Quintessential Resumes and Cover Letters Tips
Providing daily suggestions for making your resume, cover letter, and other career-marketing communications as effective as they can be.
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Crafting a Winning Resume
It may be no secret that having a professional-quality resume is a must to compete in today’s job market, but the means to creating one may be somewhat less clear and perhaps a bit daunting to do-it-yourselfers. Developing a powerful resume that will fully optimize a job search takes preliminary strategizing and a systematic follow-through to ensure an effective, attention-garnering execution. In an age of technology-enhanced job-search tools — online job postings, and electronic resumes... |
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One Size Fits All Resume?
Not possible! A common mistake jobseekers make is to submit the same version of their resume for each and every position to which they apply. This approach to job-hunting makes no more sense than wearing your summertime Tevas through the rains of autumn and on into the snowdrifts of winter and wondering why your feet are cold and wet! In almost all circumstances, this practice is destined for repeated failure in a job search. Even jobs with the same title can differ distinctly from each other,... |
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Will Your Resume Be Ready When Opportunity Knocks?
Are you a bystander in your own career? Have you watched colleagues get promoted and move up the ladder while you remain in the same old job and ruminate on their good fortune? Chances are the only real difference between yourself and your “lucky” colleagues is preparation. Oprah Winfrey rejects the very idea of luck, believing instead that moments heretofore defined as lucky are instead highly charged instances where preparation meets opportunity. This concept can certainly hold... |
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Introduce Your Resume; Don't Repeat It
This entry is one in a series by Deb Walker on avoiding the top three cover letter mistakes: Repeating the exact same things you wrote in your resume is one of the most common cover letter mistakes. No one wants to read the same thing twice. By the time most people have finished writing their resume, they feel that they have run out of ideas and just cut and paste to create a cover letter. Instead, the cover letter should be what sells the reader on your skills. Like the jacket-cover introduction... |
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Know Your Audience's Hiring Motive
This entry is one in a series by Deb Walker on avoiding the top three cover letter mistakes: A major mistake is not understanding the hiring motives of your audience. Job-seekers target their resumed to three basic audiences: executive decision-makers, resume screeners, and third-party recruiters. Each of these groups has its own hiring motives. Executive decision-makers are looking for candidates who will have a significant impact on bottom-line initiatives, such as time saved, income... |
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Most Resumes End Up in Keyword-Searchable Databases
More than 80 percent of employers place resumes directly into searchable databases and at least that many employers prefer to receive resumes by e-mail. At least 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies post jobs on their own Web sites — and expect job-seekers to respond electronically. All these stats mean that you need at least one other version of your resume that can go directly into a keyword-searchable database with no obstacles. To read more about how to format an electronic resume, go... |
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Could Your Cover Letter Be Hurting Your Job Search?
This entry is one in a series by Deb Walker on avoiding the top three cover-letter mistakes: As a career coach and professional resume writer, I’m often asked “How important are cover letters to my job search?” My answer is, “It depends on how long you want to search for your next job.” If you are in no hurry to get interviews, then don’t worry about your cover letter. The fact is I’ve never met a job searcher who wants to have a painfully slow job... |
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Formatted Print Resume is Just One Tool
A job-seeker simply cannot succeed these days with just the traditional formatted resume intended to be printed out as a visually pleasing marketing piece. The formatted “print” resume is still important, but it can no longer be the only resume tool in your kit. Read about electronic resumes at The Top 10 Things You Need to Know about E-Resumes and Posting Your Resume Online. |
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Cover Letter Editing Tip
What’s the best way to make sure your cover letter is well-written and on target? If your time frame will allow it, put your cover letter down, and then pick it up a day or two later as though you were the prospective employer. Does it grab and hold your attention? Is it concise? Is it free of typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors? Is it interesting? If you were the employer, would you know what this job-seeker wants to do and why he or she is the best person to do it? Would you invite... |
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Include USP in Your Cover Letter
Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). An advertising term, the USP is the one thing that makes you better qualified to do the job than anyone else. The USP should answer the question: “Why should I hire this person?” Want more? See Cover Letters: A Key to Gaining A Competitive Edge in the Job Market. |
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Load Your Resume with Keywords
Your e-resume must be loaded with keywords. This advice really relates to all resumes in the era of the keyword-searchable database, but it’s especially important for e-resumes. Job-hunting today increasingly revolves around the mysterious world of keywords. Employers’ use and eventual dependence on keywords to find the job candidates they want to interview has come about in recent years because of technology. Inundated by resumes from job-seekers, employers have increasingly relied... |
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Why is a Cover Letter Necessary?
A cover letter should always accompany your resume. A cover letter tells the employer exactly what kind of job you want to do and tailors your qualifications to that job. Learn more by reading Cover Letters: A Key to Gaining A Competitive Edge in the Job Market. |
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Job-Hunting in a Weak Job Market: 5 Strategies for Staying Upbeat (and Improving Your Chances of Success)
As a member of a community of resume writers, career coaches, and other career experts called the Career Collective, I am posting this guest entry by Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D. about staying upbeat in a tough job market, along with links to other members’ responses at the end of this entry. Please follow our hashtag on Twitter: #careercollective. Job Market Blues: A malady affecting millions of Americans during a weak job market caused by a struggling economy. Symptoms include high levels... |
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Resume Fundamentals
You probably have about 30 seconds to convince a potential employer that you deserve an interview. A resume summarizes your accomplishments, your education, and your work experience, and should reflect your strengths. View an outline of a typical chronological resume — best suited for entry-level job-seekers or those who have stayed in the same field at Fundamentals of a Good Chronological Resume. |
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Cover Letter Should Be More than an Afterthought
The cover letter is usually an afterthought, dashed off to accompany a resume into which you’ve poured blood, sweat, and cash. Its potential as a powerful marketing tool frequently is overlooked. Learn more by reading Cover Letters: A Key to Gaining A Competitive Edge in the Job Market. |
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Resume Preparation Do's and Don'ts
Here are some keys to successfully preparing and writing a resume. Follow these simple rules and you should achieve success in this important phase of job-hunting. Do consider a bulleted style to make your resume as reader-friendly as possible. Don’t get overwrought about the old “one-page resume rule.” It’s good to keep your resume to one page, if possible, but if you have a lot of experience, two pages may be more appropriate. If your resume spills beyond one page,... |
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Many Recruiters Prefer Cover Letters in the Body of an E-Mail
More from a posting on the RecruitingBlogs site from corporate recruiter Bill Meiers: Several of the commenters to Meier’s blog posting protested that it’s cumbersome to open multiple attachments when resumes are e-mailed to them. Thus, they prefer the job-seeker’s resume as an attachment, but the cover letter in the BODY of the e-mail to which the resume is attached. At least one commenter, though, feels it’s more professional when cover letters attached to an e-mail. One... |
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Frequently Asked Questions About Cover Letters
At a time when employers are inundated with resumes, how can you make yours stand out in the crowd? Find out by reading more at Cover Letters: A Key to Gaining A Competitive Edge in the Job Market. |
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Tailored Cover Letter, Yes -- But You Can Make Tailoring Easier
More from a posting on the RecruitingBlogs site from corporate recruiter Bill Meiers: Cover letters should always be tailored to the individual job and employer. Generic cover letter are pointless. But, as Meiers suggests, you can make the job of tailoring your letters easier by developing boilerplate letters for various kinds of jobs. Then, it’s a simple matter to pick the right boilerplate for a given job posting and tailor the boilerplate to that posting: I would suggest a short investment... |
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Three Kinds of Cover Letters
There are roughly three kinds of cover letters, each corresponding to a different method of job-hunting. Most successful job-seekers will find that they do not employ any one method or use any one kind of cover letter, but rather a combination of all three. To understand the three kinds of cover letters, read more at The Basics of a Dynamic Cover Letter. |