Career Archives - Palladian Career Resources

How To Update Your Resume for a Career Change

Changing careers is an exciting opportunity to explore new possibilities, but it often requires rethinking how you present yourself to potential employers. Your resume serves as a crucial bridge between your past experience and your future goals. A well-crafted resume can help hiring managers see the connection between your previous accomplishments and the value you bring to your new career path.

Here are 5 steps to update your resume for a new career:

1. Start with An Objective Statement That Highlights Your New Career Goals

An objective statement is your first chance to communicate your career transition effectively. This section should succinctly convey your aspirations while emphasizing the skills and experiences that make you a strong candidate for your new career.

Reference:

To learn more about writing a winning objective statement, see How To Leverage AI To Write A Winning Objective Statement For Your Resume.

Example:

Before:

Objective: Seeking a challenging role in marketing where I can utilize my organizational and analytical skills.

After:

Objective: Dynamic marketing professional transitioning to a career in digital product management, leveraging 8+ years of experience in campaign strategy, team leadership, and data analytics to drive customer-centric innovation.

The first objective is generic and fails to communicate a clear connection to the specific value you bring to the new role. In contrast, the second objective is both tailored and impactful. It explicitly ties your past experiences to the demands of your new career, showcasing your readiness and enthusiasm for the transition. This transformation makes your career goals tangible and compelling to hiring managers.

2. Identify and Emphasize Transferable Skills

Transferable skills are the key to bridging the gap between your current experience and your new career. Highlight skills relevant to the new role, even if they were developed in a different context.

Example:

Before:

Skills: Team Leadership, Budget Management, Scheduling, Event Planning.

After:

Skills: Cross-functional Team Leadership, Strategic Budget Management, Project Scheduling, Campaign Planning.

Notice how the skills are reframed using language that resonates with the new career’s requirements, such as “campaign planning” for a pivot into marketing.

3. Reframe Your Work Experience To Align with Your New Career Goals

Rewriting your work experience is essential to show employers how your previous roles prepared you for your new career. Tailor your job descriptions to highlight achievements relevant to the new field. Use industry-specific language and focus on measurable outcomes.

Example:

Before:

Project Manager, ABC Corporation (2018–2023)

Managed multiple construction projects simultaneously.
Developed schedules and tracked progress using project management software.
Oversaw budgets and procurement processes.

After:

Project Manager, ABC Corporation (2018–2023)

Coordinated cross-functional teams to deliver projects on time and under budget.
Utilized project management software to streamline timelines and ensure deliverable quality.
Implemented data-driven processes that improved client satisfaction by 15%.

The updated version emphasizes transferable skills like team coordination, software proficiency, and client-focused outcomes.

4. Add Relevant Education and Certifications

When transitioning careers, certifications and additional training can demonstrate your commitment to learning and adapting. Pursue courses, certifications, or workshops to bridge knowledge gaps. List new credentials prominently and link them to your desired role.

Example:

Before:

Education:

B.A. in English, XYZ University (2015)

After:

Education and Certifications:

Digital Marketing Professional Certificate, Coursera (2024)
B.A. in English, XYZ University (2015)

This addition showcases your proactive efforts to gain industry-relevant knowledge.

5. Add Relevant Personal Projects

Personal projects can be a great way to fill experience gaps while demonstrating passion and initiative. Include projects that directly relate to your target industry under a dedicated “Relevant Experience” section.

Example:

Relevant Experience:

Developed a content strategy and grew a personal blog from zero to 5,000 monthly readers in six months, focusing on SEO best practices.
Designed a social media campaign for a local nonprofit, increasing engagement by 40% in three months.

These examples highlight real-world application of skills that employers value, even if they were acquired outside a traditional workplace.

Conclusion

Updating your resume for a career change is not just about adding new content—it’s about reframing your existing experience to match your aspirations. By starting with a clear objective statement, emphasizing transferable skills, and strategically highlighting relevant experience, education, and personal projects, you can present yourself as a strong candidate ready for the next step in your professional journey.

How To Advance Beyond Your Current Position

As inflation rises, many people seek career advancement to secure financial stability. To succeed, it’s essential to cultivate a strategic mindset. Advancing beyond your current position will require a shift in the way you think about your role in your company and the value you can provide to meet the challenges of an ever-changing world.

Here are five essential mindset shifts to help you advance in your career:

1. Adopt a Growth Mindset

A growth mindset is key to personal and professional development. Embrace challenges as learning opportunities, and view setbacks as stepping stones rather than failures. The willingness to adapt and improve will set you apart.

Every new experience can become a major bullet point on your resume or a key talking point in an interview. Many job seekers fear questions about weaknesses or failures. Those should be some of your strongest answers. If you understand your weaknesses and know how to succeed despite them, you are a much greater asset to a company than someone oblivious to their weaknesses. Check out this article on handling questions on failure.

2. Seek Out Mentorship

Find mentors who can help you grow, and learn from their experiences. A mentor not only provides guidance but also challenges you to think beyond your current limitations, pushing you to grow in areas you might not have considered.

One of our greatest challenges learning to see the blindspots in our view of our skills, abilities and performance. The vast majority of workers think they are above average. Obviously, the math on that can’t work. Most people are more comfortable remaining blind to areas of opportunity rather than confronting them. Find someone you trust who has the experience to see what you could become. Avoid people that simply feed your ego and lead you away from personal accountability. Such people might make you feel better in the short run, but they do little to help you grow.

3. Demonstrate Leadership

Being a leader means more than just telling people what to do—it’s about taking initiative and guiding others through sophisticated challenges to meet your company’s needs. To be a good leader you must be able to collaborate with others to accomplish a common goal. Make an effort to build relationships across your organization and actively participate in projects and discussions. By showcasing your ability to take ownership and work with others you’ll position yourself for advancement.

4. Know Your Desired Position and the Current Jobholders

If you’re aiming for a specific role, thoroughly understand the requirements and expectations of that position. Observe the current jobholder—what are they excelling at, and where might they fall short? Identify gaps where your strengths can bring value. By positioning yourself as someone who can complement or even exceed the current jobholder’s performance, you’ll stand out when opportunities arise. This awareness allows you to strategically demonstrate how you’re the ideal candidate to fill that role when it becomes available.

5. Ask To Advance

One of the most straightforward, yet often overlooked, steps is to ask for advancement. Many employees hesitate to express their ambitions clearly. Initiating a conversation with your manager about your goals shows drive and initiative. Discuss the steps you need to take to move forward and ask for feedback. Let them know you’re ready and willing to take on more responsibility. Being direct about your aspirations can open doors that you didn’t realize were available.

Mindset is everything when it comes to advancing in your career. By fostering a mindset of growth, leadership, and strategic awareness, you position yourself for long-term success and open doors to new opportunities.

Spell Check Web Forms

Everyone knows you should proofread and spell check your resume. Unfortunately, a single resume document isn’t sufficient for a job search today. Many companies require job seekers to apply through lengthy online forms. Each field collects different information, and you will need to write answers to questions not covered in your resume.

The text you put in an online application needs to be professional. You can’t have a ton of spelling errors and think you are going to make a good impression. Submitting a job application isn’t like other writing activities – you will be judged very critically. Many job seekers struggle with this. They use spell check effectively but are lost as soon as they have to fill in a web form. There are solutions to help eliminate mistakes.

Google Toolbar

If you use the google toolbar, there is a spell check tool you can use. All you have to do is click the button on the toolbar and google will spell check all the text in the form fields on a web page. This tool doesn’t have a grammar check component. It also won’t identify places where you misspell a word by typing a different word. For example, I’ve found lately I continue to type “you” for “your” when writing. I can’t type as fast as I would like and end up missing a letter here and there. Spell check will never find this mistake, and a grammar checker won’t even find it a lot of the time.

Despite missing some errors, the google spell check will catch obvious misspellings. It’s easy to add and only takes a few seconds to run.

Using a Word Professor

To check your text more thoroughly, copy it over to a word processor and run the grammar checker. This is more time consuming, but will help you avoid mistakes on applications. It’s definitely worth the time.

Other Tools

There are other tools to help you avoid typos in your writing. I use a number of checks to try to avoid mistakes. I’ve learned the hard way. If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, hopefully you have noticed a vast improvement over the last year and a half. I find it extremely difficult to see mistakes in my writing. I know what I meant to write and have trouble seeing what I actually typed. This is especially difficult when I proofread immediately after writing. For this blog, this is how I write. I usually spend less than an hour from the time I start an article until I hit publish. That doesn’t give much time to edit.

On Monday, I am going to outline the full process I use to write and edit an article quickly. It’s reasonably effective, but not perfect. Within the process, there are four different checks I do to catch errors. I’ve worked to balance the effectiveness of the editing process with the time required. Check back Monday to see if some of the checks I do can help you improve your writing on cover letters and job applications.

Finding a New Career

In every recession, some companies and industries decline, never to come back. As painful as this process is, it is a natural component of our economy. Periodically, we clean house and get rid of companies who are not competitive. For the employees of these companies, the process is painful, frustrating and depressing. Making the situation even more difficult is the fact that the recovery will not bring back a lot of the jobs that were lost.

We have industries in decline and the recovery will not happen overnight. The US auto industry will be much smaller in the future. Cuts made at GM and Chrysler will lead to more foreign made cars and less domestic made cars. For people in the auto industry, this means jobs are going to be few and far between. Other industries are undergoing similar transformations.

The strength of our economy is the ability to bounce back and reinvent itself. Time and time again, we have had industries decline and collapse, only to be replaced by other industries. This has led to mass migrations of people to areas with better job prospects. One of the strongest images of the Great Depression is the small farmer packing up and moving from the mid-west to California. This pattern continually recurs. I grew up in Pittsburgh and watch hundreds of thousands of steel related jobs disappear in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. It’s part of the reason Steeler fans are everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of people have moved to other parts of the country.

We’re going to see the same type of transformation over the next several years. This could happen quickly, or it could take a while – in either case, it will happen. If you are a job seeker, letting go of a job, employer, industry and home can be extremely difficult. Many people struggle with imagining what their possibilities really are. They also are reluctant to start over completely in a new field.

If you are considering a career change, picking a new field or industry can be difficult. There are some tools that can help. One tool that can help narrow the search and uncover jobs you may not have heard off is O-Net. O-Net is a website that allows you to search skills and identify the jobs that match your capability.

O-Net provides detailed information on the jobs it recommends. This includes information about the skills, education and experience required. It also provides an assessment of the demand level for the positions to help you focus on careers with more demand than job seekers.

Breaking into a new field can be difficult. It’s humbling to go back to an “entry level” status after progressing successfully in an alternate career. In the long run, starting over can pay huge dividends. The new career can also provide a faster career path. An experienced professional starting over should move up faster than someone without experience, and in a growth industry, there will be more opportunities to progress upward.

Sharpening the Saw

I spent several days last week in a training class. Professional development is important if you want to improve in your career. In today’s economy, it is even more critical. Unemployment continues to increase and job seekers continue to become more frustrated with the job market.

There is a lot of talk about the recession being over. We’re now in recovery! Unfortunately, it’s being called a jobless recovery. Companies have downsized to a point where they are profitable at lower volumes. They are not in decline any longer. They are also not growing or adding staff – they are only replacing key losses. This could make the job market very difficult for an extended period. It won’t last forever. Job creation will return, but if you need a job now, that’s not much of a consolation.

In the training class I attended, there were people stable in their careers looking to add a new skill, there were individuals looking for work who wanted to give themselves an edge in the job markets and others were looking to move in a new career direction and needed to add new skills to make the career change.

These are great goals. Additionally, by taking the initiative to find and attend a workshop, these individuals demonstrated a commitment to their professionals above what most are doing. They are not sitting still. They are striving to move forward and grow.

This is an important lesson in an economic downtown. The number of discouraged job seekers has been climbing. There are a ton of people who are out of work and have given up searching for a job. An extended job search is frustrating and depressing. There’s no way around that. Being rejected over and over can make a person feel that their job search is pointless. Unfortunately, if you adopt this view, you will be right. Giving up will ensure an unsuccessful job search.

So what are you going to do? Asking this question is a critical first step. Running out and signing up for a training class is an answer, but it is far from the only one. What is critical is what you are doing during your job search. This could be enrolling in school, attending a workshop, volunteering at a local charity or any other activity that keeps you on a path of learning, growth and development.

In additional to gaining some new skills, you will also help your marketability. For people who have been out of work for an extended period, they are likely to face the question, “what have you been doing while out of work?” Many will only answer “I’ve been looking for a job,” while a few will describe substantive activities related to their career that could make them more marketable. If you were hiring, who would you pick?

Supply Chain Risk Reduction

As you write your resume and prepare to interview, you will want show how you contributed to your past employers. Focusing on ways you have cut costs is a good start. Reducing lead times and improving quality are also good to emphasize. These are only starting points for supply chain professionals. Managing risk can be the most important aspect of a supply chain role.

Supply chain professionals face numerous challenges. Sourcing provides some of the most complex obstacles a company will face. Sourcing professionals need to find ways to source high quality products, materials and services at low prices with short lead times and no supply interruptions. All of this must be done in a global economy constantly changing. As a supply chain professional, how you maximize the performance of the supply chain is important, but equally important is minimizing risk.

There are risks in every strategy and tactic a company adopts. Some risks are small. Supply chain risks are often huge. For example, construction firms who utilized Chinese drywall over the last decade face tremendous liabilities as the material has been found contain chemicals that make houses unlivable. Entire subdivisions are being abandoned. There are numerous examples of companies harmed by poor quality materials from suppliers. These risks are significant, but are only the tip of the iceberg.

When sourcing globally, companies face risks from every direction. Currency fluctuations can turn the lowest cost supplier into the highest cost option. Political disputes and striking workers can shut down companies and key transportation routes. Energy price changes can drive up or down transportation costs. Every year, natural disasters, from hurricanes to earthquakes, hit different parts of the world. The more widely spread your supply chain, the more likely you will be affected.

Managing all of these risks is challenging. Risk management was a key theme in one of the supply chain management sessions at the APICS Conference in Toronto I attended. The speaker talked about ways to build in alternatives and options into a supply chain. Developing secondary suppliers and alternate delivery strategies can be essential if your company wants to survive a major supply disruption.

As you write your resume, include examples of your contributions to managing supply chain risk. Often this will take the form of developing additional suppliers. Doubling your supplier base could be an expensive proposition, but it could also be much less costly than a major supply disruption. Your experience with balancing these priorities and the solutions you delivered can help set you apart from other supply chain professionals. Some people just show up. They do the minimal to get by. This usually involves shortcutting to the solution. Showing how you took a more difficult path but set the company up for success no matter what happens is much more valuable.

Risk management is a good topic for a resume, but it may be more suitable for interviewing. On a resume, you need to brief. You may only have a couple lines to devote to each accomplishment. Managing risk can be a complex process not easily condensed. For this reason, your best risk management accomplishment might not help on your resume. Once you get into an interview, though, you will have the opportunity explain what you did more fully and dive into complex accomplishments.

Information as a Strategic Asset

I had the opportunity to listen to a couple consultants from IBM at the APICS Conference in Toronto. They discussed ways to capture information and make it easier for decision makers to use. The overriding theme of the presentation was transforming a mass of data into an organized, easily accessible store of information. Meeting this challenge can offer job seekers a means of differentiating themselves from their competition.

The guys from IBM quoted two statistics that really stood out. First, they referenced a survey of CEOs where 60% said they need to get better at leveraging information. This is a challenge in every organization, regardless of company size, industry or market position. We live in a world with so much information; it can be difficult or impossible to get a handle on what is really going on.

The second stat related to ability of workers to find the information they need to make decisions. The stat was from a study of workers’ time and found 70% of time is spent searching for information. This means in a company, out of every three people, two of them are looking for information at any point in time. Only one in three is actually acting on the information they find.

These stats point out a major concern in organizations. Capturing data quickly and efficiently, and incorporate that data into decision making are critical capabilities to allow a company to change faster. Speed and flexibility were a major theme of a number of the presentations at the conference. Companies can’t afford to wait a long time to see trends develop and mature. They need to adapt quickly – faster than their competition.

As a job seeker, how is this relevant to your search? Simple, managing and leveraging data is a critical concern for companies, and if you can show how you improved the effectiveness of an employer in this area in the past, you can set yourself apart.

Some people will look at this and assume the change has to be major – implementing a major data management system affecting every aspect of the company. Major technology upgrades are important, but few of us are involved in buying a new ERP system. Despite this, there are a lot of other ways you probably affected information utilization.

Look at the ways you changed the information you required from your team. Did you make any changes to the reporting you required? How did this streamline the process for your team? How did this allow you to make faster and better decisions?

Look at the ways you changed the information you provided others in the organization. How did you improve the speed you were able to distribute information? How did you improve the quality of the information you provided? What did you do to make this information more accessible so others could make better and faster decisions?

These questions point to improvements you may have made in your organizations. Examples of these improvements can show the value you will provide if hired. They are accomplishments that can set you apart from your competition. To present these with the most impact, you should show the end result of the improvement. It’s not enough to just say you improve the efficiency of information gathering activities. How did gathering that data faster allow the organization to do something it couldn’t do before? This improvement could allow for better customer service, better forecasts, improved quality and reduced scrap, faster product development, or a host of other improvements.

Ultimately, you want to show how your efforts made a company more competitive and profitable. The incremental activities towards this goal can be impressive and help you land a job over other candidates with the same or greater experience. The key is showing your contributions and successes. Data management and reporting is critical competency affecting the overall success of a company. Providing examples of your success in this area will help demonstrate your potential.

APICS Conference

I’m back from the APICS Conference in Toronto. The event was extremely valuable. If you are not familiar with APICS, the organization provides operations management education, research and professional development. This was the first time I have attended an APICS Conference. I’ve been a member for a long time, but had never made it to conference. I now know what I was missing.

Two elements made the conference exceptional. First, the people at the conference are leaders in their fields. They are constantly reinventing manufacturing, operations and supply chain practices, and they are committed to improving not just their companies but their own potential. Second, APICS developed an educational curriculum offering tremendous value.

What stood out to me was the scope of the challenges people were tackling. For example, the theme of the conference was Global Ability. With this theme, people talked about how they were cutting costs and reducing their impact on the environment at the same time. The discussion was not how to balance these priorities. Balancing requires tradeoffs. The discussion focused on ways to achieve both simultaneously without having to hurt one area to help another.

The goals were impressive, but the results were what really stood out. I had the opportunity to hear from people who were succeeding in some of the most challenging situations. For example, one food manufacturer had committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, reducing waste and improving profit margins. Several years into their effort, they had made substantial GHG cuts, and they reduced the total waste from a manufacturing plant to less than one dumpster a week. They also demonstrated specific savings from each of the activities they undertook. The result was a company doing significantly more volume, with less overall GHG emissions and waste, and a higher profit margin.

This is a great story and should inspire people to stretch to achieve beyond what appears possible today, but that’s not why I’m telling it. The people who developed the plan, solved the technical problems, led the teams to implement the changes, worked through the details and made this happen, and everyone else involved in the effort delivered substantial success. Do you think there are companies who would like to achieve similar results? Do you think there hiring managers who are tasked with delivering similar results and need help? Absolutely.

With the global theme of the conference, it became clear that the companies around the world face the same challenges. There are differences, but much more was the same. The demand for solutions and the people who can provide them is strong – even as the job market is weak.

To standout in the job market, you need to show how you are exceptional. There are plenty of people who will be average in a role. Hiring managers want people who will deliver results well above average. The key to this is showing what you have done.

Over the next couple weeks, I’m going to focus on operations positions and show how you can differentiate yourself and get hired. Some of the advice will related to resumes and some to interviewing, but most will help across the board in a job search. Although I am focusing on a specific set of careers, the advice holds for anyone. It doesn’t matter what your career field is. Demonstrating your potential through specific examples of your past success is proven technique and very effective in a job search.

So, check back every couple days for the operations management articles. To make it easier, you can sign up for the newsletter and receive all of them, sent twice a month.

Are You Engaged in Your Career

I’m in Toronto at the annual APICS International Conference and was able to attend a session with bestselling author Jason Jennings. Jason’s presentation was excellent and included a number of insightful ideas about leadership. One statistic jumped out to me when I heard it.

The statistic Jason quoted was that in studies, 73% of workers say they just show up to work. They have no emotional attachment to their jobs.

This is an incredible stat. Out of every four workers, three aren’t engaged. They are doing their job but don’t have a true passion for their work. This doesn’t make these employees failures or valueless. They are making a contribution to their companies, but they are unconcerned about delivering superior results.

If you are seeking a job, you can expect a hiring managers to want candidates who have done more than just meet the minimum requirements. They want people who will exceed expectations and go above and beyond the norm.

Accomplishments

When we studied resumes a year ago, we found 57% of resumes either failed to include any accomplishments or listed only one or two. The resume is the primary sales pitch that will land you an interview. Despite this, nearly 60% of job seekers are saying they have accomplished very little in their careers that is noteworthy.

Most resumes list a ton of responsibilities. They show what the job seeker should have done. Listing responsibilities does not show what you did.

Roughly 40% of the resumes we studied showed 3 or more accomplishments. Only 10% had 5 or more. For a hiring manager looking for someone truly engaged in their career, with a passion for their job and a commitment to exceed expectations no matter what, who do you think will get hired? Do you think it will be the 60% that have few or no accomplishments on their resume? Or do you think the job seeker who shows a pattern of success throughout their career will garner more attention?

The answer is obvious. Hiring managers want people who are successful and that will do more than just show up.

What You Can Do

On your resume, you need to show what you did, not what you were responsible for doing. List accomplishments throughout your resume. These can major accomplishments, recognized throughout the company, or they can be smaller accomplishments only recognized within your department. The key is showing what you did beyond what is typical.

When you interview, be prepared to talk about your commitment to succeed with specific examples of what you have achieved. In our economy, there are a lot of talented people on the job market. The people who rise to the top will be the ones who best market their ability to deliver results.

In your career, you can be one of the 73% of people who show up, or you can be someone who is engaged and committed to their job far beyond normal. If you choose the later, not only will your career be more successful, but your job search will be more successful as well.

Using LinkedIn in a Job Search

LinkedIn can be a powerful tool in a job search. You can use it to uncover opportunities. It can help you gain referrals into companies, and it can help you research jobs. Using LinkedIn in your job search is also easy.

On Monday, I wrote about building your LinkedIn network. This is an essential first step to using LinkedIn. Once you start building your network, you can start leveraging the contacts you develop.

The easiest way to use LinkedIn for your job search is to check out the job postings. A lot of companies post positions on LinkedIn. This doesn’t require network building. All you have to do is search the jobs. Although there is a benefit to job postings, this is just a starting point.

The real value LinkedIn offers is in gathering intelligence. Knowing the priorities and goals of a hiring manager can give you a significant edge in the hiring process. Failing to understand what a hiring manager wants can make it difficult to tailor your presentation, both with your resume and in interviews. LinkedIn offers a great way to gather insight into the hiring priorities of a company.

Researching Profiles

The first step in researching a position on LinkedIn is to read the profiles of people in similar positions. Ideally, you will be able to find the profile of the hiring manager, but this isn’t always possible. In large companies, there is a good chance you will find people doing the job you are pursuing. They may be in other locations, but their profiles can still give you insight you can use. Just remember many people don’t update their profiles routinely. The “current” descriptions can be a year or more old.

LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn Answers offers a great way to pose a question to a large group of people. A lot of LinkedIn users actively participate by answering questions. If you ask a broad question, there’s a good chance you will get good info from a number of people. When asking a question, ask something that a lot of people in a company could answer and that would be valuable to more than just you. For example:
How would you describe the culture at Widget, Inc? I’m interested a job opportunity in (department or division) with Widget, Inc and would like to get an idea of what it is like working there.
How does the hiring process work at Widget, Inc? I’m pursing a <job title> position and want to understand what I should expect during the hiring process.

With large companies, you should get some answers that will be useful. For small companies, this tactic is unlikely to yield much. You can check how many people from a company are on LinkedIn by clicking on the company name in someone’s profile.

Asking For Help

Instead of broadcasting a question to everyone, you can ask a question of specific individuals within your network. With large companies, you can often find someone doing the job you want in a different location. Asking this person about their job and how they got their job can often yield great insight. Stick with questions the person can answer easily. For example, if you find a person hired in the last year, you can ask how the hiring process worked when they were hired and what they did that was effective in landing the position. Asking a question like “what is the manager at xyz location looking for” is not a question most people in other locations will be able to answer. You’re unlikely to get any response to this.

Getting Referred

As you interact with people through direct contacts and LinkedIn Answers, you will start building relationships with people. At some point, you may get to know someone who offers to refer you to the hiring manager for consideration. This can improve your chances of success dramatically. It’s not that the hiring manager will lower their standards – those won’t change. What will change will be the level of scrutiny you will receive early in the process. Many hiring managers receive an overwhelming number of resumes. Most only get a 15 to 30 second look before being rejected. You can improve your chances by getting the hiring manager to take a much closer look before making a decision.

Remember the rule of networking – it’s a two-way street. Individuals aren’t going to drop what they are doing to start working on your job search full time and a person isn’t going to recommend you for a position if they don’t think you will be successful. People will help you but it will be on their terms. You also need to try to help them. There will be times, in the short run, when networking is one sided – either you get a significant benefit without offering much or you provide a lot of help without getting anything in return. In the short run this is possible, but over the long term, both parties need to contribute. If one side is perceived as only interested in their self promotion, the relationship won’t work.