Posts Tagged ‘Tyrone Norwood’

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Dress for Success at Your Next Job Interview

Wednesday, September 6th, 2017

Sometimes, it’s the simplest things that can sabotage your career, so it pays to sweat the details.

When you’re invited to a job interview, for example, one wrong move can blow your chances. Even wearing the wrong thing can distract an employer from your polished resume and outstanding experience.

Before you schedule your next interview, be sure to review this list of the six worst things to wear for a job interview.

Ill-Fitting Clothes

If you haven’t worn your interview outfit recently, you might find it doesn’t fit the way it used to. Don’t try to pull it off, though. You won’t look your best and you won’t feel comfortable — and it will show.

Better to wear an outfit that is tailored to suit you, rather than anything that feels or looks too tight or too short. It may not only give the wrong impression, it may also be distracting. Tugging at your skirt hem, for example, is another distraction that takes away from the focus on you and your skills.

Overly Casual Clothes

Even if you’re interviewing at a laid-back workplace, it’s still possible to take the casual concept too far. Do not wear jeans, tennis shoes, shorts, t-shirts, hats, flip-flops, or any garments with messages or brands written on them. For men wearing a suit, do not wear loud, obnoxious colors, busy-printed shirts or overly patterned ties. Take the conservative approach, and save the fun stuff for after you’ve got the job.

Anything Distracting

There’s a fine line between standing out and wearing something that’s just distracting. In the interview process, you should err on the side of caution and tone it down. Better to choose subtle patterns over brighter ones, and dark or neutral clothing versus neon colors or anything distracting. You should be the focus of the interview, not your clothing.

Women should not wear anything too revealing or low cut. No platform heels, no sun dresses, nothing too trendy. Make up and jewelry should also be toned down. For men and women both, it’s generally a good idea to stick with the basics: a black, blue, or grey suit and the associated conservative accoutrement.

Excessive Accessories

You might like to make a statement with your jewelry, but the job interview isn’t the time to do so. Stay away from jewelry that jingle-jangles, which can be very distracting for an interviewer.

Experts advise against wearing perfume and cologne as well. You may feel like something is missing when you refrain from wearing your favorite fragrance, but this is one more thing that can be distracting during the interview. In addition, many people have sensitivity or allergies to fragrances. Play it safe!

Something Very Different from What the Interviewer Suggested

It’s a good idea to ask about what’s expected of you when you’re setting up a job interview. Always ask the point person that set up the interview for advice on what to wear. If you wear something that is significantly different than the instructions that you were given, then you stand a good chance of turning off the interviewers.

The Obvious

Never attend any interview with ill-fitting, sweat-stained, smelling like smoke, dog or cat hair covered clothing that looks like something you slept in. Never wear the same ensembles you would wear out to a bar or nightclub with your friends. Ridiculously sculpted fingernails on women and pointy shoes and contrasting socks for men are no-nos.

When in doubt, overdress for the first interview.

Good luck!

The 6 worst things to wear to a job interview | Catherine Conlan via Monster.com.

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When Should You Lie on Your Resume?

Wednesday, June 21st, 2017

Probably everyone you’ve ever met has told you that you shouldn’t lie on your resume. But what if you can’t seem to get a job with the skills you have? You may really want to be honest, but want to be employed even more. What should you do?

When it comes to resumes, and many other things, you can’t look at every statement as black and white. You never want to outright lie on your resume, of course, but you do want to paint the best picture of yourself possible. This sometimes means leaving out certain information or finding the right angle for your experience. Here’s some rough advice on what you can do and what you should never do to enhance your resume:

Don’t Include Your Entire Work History

Whether you have a short or long work history, you don’t necessarily want to include all of it. If you’re applying for a marketing position and you’ve worked as an intern and an associate in separate firms, but also as a cashier at a grocery store, don’t pad your resume with the irrelevant job. Doing so wastes space that you can use to explain the good work you did at the actually relevant jobs.

Conversely, you may want to leave off jobs (and other information) that make you look overqualified. You don’t need an MFA to work in telesales or Vice President position to get a job as a programmer. Part of putting your best foot forward on your resume involves leaving out the stuff that makes you look wrong for the position, no matter how impressive.

Temporarily Lie About Skills You Can Learn

Do you know Excel? Probably not very well if you haven’t touched it since 2004, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t include it on your resume. If you can spend a night learning what you need to know before you need to know it, you can claim proficiency in a skill you don’t really have.

Keep in mind this means taking a sizable risk and you shouldn’t take it often. You don’t want to claim to know JavaScript when you’ve never even learned the basics. That said, you can claim to know HTML and CSS if you’ve learned a little bit but not a lot. When you “lie” about a skill, you have to know you can acquire that skill quickly if needed by your employer. Don’t apply for jobs that require certain primary abilities you don’t have. You wouldn’t want to try and get a job as a front-end developer with limited knowledge of HTML and CSS, for example. You might, however, promote that same limited knowledge to find work as a blogger (or any job where those skills help but aren’t required). Although it’s always better to just tell the truth, if you need to embellish your skill set you can safely, under these constraints.

Don’t Embellish Your Position, Explain It

You never want to lie about your position. While your work might imply a more robust job title, if a prospective employer calls your previous employer to ask about a position that doesn’t exist, you’ll just seem like a liar. That said, you shouldn’t discount the work you did beyond the call of duty. For example: Let’s say you were an intern last semester. You worked really hard and you think, “Hmm, I worked almost as hard as my manager, I’ll just say that I had his title instead.” Sometimes a hiring manager catches this fib and sometimes they don’t. If you were a hardworking intern, illustrate that with the bullet points below your title, not by lying about your position at the company.

You can still call yourself by your correct title and explain only the great, relevant work you did. You don’t have to include remedial tasks that made up most of your job if it doesn’t apply to the job you’re trying to get. Instead, you can leave out more of the irrelevant tasks and focus on the ones that make you look like an intelligent, hardworking prospect.

All of that said, if you have a great relationship with the company you’ve left (or plan to leave) and want to use a more impressive title, talk to your boss or manager about using one. They may allow you to use a more impressive-sounding title on your resume and play along when called as a reference if they like you. Perhaps they’ll even award you that honorary title as a parting gift. If your boss or manager approves, it’s not really a lie.

Spin Relevant Experience When You Have None

The trick doesn’t involve lying, but rather digging deep to find relevant experience you didn’t really know you had. If you really want a job as a graphic designer but work as a receptionist, you can spin a lot of your experience to make it relevant. Perhaps you’ve created fliers, mailers, in-office posters, and so on. I worked as a customer service representative awhile back and found ways to make company videos, design posters, and even write code. If you want a different job, find ways to do the kind of work you want to do at your current job so you can claim it as experience on your resume. You still have to do the work assigned to you, but if you add a few other helpful tasks here and there your company should appreciate you for it.

When you can’t do something at a company, do it on your own time. Nobody can stop you from designing, writing, or whatever else after you clock out. When you have no relevant experience, you can always make some yourself. That might not get you an interview all by itself, but you can also try to meet someone from the company to give yourself a better chance. A simple email asking if you can take someone out to lunch to ask them for career advice can go a long way.

In the end, you want to lie as little as possible but find ways to make what you have look as attractive as possible. That means embellishing your skill set a little, including the right jobs, and focusing on relevant experience—even if it didn’t make up the majority of your work. If you just don’t have a lot of work experience at all, seek out internships to get some. Just don’t outright lie on your resume. That might get you an interview, but it probably won’t get you a job.

Good luck!

When Should You Lie on Your Resume? | Dave Yourgrau via Lifehacker.

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Resume Guide for 2017

Wednesday, January 18th, 2017

Another year has arrived, and with it comes the obligatory style guides and fashionable advice for your resume. Though the overall trends usually stay the same, and most advice remains constant, there are always a few new tweaks when the calendar changes, as the warped and twisted realm of HR and human capital belches out new gimmicks that go viral and then are quickly discarded (to be picked up and recycled again in a later generation).

But though it might be easier to ignore the hype guides and the ceaseless barrage of “helpful” advice, you really don’t have the luxury. With each recruiter or hiring manager giving your resume maybe six to ten seconds these days at a first glance, even a subtle mistake can be enough to land your resume in the trash. With so little time to make a first impression, it certainly doesn’t pay to stick with an outdated and ineffective resume.

So here are a few tips you need to remember before sending out your resume in 2017:

The robots are dead (or dying)

One of the main tips that has become canon in recent years is the need to include keywords and buzzwords. This was to get past the infamous ATS (or applicant tracking software), which scan the many resumes that reach the inbox of the HR manager and let only ‘specific’ ones pass through. So, the probability of a worthy candidate’s resume being rejected because of the lack of keywords was high. However, most companies are now moving away from such systems as they have identified its numerous shortcomings. So be honest and precise about your skills in your resume. A skills section is still helpful for readability, of course, but don’t be as worried about the robots ditching your resume because you didn’t pad it enough.

Make it visually appealing

Given that the scare of robots does not apply anymore, it’s safe to make your resume as visual as possible. Infographic and multimedia resumes seem to be the new rage now, with candidates in creative fields like design, film, creative writing, and digital marketing embracing it. They showcase your creative skills, personality and experience all in one go. While there are many recruiters who feel that such resumes should not be the primary one you use to reach out to employers, others encourage using it if it fits the job role you are applying for. It is logically more likely for a quirky startup to be interested in a creative resume. If you are from a field that does not encourage extreme creativity, just add some color to your resume to liven it up.

Ditch the objective

It’s 2017, and no one has the time to care what you have regurgitated in the form of ‘career objectives’. Recruiters have realized the pointlessness of these objectives after hearing every candidate state that they want to “use their skills to contribute meaningfully to personal growth as well as that of the organization”. Instead, what they want to see upfront in your resume is a summary of your experience and skills. Keep it short and precise. Writing it in bullet points is even better. It should convey the number of years of experience you have, your job history and your big career achievements. This is all the information that an employer needs to have before he or she decides whether to read your resume further or not. So, include all the relevant information, but remember that this is just a summary of your profile.

Easily accessible contact information

We would suggest that you start off your resume providing relevant contact information. Don’t make hiring managers hunt your resume for your contact in case they need to call you for an interview. On an online resume, make sure that you hyperlink your email id and, it goes without saying, include all social media profiles that are relevant to the application. LinkedIn is the first on this list, followed by Twitter and the rest. However, resist the temptation of including all your profiles, because while creative designers may need to include their Instagram and Behance profiles, accountants and engineers may not. As we warned you earlier about dying ATS, what is replacing them are such social media profiles. So keep these profiles up-to-date and be active on them. And please, for the love of God, don’t be that person who tries to be cute by not including an email address at all… do you really want to make it harder for potential employers to reach you?!

Titles and fonts

Your resume may not get read word to word by the employer so make sure you have highlighted what you don’t want them to miss out on in case they choose only to scan or skim through it. Keep such position titles or phrases in bold, so that even someone who glances at your resume gets a full picture without having to read what is written under every point. Ditch traditional fonts like Times New Roman, Arial and Courier for more modern and chic fonts like Garamond, Cambria and Calibri. The standard font size can vary from 10 to 12 point for the body, with larger sizes acceptable for headings or subheadings. Always remember that different people may have different font settings on their computers, so it’s best to send a resume that has uncommon fonts in PDF format so that the appearance is not tampered with.

So what does it all mean? That infographics and social media resumes are the wave of the future (remember the video resume)? Probably not but it pays to keep apprised of what everyone else is doing. In the long run, though, it’s always best to have an easy to read, targeted, honest, and consistent resume ready at hand for when that dream job finally does come along.

Good luck!

How Your Resume Should Look in 2017 | Monty Majeed via Your Story

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Crafting a “Tailored” Resume

Thursday, September 15th, 2016

Since the advent of modern computers, the job application process has certainly become more complicated than it once was. These days, instead of a typed letter of intent sent along with your resume via snail mail, to be screened by an HR clerk perhaps on the other end, you now have Application Tracking Software, massive job board application systems, and “shot-in-the-dark” emailing to hiring managers, all of which has made your job search a hundred times easier and a million times harder than it ever was before.

Imagine the postage and time necessary for each application in the past… now, it’s just a few button pushes and your resume is carried along automatically to the hiring company… to be trapped in an email spam folder, or discarded by an ATS robot for something as simple as using “online content” instead of “digital content”.

You’re also certain of getting into a much bigger pile of applications than ever before, as the ease of applying means dozens, if not hundreds, of totally unqualified people send along their resume as if it’s nothing, for just the merest possibility of an interview, or out of shear desperation, making it easier and easier for your resume to get lost in the shuffle of human and robot eyes.

So, it’s now become common to hear the advice “tailor your resume” to get around these obstacles. If you tailor your resume to a particular company and role, the choir says, it will have a much better chance of sneaking through the filtering of robots and a greater likelihood of being noticed by tired HR clerks, which in turn increases its chance of eventually being seen by hiring managers and the real decision makers.

The instructions are clear: no more stock and bog-standard resumes. Now, you’re making the suit fit the wearer. Certainly a lot more work than before.

encrypted_resume

But a major question remains: how do you craft a tailored resume?

Here are a few quick expert tips to get you started:

Actually Read and Try to Understand the Job You’re Applying For

First things first: Sit down with a highlighter and really read the job description. Go through and highlight the points that seem important (think the ones that are mentioned repeatedly or anything that’s slightly out of the ordinary) and the points that you could speak to with your particular experience and skills.

This is always step one—after all, you can’t tailor your resume for a position if you don’t really know what the gig entails.

Make Your First Point Immediately Relevant

Next, with your newfound knowledge of what the hiring manager is looking for, take your resume, find the experience that would make him or her most excited about your application, and rework the document so that’s what’s at the top. Maybe it’s your current position, or maybe it’s some specialized certifications or the freelance work you do on the side. Whatever it is, make it the first section of your resume.

And yes, even if it’s not the most recent. There’s no rule that says your first section must be “Work Experience.” Tailoring your resume means finding what is most relevant, creating a section for it, and filling it up with experience or qualifications that will catch a hiring manager’s eye. If that means nixing “Work Experience,” creating a “Marketing and Social Media Experience” section, then throwing everything else in an “Additional Experience” section, then so be it.

resume

Revamp Your Bullets Even for Less Relevant Experiences

Now that your relevant experiences are at the top of your resume, that doesn’t mean you should ignore everything else. Nope, it just means you need to pull out the relevant bits of those experiences in your bullets.

From the job description, you’ll likely find more than just the technical qualifications needed to complete the job. Strong communication skills, ability to work in a team, and other soft skills are probably listed as well. So, while your tutoring experience might not be directly related to the sales position you’re interested in, you can definitely still highlight some of the soft skills that both positions require.

Check to See if It’s Clear Why You Are Applying

Finally, your last quick assessment to make sure you’ve successfully tailored your resume is to see if someone else—like a friend or mentor—can explain why you’re interested in the position just based on reading your resume. If your friend can’t suss out why you’re applying or how you’re a good fit, then more tailoring is likely needed.

This largely used to be the role of the cover letter, and many companies and hiring managers still appreciate receiving these, but because of the shear number of applications they will likely be reading through, you can’t rely on them ever reading or even seeing it… so you’ll need to factor this into the resume itself as well.

Of course, sometimes there’s only so much you can do. If you’re making a big career change and you just don’t have the relevant experience, then no amount of tweaking bullets can spell that out. In this case — and only in this case, I might add — you may actually want to use an objective statement to properly explain your interest in the position.

Tailoring your resume, especially if you’re applying for a lot of positions, certainly isn’t the most exciting or enjoyable part of applying for a job, but it’s definitely one of the most important these days. After all, regardless of media reports to the contrary, the resume is not a “dead” document and is still essential… and it’s the document that decides what first impression you make. It might take a little extra work, but it’s worth it to be that much more memorable.

Good luck!

What it Really Means to “Tailor Your Resume” | Lily Zhang via The Muse

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How Long Is Too Long for a Resume?

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2016

The age-old question, that afflicts new college graduates, senior executives, and foreign applicants alike: how long should my resume be?

The dynamics of the question have changed significantly in the last few years, as online application and electronic resumes have become the norm.

The problem with the question is that it’s not framed properly. For people who prefer certainty, the real answer is disappointing: it depends.

In some cases, a long resume will do you no favors but in other cases, being too brief will cripple your chances.

Let’s look at some times when it pays to be brief:

long resume

  • Online Applications: When you’re submitting your resume to a company website or online job board (which is generally not the best way of approaching a company or job, though probably the most frequent), it pays to know your audience: the machine. ATS machines are fickle, easily confused entities, so it pays to keep format and length to standard when dealing with them, lest they spit you out with asterisks and hissing.

    And since your resume, in this case, will be stacked on top of myriad others being submitted via the same portal, getting your foot in the door would be better served by being brief, concise, and neat.

  • Human Resources: The bane of the modern corporate world (unfairly, to some extent), the HR professionals set to watch the outer walls of each corporate citadel are frequently overworked and tasked with sorting through thousands of resumes for jobs that they may or may not understand (and likely have never done), in order to meet metrics that may have nothing to do with department needs.

    In that environment, anything out of the ordinary regarding your resume (typos, excessive length, improper formatting, too many exclamation points) is likely to send it into the black hole instantly.

  • College Graduates: Someone just out of school will probably have a shorter resume, naturally, and one page tends to be the standard for college graduates or entry-level professionals.

    While it might seem like a good idea to dredge up every job you’ve ever done back to fry cook at McDonald’s, searching for those oh-so-relevant “cross-functional” and “intangible” skills, or adding all of your personal interests, if it ends up padding your resume beyond one page, it’s probably better to leave it off, especially if it’s not strictly related to the position for which you are applying.

There are plenty of times, however, when an expanded resume will come in handy:

stickynote

  • Hiring Managers: Once you’ve managed to get past the gatekeepers and your resume into the hands of the person you will likely be working under, they will probably want to see something far more extensive than just a one-page summary. Since at this stage, they aren’t sorting through a stack of 1000s of resumes, it will be coming down to a choice between just a few candidates, and having those extra details could make all the difference in being chosen for the position.

    If a Tax Director, for example, knows the department will be needing someone with FAS 109 experience, but of course HR didn’t include that in the job description, and you’ve got it on your resume, even though it may have seemed a minor thing, that could be what seals the deal.

  • Recruiters: Recruiters are a strange breed and very needy. If you’ve worked with them for any length of time, you’ll likely find yourself filling out dozens of forms and templates and being sent sample resumes to “update your resume”, probably with very little in the way of guidelines besides “make it more like this.”

    But since they are working directly with Hiring Managers on many occasions, they will probably not be interested in short resumes either, since all the details you provide could be what determines whether you’re selected for an interview (and whether they get the commission).

  • Referrals: If you have a former colleague, manager, or friend who can get you the inside track on a new role, it pays to have something more detailed at the ready, since it’s going to be read directly by the person responsible for hiring.

  • Format: In addition to situations where the person you are sending the resume to makes a difference, there also comes a point when you just can’t fit it on 1-2 pages anymore. A few lines just seem to fill out onto the next page, no matter how precise you are, leaving a big empty white space at the end.

    And no one wants to read tiny 8-point font with the margins shrunk almost to the page borders… and the game of decreasing font-size and zooming in Word might seem like a good idea until the person on the other end tries to import into an ATS system or print it.

    So in that case, a longer, fuller resume would be preferable to an empty white page, something important cut out, or formatting tricks.

  • Career Length: Obviously, the further in your career you are, especially if you’ve worked at many jobs and at many companies over the years, the longer your resume will be. A finance executive would have almost no space left for anything but titles if he restricted his resume to one or even two pages.

So what’s the bottom line? You’ll probably need a short and a long version of your resume, depending on who you’re sending it to and at what point in the process you are.

There may never be a need for a CV style, exhaustive treatise on your entire professional history back to your paper route and yard work and the articles you wrote for your high school journalism class, but it would pay to have an extended version with more details available just in case a recruiter or hiring manager wanted to see more before an interview, after the screening process matured to a later phase.

That one extra line could make all the difference.

Good Luck!

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“Follow Your Passion” May Leave You Poor and Regretful

Thursday, July 21st, 2016

fishing

Unless you’re independently wealthy, “following your passion” can be costly

One of the most popular career adages given to young people as they are preparing for college and their career is the simple message: follow your passion.

It may be proposed as a solution to figuring out what you want to study, or what job you should take, or even where you should live. It appears regularly during graduation speeches, job training seminars, and even on the lips of your parents and friends when you ask them for advice. And oftentimes, it is emphasized over more practical concerns, like ability, skill, or viability.

And it certainly sounds great… who wouldn’t want to spend the rest of their life devoted to what gives them the greatest joy and satisfaction?

But many experts, not to mention people who have tried to live this advice, say that doing this can be tricky when it comes to your career. To be blunt, as Mike Rowe, host of the TV show “Dirty Jobs,” put it, “Just because you’re passionate about something doesn’t mean you won’t suck at it.”

Here are three reasons you might want to think twice about running after your passions:

A passion for the topic doesn’t mean you’ll like working in that field

After a snorkeling trip to Hawaii during high school, San Diego resident Deborah Fox became fascinated with marine biology, which she subsequently majored in. So when she landed a job at a fish farm upon graduation, she was thrilled — but not for long.

“I was throwing fish chow into the tanks and the fish were going crazy, splashing around and soaking me. Here I am a social person and I’m alone all day with these fish who just splash me with water. What am I doing?” she asked herself. “I found out that having a passion for a certain type of study or interest does not necessarily translate into finding passion for the day-to-day work in that area,” she says.

Career coaches often say the same: You may be passionate about the idea of a career, not the career itself. And, like Fox did, you may find that your personality traits — in her case, a love of people — don’t fit in with the traits needed to do your job.

That’s one reason that before you pursue a certain line of work you think you’re passionate about, you should ask people who have worked in the field a long time about what the job is like, and its pros and cons. You might even shadow someone who does the job you want so you have some real life experience to base your decision on.

You may not be good at what you are passionate about

Many an out-of-tune “American Idol” contestant has learned this message the hard way.

Indeed, there is often a gap between our passions and our skills, experts say. You may love art and dream about being an artist, but if you’re not good at it, that passion won’t translate into a career for you.

Or you may be good at certain parts of the job you’re passionate about, but not others — a fact that Southern California resident Jasmine Powers found out the hard way. Fed up with her administrative job, nine years ago Powers struck out on her own to pursue her passion of becoming a freelance events specialist.

But she soon realized that, while she was great at the events side of her business, she struggled with how to sell her services to clients. “I love working with other small businesses doing consulting and event marketing, but with a crowded marketplace of digital marketing experts and savvy founders, I struggled to prove my value and turn significant profits,” she says.

Those looking to pursue a passion career should do a reality check and be honest with yourself about your abilities before moving forward.

rowe_jobs

You may not be able to support yourself on your passion

Many people are passionate about career paths that simply won’t pay their bills, experts say. For example, while tens of thousands of Americans are passionate about crafting, it’s hard to make a living doing it. Indeed, there are few jobs — just over 50,000, about half of which are self-employed people — in the crafting and fine arts arena, and median pay isn’t great at just over $21 per hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You might enjoy making hats, but a little research will show you that milliners do not have a bright future in the U.S.

What’s more, you may be passionate about a dying field. And that means that while it may pay the bills now, there may not be a future in it for you.

So, unless you’re independently wealthy or have a pile of savings, you likely need to consider whether your passion can pay. Make sure to research your planned career in advance, talk with people who already work in the field, and recognize that if the pay or the future of the career isn’t great, you may find yourself with a second job just to support the first one.

This isn’t meant, of course, to destroy any hope you have of following your dream career. After all, it’s not all about money or ability… there are many other potential reasons to follow your passion, whether it’s personal fulfillment, happiness, or peace of mind.

It’s just important to be realistic and realize that it may not work out, and that even if it does, it may not be as lucrative or as fulfilling as you’d hope.

Good Luck!

This popular career advice may leave you poor and regretful | Catey Hill via Market Watch

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Beware the Risks of Resume Humor

Thursday, June 23rd, 2016

resume-funny

Another frequent way that job candidates attempt to set themselves apart from the competition (besides the bizarre options mentioned before) is via humor.

While it’s certainly fine to inject a touch of wit and personality into your application materials, don’t go overboard with the playfulness. Prospective employers seek insights into your skills – not your wacky sense of humor. Hiring managers won’t take you seriously if your top priority seems to be cracking one-liners.

Check out some of the over-the-top comments job candidates have inserted into their resumes (from a recruiting company that has likely seen them all):

“JOB HISTORY: As a consultant, I was responsible for public service announcements, identity packages, brochures, client meetings and approximately 73 chewed-up pen caps.”

We’ll be sure to lock the supply closet.

“LANGUAGE ABILITIES: I can bark like a dog and make the best monkey sounds ever.”

Not the bilingual skills we had in mind.

COVER LETTER: “I’m entertaining, but be warned that I’ve got a potty mouth. Ha-ha.”

We’re going to have to swear off this candidate.

joke

“JUST FOR FUN: A self-proclaimed ‘Lord of the Geeks,” I am a true champion of useless knowledge.”

You said it, not us.

“TRAININGS: Currently training to become humorous.”

That gives new meaning to the phrase, “Flex your funny bone.”

“TALENTS: I do not slurp my coffee loudly during Skype meetings.”

We’ll drink to that.

“OTHER POSITIONS I WOULD CONSIDER: Hot tub tester.”

Nice work if you can get it.

So keep in mind the main purpose of your resume: to sell your skills and your background to a particular company, for a particular role, and not to entertain. A bit of levity is certainly warranted in some situations but don’t derail your job search by appearing to be less than serious about the application process; after all, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other applicants waiting in line behind you should you come across as more wit than substance.

Good Luck!

Resumania: Beware the Risks of Resume Humor via Robert Half

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Know When It’s Time to Quit

Wednesday, June 8th, 2016

quit-job

Even in a stable job market, the idea of voluntarily leaving your job can be a bit scary. Compared to whatever horrors you are currently facing, the fear of the unknown often seems much worse and doubt can quickly seep in: will I be able to find a new job quickly and will that new job be even worse than what I have now?

Maybe you’re looking to take a step up the corporate ladder and your current company provides no options. Maybe you’re looking for better pay or benefits. Or maybe you finally want to go into another field entirely. If you stay in the same place forever, you stagnate. But if you move too many times or too often, ironically you won’t get anywhere at all.

So how do you know when it’s time to finally call it quits and move on to greener pastures? Here’s some advice to keep what can be a very emotional issue in perspective.

You’re consistently experiencing more frustration than reward. With any situation, you have take the bad with the good. But if your experience is overwhelmingly negative for a long period of time, you have to consider leaving or some radical change. One unmistakable sign: You breathe a sigh of relief and your life feels instantly better with the mere thought of quitting.

You can’t envision a possible solution or continuing this way. After trying to resolve the issues that have been dragging you down, you still have no confidence things will change. Maybe you’ve been promised a promotion (that’s always fallen through) for years; maybe you’re waiting on others to change their habits when it’s the last thing they want to do. For some situations, like when you’re stuck with a bad manager, you might not have any choice but to quit.

job-security

You’re staying for the wrong reasons. If your decision to stay is based more on fear than on faith, you’re probably in it for the wrong reasons. Are you afraid to hurt someone’s feelings? Staying solely out of a sense of responsibility? Afraid to admit you just made a bad choice or start over (e.g., a wrong career move and now you have to quit a job you just started)?

Don’t think of quitting as either good or bad in itself or a reflection of your self-worth. Many of us have a hard time quitting. For others, change is everything and quitting comes probably too easily. Don’t stay or quit just for the sake of it.

One thing that often holds people back is what economists call the “sunk-cost fallacy”: The belief that you can’t quit because of all the time or money you spent. Beware of falling victim to that kind of thinking.

Spending time on this keeps you from more rewarding endeavors or seriously damages your well-being. Ignore the fear of quitting and consider: Do you think you could achieve a better life for yourself if you quit? Is staying on with a project causing you to over-extend yourself?

Similarly, it’s a huge red flag if your current situation is taking a toll on your mental and/or physical health. Get out of toxic relationships where a partner, client, or boss doesn’t appreciate your value. (By the way, it’s not normal to lose all your hair or take up drinking at 10 am because of your job.)

Your friends and family keep telling you to quit. While the advice of others alone shouldn’t be what you base your decision on, your friends and family want the best for you and may see what you need to do more clearly than you do.

So now you’re probably gnashing at the bit to resign and move to something better. Well, before you do that, you might want to have a couple things in place first, like a new job, a back-up plan, or at least your resume all touched up and ready to go.

And you should also be certain you really understand what is making you unhappy about your job. If it’s the field, then just shifting to another job in the same industry probably won’t help and you’ll find yourself in the same position again in a few months. Or maybe it’s something outside of work, some other personal issue or commitment or just a couple of really bad days in row, that is actually what’s making work so difficult.

But if you’ve finally hit your limit, or better yet decided to take your career by the horns and direct it instead of letting it direct you, then hopefully you’ll now be able to move forward in confidence to whatever is next.

Good Luck!

How to Know When It’s Time to Quit | Melanie Pinola via Lifehacker

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Tone Down Your Resume To Improve Results

Wednesday, May 11th, 2016

Dancing Resume

In the past, we have highlighted some of the crazy, over-the-top resumes that people have used to try to get attention, from candy bars to beer to odd videos to Legos to billboards to wandering around the streets with a sign. From the amount of media attention that sort of behavior gets, you would be forgiven for thinking that trying something equally creative is a must, if you want to make an impression.

But while that sort of thing may get you hired at Google or a media company (if you’re the first person, and not the second or third, to try it), where creativity is valued above all else, it might not get you anywhere if you’re trying to land an HR generalist role at a small construction company. It’s important to tailor your resume to your audience, if you want to stand out with the types of companies and hiring managers appropriate to your discipline. A recent blog article addressed this disconnect:

Unfortunately, the media’s need for sound bites and traffic-generation often supersedes providing pragmatic value to the job-seeking audience. While boots-on-the-ground resume strategists who have intimate experience working alongside job seekers sit quietly holding their tongues, the airtime often goes to reports touting sexy, outlandish resume methods under the guise of ingenuity.

If this confusing message has sent your blood pressure soaring and compelled you to seek the craftiest way to market yourself, calm down – creative resumes that tell a ‘value story’ still net the best results.

More than ever, in fact, doing the roll-up-your-sleeves work to research your target company, hiring manager and company culture is critical. By doing the arduous work in understanding your recipient’s needs and then vetting out your methods of fulfilling those requirements in your resume, cover letter, emails, elevator pitches, biographies and social media profiles you will ultimately stand apart and get the right person’s attention.

While the flash-in-the-pan resume infographics may dazzle a news reporter, the reader that matters is the one who will choose your resume from the stack of thousands and ask you for the interview. That person is silently waiting for the most qualified candidate, not the most innovative sound-bite resume.

So the bottom line is: know your audience. Stay away from the kooky and weird; even if they worked the first time, by the time you hear about them, they are already old hat and you definitely don’t want to be someone who is the second or third or even fourth person to send a no longer clever gimmick to a hiring manager.

The Perfect Resume

Instead of wacky and weird, think targeted and framed. Don’t spend a hundred years trying to think of the perfect, original idea to craft the perfect resume; focus on getting your individual value across as succinctly as possible to the people who make the hiring decisions. Regain control of the mess your resume has become and remember that, ultimately, it’s not about you and your resume… it’s about THEM.

Good luck!

How To Tone Down Your Resume For Better Results | Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter via Glassdoor

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5 Strategies for LinkedIn Job Searching

Wednesday, April 27th, 2016

LinkedIn has been called the Facebook for professionals… or MySpace (dated reference) with ties. From humble origins, it has grown to become the premier professional networking site, par excellence, throughout the internet, and despite the company’s various attempts to hide its more useful features, especially for job seekers and recruiters, behind pay walls and “premium accounts”, for the most part it is still free and open and certainly one of the best tools a passive or active job seeker has available.

However, as anyone who has been a member for any length of time (and received the countless spam messages from sales and marketing professionals in India) will know, LinkedIn can be used properly and then it can be abused and what goodwill you might have generated may be quickly squandered. Nothing like putting your foot in it when thousands of people are watching. And the more connections you have collected, the more opportunities there are for that grand faux pas that has sunk the career of more than one actor, politician, sports star, and internet thug on Twitter or Facebook.

So how then does one effectively use LinkedIn for a job search without abusing it and without falling into the trap of trying to do “too much”, to the ire of connections and staff admins alike? Here are a few basic tactics to employ that don’t require a premium account or paying for InMails:

Follow a company. You will get updates on who in your network moved where. While it’s interesting to see who the “New Hires” are, more important is where they came from, as these might point toward openings at their old company. Also note what their new positions are to get an idea of a possible career path. And, of course, a company’s “Recent Departures” list also lets you know of openings.

Mine new contacts for even newer ones. Every time someone connects to you, look through his or her list of contacts. View the profiles of those that intrigue you, and reach out to a few of them, citing things like common interests, schools attended, and shared company experience, or even just mention photos they’ve posted… LinkedIn allows people to put up so much content — slide shows, groups, awards, reading lists, articles, blogs, Twitter streams — it’s very easy to find a common reason to connect.

Connect with highly visible people. Search on terms like “speaker,” “author,” “writer,” “coach,” “trainer” “evangelist,” “sales,” “keynote,” “award-winning,” or “expert.” These people are often uber-connectors with thousands of connections. When you find one in your field (or a related one), search for him or her on the Web to find something he or she has written, and send a thoughtful comment or compliment. Make sure it’s sincere. If you get a good response, follow up with an invitation to connect, but don’t pester the person if he or she ignores you. These well-connected types are very busy people. A visit to the person’s Website might reveal an upcoming speaking engagement in your area. Whatever you do, respect an uber-connector’s time. Recruiters are in their own category; they often have connections in the thousands and knowledge of job openings, but they are also overwhelmed. If you contact them, make sure you give them a good reason to link and try to be memorable.

Connect to “interesting” people. Search on an unusual interest of yours to see who else has it. You might get ideas about career direction, or a contact might be able to give you a job lead. Imagine you’re a medical assistant who likes dancing. A search on “flamenco dancer” brought up this title for one person: “Medical Doctor, Wellness Expert, International Speaker, Life Coach, Author & Flamenco Dancer.” You could reach out to say, “Wow, another person in health care who loves flamenco!” It’s a long shot, but life is made up of such coincidences.

Leverage even weak links. I once got an interview by sending a message through LinkedIn to one of my contacts, with whom, truthfully, I was only loosely connected. Not only was she someone I’d never met in real life, but I’d turned her down for an interview! (I got a job offer elsewhere.) A year after our initial connection, I was job searching again, and I noticed she was connected to someone I was targeting. It was gutsy of me to do, but I felt I had nothing to lose, so I contacted her. She forwarded my resume, and I got the interview.

Some people are keen to update their profiles to “Job Seeker” or put something rather desperate sounding in their current title or job description (like “Looking for the Next Great Opportunity!” or “THE Candidate You’ve Been Looking for!”). Always seems a little desperate and likely to attract the wrong sort of attention from recruiters and hiring managers. While it’s always good to be honest about your current job status, no need to wave around being unemployed like dirty underwear.

Get started on LinkedIn BEFORE you are out of work, so you have the resources in place beforehand and it doesn’t look like you’ve joined or become suddenly active only because you’re looking for a job. Then you’re free to use LinkedIn like your online resume for both passive and active opportunities that come up.

Good luck!

5 Tips for Using LinkedIn During Your Job Search | Maureen Nelson via Quint Careers

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