Job Search Advice

Stepping Up to a Better Career was created to help job seekers nationwide find fulfilling employment by providing advice on resume writing, interviewing, job searching and more.  For the past year, I have upheld that goal by creating topics that I felt would be interesting to the 100 loyal readers I have each day.

Now I feel it is time to turn over the reigns.  I want to hear your specific questions and concerns and provide you with advice that will aid you in finding fulfilling employment and fast.

Have a question about transitioning careers? Looking for employment while keeping your old job? Networking to find employment? Moving from nonprofit work to the business sector?

Explaining laid-off or fired status? Job searching on the internet? Keeping a job after your company has been bought out or your department is being phased out?

Creating a resume? Formatting a resume? Specific resume samples? Types of resumes?

Following up on an interview? Negotiating your salary? Creating a cover letter?

If you have any questions about your job search…

Contact me!  You can choose to comment directly on this blog or you can e-mail me your questions at Resumes@AyeshaWrites4u.com and see your question appear in my next post.

All I ask is that along with your question(s), you send your first name and an e-mail address where I can contact you to let you know that your answer is being posted on the blog.

As always, good luck on your job search.

Ayesha Long

www.AyeshaWrites4u.com

Formatting Your Resume

An often overlooked factor to most resumes is presentation. Whether or not an employer will take a second look at your resume is all based on how the information and wording is presented.  Fail to command his attention in under thirty seconds, he will never know that you have been the governor’s personal assistant for the past ten years.  Have over two formats and he won’t care that you graduated magna cum laude from Harvard.

Why?  Because we are a superficial society that bases most of our judgments on appearance.  If we do not like what we see, then we fail to value it for what it is actually worth.  Don’t believe me?  Show up to work with wrinkled clothes and smelly armpits while being 25% more productive than you’ve been in the past five years at your company.  Will anyone notice your greater efforts and productivity?  Nope.  In fact, you might even be sent home for the day to go wash and get yourself together.

With that said, let’s look at how to create a resume that will shine and give forth a polished, respectable appearance WITHOUT looking like every other resume that your employer will see.

First, pick a font.  Only one font.  This font must be a serif font, such as Garamond or Georgia.  Serif fonts have more curvature than sans serif fonts, such as Arial or Courier and typically look like typewritten letters. Even though all resumes should have serif fonts, don’t feel limited to using Times New Roman.  Most word processing programs have between 25 and 80 fonts to choose from.  Be creative because whatever font you choose will be used throughout your entire resume.  If you need to emphasize headings, important phrases, and titles – you can use other accents such as italics, bold, underlining, and changing font size.  If you feel it absolutely necessary to differentiate your contact information, then you can choose to use a different font for your phone and e-mail with the caveat that the different font is still readable.

Second, you are going to decide how to break up your work history.  If you are applying for an entry-level position, then you should typically use bullets to highlight both your responsibilities and accomplishments.  If you are applying for a C-level position, transitioning careers and worked for smaller, unknown companies,  or have worked previously as a CEO or COO, your resume should be comprised of a paragraph defining your responsibilites and the size of the company and bullets for your accomplishments.

Third, differentiate your headings.  Are you going to use shading to distinguish each section of your resume verses borders?  Or are you going to use the typical format where your headings are to the left and your explanation of each section is to the right?  Most resumes no longer use the latter and will choose between one of the former alternatives to make their format more attractive and appealing to the eyes.

Fourth, define your bullets.  Yes, bullets are a neccessity and every resume MUST have them.  But that doesn’t mean that every bullet has to look alike.  Look in the bullets section of your word processsing program and choose the bullets that are most appealing to you.  Chances are – if you like them, your future employer will like them as well.  I often like to alternate bullet patterns between sections to break the monotony of the same bullets within the document and to keep the reader’s attention.  If you choose this approach, make sure that your bullet choices complement each other.

Lastly, check your tabs and margins.  If you are creating your resume from scratch, you should define your tab areas so that each section is perfectly aligned.  If your resume goes over two pages or takes less than 1/3 of another page, play around with your tabs and margins to keep the resume on the same page.

And there you have it.  My five tips on how to format a job winning resume – or at least a resume that will get you interviewed.  To get the job – you have to put in the work when you get called in for your interview!

As always, good luck with your job search.

Ayesha Long

www.AyeshaWrites4u.com

Step Up to a Better Career with Professional Resume Services

The ASCII Resume

For any serious job seeker, an ASCII resume is a necessary part of your job searching arsenal.  An ASCII resume, which is pronounced (as-KEE), stands for American Standard Code Information Interchange.  This is the unformatted version of your resume that you can post onto job searching sites, send into e-mails, and onto job forms that require you to cut and paste your resume.

It is also referred to as a plain-text resume, text only, scannable resume, internet resume, and electronic resume.  If an employer asks you to send either of these documents, he is referring to the ASCII resume.

ASCII resumes are  preferred over formatted because the special symbols and tabs used in formatted resumes will alter the flow and be incapable of passing through any applicant tracking system. Also, regardless of the employers computer capabilities, all computers can download and read ASCII resumes.

Even when you are sending your resume by fax, you should use  the ASCII resume.  Why? Because some fax machines cannot handle all of the special characters used on a formatted resume and may not be able to print the document correctly – making it messy and too much of a hassle for an employer to sift through.

So how do you create an ASCII resume?

Most word processing programs allow you to convert your document to text (.txt) or rich text format (.rtf) format.  When you recreate the resume using this format, it will eliminate all of the headers, tabs, and special formatting used within your original resume.  However, before sending out your document, you must ensure the following:

• Special Characters have not been altered into unreadable WingDing formats that will look funny and distract an employer.  Instead, opt for eliminating the special characters or replacing with an asterix (*) or dash (-).
• Tabs have been replaced by space bars.
• Wrapped text makes sense and has not altered the format.
• Each line has no more than 65 characters for both letters and characters.
• The format has absolutely no indentations, shading, borders, italics, or bold.
• Font is sans-serif, such as Arial or Courier.

After creating your ASCII resume, you must ensure that every time you cut and paste it onto a job board or an e-mail that you have fully proofread it and that it has pasted properly onto the website.

As always, good luck with your job search.

Ayesha Long

www.AyeshaWrites4u.com

Step Up to a Better Career with Professional Resume Services

*** Also be sure to go to Ayesha Writes 4 You’s website and schedule your Free Resume Consultation. From now until August 15th, you can take advantage of our Summer Discount and get 15% off any resume package. So go to www.AyeshaWrites4u.com to get started now!

You’re too old to be hired???

One of the most ironic things about finding employment is that experience is always considered an advantage when someone is seeking employment.  Yet if you have too much experience, those same businesses from five years ago that were banging on your door asking you to work with them are now too busy to even interview you.  If you have over twenty years experience in your field and are not a C-level executive, experience becomes a barrier.  More factually, it’s not the experience, it’s your age.

Something about being older than most of your cohorts will turn employers off from employing you.  Unfortunately, they have biases due to increasing health issues and stubborn attributes that are often associated with older employees.  So how do you fight age discrimination?  How do you get an employer to look at your age and experience as an asset as opposed to a liability?

Our guest blogger, Kevin Donlin answers this question in his article, “How to Get Hired Faster by Overcoming Obstacles Like Age Discrimination”.  Before turning over the realm to Kevin, I want to point out that many of us know these answers.  It will be the same time and time again.  You must always sell the positive and forego the negative.  If you are unsure how to do this, hire a professional.  If you want to attempt to do it yourself, be sure to click on the link for The Guerrilla Job Search DVD at the end of Kevin’s blog post.

As always, good luck on your job search.

Ayesha Long

www.AyeshaWrites4u.com

Step Up to a Better Career with Professional Resume Services
*** Also be sure to go to Ayesha Writes 4 You’s website and schedule your Free Resume Consultation. From now until August 15th, you can take advantage of our Summer Discount and get 15% off any resume package. So go to www.AyeshaWrites4u.com to get started now!

How to Get Hired Faster by Overcoming Obstacles, like Age Discrimination

By Kevin Donlin

I got an email last week from Jim S. in New York. His job-search question may not apply exactly to you, but the mind-set I suggest to solve it should.

So, if you give me two minutes here, I’ll show you two ways to get hired faster, by playing to your strengths, and offering employers the equivalent of “found” money.

Ready?

Jim writes:

“I have been a self-employed residential general contractor with some commercial supervision experience for 35 years. Last fall I had heart surgery and as a consequence, I am no longer able to meet the physical demands of the job. How do I best convey this situation to a potential employer and still get in the door?”

When Jim asks, “How do I best convey this [health] situation to a potential employer and still get in the door?” what he’s really asking is: “How can I bring up my health problems and still get an interview?”

This is common, backwards thinking.

Instead, of worrying about how to confess a negative, Jim should build a case for his strengths until they overcome any resistance in the minds of employers.

Here’s the question that Jim (and you) should ask instead: “How can I appeal so strongly to an employer’s self interest that any issues about my physical condition won’t matter — they’ll want to hire me for my brains and not my body?”

Put another way, there must be some management function Jim can perform in construction that can leverage his 35 years of industry experience and knowledge, without requiring hard physical labor. He should examine his work history until he can picture a suitable job.

Better yet, he should call past supervisors, vendors, and clients, remind them of the good things he did for them, then ask: “Given my knowledge and experience, what leadership role do you see me playing for an employer?”

This is one way to overcome obstacles of physical condition, age, etc.

To learn more about how to use Guerrilla Job Search tactics in your job search, click here.

Let Your Resume Shine WITHOUT You

In a world where individualism, self-criticism, and  self-reflection are encouraged, there are still places where you are not important.  Your resume happens to be one of those places.  When your resume focuses only on you and not on an employer, your previous companies, or the achievements a compnay has received by hiring you, then you will NOT get hired.

If you have ever written a resume before, you know the basics.  Pronouns do not belong on a resume – so there should be no I, you, we, he, she, or they on the resume.  Instead, your resume should begin with strong verbs that demonstrate your capabilities as an employee.  Here is where the fine line is drawn.

How do you know how much of yourself to include and how much of your previous employers?  Simply look at the classified ads and look to see what qualities your prospective employer is seeking.  Then look at your resume and ask yourself if the qualities you project on your resume demonstrate you as the right candidate for that position.

Here is an example.  I once worked with a client.  Let’s call him Jeff.  Jeff had worked in the Human Resource field and had listed every detail required of his job as an executive recruiter.  Jeff, painstakingly described how he went into the field, came up with campaigns to generate candidates, and coordinated with the hiring companies.  Yet, Jeff was trying to transition into a mangement position.  No where on his resume did he demonstrate his capabilities as a manger.  He was perfectly qualified.  In fact, on his resume he was perfectlyqualified as well – to be an executive recruiter!

The problem was that Jeff was more concerned about his past achievements and wanted to show off his success as an employee  – which is something that all employees should do.  Yet, he forgot about the most important aspect of any resume – it is not about you!  Employers do not care about your past achievements because they are well, in the past.  What they do care about is that everything on your resume demonstrates that the achievements you had were stepping stones to ensure that you are capable of handling the job that they are going to hire you to do.

So after six months of using his own resume, Jeff hired me.  Together, we looked at the classified ads of companies looking for Human Resource Managers and were able to find the qualities Jeff was lacking on his resume.  I constructed a job-winning resume that demonstrated his managerial skills, while still leaving his best accomplishments as a recruiter.  Within two weeks, Jeff had received three job offers.

Learn from Jeff.  Look at your resume and make sure that every accomplishment you post is not about you, but is about the needs and desires of your prospective employers.

As always, good luck on your job search.

Ayesha Long

www.AyeshaWrites4u.com

Step Up to a Better Career with Professional Resume Services
*** Also be sure to go to Ayesha Writes 4 You’s website and schedule your Free Resume Consultation. From now until August 15th, you can take advantage of our Summer Discount and get 15% off any resume package. So go to www.AyeshaWrites4u.com to get started now!