Archive for May, 2010

On Monday, I’m doing a webinar with APICS reviewing different online resources for job seekers.  The focus will be on how to make your job search more effective.  APICS is an organization dedicated to operations management.  I’ve been a member for around 15 years and am currently President of the Blue Ridge Chapter.  If you are a manufacturing, distribution or supply chain professional, you should check out APICS.  It can be a great benefit to your career.  If you are a member already, check out the APICS Career Center for information on the webinar.

There are 20 million companies in the US.  Although a hiring manager may recognize a few thousand of these, it is impossible to know what all 20 million do.  For most job seekers, this offers a potential pitfall.  Your past employers may be completely unknown to the hiring managers reading your resume.

When a hiring manager has not heard of a company, they will not do research.  The hiring manager screens hundreds of resumes. Googling every unknown company would be an incredibly time consuming activity.  The hiring manager will try to piece together what the company does from what you did at the company.  This is difficult and often leaves a lot of ambiguity in your experience.

You want a hiring manager to understand the context of what you did.  This requires giving background on the company.  Despite this, few job seekers include details about their employers. 

You can improve your resume by offering a few minor details on each employer.  I like to get an estimate of the size of the company.  For example, consider two production supervisors.  One worked for a small job shop with fifteen employees.  The other worked for a large Tier 1 automotive supplier with over 1,500 employees in the facility and more than 20,000 worldwide.  Some of the responsibilities of the two people will be similar, but many will be different.  The job shop will necessitate a wider range of challenges with the supervisor adapting to a lot of different roles on a daily or hourly basis.  The auto supplier is likely to have much more structured procedures and a more limited range of responsibilities.

The differences between the two candidates do not make one candidate better than the other.  They just show a difference in experience.  Some companies will value one of the backgrounds more than the other.  It is likely a small job shop will prefer a candidate coming from a similar type of organization, and an auto supplier will prefer a candidate from a similarly large organization.

The importance of the type of company offers you an opportunity to improve your resume.  By clearly showing the type of organizations you have worked for, you can help the hiring manager screening your resume to better understand how you can fit into their company.  To do this, you only need to add a sentence to each job listing.

I like to list work experience with the company name first and the job titles underneath.  This highlights the time you spent with each organization and is most effective for people who held multiple positions with the same employer.  With this structure, I put the details of the company right below the company name.  Although it is important to describe an employer, I consider this lower priority information and will make the font size small.  I want the reader to be able to learn about the company if they are interested, but will make a job seeker’s accomplishments stand out to be the first thing read.

Example

Work Experience

Widget, Inc., Capital City, State 1/2005 to Present

Tier 1 automotive supplier with $1 billion in revenues. The Capital City plant had 1,000 employees.

Production Supervisor

• Bullet 1: An accomplishment
• Bullet 2: An accomplishment

This structure gives an easy way to describe the employer without detracting from the most important information on your resume.  It also takes up very little space as the description of the company is in a very small font.

I reviewed a resume from a production supervisor today with an introduction that immediately caught my attention.  When I was a recruiter, I worked on a few positions where this job seeker would have been like gold.  Despite this, the writing of the introduction was actually horrible, even though it was extremely effective.

It may seem odd that the intro section was both horrible and effective.  The goal of a resume, after all, is to land an interview. You aren’t trying to create a Pulitzer Prize winning document.  Despite this, job seekers should try to make their resume easy to read, clear, concise and well thought out, and this resume did not meet these goals.

There is one reason why this resume was effective.  It led off with a skill set that is typically in demand.  The skill set the job seeker led off was bilingual production supervision.  In many parts of the country, finding experienced production supervisors and managers who are fluent in both English and Spanish is difficult.  I’ve been in production facilities where more than 90% of the work force speaks Spanish as their first language.  In fact, early in my career, I spent a year managing a production team with recent immigrants who could barely speak English.  They were extremely hard working and productive, but I struggled to communicate effectively with them.  I learned how important it is to have bilingual supervisors in a production facility.  Later, as a recruiter, I again saw this importance from my clients who needed to hire bilingual supervisors.

A strong bilingual manufacturing professional can be difficult to find.  For this reason, some recruiters will be ready to pick up the phone to call this candidate as soon they read the first line of the resume.  Because of this, the job seeker produced an effective resume.  Unfortunately, the job seeker misses an opportunity to write a resume that will be effective in other situations.

Most manufacturing facilities do not require a bilingual candidate.  If a hiring manager is looking for a strong supervisor, they are going to focus on the leadership skills, experience and accomplishments of the candidate.  This is where the resume fails.  After the first line, the job seeker has a very long paragraph listing a large number of skills… a total of 27 skills over the next fifteen lines.  Most of the skills are the standard run of the mill type, for example, communications skills, experience with Word and Excel, leadership, problem solving and cost reduction initiative.  This will do little to impression a hiring manager.  Anyone can put these phrases on their resume, and doing so doesn’t make a candidate better than another candidate.  You need to have more substance.

A much better approach would be to lead with one or two short sentences, highlighting the most valuable skills and then listing a few accomplishments demonstrating the experience with the skills.  The skills that should be listed first are the ones that are most in demand.  For this candidate, bilingual and 15 years of production supervision should be right at the start.  Buried in the resume, this candidate discussed how he was a part of Six Sigma project saving $250k annually in scrap reduction, and how the candidate was close to receiving his Black Belt.  This is another significant experience that should be at the top of the resume, not buried at bottom of the first page.

The key is to emphasize a few skills and accomplishments that will motivate a hiring manager to pick up the phone and call you.  You may have one skill, like being bilingual, that will help in a lot of situation, but you should have more than that.  A one trick pony will be excluded from most positions that don’t require that one skill.  Pick the three or four most significant skills in your background (and that are in demand) and sell those at the top of your resume.  Then, move the list of every skill under the sun to the bottom of your resume.  This can serve as a good keyword list so your resume shows up when hiring managers do database searches.

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