gcapone, Author at Palladian Career Resources

Maintenance Tech Resume

A resume I read from a medical equipment technician. The resume illustrates a few of the common mistakes many job seekers make.

First, the job seeker failed to list his skills. Every job seeker needs to highlight their strongest skills on their resume. For equipment technicians, this is even more important. With technical positions, the technical skill of the job seeker is a major factor, and often is the most important assessment criteria. Omitting this information will hurt the candidate’s chances.

The job seeker could correct this by adding a skills section showing the specific types of equipment and technologies he has proficiency with. Adding some of the training classes he has taken would also help. In 25 years of operating and maintaining high tech medical equipment, the job seeker doesn’t show a single training class where he updated his skills.

The second change the job seeker needs to make relates to the responsibilities he has had. His resume has nothing more than a list of responsibilities. There are no accomplishments listed. Most hiring managers will assume he has either been unsuccessful or minimally successful in his career as a result. Below is are the bullets from his most recent position:

Maintain and troubleshoot anesthesia equipment and other medical electronics in the hospital
Provide clinical assessments during surgical procedures for anesthesia staff and residents when needed
Perform in-service training for anesthesia students on a variety of electronics equipment
Develop equipment maintenance procedures for department

For an equipment tech, it’s difficult to imagine someone else in the same role not having essentially the same responsibilities. The job seeker has succeeded in making himself a commodity no different from anyone else. This will not help him get hired.

I expect there are a number of accomplishments the job seeker could list. For example, he could expand on how he developed maintenance procedures. Giving a specific example of this, including the type of equipment, the scope of the procedures he developed and some measure of how change contributed to the organization would make a great impression.

A few questions this job seeker could answer that would lead to the type of impressive content that would get a hiring manager excited are:

When have you developed or changed a maintenance procedure resulting in lower overall maintenance costs?
When have you improved the performance of equipment you were maintaining?
When have you improved the reliability of the equipment you were maintaining?
When have you developed a faster process for maintaining equipment?
When have you modified equipment to better suit the needs of medical personnel using the equipment?

As it stands, a hiring manager who is concerned about some of these questions (cutting costs, improving performance and reliability, etc.) will assume the answer to each question is “never.” That’s not the impression this job seeker wants to make. Fortunately, the solution is easy. Add a couple bullets points showing the contribution the job seeker made.

Sales Tips for a Job Seeker

A job search is a sales activity. You are selling yourself and trying to persuade a company to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for your time and effort. You need to present an advertising, marketing and sales material to get land an interview and need to make a better sales presentation than your competition. If you don’t, someone else will land the sale and get hired.

There are a lot of people who detest sales. They think it’s dishonest and unethical. This view is completely wrong, but it exists in our society. If you hold this view and refuse to try to sell yourself in your job search, you will be placing a huge obstacle in your path. Selling is an activity that helps the buyer. Buyers are not experts on the products they are buying – the sales people are. A good sales person will help a person find the right product or service to buy. You need to do the same in your job search.

A hiring manager is a buyer. The hiring process is designed to assess candidates, learning as much as possible, so the hiring manager can make the best decision. You need to make sure you are providing the information the hiring manager needs and show them the value you offer. If you don’t do this, you won’t get hired. There are a few key steps in the sales process you need to execute effectively:

Give a Reason To Buy: The number one task in your job search is to give a hiring manager a reason to hire you. This may seem obvious, but it is amazing how few people actually do this. You need to show very clearly why you will provide more value to the hiring manager and employer than your competition. Imagine going into a car dealer and the sales person shows you a car. You ask why you should buy it, and the only answer is the car drives and will get you places. This is what many job seekers do. Their sales pitch is that they can do the job. Meeting the absolute minimum requirements is not a sales pitch. This is essentially saying “I offer the least value possible while still being able to do the job.” Not very impressive.

Know Your Limitations: You are not an ideal fit for every job. There are plenty of positions where other candidates have a better combination of skills and abilities. This isn’t a bad thing. You can’t bet the best at everything. You need to be the best at something. Too many people try to cover every base possible. Focus on what you are truly good at doing. If a hiring manager wants someone with a different skill set, be honest. You won’t land that job, but your honesty can make an impression and lead you to other positions with an organization. The hiring manager may have the perfect job for you. If you aren’t honest about your strengths and weaknesses, you may never discover this position.

Focus on Benefits: One of the most basic lessons taught in sales courses is to focus on benefits not features. In a job search, this is showing the contributions you will make. To do this, you need to show the hiring manager similar contributions you have made in the past. For example, in some cereal ads, the actors talk about how after eating one type of cereal, their cholesterol was lower, and their family was happier as a result. Can you show how you exceed the expectations of a former boss and delivered specific results to the company? This is what a hiring manager wants – the results that will allow them beat their budget and goals. If you show how you will do this, you will be much more likely to get hired.

Listen: Great sales people listen much more than they talk. They learn as much about the needs of the customer as they can. Because interviews are typically a series of questions by the interviewer and answers by the job seeker, it may seem difficult to listen to the needs of the hiring manager. It’s much easier to learn what a hiring manager wants if you put forth a little effort. The first step is to network with people who understand the company and job and learn as much as you can. This will give you insight into the hiring manager’s perspective. During the interview, pay attention to the type of questions being asked and ask questions to learn about the position. For example:

What are your goals for this position?
What is the biggest challenge for this position?
What do you want to see a person in this role accomplish in the first 3 months? 6 months? Year?
How will I be assessed and evaluated in this role?

Answers to these questions will show you what a hiring manager wants. Listen closely to the answers and show how you will meet these needs.

Follow Up: Good sales people follow up, even after being rejected. Make sure you send thank you notes after interviews, and stay in touch with hiring managers. It may take months or years, but each relationship you develop and maintain has the potential to lead to offer.

If you focus on selling your potential, you will maximize your chance of success. If you don’t want to do this, you will help your competition gain the edge over you.

Why Your Resume Should Have a Summary Section

The resume I read today illustrated how important a summary section is. The resume was from a sales professional with around five years of experience. The resume started with candidate’s work experience. Although work experience is extremely important, you are limited in your presentation if you lead off with a work experience section.

A great way to start a resume is with a summary section. This section provides the primary sales pitch to get a hiring manager excited and interested in your resume. Without a summary section, it’s difficult to grab attention fast and keep it.

The problem with starting a resume with your work experience results from the order of the information. You need to put your experience in reverse chronological order. This puts the most recent position at the top.

If your most impressive experience is listed under your most recent job, you’re in good shape. Often, your best selling points will be scattered throughout your career and your resume. This is where a summary section helps. You can gather the most important elements and list them separately at the top of your resume.

To illustrate this, look at the top of the resume I received:

<Employer Name>, Account Manager Sept. ’08 to Present

Manage the relationships with key prospects throughout my region, to ensure that is best placed to win major contracts and associated services

Coordinate internal resources to respond to RFPs and secure business from both new and existing customers

Establish and strengthen customer relationships through developing an intimate knowledge of individual accounts and key stakeholders

The candidate has been in this job for less than a year and lists a few responsibilities, but no accomplishments. In sales, especially a field with large proposals that can take upwards of a year to win, it is difficult to show significant accomplishments in the first few months. This leads to an unfavorable impression of the candidate at the very beginning. He is a sales professional who has not had any success – not the kind of sales pitch that is going to get a person hired.

The core problem is how a hiring manager reads a resume. Hiring managers scan resumes very quickly, focusing on the top of the resume. They also will not assume a candidate is any better than what is presented, and will not assume a candidate has been more successful than the resume presents.

In the case of the resume excerpt above, a typical reaction will be to assume the candidate has been completely unsuccessful. Otherwise, the candidate would have listed something about his success. This leads to an impression in the first 15 seconds that the candidate is an unsuccessful sales professional. The resume will probably be rejected at this point.

The truth is the candidate does have some impressive accomplishments. Unfortunately, he is unlikely to get the opportunity to tell a hiring manager about them because his resume will be rejected at the start of the process.

The solution is easy. Write a short summary section highlighting the key accomplishments and skills of the candidate. This will get a hiring manager excited and motivated them to give a call.

Turn Your Resume Into a Billboard

One advertising media that can teach an important lesson about resume writing is a billboard on an interstate. Billboards can be effective because they are seen by a huge number of people who have little else to read. They also pose a significant challenge. Drivers only have a second or two to read the billboard.

A resume is an advertisement for you. It needs to contain some specific information about your background, but at its core, a resume is designed to make a sales pitch. Focusing on this aspect of resume writing can greatly improve the effectiveness of the document you produce.

Imagine designing a billboard version of your resume. You would have to shorten the content to a few words. Adding too much will hurt the overall effectiveness, even if the added content is important and impressive. The reason for this is simple. A driver may only have time to read five or ten words. You can’t count on them starting at the beginning of the message. This means that any content beyond the most important five or ten words will reduce the chance the most important content will be read.

Your resume faces a similar challenge. A hiring manager will only look at a resume for a short time. Often, it will only get a 15 to 30 second look initially. This prevents the hiring manager from reading more than few a sentences. If they read content that is of little importance, the odds your resume will be rejected go way up.

To write the best resume, you should not assess the value of each piece of content in isolation. This will lead to a resume that is too long. You need to assess the relative value of the content and delete the elements that may be valuable but distract the reader from the most important elements.

One of the biggest challenges in this process is detaching the emotional ties to specific experiences. Deleting something from your resume does not reduce the significance of the experience. It only reflects the lower importance of the element to a specific audience. For example, billboards for restaurants, hotels and other destinations always list the exit number. The exit number is a very minor detail in assessing the quality and value of a restaurant in every situation except for a passing driver who doesn’t know where the location is. In this case, details about the quality of the food, the selection, the cost and the overall attractiveness of the restaurant are less important details and are usually omitted from the billboard.

Approach your resume from the same perspective of the billboard designer. Imagine a hiring manager speeding past resumes, only getting a quick glance at the content and deciding in an instant, whether they are going to get off the exit and take a long look, or keep driving. If you catch their attention quickly, you will greatly improve your odds of getting an interview.

Applying Behavioral Interview Techniques to Your Resume

Behavioral interviews ask situation based questions and focus on getting the job seeker to talk about specific examples of their performance. The technique was developed because past performance is the best indicator of future performance. If a hiring manager can assess how you performed in a number of key situations relevant to the job, they will be able to better assess your potential in that job.

The behavior techniques provide a great opportunity for a job seeker to set themselves apart from their competition. Creating this same impression in your resume can help propel you to the top of the pile. Right now, companies are receiving hundreds of resumes for every position. The vast majority of resumes look alike and do nothing to differentiate the job seeker. You can use the lessons from behavioral interviewing to upgrade your resume and make a powerful impression.

Focus on Accomplishments: The cornerstone of a successful behavioral interview is showing the hiring manager past successes. You need to do this on your resume too. The focus of your resume needs to be your successes and contributions in past positions.

Be Specific: Behavioral interviews ask questions designed to get the candidate to tell specific stories from their experience. Be specific on your resume too. A few very detailed stories of your past success will make the best impression.

Keep it Simple: The most important aspect of showing your accomplishments is not showing the biggest impact. The key element is making it easy for the hiring manager to picture what you did. This requires explaining the basic and providing simple, easy to understand examples.

Detailed Results: For an accomplishment to be impressive, you need to show the results you achieved. This requires specific numbers demonstrating the scope of the accomplishment.

Make it memorable: The accomplishments on your resume are the short highlight film clips that summarize your career. How are your favorite actors and athletes remembered? Often, an actor who starred in dozens of movies will be remembered for one movie, and possibly one scene from that movie. An athlete is often summarized by a single play. These isolated events create a power memory that makes it easy to remember the person. Most job seekers have completely forgettable resumes. A single accomplishment that creates a strong, specific image can make you memorable and give you an edge in your job search.

A few accomplishments explained in detail can set your resume apart from your competition. Most job seekers fail to show accomplishments on their resume. Adding a few accomplishments will greatly improve the success of your job search.

As important as it is to include examples of your accomplishments, you also need to tailor them to the position. List a few accomplishments that directly relate to the job you are applying for. Ideally, you will provide answers to the top two or three questions a hiring manager would ask in an interview.

Our book on Interview Preparation teaches behavioral interview techniques in a quick, easy to learn style. The book is set up with short chapters that each cover one step in the preparation process. Each chapter is followed by exercises for you to complete that move you toward your goal of mastering behavioral interviewing. Get our book on behavioral interviewing.

Fast Track Your Career

Markell Steele of Futures In Motion is offering the Fast Track Your Career Teleclass on Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 3pm PST.

Markell will share her tips for how you can create a career map that reflects your skills, values, interests and desired lifestyle. Your career map will be a planning tool you can use to guide your career in a satisfying direction. The goal for the teleclass is for you to gain confidence in actively planning your career. Markell will outline the specific steps you can take to discover what’s most important to you and to describe how you can chart your path by creating a career map.

Markell R. Steele, Career Counselor and founder of Futures in Motion, Inc., is a national certified counselor, distance credentialed counselor, author, and speaker. "I help frustrated job seekers find career direction, so they can get the job they want in less time with less stress."

Working directly with clients, Markell helps them gain the confidence they need to create and manage satisfying careers. She is an expert in the career management process and provides her clients with a wealth of knowledge about the world of work and strategies for career success. As a counselor and coach, she facilitates career decision- making, job search action planning, self-marketing campaign development, professional network development, and leadership development.

Markell is passionate about her career and her mission is to help as many people as possible create a career and life they love. She's faced obstacles in her career and has learned from her mistakes and successes. She shares all of that with her clients, so they can avoid the pitfalls that will derail their careers. Her clients appreciate her straightforward, action-oriented approach that is infused with a caring, supportive and understanding attitude.

Markell’s educational background includes a Master of Education degree in Counseling from the University of San Diego (USD) and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She is a National Certified Counselor and has been trained as a Distance Credentialed Counselor. She also serves on the boards of NAWBO-OC and the UCSB Alumni Association.

You can sign up for the class at: http://www.futures-in-motion.com/teleclass-fast-track.php

Telling Hiring Managers What They Want

I receive cover letters on a regular basis that try to define the hiring criteria for the hiring manager. Most hiring managers know what they are looking for when hiring. They might have some flexibility in the criteria, but generally they know what types of skills, experiences and abilities will make someone successful. As a job seeker, it’s a waste of time to try to persuade them to change their criteria. Despite this, some job seekers lead off their cover letters with instructions for how to hire.

The cover letter I read today did just that. Below are the first few lines of the letter:

Today's market require a sales representative that is versatile, competitive, unrelenting and strategic. If that set of skills can also harness the new technologies found in the marketplace, then you have a solid member to any organization that is positioning, marketing and selling their product. I am such an individual.

The qualities mentioned above sound good… versatile, competitive, unrelenting, strategic and able to harness technologies. They may not be the top priorities for the hiring manager. An ability to cold call, generate referrals or up sell clients into higher margin products may be the key concerns of the hiring manager. Focusing on a different set of skills will not win the hiring manager over.

This tactic has one other major problem. There are hiring managers who will read the cover letter and picture the person telling them how to run the department. A manager does not want someone who will question and challenge every decision and assignment. This is too time consuming for a manager. The manager may want input and ideas from time to time, but they also want a person who will follow the systems and processes.

The job seeker could easily change the cover letter to highlight the same skills but not lecture the hiring manager. For example:

I am a committed, competitive and unrelenting sales professional, able to adapt quickly and focus on strategic activities that will grow sales. I have consistently used new and cutting edge technologies to gain an edge over my competition in the marketplace.

This intro focuses on the job seeker, not the hiring criteria.

Job Search Webinar Schedule

Next week, I am presenting three webinars, Resume Writing Basics, Job Interview Basics, and Job Search Basics. I taught these three classes online for the first time a couple weeks ago and the response was great.

This will be the last time I offer the basics series of webinars for free. I have been testing the software and getting comfortable presenting online. Although I’ve presented these topics in person a number times in seminars, I wanted to practice the online presentation a few times and get some feedback on the presentations. The feedback was great and very helpful, and I’m doing one last set of free sessions. Next week will be the the last opportunity you will have to attend the sessions for free – so sign up today!

The schedule for next week is:

Resume Writing Basics – Monday July 27, 11AM EDT
Job Interview Basics – Wednesday July 29, 11AM EDT
Job Search Basics – Friday July 31, 11AM EDT

The three webinars form our Basics series. We are designing Advanced courses on each of these topics. Our goal is to complete the Resume Writing Advanced Series within the next couple weeks. This series will start with the Resume Writing Basics course and includes six other webinars on advanced resume writing topics. Check out the Resume Writing Advanced Series of Webinars.

If the days and times above don’t fit your schedule, check our Career Advice Webinars page for announcements of upcoming events. You can also register for a special mailing list to receive emails announcing each class. We plan on presenting webinars during the week with both daytime and evening sessions and are planning a Saturday series offering several webinars back-to-back.

Update: I know do webinars for APICS. Check out APICS to learn about the webinars, whitepapers and other career resources available to members.

Accomplishments that Hurt a Resume

I write a lot about how important accomplishments are to a resume. They provide the sales pitch to get a hiring manager interested and excited about your background. They also demonstrate your capability in a way that nothing else can.

The resume I read today showed me the rare example of when accomplishments actually hurt the overall impression. The problem wasn’t the individual accomplishments – each was good and impressive. The problem was they didn’t fit together. In fact, they seemed to contradict each other. Below are the two accomplishments from an operations manager within a distribution company:

Building up staff to eventually build in 2nd shift for production to accommodate increased volume.
Reduced warehouse staff 25% and increased production by 15% in shipping and receiving.

The candidate has been with this employer for around a year. In this short time, both increasing and decreasing staffing levels seems out of place. If the candidate had a five year track record with the company, it would be fine. The business cycle has changed and companies are adjusting.

Do I think the candidate is lying about his accomplishments? No. There is probably a good explanation for what he did. Despite this, I’m focused on whether he is telling the truth, how these two accomplishments could be reconciled and whether the accomplishments are credible. I’m not thinking about how the accomplishments demonstrate an ability to help an organization.

If the job seeker is coming for the exact role and type of company than the job being filed, this won’t be too much of a problem. A hiring manager is like to still give him a call. More often, a job seeker will be from a different job type or industry. If this is the case, the job seeker already has a strike against them. Adding even a little doubt or confusion about the accomplishments can be the deciding factor in rejecting the candidate.

There are a couple of solutions for this job seeker. The easiest is to delete the bullet related to adding 2nd shift. In a down economy, more companies are concerned about cutting costs, and few are worried about expanding. Dropping this will not hurt the resume.

Another option would be to explain the accomplishments better, so they make sense together. For example, the staff reduction might be in one department and adding 2nd shift could be in a completely different department. If this is the case, providing a little more detail would fix the inconsistency.

One of the greatest challenges when writing your resume is knowing how a reader, who knows nothing about you, will interpret what you write. You have the benefit of knowing your complete work history. This makes it difficult to see when key details are omitted. The solution is to have someone, who knows little to nothing about your review your resume, assess the content.

Replacing a High Paying Job

In the early 90’s, I worked for an engineering firm who built steel mills. This company had a new technology that was in great demand. At the same time, the industry was down and most engineering firms in the steel industry were laying off people. The department I worked in designed the piping systems for the steel mill. It was led by an engineering manager, had a team of engineers, a drafting supervisor and team of draftsmen.

One of the draftsmen had been the engineering manager for a different firm, but had been laid off. In taking the drafting job, his income was probably cut by sixty or seventy percent. When I first met him, I felt sorry for him. He had a couple of kids in college and was having trouble supporting his family. My sympathy didn’t last long. The guy was extremely bitter and spent most of his time criticizing everything around him, especially the company. He blamed everyone he could for his misfortune. He ended up being a miserable person to work with and most people avoided him. He didn't last long at the company, despite being extremely qualified, capable and skilled.

It wasn’t the company’s fault that he had lost his job, or that they were paying him so much less than he had been making. When they hired a draftsman, they hired him despite his being vastly overqualified. He had a chance to prove his capability and earn promotions quickly. The company was growing and there was a lot of potential to move up. His attitude ensured he would not see a promotion, and he didn’t last long with the company.

Although this story is almost 20 years old, it has a lot of similarities today. I have been running into job seekers who are struggling to find a job that pays as well as their last position. During their career, they progressed up and received good raises. Recently, they were laid off. They are now finding it difficult, if not impossible, to find a job that pays as well as the one they lost.

This is a very difficult situation. Some people are looking at more than a 50% cut to their pay. Add to this a high mortgage, falling real estate prices and a stock market down significantly from its highs. Prospects may look bleak.

Despite the tough economy, many of these job seekers feel that they are owed a job at least as good as the one they had. Employers don't want to hear about a person's hardships or their expectations. They don't care what you think you deserve. They want to hire someone that will do a job efficiently and effectively. They will also minimize costs and will not pay someone more than they have to.

I would like to give the secret to replacing a great salary, but there is no “do this one thing and you’ll be rich” tip. The truth is replacing an income at the top end of the range for a job type may not be possible today. This isn’t what anyone wants to hear, but it is the truth. So what do you do?

The first thing you need to do is accept that just because a company paid you a lot in the past doesn’t mean you are owed that today. This is tough to accept – no one wants to take a step backwards.

Second, look at the long term potential of a position. If you could take a 50% pay cut, knowing that within two years you would get promotions and replace the lost pay, would situation be more attractive? Too many people expect to replace their lost income immediately. This leads to long periods of unemployment and no potential for promotion.

It can be difficult to accept a major cut in pay, but being bitter about it will only hurt your job search and your performance on the job once hired.