Archive for May, 2009

For job seekers in high unemployment areas, relocation may be the only option.  If you are considering a move, you should check out the following resources:

Best Places:  Provides detailed reports by zip code, including housing, crime, climate, cost of living and education.

Great Schools: Provides detailed information on schools.  Compare elementary, middle and high schools within a school district based on test scores, teacher to student ratio and ratings from parents.

Salary.com:  Provides cost of living comparisons between metro areas and salary estimates for different careers.

BankRate: An interesting cost of living comparison tool showing the specific cost differences of a selection of common expenses.

One technique for writing a cover letter is to address each of the key requirements of the job.  This approach provides a bulleted list or a table.  Each line has one requirement and a short description of the job seekers experience with that specific task.

This technique can be very effective.  It focuses on the key experiences the hiring manager wants and organizes them in a very easy to read format.  When done well, a cover letter written this was should almost guarantee an interview before the hiring manger reads the resume.  Unfortunately, writing a cover letter in this style is often done poorly.

There are three primary pitfalls with this style.  First, the cover letter focuses on the key requirements of the position and provides a specific assessment of the job seeker’s experience with each.  If the job seeker does not have extensive impressive experience with each requirement, the format will highlight the holes in the job seeker’s background.

Second, you need to have an accurate and complete list of key priorities to write a cover letter in this format.  You may be able to get the key priorities from a posted job description.  Often, the job description will not list every requirement and the relative importance of the requirements is usually difficult to determine.  The reason for this is a result of where the job description originates.  Most companies have standard job descriptions for each position.  When the position opens up, the standard description is used.  The hiring manager may have specific challenges in their department that are slightly different from the job description.  Often, the hiring manager will post the standard description but actually assess candidates on the ability to meet the current challenges.  This can make it difficult or impossible to understand a position fully from just a job description.

Third, many job seekers provide vague assessments of their experience.  If you outline your experience relative to each job requirement, you need to be specific.  Generic answers will hurt the overall impression you make.

The cover letter I read today fell into a couple of these pitfalls.  Below are the first few bullets from the cover letter:

• Maintain and expand customer base: See resume
• Develop marketing plans: I have been doing that my entire career.
• Expand company revenues: I was instrumental in growing a small local manufacturing company into a national supplier with plants in three states.
• Manage trades shows: I have done them but it was not a major tool for us. 

The format of the bullets is good but the content doesn’t work.  The first bullet references the resume.  If you are going to call out your specific experience, you need to include it in the cover letter.  Don’t make the hiring manager go and look up the information.

The second bullet is extremely vague.  It says nothing about the role of the job seeker in developing marketing plans, the scope of the plans that were developed or the success of the plans.  We don’t know if the job seeker developed the marketing plan for the annual church bake sale for the last twenty years or if the job seeker was the chief architect of the global marketing efforts of a Fortune 500 company.

The third bullet is also vague.  It does not show the job seeker’s role, the scope of the sales growth or the time period of the accomplishment.

The fourth bullet highlights the lack of experience with this requirement.  Stating that trade shows were not a major tool is equivalent to saying that the job seeker has limited experience in this area.  If managing trade shows is a key priority, this bullet could sink the job seeker’s chances by itself.

To rewrite the bullets to be more effect, we need to be specific and focus on the benefits the job seeker has provided in their career:

• Maintain and expand customer base: Over a twenty year period, grew a small regional manufacturing business into the leading supplier of a line of precision equipment in North America, expanding the customer base from a limited number of local firm to almost every major company in the industry.
• Develop marketing plans: Developed and managed all marketing plans, including managing sales, estimating, proposal development, advertising, and customer relationships over a 20+ year period, resulting in an increase in sales from $2 million to over $14 million.
• Expand company revenues:  Entered a new market, growing sales from nothing to over $6 million.
• Manage trades shows: Managed and attended various industry trade shows over 20+ years in sales management. 

The bullets are much more specific.  The first three should make a very positive impression.  The fourth is vague but much more positive than the original.  If the majority of bullets are specific, one or two that are more general won’t hurt the overall impression.  Ideally, the job seeker would describe how many trade shows they attended, the sales results from attending and the names of the specific shows.

One final drawback of this style of cover letter is how it focuses on the requirements and not the job seeker’s strengths.  If your background matches the position exactly, this isn’t a problem.  Most people will not be an exact match though.  Your cover letter could be more effective focusing on your greatest strengths and accomplishments.  The cover letter is a sales pitch for you and you should chose the structure that fosters the best sales pitch.

If you aren’t going to be specific with each requirement, avoid this style cover letter.  It will do more harm than good.

When a hiring manager starts to read your cover letter and resume, you have no credibility.  The reader doesn’t know you.  They don’t know if they can trust you or if you are prone to exaggeration and lying.
This lack of credibility is highlighted when a job seeker leads off their cover letter with a boastful statement.  Hype without substance will not establish credibility, and without credibility, your hype won’t be believed.

This mistake was exhibited in the cover letter I received today.  The first sentence was pure hype:

When I saw your job listing I could not believe the uncanny resemblance of my experience to your specified duties.

Claims like this are common, but are unlikely to be believed.  If you were hiring and received a bunch of resumes with claims like this, would you believe all of them?  You can’t.  Every applicant isn’t perfect.

In reviewing the job and resume closely, the candidate’s qualifications are not ideal.  The job seeker had no experience in the industry of the company and the job seeker did not have a key technical skill.  The candidate does have experience with most of the responsibilities of the positions.

A much better approach for this job seeker would have been to focus on the experience and skills of the job seeker.  The job seeker was pursuing an industrial sales position and has extensive sales experience.  A better start to the cover letter would have been:

I am a highly successful sales professional, with more than 25 years of industrial and technical sales experience, and am interested in your technical sales opportunity.

This sentence starts to establish some credibility by showing the candidate’s 25 years of experience.  The next step is to show the performance of the job seeker through examples of his track record of success.  A couple accomplishments will make a good impression.

When you write your cover letter, make sure you focus on substance and not hype.

I worked with a job seeker interested in returning to the workforce after several years of retirement. Like many people today, the combination of falling housing values and a large drop in the stock market have reduced the retirement savings well below what was expected. To maintain the standard of living, this individual decided a part time job would help. The job seeker is also excited to return to working after several years off.

I reviewed the cover letter written by the job seeker. In it, he calls attention to his extensive sales experience. This individual worked in sales for just over forty years. This makes it easy to figure of the age of the job seeker.

Many people report encountering age discrimination. How common it is and how likely this job seeker is to encounter it are tough to estimate. There are companies who will not discriminate, and there probably are some who will. Knowing how big a factor age discrimination might be for this individual is impossible to tell.

A job seeker can raise or lower the odds of encountering age discrimination. You are not required to tell an employer your age. You also don't need to tell an employer key information that allows the calculation of your age – for example, a high school graduation date should not be listed on your resume.

The individual's cover letter included a sentence highlighting the 40+ years of sales experience the job seeker possesses. Highlighting the sales experience is good, but there is little need for emphasizing 40+ years.

The job seeker had held several positions over his career, and we decided to omit from his resume several at the start of his career. The resume showed more than twenty years of work experience. Omitting the first few positions does nothing to obscure the candidate's experience or potential. An entry level position forty years ago will not make a difference in a person's marketability today.

In the cover letter, we changed the 40+ years of experience to 30+ years of experience. It is still accurate – the candidate has more than 30 years of experience. It is just less precise. The difference in the presentation expands the potential age range of the job seeker. With more than forty years of experience and several years of retirement, the job seeker should be in his mid to late sixties. Changing the cover letter to thirty plus years changes this potential range to mid fifties and older.

This is a small change but it makes the age of the job seeker less of a factor and this may reduce the chance of age discrimination.

The career progression of most job seekers follows a typical pattern.  It starts with an entry level job and progresses to positions of increasing responsibility.  At any point in time, the job seeker holds a single full time position.  This progression is very common and easy to understand.  So, what do you do if your career isn’t typical?

The resume I ran into today dealt with a non-traditional career in a very effective way.  The job seeker had held a series of sales and sales management positions.  Then, a couple years ago, he shifted into a consulting role.  His resume shows five concurrent positions, with titles such as Director of Sales, Director of Business Development and Director of Fundraising.

This list of positions raised a number of questions immediately.  Holding what appear to be five full time positions simultaneously doesn’t make sense.  My initial reaction was confusion.  I had no idea what the job seeker was doing.

One tactic the job seeker could have taken would be to describe each position in detail.  This would make for a very long resume.  The job seeker took a different approach.  He provided one line that explained that these were consulting positions.  He then offered an example.  In the example, he described one of positions in detail.  This showed the type of work the job seeker was doing.  Because the positions were similar, it is easy to see how the other roles would have similar responsibilities and accomplishments.

The job seeker then provided a traditional description of each full time job he had held prior to moving into consulting.  The approach turned out to be clear and easy to follow.

The key to the effectiveness of this resume was its clear presentation of what the job seeker did.  The way it was written was unusual, but it made it clear, very quickly, what the job seeker did.  Although I started out confused, it only took a few seconds to understand what was going on.  There are other ways the job seeker could have presented their consulting experience without writing a long description of each position.  The important thing is not providing every last detail – it is showing a clear picture of your overall experience.  In this regard, the job seeker did a good job by describing just one of the five positions.

If you have a non-traditional career progression following a traditional chronological format may not work.  If you are uncertain how to structure your resume, get help.  Palladian recommends ResumeWriters.com to design an effective format highlighting your strengths, abilities and accomplishments in a clear, easy to follow and effective manner.

Networking is the most effective job search technique.  All other techniques will take more time and have a lower success rate.  Unfortunately, many job seekers fail to use their network.

There are three reasons job seekers don’t network.  First, many job seekers that are unemployed withdraw from friends and associates.  Whether it is motivated by a lack of confidence, depression or embarrassment, many people hide their job search from the people they know.  Second, job seekers often fail to recognize the relationships they can use to help their search.  Third, many job seekers don’t know what help they can get from people they know.

To maximize your job search success, you need to overcome these three obstacles. 

A lack of confidence can be very difficult to get over.  Getting fired or laid off does nothing to change the accomplishments you had.  Focus on your successes.  This is good advice for anyone.  Your resume should emphasize accomplishments, and you should talk about your past successes in interviews.  Preparing to do these two things can help you restore your confidence.

Most job seekers consider very few people in their network as resources for their job search.  The truth is you have hundreds or thousands of potential allies that can help you.  Let’s look at the math.  A person with just 10 friends and associates has access to a team of more than 100 that can help.  The reason this works is that each of your ten friends has 10 other friends.  If you asked everyone you know if they know anyone at a particular company, you will probably cast a net in the hundreds or thousands. 

One pitfall job seekers often fall into is only asking for help from people that are in a position to hire them.  Any employee of a company can help you get noticed by their employer.  Asking for help and getting help are easy if you are willing to ask and know what to ask.

The key benefit to using your network is learning as much about the company as you can.  The more you understand the priorities, values and hiring process of a company, the better you can tailor your approach.  Once you identify someone you can talk with about an employer, ask the following three questions:

• Can you tell me how the hiring process at your company works?

• Can you describe what makes someone successful at your company?
• How did you get your job at…

Your goal in asking these questions is twofold.  First, you want to gather intelligence on the company that you can use to best sell your background and potential.  Second, the person helping you may offer to recommend you to a hiring manager.  Many companies offer referral bonuses to employees that recommend people that are hired.  This can turn your contact into a significant advocate for you.

You can take this process to another level by reaching out to people in your online social network.  Contacts on Twitter or LinkedIn and be very helpful – even if you have never actually talked with these individuals.  The key is asking for help that the individual can provide.  Asking if they can give you a job will rarely lead to anything.  Asking what makes a person successful in their company is likely to yield and answer that you can use to tailor your resume and interview answers.

Many companies have increased the emphasis on cost cutting with the economy declining.  Lower sales makes it much more difficult to remain profitable.  For some companies, cutting expenses is necessary to stay in business.

The emphasis on cost savings will drive the decision making of hiring managers.  A few years ago, a key priority might have been increasing volumes, adding new products or adding more staff.  Today, the same hiring managers are focused on shrinking the organization to maintain profitability.  You need to adjust your job search approach accordingly.

You need to show your experience adjusting to a declining business.  For many job seekers, this is uncharted territory.  They have written their resume and prepared to interview with great examples of growth.  As impressive as these accomplishments may be, they may not be the best for landing a job today.  Focus on showing your experience adapting and overcoming challenging situations. 

To prepare to discuss your cost cutting experience, prepare answers to the questions below.  Although you may not be asked any of these questions specifically, preparing answers to the questions will make it easier to address your cost cutting experience. 

• How have you reacted to declining volumes?
• Tell me about a time when you knew you were going to miss your budget.
• Tell me about a time when you encountered forecasts that were significant wrong.
• Tell me about a time when you had to adjust to the loss of a key customer.
• If you had to cut expenses immediately, what would you do?
• Tell me about a time when you automated a process without a significant capital expenditure.
• Tell me about a time when you eliminated a process or step in a process that was unnecessary. 

You can expect that many companies will look for employees that can step in and make an impact immediately.  In a recession, a company can’t afford to hire and train someone that won’t be productive for months or years.  The company will expect the new hire to generate income or cost savings to more than pay for their salary. If you can show your ability to pay for your salary and increase bottom line profits, you will have a greater chance of getting hired.

It has been said that many armies prepare to fight the last war instead of the next one. This was true in World War II in France. The French built a line of heavily fortified defenses designed for the type of trench warfare in World War I. When WWII broke out, the Germans utilized highly mobile tanks to simply drive around the French defenses.

Your job search poses similar challenges. It is likely the economy was good the last time you looked for a job. Today, the situation is different. The tactics that worked so well a few years will be less effective today. You need to adapt.

In a booming economy, many people are directly recruited before they start a formal job search. Companies can’t sit by and wait for candidates to come to them. Posting a resume online could yield phone screens within hours. Hiring managers aggressively sought talent.

Today, the situation is different. Companies can sit back passively and wait for job seekers to come to them. Hiring managers know they can be selective and look for the perfect the fit.

You cannot sit idly and hope companies will call you. You need to be proactive. Just as companies aggressive sought candidates in the past, you need to aggressively seek out opportunities. It sounds easy, but in practice can be difficult.

Many people assume an aggressive job search means sending your resume to everyone. It doesn’t. The key is getting someone to read your resume thoroughly. Blasting your resume to every address on the net is not going to get many people to read your resume. Resume submissions online have increased significantly and your resume may never get read. Large companies often use software to screen resumes before a person takes a look.

To be successful, you need to stand out from the mass of resumes a company receives. There are ways you can customize your approach to a company to improve your chances:

1. Tailor Your Terminology – Research the company and identify the key terminology the company uses. Revise your resume to use the terms the company prefers instead of alternatives.

2. Learn the Company’s Priorities – Each company has its own set of values and priorities. Learn what is important. Does the company value consensus building and supporting group results or value individual achievement more? Does the company pursue cutting edge technology, or prefer applying older, proven solutions?  After you lean what is important, emphasize your experience in this area.

3. Get Referred In – When a job seeker is referred to a hiring manager, whether referral comes from an employee or a recruiter, the hiring manager will usually spend significantly more time reviewing the resume and considering the candidate.

A few years ago, these tactics were not necessary.  They would have been effective, but job seekers didn't need to do them.  Today, you need to adapt and manage your search based on the current challenges.

Buzzwords are used so commonly they lose their impact.  The resume I read today illustrates this.  At the top of the resume was a Summary of Qualifications section.  In it, there were a number of buzzwords.  The overall effect was to hurt the impression the resume made.

The buzzwords listed are some of the most common.  In fact, some used so much, they qualify as gobbledygook – words that have lost all meaning due to over use.  Below are a few of the bullets from the Summary section:

Summary of Qualifications

• Change-management leader

• Understands budgets and expense control

• Six Sigma/Lean exposure to improve productivity, teamwork, and profitability

• Diversity aware

A summary section like this is supposed to create a positive image while introducing the job seeker.  Instead, the bullets do little if anything to promote the job seeker.  The problem is they don’t have any clear benefit.

Change-management is a nice buzzword, but the resume has little content that demonstrates how the job seeker led change in an organization.  Where it is mentioned, it is buried deep in the resume.  I had to read closely to find something that showed some change-management experience. 

I’m not sure what to make of “Understanding budgets and expense control.”  My initial reaction is: “great, you understand cost-cutting – I’m looking for someone with experience cutting costs.”  This is a very weak bullet and the resume would be stronger if it was deleted.

The Six Sigma bullet is also extremely weak.  I read having exposure to Six Sigma as meaning someone in company ran a six sigma project and the job seeker got to watch some of what that person did.  Reading rest of the resume, there is nothing that shows the six sigma experience is more than a basic familiarity the term.

Six Sigma is a major buzzword found in a lot of job postings.  If you have significant Six Sigma experience, highlight this skill.  If you don’t have experience, don’t highlight it.  This bullet was at the top of the resume, with the words "Six Sigma" the 14th and 15th words on the resume.  Putting this at the bottom of the resume wouldn’t hurt overall impression (I doubt it would help either).  At the top of the resume, it makes a terrible impression.

The resume is from a human resources manager.  Diversity is a major buzzword in HR, but I really don’t know what it means to be Diversity Aware.  Is the job seeker aware of the importance of diversity in the workplace?  Does he have experience promoting diversity?  Is he saying he is capable of recognizing difference between men and women or between different ethnic groups?  I expect that he is trying to say that he knows how to promote and improve the diversity in a workforce. 

When hiring managers read your resume, they will not assume you have more experience or better credentials than the content of your resume shows.  If you are very good with a specific skill, you need to show that.  Listing a buzzword without qualifying your experience will not help and may hurt the effectiveness of your resume. 

One of the most effective ways to prepare for a job interview is to complete a few mock interviews.  A mock interview simulates a real interview.  To maximize your improvement, record the mock interview and review it.

Improving your ability to react to a completely unexpected question is the most difficult aspect of interview preparation.  If you get blindsided it can disrupt your performance throughout the rest of the interview.  When you are preparing to interview, you can’t surprise yourself.  The questions that will be the most disruptive are the ones that you have not considered.

To prepare for the unexpected, you need an interviewer to interview you.  Completing two of three mock interviews can make a dramatic difference in your performance.  You can also gain the insight of the interviewer after the interview.  It is very rare for a hiring manager to give a candidate specific feedback to help them improve their interviewing.  A mock interview is different.  Feedback and constructive advice are integral elements in a mock interview.

When I work with a job seeker to improve their interview skills, I offer the option of recording the mock interviews.  Surprisingly, many job seekers turn down this option.  They don’t want to hear themselves in an interview.  Many job seekers have a fear of interviewing.  The anxiety can be overwhelming, and the idea of reliving the experience through a recording is terrifying.  Unfortunately, avoiding mock interviews will not improve the situation.

If you want to gain an edge over your competition, commit to improving your interview skills and practice interviewing.