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!

Most Common Resume Writing Mistake

It takes an employer thirty-seconds or less to scan a resume before it hits the trash pile.  It takes forty seconds for it to hit the cycle pile, which means it stays in the system, but never gets used.  It takes less than ten seconds for him to look at your resume and know that you are the perfect fit.  So why isn’t it happening to you?

The answer is simple.  Most employees create one resume and send it out to every job opening available.  Employers can easily spot a generic resume and are turned off by lazy job seekers.  If you couldn’t take the time out to create a customized resume, why should they take the time out to interview you?  So if you are looking to get hired, but don’t want to spend the time creating a new resume for every new job opening, here are three options for you to try.

Option 1 – Use your transitional skills.

If you want to change careers, but haven’t found a career that best suits your personality, then you can create a typical functional resume.  In a functional resume, you start off with your transitional skills, as opposed to your work history.

You take a look at your highest skill sets or the skills needed for most of your jobs of interest and group them into categories.  For example, a customer service professional looking to transition into the IT profession can clump her skills into: Technology, Communication, and Collaboration.  Then under each subfield, she would show explicit examples demonstrating that skill utilization during her work or educational experiences.

If an IT hiring manager is looking for those three categories, she will definitely stop to look at this person’s resume.  However, be forewarned, that many employees are leery of resumes that are only functional (see Chronological? Functional? Or Combination?).

Option 2 – Lead with your job sets.

If your current job is less than satisfactory and you want to return to an old career, you can use a career-styled functional resume.  In this functional resume, you group your work history into career sets.

Similar to a standard functional resume, you will have a different section on your resume for each career field.  So someone who has been a medical assistant, nursing assistant, and phlebotomist and is willing to work in either field again could have three sub-sections for their work experience – Nursing Assistant Experience, Professional Medical Assistant Experience, Phlebotomy Technician Work Experience.

Then for each job he applies to, he can lead with the section that best applies. If it’s a medical assistant position, then the Professional Medical Assistant Experience section would be the first section in the work history, followed by the other two career sets.  If it’s a nursing assistant position, he’d lead with the Nursing Assistant Experience.

Option 3 – Create a new resume for every job.

If you have the time and energy to recreate a new resume for every job posting, then this is the best option.  However, this option is the most time-consuming and is generally meant for employees who are looking for positions within the same industry.

For example, an elementary school teacher trying to become a math coach or social studies cluster teacher can use the same resume and add bits and pieces to the objective, summary of qualifications, and job history to highlight her experience and expertise in each field.

This resume will still look like a chronological resume and will include the work history listed in the dates of descending order, but it will highlight the skills necessary for each position.

Using, Ayesha Long’s tips, your job search should be more proactive.  If you need assistance or are still not getting the results you like, Contact, AyeshaWrites4u at (866) 620-2741 or visit the site at www.AyeshaWrites4u.com.

As always, good luck with your job search.

Sincerely,

Ayesha Long

www.AyeshaWrites4u.com

Step Up to a Better Career with Professional Resume Services

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Chronological? Functional? Or Combination?

Chronological resumes… Functional resumes… are things of the past.  If you are still using these two formats or trying to decide between them, then you are not giving your resume a chance to succeed.   Now, employees are being advised to use combination resumes. 

What is a combination resume?

A combination resume has become the new format used by resume writers for the past three to five years.  A combination resume takes the positives of both the functional resume and the chronological resume and puts them all into a nice little grouping.  I advise most of of my clients to use a combination resume because it allows them to highlight their qualifications AND their skill sets.

If your resume is ONLY chronological or functional, you might want to ask your resume writer is their a better alternative…