gcapone, Author at Palladian Career Resources

Personal Information on a Resume

A resume is a presentation of a person’s professional background, demonstrating their capability and potential. It needs to sell the job seeker to a hiring manager and generate interest that will lead to an interview.

Some job seekers try to personalize their resume by including information unrelated to their career. This can include their age, family status, religious affiliation, hobbies, volunteer work or other details. The only reason to put something on a resume is to make it more effective – in other words – land an interview. By putting personal information on your resume, you are asking a hiring manager to make a hiring decision based on this information.

Do you think that having three kids, being an active fisherman or volunteering at a charity is a reason why a person would be a better quality manager, distribution supervisor or sales executive? There are much better reasons why to hire a person. For example, their experience in a similar job and their education are usually good criteria for making a hiring decision.

Including some personal details is not a major detractor on a resume. Just as a hiring manager won’t hire someone because they ballroom dance, they will not reject them for this either. The reason you want to omit personal information is that your resume is limited in length. The vast majority of resumes need to be two pages or less. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are rare. With only two pages to show your entire professional background, extraneous information needs to be avoided.

Every element of your resume needs to demonstrate your potential. If a detail doesn’t help you get an interview, you should put something else in it’s place. For example,

Expand the descriptions within your work experience by adding additional accomplishments.
List training classes and continuing education you have completed in your field.
Qualify the skills you list on your resume with examples of projects that demonstrate your skill level.

Adding information to your resume that could impress a hiring manager and eliminating informations that is far less important to your career will improve your chances of landing an interview.

What Have You Created?

For many job seekers encounter, developing a good list of accomplishments to include on their resume and to discuss in an interview is a challenge. Listing accomplishments sounds like an easy task – just write about your successes. Despite this, it often proves to be very difficult.

The result, nearly half of all resume list no accomplishments.

There are several causes of this. Many people forget details from prior positions. Some job seekers find it difficult to focus on their successes after a job loss. Their reduced confidence affects their resume, interviews, and job search success. The most common cause I see is an a failure to recognize an experience as an accomplishment that will impress a hiring manager. This stems from a lack of understanding of what a hiring manager wants.

You can find accomplishments that will demonstrate your potential in a wide variety of work activities. One particular focus I find uncovers a lot of impressive accomplishments is to look for things the job seeker has created.

There are a few questions you can ask yourself to get the process started:

What systems have your created and implemented?
What processes have you created and implemented?
What tools, including forms, spreadsheets and databases, have your designed?
What products or services have you designed?

These questions will help identify potential accomplishments. From there, you need to look at your specific actions and the results that were achieved. Designing a great system that never gets implemented or a product that never makes it to market is difficult to sell as an accomplishment. Provide specific results. Did the project you completed increase sales, reduce costs, improve quality, increase customer service, or provide another benefit.

It is the benefit, the tangible value you provided an employer, that will impress a hiring manager.

5 Quick Fixes for Your Resume

The vast majority of resumes are ineffective. They look like every other resume and fail to give a good reason why the job seeker should be hired. If your resume isn’t getting much of a response, it probably needs a lot of work. You have a few options: hire a resume writer, become a resume writing expert so you can fix if yourself, or focus on the quick and easy changes you can make right now. This last option won’t perfect your resume, but it will help you make a lot of progress fast.

I’ve put together a list of the five easiest, fastest and most effective fixes. This list is far from being complete. It isn’t meant to be. It is just the changes you can make fast that will give you the most improvement.

Add a Positioning Statement

Your resume should create a clear picture of who you are. Most resumes are just a listing of facts – names, dates and responsibilities. To be effective, you want to frame the image you create. Do this by adding a summary at the top of your resume that defines who you are, the value you bring and an idea of the type of position you are pursuing. Only half of all the resumes have an objective statement and even less provide a compelling positioning statement that sells the potential of the job seeker. Adding a couple sentences at the top of your resume is the fastest and possibly most significant improvement you can make.

Lead off with an accomplishment

After you add a positioning statement, include a bullet point with an accomplishment. Often, I like to see two or three accomplishments at the top of a resume and a lot more scattered throughout the work experience of the job seeker. If you have a resume devoid of accomplishments (this is very common), it could take a lot of time and work to put accomplishments throughout your resume. Don’t let this discourage you. Start with one accomplishment and put it at the top right under your positioning statement. If you have accomplishments on your resume, put one to three of them at the top. The beginning of your resume becomes an executive summary that provides a statement of who you are as a professional and an accomplishment that reinforces this.

Separate your responsibilities from your accomplishments

Within the descriptions of the positions you have held, you probably list a combination of responsibilities and accomplishments. You want to draw the reader to youraccomplishments – they are the details that will separate you from your competition. Emphasize your accomplishments by grouping them separately from your responsibilities. One format to consider is to put your responsibilities in a single, short paragraph and put accomplishments in a bulleted list. Most people are drawn to the bullets more than a block of text in paragraph form.

Add titles to your bullets

To emphasize the bulleted information even more, provide a bolded title for each bullet. The title should be short and should summarize the theme of the bullet. For example, I have added a title to each of the five bullets in this list. I could have just bulleted the five paragraphs without a title. Visually, this would have been much less appealing. (Note: If your resume doesn’t use bullets and is written in large blocks of text, change this first. It is unlikely that long paragraphs will be read. Break the text into small blocks.)

Add Employer Descriptions

There are over 20 million businesses in the U.S. No matter how many a hiring manager knows, the number is still a very small percentage of the total. It is likely many hiring managers will be unfamiliar with some of your employers. Provide a short sentence summarizing the background of the company, including the industry and size of the company.

If you act on all five of these recommendations, your resume will improve significantly. All five can be addressed quickly… for many people, only an hour or two can make a huge difference.

Prioritizing Information on Your Resume

I reviewed a resume of a supply chain professional that failed to prioritize the content of their resume. The result was a confusing resume that didn’t create a solid picture of the job seeker.

The problem was not the content. The content was fine. It was the order and presentation of the information that hurt the effectiveness of the resume.

The basic structure looked like this:

Executive Summary: Supply Chain Executive with a strong track record of improving operations and providing leadership. Proven discipline for managing multiple departments and organizations with in excess of 150 employees.

Extensive professional skills and experience, including:

<listing of supply chain skills>

Work Experience

Most Recent Position – held for the last year
Operations Manager

Inventory Management Accomplishment

Sales Accomplishment

Sales Accomplishment

Inventory Management Accomplishment

Sales Accomplishment

Purchasing Accomplishment

Previous Position – held for 3 years
Sales Associate

Listing of sales responsibilities and one sales accomplishment

Military Service – 20 year career
Logistics Specialist

7 accomplishments related to logistics and transportation

Education

After reading the executive summary, I expected a typical supply chain/logistics resume. The list of accomplishments under the most recent position started to confuse the issue. Sales and customer service activities were presented on equal footing with the logistics experience. The confusion built with the second position – a pure sales position. Looking at these two positions, the job seeker has split time between logistics and sales for one year out of the last four. It doesn’t present a strong logistics presentation. I could see some hiring managers hitting the delete key at that point.

Now, let’s look at the picture from a different perspective. The job seeker had 20 years of experience in logistics in the military. He tried a sales position for three years after leaving the military. He then moved back into logistics a year ago, managing operations for a wholesaler. In this capacity, due to his success in sales in the previous role, he managed some sales functions in addition to his primary responsibilities for operations and logistics. In this description, the emphasis is on the twenty-one years of logistics work out of the last twenty-four.

To revise the resume this way, I would change the order of the content to emphasize the logistics experience like this:

Executive Summary: Supply Chain Executive with a strong track record of improving operations and providing leadership. Proven discipline for managing multiple departments and organizations with in excess of 150 employees.

Inventory Management Accomplishment from most recent position

Logistics Accomplishment from military career

Logistics Accomplishment from military career

Work Experience

Most Recent Position – held for the last year
Operations Manager

Inventory Management Accomplishment

Inventory Management Accomplishment

Purchasing Accomplishment

Very brief summary of sales accomplishments

Previous Position – held for 3 years
Sales Associate

Listing of sales responsibilities and one sales accomplishment

Military Service – 20 year career
Logistics Specialist

5 accomplishments related to logistics and transportation

Skills

<Listing of supply chain skills>

Education

The change in structure is small, but increases the emphasis on logistics and supply chain experience. The sales experience is still listed; it is just deemphasized so that it doesn’t detract from the primary message.

Interview Questions About Former Bosses

One of the types of interview questions that cause job seekers a lot of trouble is about former bosses. Discussing previous supervisors often paints a great picture of the attitude of the job seeker. Unfortunately, this is one area where job seekers tend to lose their professionalism and turn very negative.

A few of the variations of questions about former managers include:

Tell me about the worst boss you have had.
Tell me about a time when you did not work well with a supervisor.
What would you do if you knew that your boss was making a very poor decision?

These questions open the door for you to talk about the aspects of a former boss that you did not like. Usually, this spells disaster.

I’ve interviewed a number of job seekers that interpret these questions as a green light to badmouth a boss. In the worst cases, years of pent up frustrations and resentments boil out.

The problem with answering a question like this is the interviewer may interpret your attitude towards a former boss as the attitude you will have with your future boss. One of the key goals a hiring manager has is to select a candidate that will not be a problem. If you send signals that you had an attitude problem in the past, your chance of getting hired goes way down. This is the pitfall many fall into.

You don’t have the option of avoiding this question. You have to give an answer. The best approach is to honestly assess the strengths and weaknesses of your previous supervisors.

Let’s look at two examples of how to answer the “worst boss” question. We’ll start with a poor answer:

There’s no contest when it comes to the worst boss. I worked for a guy that was abusive and offensive. This manager routine screamed obscenities at all of his subordinates. One of the games he would play was to find the nickname that would make each person the maddest. He was absolutely terrible and got sued a few times by employees for harassment. The verbal harassment was bad, but his guy didn’t stop there. He routinely brought handguns into his office and would show them off to threaten employees.

Now this answer could be interpreted in one of two ways. It could generate sympathy from the interviewer. This may help build rapport but will do little to get you hired. The second effect it could have is to cause the interviewer to question the credibility of the job seeker. The accusations in the answer are pretty severe and many people may not believe them. If this is the case, the interviewer will conclude that they cannot trust the statements of the job seeker. Even worse, the interviewer may believe that the job seeker is prone to telling lies about their boss.

This story is completely true and the reality is actually worse than described. Despite being true, this would be a terrible answer in an interview. The following example would do much better:

I’ve worked for a variety of bosses with a mix of strengths and weaknesses. One in particular comes to mind. This individual managed the facility where I worked. As a manager, he was very good bringing the team together and motivated cooperation to get things done. The one weakness this individual had was in creating sustainability. He was very good at creating rapid change but rarely implemented performance metrics and follow up procedures that would sustain the change. In working for this manager, I learned how important it is to build systems that will sustain and continue to build on improvements.

This example details a very specific weakness of a former manager, along with the manager’s strengths. It is a much more balanced approach. The most important part of this answer was the lesson learned – the importance of building systems to sustain change. An even better answer would incorporate an example of how the job seeker implemented a system that helped maintain performance improvements.

Hopefully, you have assessed the managers you have work for and understand their strengths and weaknesses. If you have done this, developing a strong answer about a former boss should be easy.

Sentence Structure

I updated some of my social media accounts this weekend. My motivation was twofold. First, some of accounts badly needed an update to the design and content. I had not updated some of the information in the last couple years and it showed. The second reason was motivated by one of the blog readers. She pointed out that the writing style and sentence structure of my LinkedIn account wasn’t consistent. When I reviewed, I realized this was a generous assessment – my LinkedIn profile was awful.

I had setup my LinkedIn account a couple years ago and used my bio from my website. My bio is written in a 3^rd person style and this is suitable to a corporate website. On LinkedIn, the style should be more personal, and written in the first person. The same goes for other social media sites. I’m still working on updating and improving – these are going to be a work in progress. That’s a lot better than what they were, though… stale and out-of-date.

So, what does this have to do with a job search? The sentence structure of a cover letter and resume need to be written professionally and in a suitable style.

A cover letter is a business letter from you to another individual. As a result, it should be written directly in the 1^st person. Do not refer to yourself in the 3^rd person. It makes a very poor impression.

The resume should have a different style. It should be written in an implied first person. This structure starts with the personal pronoun “I” but this word is omitted. For example, “Managed the production department” is a sentence that has an implied subject – the “I” is left off the beginning of the sentence. This style is appropriate for a resume.

Write your resume in the 1st person but avoid using “I” or your name in your resume.

I’m still working on improving my profiles online. On LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/garycapone), I accept all invitations to connect and have over 2,500 connections. You can invite me to connect at [email protected]. I setup a Twitter account this weekend (www.twitter.com/garycapone). The other account I updated was Facebook. This is the one account I don’t accept every invitation. I’m limiting it to people I know and have established personal relationship.

Interview Questions About Deadlines

One of the interview questions that is very common relates to working under tight deadlines. It is important to be able to meet deadlines in many careers. There are very few companies where the speed and urgency are not important.
Over the years, I’ve asked about deadlines in interviews very frequently. This is one of the questions where job seekers usually react exactly the same way.

Over the years, I’ve asked about deadlines in interviews very frequently. This is one of the questions where job seekers usually react exactly the same way. It doesn’t matter what type of personality the job seeker has, their job type or the industry. The answer that almost everyone gives is a variation of this:

Question: Tell me about a time when you worked under a tight deadline.

Answer: All the time. Everything we do has a tight deadline. Meeting customer needs requires responding quickly. We never have much warning when we get a special project and have to get the project done quickly.

This answer is very general. Job seekers usually include specific industry terms in their answer, but the overall message is the same. Everything the job seeker does has a deadline.

I’m sure you can see that this answer tells the interviewer nothing. The goal of a question about deadlines is to understand the sense of urgency of the job seeker and to get an idea of how the individual will perform. Generalizing the answer provides nothing noteworthy.

To effectively answer a question about deadlines, you need to give an example. Starting out with a statement that deadlines are common in your field is ok. The interviewer probably hears this every time they ask the question, so you’re not going to make a bad impression with it.

The key to making a good impression is what you do next. Give an example of a specific deadline and how you were able to meet it. This will demonstrate the value you provided in the past and help create an impression of success.

This is an example of a better answer to this question:

We work under tight deadlines all the time. For example, we recently had a customer place an order for one of our products with several custom modifications. The customer needed the product in a week, and our typical lead time with the modifications was 10 days. I was able to cut a couple of days off the production schedule by coordinating with the manufacturing department to run the product on a different line than normal and then cut another day by working with quality so that they would inspect the product as it was produced. We shipped the product on time. These type of deadlines are commonplace and I work very well with other department to ensure that we meet every schedule no matter how tight.

This is very basic example of expediting production of a product. Despite this, it shows the type of deadlines the job seeker encounters, how they approach the deadline and gives an example of a success. Even though this is a basic example, it is a much better answer than the original general answer.

One reason this example is effective is the emphasis on working with other departments. The anser address the sense of urgency of the job seeker but also uses the example to demonstrate how effective they are at influencing others in their company.

Look for ways to give examples of what you have done. Examples create a picture in the mind of the interviewer and make a much stronger impression.

The Two Ways a Resume is Assessed

The basic purpose of a resume is get you an interview. This is a simple goal, but one many job seekers struggle to reach. The problem stems from how a resume is assessed. A resume is usually assessed in two very different ways, but few job seekers design their resume to make the best impression during both of these assessment.

The first assessment your resume needs to pass is the initial screen. During this screen, the goal of the hiring manager is eliminate as many resumes as possible in a very short time. A hiring manager might receive a hundred or more resumes for a position. The goal at this stage is to reduce this stack of resumes down to a manageable number, perhaps the top 10 or 20.

In this review, the hiring manager will often have a few criteria that are critical to the position. These critical elements could be educational, work experience or skill requirements. Usually, two or three criteria are sufficient to reduce the resumes down to the top 20.

As a hiring manager does this initial screen, they may only give a resume a 15 to 30 second look. That’s all that is needed to look for two or three main elements. For example, if a hiring manager requires an MBA for a position, it only takes a few seconds to see if the resume lists an MBA.

The common pitfall many job seekers fall into is not making their qualifications with critical elements of the job very prominent on their resume. The education of a job seeker is usually easy to find, since it is in a section of its own. Work experience and skills are not always as clearly identifiable. For this reason, it is extremely important to look at the requirements for a position and make sure you show how you meet these requirements.

If you have the experience that a company wants, it should be clear and easy to find. With hiring managers only spending 15 to 30 seconds on your resume initially, they can only do a quick scan. They will not read every word. Important details of your background need to be prominent. If they are buried in large blocks of text, there is little chance they will be read.

The second assessment is a detailed look at your resume where the hiring manager attempts to learn as much about you as they can. All of the resumes in this group meet the minimum basic requirements for the job. The goal now is to identify the best of the group.

In this detailed assessment, demonstrating qualifications isn’t sufficient. All of the candidates at this stage will satisfy the basics and many will have a background very close to the target of the hiring manager. The candidates that rise to the top and get interviews demonstrate a pattern of success. The key is showing how the job seeker contributed significant value to their employers.

Most job seekers focus on experience. This focus leads to an emphasis on the responsibilities they held. Because their competition for a position held the same responsibilities, this does not differentiate them. Usually, it only gets them past the first screen – the 15 second look. When they are looked at in the second assessment, they get passed over. There will be candidates that emphasize the value they have provided in their careers. By doing these, these individuals rise to the top of the pile and get invited to interview.

When you write your resume, you need to work to make your resume standout in both assessments. Ensure that your resume demonstrates your basic capabilities very clearly and includes detailed examples of your contributions to your employers. If you do both of these things, you will have more success than most of your competition.

Your Resume’s Executive Summary

I’m a big fan of starting a resume with a summary statement. A summary statement gives a job seeker the opportunity to create a very strong positive impression in just a few lines. The summary statement is also the grabber that motivates the hiring manager to read your resume closely, rather than just skim it fast. Developing a good impression and grabbing the reader can make a huge difference in the overall effectiveness of the resume.

Today, I read an article on resume writing that offered some great advice but differed on the importance of a summary statement. The article gave three reasons to avoid an objective or summary statement:

You don’t want one
You don’t need one
You don’t have room for one

All three of these statements sound good. Unfortunately, they are misleading.

You don’t want one: If you don’t want to include a summary, you don’t have to have one. This goes for anything on your resume. The problem with this is that a good summary statement will make your resume more effective. Deciding you don’t want one is tantamount to saying you don’t want to maximize the effectiveness of your resume.

You don’t need one: As I said, you don’t have to include a summary. It’s not a required element of resume. The basics that are essential to a resume are your name, contact info, education and work experience. Everything else that you may include is designed to help sell your potential to an employer. The resume police won’t hunt you done if you don’t have a good summary statement, but your odds of landing an interview may be lower without one.

You don’t have room: The third point is the one that I really have trouble with. The more information on your resume, the more important it is to have a summary. If you have no experience to write about, there’s nothing to summarize. On the other hand, if you have 30 years of experience, a summary can help frame your potential and build interest in reader to look closely at your resume.

A good summary statement is similar to an eye catching headline in a newspaper or an action packed opening scene of a movie. Both of these are designed to grab the attention of the audience quickly with the most exciting information.

The key to an effective summary statement is to present a summary of the most important information to the hiring manager. You want to get the hiring manager excited and interested.

The term objective statement is misleading for many job seekers. Hiring managers want to know what type of position you will consider accepting – not what your goals, wants and desires are. Focus on the elements of your background that help sell you to an employer. This short sales pitch should generate interest in reading your resume closely. If you do this, you will be far ahead of most job seekers.

Failing to Customize

I read a cover letter of IT professional that was one of the most general I have every seen. It was over 300 words long but didn’t say anything of substance. In the IT field, technical skills and experience with those skills are the critical factors. Despite this, the candidate failed to specify anything about their technical skill.

The first sentence of the cover letter illustrates how general and unimpressive the cover letter was:

I am writing to express my interest in the position of [Network Administrator / Help Desk], advertised as being open with your company at this time.

Now, you need to understand that I haven’t advertised a network administrator or help desk position in a very long time. In fact, my firm doesn’t advertise positions much any more. We are very proactive in our sourcing of candidates for our recruiting clients. This resume was completely unsolicited.

Here is what I think happened. The job seeker had a template for their cover letter that they customized. Over time, they grew frustrated with the lack of success and moved towards a mass mailing strategy, deciding to send their resume to hundreds of recruiters. They attempted to write a very general cover letter that would appeal to the greatest number. By doing this, they minimize their odds of impressing each recruiter.

In particular, putting the job title in brackets leads me to believe that the job seeker wrote this cover letter with the intention of replacing the actual job title each time they sent it out. When they decided to send out resumes to recruiters that didn’t advertise a position, they took the short cut and just sent the template without any changes. Not a great first impression.

The cover letter goes on with very general statements. When I finished the cover letter, my expectations were very low. I planned to read the first few lines of the resume to confirm my assessment of the cover letter. The resume turned out to be much stronger the cover letter.

The start of the resume highlighted specific skills and experiences. The job seeker had a number of impressive accomplishments, good skills and several certifications. Overall, I would say a pretty good network administration candidate. This was completely opposite to the impression the cover letter made.

Fortunately, the resume led off with several details that helped make a strong impression. If it had not, there is a good chance a hiring manager would read only the first few lines and discarded the resume. The cover letter made such a poor impression the resume would only get a very quick look.