Author: gcapone

New Book – Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers

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

APICS Webinar

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.

Describing Employers on Your Resume

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.

Production Supervisor Resume Intro

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.

 

Newly published in 2010:  Get the best book for Manufacturing Resumes

Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers - Front Cover

Prioritizing Information on Your Resume

I reviewed a resume today that made a common mistake.  The resume listed unimportant information first, and the important stuff last.  When a hiring manager reviews your resume, they will scan quickly to see if you are in the ballpark of what they want.  If you are, they will read in more detail.  If you aren’t, you get discarded.  This first decision is often made in the first 15 to 30 seconds.  That’s only enough time to read a few lines.  If you want to make it past this, you need to show very quickly that you are worth additional time.

The resume I reviewed failed to do this.  The candidate is a Distribution Manager and has spent his entire career in inventory management and distribution management roles.  Here’s how the resume was laid out:

  • Objective (five lines of generic text – “…a dynamic, growth oriented business… capitalize on my education and training…  help realize the company’s strategic business plan…”)
  • Professional Profile (eight lines describing the industry and career of the job seeker – not great but much better than the Objective)
  • Summary of Qualifications (four lines listing a variety of skills, lacking any details on the job seeker’s skill level or amount of experience with these skills)
  • Computer Technology (three lines of computer programs and programming languages, with nothing detailing the skill level with each)
  • Professional Experience (the work experience of the job seeker)
  • Education (the degrees the job seeker has)

This structure is ok, it’s the content that is a problem.  The objective, professional summary and summary of qualifications sections make up the top half of the first page, but they add almost no value.  They are little more than a list of keywords put into sentences.  There is nothing that indicates whether the job seeker is any good at any of the skills they mention, and there are no accomplishments to show the success of the job seeker.

Even worse, after the first three sections, the job seeker moves into their computer technology experience.  The section is essentially a list of microsoft products, a couple proprietary software systems and a few programming languages.  This is far from being high priority information.  Even worse, the information listed is obviously out of date.  For example, the programming languages listed have all been replaced over the last two decades.  The job seeker completed a computer science associates degree in 1986, but never worked in an IT position.  So, this candidate is prioritizing that they learned Cobol 24 years ago above their 24 years of distribution experience.  Why would the 24 year old computer skills make a hiring manager want to hire them as a distribution manager?

Review your resume and look for information with limited value to the position you are pursuing.  It can be tough to cut out details that you are proud of, or that were very significant to your career in the past.  Just remember, you need to tailor your sales pitch to the job you are pursuing today – not something you did twenty years ago.

Volunteering to Gain Experience

It’s a challenge to break into a new a career.  Companies want experience when hiring, but you can’t get the experience they want without getting hired first.  This catch-22 is frustrating and difficult to overcome.  For college students, gaining experience is also important.  The job market for college students has been very tight.  Gaining a little work experience during college can help a person standout and land a job. 

The solution for many is to work internships.  An internship is a short term position where the intern is exposed to some of the work in a career field.  The company tries to provide an experience that will help develop the intern while gaining some benefits from the work performed.  Internships can be vary in length from a few weeks to more than a year. 

Historically, there have been both unpaid and paid internships.  Many people recognize the value of the experience they will gain and are willing to work for free to gain that experience.  For a college student, who is paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for an education, gaining experience without having to pay tution can be a good deal. 

The rules are changing, though.  The Department of Labor has indicated that it may crack down on unpaid internships.  The DoL considers an unpaid internship a violation of minimum wage law, since the company is not paying the intern the minimum wage. 

This change in policy could have a significant impact on the way college students gain experience.  Many companies will cancel their internship programs.  For many firms, the cost of managing the internship program and mentoring the intern exceed the value the intern provides.  Companies offer the internships to assess students they may one day hire and to help develop a new generation of professionals in their industry.  Rarely will the company gain significant value for the work the intern performs.  Usually, the company could have completed the same work much faster and cheaper by using the companies employees instead of an intern.

By requiring companies to pay interns, the government will eliminate a valuable professional development tool many college students rely on.  If you are in college, it will become even more important to land a paid internship while in school, and competition for these slots will increase.

Internships aren’t the only area where companies do not pay employees.  Many business startups rely on the contributions of a team of people before the company can start hiring.  Usually, these people are owners in the business and exempt from minimum wage law.  Occasionally, they are friends and associates who are willing to invest some time to build the business on the hope they will be hired when things take off.  For a senior executive, this tactic – trying to create the job you want – can be effective.  While job hunting, the individual contributes to a startup without pay.  Eventually, the company grows and the executive is hired into a key role.  These situations are likely to also be reduced by the DoL’s new policy.

Happy Thanksgiving

This week, we take time to appreciate what we have. In the United States, with all the turmoil, economic difficulties and other issues facing us, we still live in the greatest nation in history. We have more opportunity and freedom than anywhere else. Countless people from around the world would give anything for a chance at the life we lead.

This week, we take time to appreciate what we have.  In the United States, with all the turmoil, economic difficulties and other issues facing us, we still live in the greatest nation in history.  We have more opportunity and freedom than anywhere else.  Countless people from around the world would give anything for a chance at the life we lead. 

If you are worried about your job, or worse, are out of work, opportunities may seem elusive.  We are fortunate, though, but being fortunate doesn’t mean everyone will get everything they want.  What it does mean is we have the opportunity to build and grow.  The elements that have made this country great – hard work, determination, and optimism – will lead us out the current recession.  Some people are saying the turnaround is already started, while others say it will take a few more months to gain traction.  Regardless of how long it takes, the economy will turn.  As I wrote a few days ago, every day 80,000 people are landing jobs in the US.  There are opportunities and companies are hiring.  Stay positive, focus on your strengths and accomplishments, and sell your potential to add value to a company and a job will come.

I hope you have a great Thanksgiving!

Trends in the Job Market

We’ve all heard the unemployment rate, and that it will get worse before we start to see some improvement. On a national basis, this is a serious problem. For an individual job seeker, the concern is more personal – landing a single job. No matter how high or low unemployment is, the primary (or only concern) is whether you can land a job for yourself. Despite this, there is some interesting and useful information in the jobs data.

We’ve all heard the unemployment rate, and that it will get worse before we start to see some improvement.  On a national basis, this is a serious problem.  For an individual job seeker, the concern is more personal – landing a single job.  No matter how high or low unemployment is, the primary (or only concern) is whether you can land a job for yourself.  Despite this, there is some interesting and useful information in the jobs data.

Unemployment Claims

Yesterday, it was announced that 505,000 people filed new unemployment claims last week.  This is just over a hundred thousand people per day.  It’s a huge number.  Fortunately, the number does have some positives.  First, it’s 100k lower than were we were at the start of the year.  Second, we’re approaching parity with jobs created.  The number I keep hearing is 400,000.  At that level, the number of people losing jobs each week will roughly equal the number landing jobs each week. 

The 400k figure has some significant implications. First, it means 400k people are getting hired every week.  That’s 80,000 people every day.  If you are worried about the economy as a whole, that doesn’t mean much, but it you are a job seeker, it means a lot.  Every day you search for a job, 80k people are going to be successful.  Searching for a job is far from a hopeless activity. 

Job Postings

Looking at Indeed’s job posting trends, in October, there were just over 1.8 million job postings.  That’s a lot of jobs.  Divide that number by 22 (the number of work days in October) and you 81,000 – approximately the number of people landing jobs each day.  So, the job postings are also getting filled.  Companies are hiring people, even if it is at a lower rate than a couple of years ago. 

The competition for these jobs is high.  There’s no arguing that.  Right now, we have approximately 15 million people unemployed.  That’s roughly 8 people for every job opening last month.  Of those 15 million, roughly 1.8 million should land jobs in November, while 13.2 million won’t.  On a national basis, this is a major problem.  For your job search, there are 1.8 million positions out there and you only need one.

Geography

All locations are not equal.  Indeed.com has a great trend page showing the number of job seekers compared to the number of open jobs for different metro areas.  It’s no surprised Detroit is at the bottom of the list, and with all the government jobs, Washington, DC is on top.  (Check out the data: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/unemployment) 

If you’re in a city with a low ratio, you should be in good shape.  If you are not, your prospects are still not hopeless.  You just have more competition you will need to beat out.

Bottom Line

Some people will look at the stats above and get energized (80k people will be hired today) and others will despair (13.2 million people won’t get a job this month).  If you want to be in the 80k getting hired every day, you need to work at it and maintain a positive, energetic attitude.  If you don’t, you are much more likely to be in the 13.2 million.  Discouraged job seekers are making up a larger and larger percentage of the population and their prospects are very low.  They are much less likely to actively network, customize their resume and cover letter, prepare thoroughly for every interview and do all the little things you need to do to be successful. Staying positive during your job search can be as important a factor in your success as all the skills and experiences you possess.