step.  Think about it – when a recruiter or hiring company places an ad for a job, particularly in today’s economy where competition for each available job is high, they’ll get hundreds or even thousands of resumes from job seekers applying for that job.  So they’re overwhelmed and simply won’t make the time to take that extra step, particularly when they have tons of resumes from other qualified (and less-than-qualified) applicants. 

So if they don’t take the time to make sure the information in the header (and footer, for that matter) is properly imported into their Applicant Tracking System, here’s what happens: Your resume will be imported into their database, but guess what? It will be missing that key information contained in the header & footer sections of your resume.  So while your work history, experience, education and other fields will be in their database, it will be missing the most important information: how to contact you. So even if your resume highlights the skills and experience that are a perfect match for the job, you won’t get a chance to interview because your contact information won’t be in the database. 

This holds true for lots of other formatting, including tables, text boxes, and so on.  So using these tools may make your resume look great on paper, it dramatically reduces your chances of having the information in those fields in a recruiter’s database.  So you end up missing out on opportunities that you would otherwise get a chance at getting. 

Here’s what I suggest: use standard formatting to make your resume look as good as possible.  This means no headers, no images, no tables, no footers, no text boxes, and so on in your resume.  If you insist on using these tools, use them for a resume that you will print out and take to your job interviews, but make sure you submit resumes online and via email that do not use these formatting tools. 

The moral of the story: Jobseekers – don’t put your contact info into the header!

David B. Wright is Chief Marketing Officer and Partner of CareerOyster