The webinar I presented on Wednesday went great. I reviewed the results of the resume benchmarking study I did for APICS, and then took questions. This was the first time I did a live resume assessment.  During the Q&A, I asked attendees to send their resumes so I could review them during the session.  Two people submitted resumes, and we walked through a few quick changes that they can make to improve their resumes.

One of the changes I identified was removing or relocating a keyword list.  Resume keyword lists are a common element of resumes.  They provide a list of technical terms that a hiring manager may use to find candidates.  This type of list is great for ensuring that a resume shows up in different searches.  Unfortunately, that’s the only benefit of a keyword list.

Putting a list of keywords on your resume will not get a hiring manager excited.  Anyone can pick out important terms and create a list.  It does not convey proficiency in any of the areas.  You have to describe your experience and accomplishments with a skill to make a strong impression.

A good place for a resume keyword list is at the end of the resume.  The section should have a title like “Skills” or “Areas of Expertise” and be the last item of the resume.  This placement ensures that it does not get in the way of more important information.  The keyword list might help a database match your resume to a search, but it is not going to make much of an impression with a human reader.

Keyword lists are most effective when they focus on in-demand technical skills.  Soft skills don’t offer as much value.  For example, leadership, communications skills, organizational skills and administrative skills may be important to a hiring manager, but they make terrible search terms.  They appear on too many resumes, and are important to almost any career.  Technical skills that are specific to a single career field tend to be much better search terms.  Ensuring these terms are in your resume by putting them in a keyword list is a great way to match as many relevant searches as possible.

Some job seekers put the keyword list at the top of their resume.  This can provide an attractive presentation, but it isn’t particularly effective.  Hiring managers will skip a list like this.  Even if they read it, the list isn’t going to do much to sell the candidate’s potential.  The result is the keyword list isn’t much better than just leaving a large blank space.  The top of the resume is valuable real estate and putting low value content such as a keyword list in it is a waste.

Palladian Career Resources has partnered with ResumeWriters.com to expand our resume writing services offered.  ResumeWriters.com has a successful track record of helping tens of thousands of job seekers to develop high impact resumes that lead to interviews.  Their large pool of professional writers offers expertise in virtually every career field and at every level of employment.  This makes them an ideal resource to tackle any challenge.  Palladian is excited to partner with ResumeWriters.com.

How does the resume writing process work?

1. Submit Career History:  The process starts by submitting your career history and information through a specially designed career information worksheet. This information is evaluated and you are matched with the most qualified writer, based on your career field. The writer makes contact with you directly and works one-on-one with you to develop the resume.
2. Receive Draft:  You will receive a draft resume or cover letter in 24/72 hours. You then contact your writer with any additions or revisions you feel are necessary. You’ll have your writer’s personal email address in order to ensure the sort of document you can be happy with.
3. Start Sending Out Resumes:  Submit your finalized resume to the job of your dreams. ResumeWriters provides their Job Search Support Center to clients, where you’ll find detailed instructions about how to submit your resume, where to submit your resume, and extensive advice concerning interviews, salary negotiations and other job search procedures.

This is a fast, easy and effective process to develop a resume that will get results.  To this end, ResumeWriters.com offers a 100% Success Guarantee:  If after having them write you a resume, you do not get a job interview within 60 days, they will rewrite your resume for free. In the more than 2 years that they have offered this guarantee, only 20 clients have requested rewrites. That means that after thousands of completed orders, 99.98% have found jobs after using their services.  That’s nearly a 100% customer satisfaction rate!

Palladian is excited about the new association with ResumeWriters due to the great depth of talented professionals that ResumeWriters has.

Upgrade your resume today!  Check out ResumeWriters.com!

I am presenting a webinar on July 13th (2PM EDT) with the results of the Resume Benchmarking Survey I conducted for APICS.  The survey looked at nearly 400 resumes of operations management professionals.  These mainly came from supply chain managers, production managers, production planners/schedulers and logistics managers, but also covered other operations management careers.

The survey looked at the resume structure and how job seekers start their resumes.  Resume titles, the first line and the content of the first section were examined in great detail.  Best practices and common mistakes were identified and reported in the APICS whitepaper. Later this year, I’m going to work on the next phase of the benchmarking survey and assess other sections of the resume.

I’m looking forward to the webinar.  The last webinar I did for APICS was on Resume Formatting and had around 400 attendees.  APICS members can download the whitepaper and register for the webinar at the APICS Career Center.

Not an APICS Member?  Join APICS Today!

I had a great trip to Las Vegas for the APICS Conference last week.  I had two sessions – one on interviewing and one on resume writing.  Both were based on sections of my books.

The interview section covered a number of topics but the core was the STAR(L).  This is technique for answering interview questions that is one of the most powerful and effective interview tools you can learn.

The resume session focused on the resume assessment from my new book, Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers.  I took the checklist from Chapter 13: Resume Assessment and delivered it as a presentation.  This checklist is an invaluable tool for assessing your resume.  Not only will it identify problem areas that you need to improve, but it gives specific best practice recommendations.

You can learn the STAR(L) technique and get the Resume Assessment with my books:

Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers

Power Up Your Job Search: A Modern Approach to Interview Preparation

My book, Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers, is on Amazon.  We had a few problems with the initial setup of the book, but the publisher did a great job getting everything fixed.  You can now buy the book on Amazon:

Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers

This book is perfect for anyone in an operations careers, whether production, quality, logistics, transportation, maintenance, scheduling or engineering.  There are tons of examples, often showing both the typical resume content/formatting and then an improved version.  In addition, I show the resume writing process from start to finish.  I used a hypothetical Production Manager for my example.  It took six chapters to show how to write this example resume, with detailed instructions showing each improvement along the way.  There’s also a resume assessment checklist that you can use to review your resume.  It gives specific criteria and best practices for the assessment so you can look at your resume like a resume writing pro.

Amazon also has the Look Inside feature active, allowing you to check out the Table of Contents, first chapter and index.

Buy the Book:  Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers

We had a slight problem with the storefront selling the book.  We’re working on resolving it.  Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers will be available within the next few days.

If you have any questions about the availability, email us at palladian@palladianinternational.com.

My new book is now available!

The book can be purchased directly from the publisher, and in the next few days, it will be available on Amazon.  I am also working on getting the book into other retail channels.

The website for the book is up and running… www.resume-writing-for-manufacturing-careers.com

Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers - Front Cover

Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers - Back Cover

My new book is just about ready to go.  I’m due to receive the first printed copy today!  The book, Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers, teaches the resume writing process in a step-by-step approach.  It starts with the information a job seeker needs to know in order to develop a good resume.  It then shows the resume writing process in great detail for a hypothetical job seeker.  Finally, the book answers many of the questions job seekers have – questions about how to deal with unusual aspects of their careers. 

The book will be available on Amazon on or before September 1st.  We’re also selling the book through some other retail outlets.  I’m working on the website to provide additional information on the book (www.resume-writing-for-manufacturing-careers.com).  I’ve added one page so far, but will follow.

Below is a copy of the cover…

Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers - Front Cover

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.