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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You Probably Need More Than 1 Version of Your Resume
Do you need more than one version of your resume? Most likely, yes. You may need more than one organizational format for your resume. See table below for the most common organizational formats. We include functional and chrono-functional formats because they do have their uses, but we should note that purely functional resumes are the least common, least preferred by employers, detested by recruiters… and most Internet job boards do not accept this resume format. Chrono-functional/hybrid/combination... |
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Carefully Research and Target Cold-Contact Cover Letter
Ensure that you’re not wasting your time, or more importantly, the employer’s time, suggests Teena Rose in her article for Quint Careers, Optimizing Your Cold-Contact Cover Letter. If you’re a software engineer and the company you’re targeting outsources its entire system needs, then you’re wasting time vying for employment with that company. Know your viability factor before adding any company to your target list. Make a courtesy phone call, if necessary. If you... |
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Substantiate Soft Skills on Your Resume
“Don’t make the mistake on your resume or in your cover letter of claiming soft-skills competency without substantiation,” cautions Peggy Klaus in her article for Quint Careers, Are You Up To Snuff When It Comes To Soft Skills? “Providing solid examples that demonstrate your soft skills in a resume or cover letter is far more effective than making empty promises, such as: I possess solid leadership, people, and communication skills. Show me! This is especially important,... |
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Grab Cover-Letter Reader's Attention with a PS
Adding a Postscript — a PS — to your cover letter — especially one that’s handwritten — is a great way to grab the employer’s attention. Ideally, your postscript should encapsulate your Unique Selling Proposition — the one quality that you feel will inspire employers to hire you above all other candidates. See examples of cover-letter postscripts. |
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Resume Should Differentiate You from Competition
“A great interview-generating executive resume is all about differentiating yourself from others competing for the same jobs,” writes executive resume and branding expert Meg Guiseppi in her article for Quint Careers, Five Top Trends for Executive Resumes. “With constantly changing trends in strategic resume writing, new ways to accomplish this differentiation are always coming forward. If you take advantage of the latest trends before they mainstream, you are much more likely... |
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Typos and Misspellings a Top Peeve of Hiring Decision-Makers
Hiring decision-makers surveyed for the book, Top Notch Executive Resumes identified this as one of their Top 30 Executive Resume Pet Peeves: Resume has spelling errors, typos and grammatical flaws. Hiring decision-makers cited this peeve more than any other. It may surprise some that misspellings and typos pervade even executive-level resumes, but they do. A job-seeker-submitted sample considered for the executive resume book, for example, contained the common error of spelling “manager”... |
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Study Shows Cover Letters Still Important
A research study shows the importance of cover letters: Cover Letters Still Play Valuable Role in Hiring Decisions, Survey Suggests MENLO PARK, CA — As the job application process increasingly moves online, some job seekers might be tempted to think a formal cover letter is no longer necessary — not so, a new survey shows. Eighty-six percent of executives polled said cover letters are valuable when evaluating job candidates. Moreover, eight out of 10 (80 percent) managers said... |
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Accomplishments in Your Resume Will Stimulate Interview
Accomplishments are the points that increase reader’s interest in your resume, stimulate a request for a job interview, and really help sell you to an employer — much more so than everyday job duties. In a study by the former Career Masters Institute (now Career Management Alliance), content elements that propel employers to immediately discard resumes include a focus on duties instead of accomplishments, while documented achievements were highly ranked among content elements that... |
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Keywords are Crucial in Your Resume
More than 80 percent of resumes are searched for job-specific keywords. Therefore, if you apply for a job with a company that searches databases for keywords, and your resume doesn’t have the keywords the company seeks for the person who fills that job, you are pretty much dead in the water. Summary/profile sections can be important for front-loading your resume with these all-important keywords. (Lack of front-loaded keywords decreases ability to match resumes to potential jobs quickly... |
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Target Job Precisely with T-Formation Cover Letter
A particularly effective way to deploy the specifics of an ad or job posting to your advantage is to use a two-column format (also known as a “T-formation” letter) in which you quote in the left-hand column specific qualifications that come right from the employer’s want ad and in the right-hand column, your attributes that meet those qualifications. The two-column format is extremely effective when you possess all the qualifications for a job, but it can even sell you when you... |
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How to Differentiate Your Resume
Differentiate your resume from the crowd, writes Deborah Walker in her article for Quint Careers, Is Your Resume Lost in the Great Internet Void?. Dozens of fast-food restaurants sell hamburgers and fries. How do you choose which one you want? Chances are, one of those restaurants has a differentiating edge, something that you like better than all the others. The job market is the same way; it’s flooded with choices, so you have to make your resume stand out from all the competition.... |
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Word Bullets Add Reader-Friendliness
Word bullets (which can be used with regular bullets), break up the text in a cover letter and are excellent for spotlighting words or phrases from the ad or job posting you’re responding to. By pulling these words out of the ad, you can focus your letter sharply on how you meet the requirements that relate to those words. See an example of a letter that uses word bullets. |
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Support Skill Statements Throughout Resume
If you have stated a skill in the summary portion of your resume, you need to support it through an example of your related accomplishment in the experience portion of your resume, whether you are using a functional or chronological resume format, writes Sherri Edwards in her article for Quint Careers, Ten Resume Tips. Describing a specific incident, event, work experience, or project will show evidence or “prove” you have a specific skill. Fancy language may appear engaging, but... |