AND FIX A resume that isn’t working.
Your resume is the most financially important document you will ever own. When it works, the doors of opportunity open for you. When it doesn’t work, you don’t either, so writing that resume is a job that deserves your full attention. Your resume establishes an achievable goal for your search, opens the doors of opportunity for interviews, prepares you for the questions interviewers will ask, and acts as a powerful ambassador at decision time.
A good resume is not simply a recitation of all the things you have done in your work life. In fact, if your resume just lists all the things you happen to think are important, it will likely sit unread in countless resume databases.
The growth of technology in our world has had a major influence over how resumes have evolved. Used to be that someone would review your resume almost as soon as it was delivered. Today, resumes no longer go straight to a recruiter or manager’s desk; instead, they usually go into a resume database. Some of those databases contain over 50 million resumes. So you can see that for a human being to review your resume, it must first be discoverable in an ocean of other resumes by a recruiter tapping in search terms, just like you do on Google.
When recruiters are searching for talent in resume databases (or social networking sites) they invariably do so with a specific Job Description (JD) in mind. This is important, because job postings invariably reflect the exact wording of the Job Descriptions they come from. This means you can identify the words and phrases your target companies use when they are looking for someone like you.
If you and I want to hire an accountant, here’s how the process works. First, we need to identify the job title, so we type “accountant” into the dialogue box and specify a location. Next we click on the keyword options (words that describe the hard skills of the job), and up pops a list of words that have been frequently found in job postings for similar job titles. Finally, we add keywords of our own that do not appear in the offered keyword options.
The software then scours the database and builds a list of all the resumes that contain any of those descriptors or keywords. It then weights the list. Those resumes with the most frequent use and greatest total number of keywords rise to the top of the list. Mentioning keywords in a Professional Skills/Core Competency section at the front of your resume, and then repeating them within the context of the jobs in which they were used, will increase your ranking in recruiters’ database searches.
This is the first keyword test your resume must pass: Because recruiters very rarely go beyond the top thirty resumes in a database search, not enough relevant keywords means that no human will review it.
Job titles change from company to company. It isn’t the job title that is important so much as the underlying job. And as we discuss in the section on Target Job Deconstruction, a good resume starts with getting inside your customers’ heads to find out what they want to buy, allowing a resume that speaks to those capabilities for those needs rather than just a recitation of your experience.
A resume that tries to be all things to all people will fail to be discovered, and even if read will likely be discarded in favor of candidates whose resumes speak more clearly about the relevant skills they bring to the table.
When you can do two or three similar yet different jobs, you must prioritize them, because the resume you write must be focused on one job in order to be data-dense enough to be discovered in the databases; you can subsequently make variations for the other job titles you want to pursue.
Prioritize your options to make sure the resume is focused on your greatest strengths. Do this by answering these three questions:
• Which is the job I can make the strongest argument for on paper?
• Which is the job I can make the strongest argument for in person?
• Which is the job where I have the best odds of success?
That’s the job you focus on. Remember: You cannot write a resume that qualifies you for different jobs. It won’t be data-dense enough to be discoverable. Once you’ve identified your best choice, focus your resume on that job alone.
You can quickly repeat the entire TJD process for the alternate jobs you want to pursue, knowing that you will have a carefully focused resume. Use a copy of your original primary resume, and customize it to fit the needs of any second or third options.
This is the second keyword test your resume must pass when your resume gets in front of recruiters’ eyes. The very first scan of your resume usually takes between five and sixty seconds. No visual accessibility (it’s too hard to read) and no relevant keywords/phrases means no second read.
The second read is a little more careful. The reviewers are looking only to see if the resume reflects the skills and competencies required for the job they are trying to fill. Recruiters and HR typically plow through enough resumes to create a “long list” of six to eight candidates.
There will be screening interviews with the recruiters and eventually your resume will land in front of the manager who actually has the authority to hire you. Managers hate reading resumes—they just want to hire someone and get back to work.
In fact, no one likes to read resumes; try reading six of them in a row and feel your brain melting into a gelatinous goop. Bear this in mind, because you can learn to use this to your advantage.
Research on what percentage of submitted resumes actually generate job interviews varies from 47 percent down to 4.3 percent. Whatever the actual facts are is irrelevant; what’s important to recognize is that most resumes don’t work. You can see that a resume that crams in everything you have ever done, without any real focus, is doomed to stumble at these initial hurdles. And no interview means no job offer. In a world without job security, where the statistics say that through a fifty-year career you will likely have to change jobs about every four years, you need to learn how to build a resume that works.
The first lessons in the professional world are invariably: The customer is always right, listen to the customer, learn the customer’s needs, and sell to those needs. And yet we seem to forget this first step when it comes to writing a resume. Before writing your resume, you need to get inside the heads of your target employers and understand exactly how they think about, prioritize, and express their needs for the job you need to land. I have devised a tool that will do this and deliver:
• A template for the story your resume must tell to be successful
• An objective tool against which to evaluate your resume’s likely performance
• An understanding of where the focus will be at interviews
• A good idea of the questions that will be heading your way and why
• Relevant examples with which to illustrate your answers
• A behavioral profile for getting hired and for professional success throughout your career
• A behavioral profile for not getting hired and for ongoing professional failure
Your resume will always be most effective when it begins with a clear focus on, and understanding of, a specific target job. Once you have this focus, you can look backward into your work history for those experiences that best position you for the target job. This will enable you to tailor a killer resume.
The big question is: How do you do this? The answer is what I call the Target Job Deconstruction process.
Focus on a specific and realistic target job, one in which you can succeed based on the skills you possess today. Some people think you change jobs to get a promotion, but this is largely incorrect, especially in a tight job market. People get hired based on their credentials, not their potential. Most people don’t get promotions to the next step up the professional ladder when they change jobs, because that would mean coming onboard as an unknown quantity in a job they’ve never done.
Typically, most professionals accept a position similar to the one they have now, but one that offers opportunity for growth once they have proven themselves. The most common exception is an employee already doing that higher-level job but without the title recognition. Also, sometimes you can combine experience and credentials from a number of jobs into a new configuration. This is always more likely to happen when the economy is on the upswing. In down economies, there are just too many thoroughly qualified candidates for an employer to warrant the risk, because with every hire the hiring manager’s performance comes under scrutiny.
So of all the jobs you can do—and we can all do more than one—decide on the one that will be the easiest sell for you and the easiest buy for the employer. This will be:
• A job you can do and that you can justify on paper
• A job you can convince skilled interviewers that you can do
• A job in which you can succeed
Let’s look at “a job in which you can succeed.” Seventy percent of the requested skills/experience will usually get you in the running for the selection cycle in any economy. In your search for jobs, don’t throw out opportunities because one line in the job description speaks of skills you lack. If you meet the 70-percent guideline, you are a good candidate. Less than this and you may need to reconsider your target job or anticipate a longer job search to reach your goals.
If you have more than five years of experience, there are probably a couple of jobs you can do. More than fifteen years’ experience and there could be half a dozen jobs in which you can succeed. Carefully evaluate and rank these jobs based on their availability, remuneration, fulfillment, and potential for growth or shrinkage. This way you will target a “primary job” based on practicality and common sense. If you ultimately decide you want to go after that White Water Rafting Guide job because you once owned a canoe . . . well, at least you’ll be doing it with your eyes open, knowing that you won’t have most of the required skills, and that your search will take considerably longer.
This does not mean you cannot pursue any of those other jobs for which you have the desire or some of the qualifications. However, be sensible, create your primary resume with a single “primary target” job in mind, and make that job one you can nail!
The one-size-fits-all resume covering all the skills you possess for all the jobs you can do doesn’t work anymore; you have to have a resume focused on a single target job. This means that you have to tailor individual resumes for each of the different jobs you want to pursue, but fortunately, this isn’t nearly as hard as it sounds. Once you have created a primary resume to your job search, you can quite easily customize it for any of those other jobs you are interested in. There is usually considerable overlap in the deliverables of the different jobs for which we are qualified, so you can take that primary resume, make a copy, retitle it, and make the necessary changes to give the secondary resume a specific focus. To determine what changes to make, go through the TJD process for each additional job-targeted resume and you will quickly maximize the impact potential of each one; you won’t have to start from scratch, and you’ll have customized resumes for each opportunity.
Collect a half-dozen job postings for your chosen primary target job; if you want to save some time, try one of the job aggregators, or spiders (so-called because they crawl the web looking for suitable jobs based on your search criteria) from the following list, each of which will search thousands of job sites for you. Some are free, and some are for a fee, but they all work similarly. The homepage has a couple of dialogue boxes: one for a job title and one for a geographic area. If you cannot find half a dozen jobs in your target location, just try another major metro area: For the purpose of TJD, it doesn’t matter where the jobs are located.
Put them in a folder on your desktop and also print them out.
From the collected Job Descriptions, we will carefully define exactly the way employers think about, prioritize, and express their needs when they consider that particular job. The result will be a template that describes your target job the way employers themselves think about, prioritize, and describe it.
This is where you deconstruct your collection of JDs so that you understand exactly how employers think about, prioritize, and describe the deliverables of your job.
1. Start a new MSWord document, and name it “Primary TJD” or something similar.
2. Under the subhead “Target Job Titles,” cut and paste all the variations on the job title you are pursuing from your collection of job postings.
3. Add a second subhead entitled: “Experience/Responsibilities/Skills/Deliverables/Etc.”
Review your collection of job postings and find one requirement that is common to all six; of these six, choose the most complete description of that particular experience/responsibility/skill/deliverable, paste it under the second subhead, and put the number 6 in front of it to signify that it is common to all six job postings. Underneath this, list additional keywords used in the other five job postings to describe this same requirement.
For this step you may find it easier to work with the printed copies, since your kitchen counter is bigger than your computer screen ;-).
Repeat these steps for any other requirements that are common to all six of your collected job postings, placing the number 6 alongside each one.
4. Repeat this process with requirements that are common to five of the six job postings, then four of the six postings . . . and so on down the line.
At the end of this first part of the TJD process, you will be able to read the document and say to yourself, “When employers are looking for _____________________, these are the job titles they use; this is the order in which these needs are prioritized; these are the skills, experiences, deliverables, and professional behaviors they look for; and these are the words with which they describe the deliverables of the job.”
As you read through your TJD document, the story your resume needs to tell will be laid out before you, and some of those promises I made a few paragraphs back will begin to sound a lot less like smoke and mirrors.
KNOCK ’EM DEAD TIP
If you are new to the professional world and cannot bring personal awareness of a job’s needs to the TJD process, you might want to do a little additional research to ensure that your resume has the proper focus.
For further insight into a specific target job, visit the Occupational Outlook Handbook pages at www.bls.gov/ooh, which give detailed analyses of hundreds of jobs. After that, talk to people who are actually doing the work and have them deconstruct the job for you along the lines discussed. Check the section on networking for ways to identify and reach out to the right people.
Add to your TJD any additional skills/experiences you believe are relevant to this job. There are plenty of Job Descriptions that don’t tell the whole story. In some companies, even publicly traded multinationals, the Job Descriptions can be maddeningly vague because the company hasn’t paid close enough attention to the hard skills of the job. Furthermore, in many companies, Job Descriptions won’t go into all the nuts and bolts of a particular job, because they all have to be approved by the Legal Department before they see the light of day. This is part of an overall corporate cost-containment policy designed to protect against the release of JDs that might aid individual or class-action lawsuits brought by disgruntled employees. How can I be sure of this? I used to be a director of human resources in Silicon Valley. I’ve overseen this process.
If you know a specific skill is mandatory for this job, feel free to add it at the bottom of your list. Job postings can also be vague or poorly thought through, which is why you collect a number of them and add responsibilities that you know belong.
At their most elemental level, all jobs are the same—they all focus on problem identification, prevention, and solution; this is what we all get paid for, no matter what we do for a living.
Go back to your TJD and start with the first requirement. Think about and note the problems you will typically need to identify, prevent, and/or solve in the course of a normal workday as you deliver on this requirement of the job; then list specific examples, big and small, of your successful identification, prevention, and/or solution to the problems. Quantify your results when possible.
Repeat this with each of the TJD’s other requirements by identifying the problems inherent in that particular responsibility. Some examples may appear in your resume as significant professional achievements, while others will provide you with the ammunition to answer all those interview questions that begin, “Tell me about a time when . . . ”
Make a list of your greatest solo professional achievements from each of the jobs you have held, quantifying the results where you can, to demonstrate the value of your work. Add to this list with examples of team achievements to which you contributed.
Once you have made this list, come up with a couple of examples of projects that went wrong and couldn’t be fixed; you need these to illustrate your answers to questions that might well be asked about projects that went wrong. Ideally, you want examples that are in the past, where the going wrong was less than catastrophic and where other people were involved, so you weren’t solely responsible. In every example you must be able to illustrate what you learned from the experience.
Interviewers are fond of asking you questions about the following:
• Things that didn’t work out well (but did in the end)
• Things that didn’t work out well ever, and what you learned
• Unpopular decisions you have had to make
• How you developed new processes (because existing ones didn’t work or weren’t efficient)
• How you improved something that was already working well
• How you fixed something that was broken
Being ready with appropriate answers for tough questions in these areas takes some thought. Now, as you do the TJD and as you gather information about your experience in the coming resume questionnaire, is a good time to think about examples to use in answer to these questions.
Come back to these examples as you are preparing for an interview. This may seem like a lot of work, but the better prepared you are, the more job offers you will land and the better companies you will land those job offers with.
Interviewers always have an image of the person they want to hire (and the person they don’t). This is not about height, weight, and hair color; it’s a composite behavioral profile of the best people they’ve known in the job. It’s what hiring managers want to find and will hire when they see.
Have you ever thought about the behavioral profile that defines success in your area of expertise and then measured yourself against it? Doing so can help you define the professional you want to be and the persona you want to show to the professional world. Not understanding how your behavior can help or hinder your success usually means that you are unwittingly sabotaging future potential.
Work your way through each of the responsibilities itemized in your TJD one by one, profiling the best person you ever saw doing that aspect of the job and what made her stand out. Describe how she went about the work, skills hard and soft, interaction with others, general attitude and demeanor, and anything else that sticks out in your mind about that person, and you’ll get something like: Carole Jenkins, superior communication skills, always asking questions and listening, a fine analytical mind, great professional appearance, and a nice person to work with; she’d do anything for anyone. Do this for each one of the job’s deliverables and you will have a detailed behavioral profile of the person all employers want to hire and everyone wants as a colleague: You will have a behavioral profile that will help you land job offers and, just as important, a behavioral profile for professional success.
Now think of the worst person you have ever seen for each of the requirements and what made that individual stand out in such a negative way. Describe the performance, professional behaviors, interaction with others, and general attitude and demeanor of that person and you’ll get something like: Jack Dornitz, insecure, critical, passive aggressive, no social graces. You are describing the person that all employers want to avoid and no one wants to work with; and you will have a behavioral profile for long periods of unemployment and professional suicide. Then compare yourself against this profile and see if there is anything you need to change or work on.
The final step of the TJD is to review each of the skills/responsibilities/deliverables of the job one last time to identify which of the transferable skills and professional values help you execute your responsibilities in each of the target job’s requirements.
Once you complete and review your TJD, you will have a clear idea of the way employers think about, prioritize, and express their needs for this job; you’ll know what they’ll need to ask about at interviews and, beyond the hard skills, exactly the person they will hire. Yes, it will take time, and it would be easy to cut corners or just skip it, but this is your career and this is your life: Make the choice that is right for your long-term success and happiness.
The more immediate result will be to give you a template for the story your resume has to tell and an objective tool with which to evaluate your work. And when you apply what you learn from the TJD exercise to your professional life, it will increase your job security as it opens doors to the inner circles that exist in every department and company.
Professional success has traditionally been defined by occupation, job title, and prestige of employer, because financial rewards have similarly been determined by occupation, job title, and employer: Better companies and higher titles lead to greater earnings and greater social prestige.
This idea has been the norm for the past five or six generations, since the industrialization of our country, and has become an integral part of traditional (and largely irrelevant) career management lore. Passed on from parent and teacher to child, conventional career management wisdom says:
1. You can go anywhere you want in life as long as you base your pursuits on a firm educational footing. (NB: If you live in America, for many people this means getting deep into debt.)
2. Be prepared to start at the bottom and work your way up.
3. Do whatever is required of you without complaint; sacrifice your energy and your time for the benefit of your employer.
4. Hang on with ten fingers and ten toes—and if you lose one, then hang on with nine, because you will be rewarded with gradually increasing responsibilities, earnings, and titles.
5. You will be rewarded with long-term employment and a steady career with an employer who makes sacrifices on your behalf equal to your own.
1. With exceptions as rare as hens’ teeth, employers make no sacrifices on your behalf.
2. With all that hard work and sacrifice, you get to keep that job just as long as it takes the employer to find someone cheaper (here or abroad) or automate your job out of existence entirely.
Our political and business leaders have told us for twenty years that, yes, we are losing jobs, but, “They’re those dirty old jobs that you don’t want anyway. What you want is one of those shiny new jobs that globalization is making possible.
“All you have to do is go back to school for retraining (getting deeper into debt) and then start at the bottom, and work hard, make sacrifices, hold on with ten fingers and ten toes . . . ” You know how this story ends.
In short, you are being sold a pack of lies again. It is not that any one person is setting out to tell you lies, but cumulatively this is what the advice amounts to.
1. All jobs are under threat all the time from the inexorable march of automation and the globalization of work it makes possible.
2. No job today is secure from the impact of technology-driven change.
3. The better you become at your work and the more you earn as a result, the more you increase the probability that with some new software development, there’s a cheaper alternative that can be found to replace you.
4. The better you become (which is something you strive to do because that is where the rewards have always been), the higher you climb.
5. Climbing ever higher on the ladder of professional success has traditionally meant security, but now with the globalization of manpower and age and wage discrimination, many people are beginning to recognize that the higher you climb, the fewer alternatives are open to you and the bigger the target on your back for all the people coming up behind you and snapping at your heels.
You can’t rely on hard work and loyalty to deliver a successful career, because behind the scenes your employer, and every employer, is constantly looking to contain costs by automating and outsourcing work.
Consequently, you have to take a more active role in managing your career. Now, while this section is primarily focused on creating a resume to get you a new job, these same tactics can be applied to pursuing a promotion on that job and maintaining your desirability as an employee in the event of the unforeseen (but not unforeseeable!) occurring.
In fact, the TJD process we discussed should play a twice-yearly role in your ongoing career guidance strategy, both for maintaining employability and for pursuing professional growth.
To keep yourself employable, you must stay in tune with the new skills that employers are seeking when they hire people like you.
Twice a year, collect half a dozen job postings for the job you have now and the job you would likely pursue in the event of an unexpected layoff. Review these job postings for the skills employers are seeking. You should consider adding any skill you do not have to your professional skill development program. If the skill is relevant to your work, employers will often support you in acquiring it.
You can also use the TJD approach to climbing the ladder of professional success. Many people mistakenly assume that promotions come with time, hard work, and loyalty. Promotions do indeed take time and hard work, but are based more on the presence of the necessary skills than oafish loyalty.
So if you have plans to climb the professional success ladder, it is common sense to identify the skills and experience needed to take that next step up the ladder, then set about acquiring those skills and that experience.
Once you have a clearly defined target job, you can look back into your work history and pull out the experiences that best reflect your ability to do this job. The following questionnaire will help you assemble all the data you will need for a productive resume.
You can find an electronic version of this questionnaire at www.knockemdead.com on the resume advice pages. The electronic document will expand to fit your needs.
You can find an MSWord version of this and all other documents used in resume development at www.knockemdead.com.
In answering the questions, don’t worry about grammar or perfect expression (that comes later), but do take the time to think about the issues. Be descriptive—don’t just say you were a manager: Say that you were a manager with fifty-five direct reports in Decatur and a further fifteen in Mumbai. Be specific whenever possible. Mention full budgetary responsibility (with dollar amount) plus selection, development, discipline, and termination responsibilities. Wherever you can, illustrate with real-world examples, and quantify those examples in terms of money earned or saved, time saved, and productivity improved. Round these examples down, rather than up. Always identify your role as a team member when appropriate. This makes your claims more believable.
Name
Address
Home telephone (recommend alternate #)
Cell
Current job title
Variations on this job title
Operational area (sales, finance, R & D, IT, supply chain, etc.)
Industry/market sectors (technology, pharma, financial services, etc.)
Postsecondary education (You might not use all this but do collect it.)
Degree
Concentration
Graduation date
Major
Minor
GPA
GPA major
GPA minor
Ranking
Honors, scholarships
Special accomplishments
International studies
Degree
Concentration
Graduation date
Major
Minor
GPA
GPA major
GPA minor
Ranking
Honors, scholarships
Special accomplishments
Professional Education (Ongoing professional education signals commitment to success.)
Course name
Completion date
Duration
Certification
Sponsoring organization
Professional Credentials Not Covered Elsewhere
Professional memberships and affiliations (American Management Association, American Marketing Association, etc.)
Organization
Leadership role
KNOCK ’EM DEAD TIP
Active membership in a professional association is a key tool for career resilience and success.
Technological Skills (List all that apply to you.)
No one gets ahead today without technological competence. Capture your fluency here, and update regularly. That alphabet soup of technology just might help your resume’s performance in database searches.
Corporate Accomplishments (You can also include here your work on projects that resulted in copyright and patents, so long as you make clear your real contribution.)
Awards and recognition
Public speaking/presentations
Profession-related publications
Patents and copyrights
Global Experience, Cultural Diversity Awareness
In a global economy, any exposure here is relevant, and it doesn’t have to be professional in nature. That you were an Army brat and grew up in ten different countries can be a big plus. Just name the countries, not the circumstances.
Foreign Languages
Community, Civic Involvement (List all organizations and any special projects/activities/leadership roles.)
This should include all the activities with which you fill your out-of-work hours. Your resume may include those activities that can say something positive about the professional you. For example, in sales and marketing just about all group activities show a desirable mindset. Bridge might argue strong analytical skills, and the senior executive who still plays competitive lacrosse and runs marathons is crazy not to let the world know.
Valuable Profession-Related Skills Developed Outside of Your Professional Work
Military Service
Rank
Discharge
Promotions
Decorations
Honors
Professional Development Courses
Achievements
What professional capabilities/skills do you feel have most contributed to your professional success?
What professional behaviors (analytical or communication skills, for example) do you feel have most contributed to your professional success?
Employment History (To ensure a proper focus, I strongly advise that you complete your TJD exercises before looking back at your work history.)
Current position
Company
Employment dates
Location
Standing (division, public, private)
Industry/market sector
What does your company do?
Squanto Corporation, Inc., Orlando, FL
1997 to present
$500 million company
One of the largest resort and vacation sales/development companies in the United States.
In rapid growth through international expansion, strategic M & A, industry roll-up, and IPO.
What were you hired to do?
EXAMPLE:
Worldwide Director of Operations, Entertainment Imaging, 1998–2006
Selected to re-engineer and revitalize this $65 million business unit with accountability for thirty-two direct reports in four cities across the United States. Established strategic vision and developed operational infrastructure. Managed Supply Chain, Logistics/Distribution, Forecasting, System Integration, Project Management, Contracts Administration, and Third-Party Site Operations.
Or, more simply:
EXAMPLE:
DryRoc, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, 2004–present
Production Director
Drove production for world’s largest wallboard plant, with 258 employees working in multiple shifts.
Title you report to
Department/unit
Leadership or membership of executive teams, project teams, or committees
Responsibilities/deliverables
Quotes, praise, and endorsements from management
How do you hope a professional colleague would describe your most desirable professional qualities?
Having taken a first pass at the responsibilities/deliverables area, take a few moments to review your TJD. Identify the ways in which your department or unit is expected to contribute to the bottom line (making or saving money, improving productivity, and so on).
Internal auditor: to contain costs by audits to ensure adherence to company policies and financial reporting procedures.
All jobs revolve around problem identification, prevention, and solution.
At some level every job exists for four major reasons:
1. To identify potential problems and prevent them
2. To identify and solve the problems that arise daily as an integral part of the job
3. To identify, prevent, or solve the major problems that occur in every business on a regular basis
4. To identify opportunities for contributing to the bottom line
Develop examples of problem identification and opportunity initiatives, both small and large, for every job title you have held. The more you come up with the better, because they will add weight and reality to your resume and show that you think with employers’ needs in mind, which will boost your resume’s punch. All examples are valuable; those most relevant to your target job are most valuable.
To help you bring out the information that will be most useful to you in your resume and in interview situations, you can apply the PSRV process (you might know this as STAR—same process, different acronym):
• Identify a Problem.
• Envision your Solution, including strategy and tactics.
• Take note of the Result of your actions.
• Understand the Value of this to the company (usually in earnings or productivity enhancements).
Now describe four typical or notable problems with which you have been involved on your last (or current) job. Analyze each in terms of PSRV and include the following information:
Employment dates
Location
Standing (division, public, private)
Industry sector
What does the company do?
What were you hired to do?
Title you report to
Your title
Department/unit
Leadership or membership of executive teams, project teams, or committees
Responsibilities/deliverables
Quotes, praise, and endorsements from management
The TJD process gave you a clear idea of the way employers think about, prioritize, and express their needs for this job; as such, it provided a template for the story your resume has to tell and an objective tool with which to evaluate your work. Next you filled out the questionnaire, which helped you gather all the raw data that you will shape to match the employer priorities uncovered by the TJD. Because all jobs at their heart are about problem identification and solution, you went through your work history using the PSRV process to help identify examples of problems you have surmounted. This helps you figure out what exactly it is you’ve been doing for forty hours a week all these years, how it contributes to the company’s bottom line, and how to pack this information into trenchant, high-impact sound bites for your resume. Now it’s time to decide on a resume format that fits your work history.
There are three standard types of resumes:
1. Chronological: The most frequently used format. Use it when your work history is stable and your professional growth is consistent within a profession. The chronological format is exactly what it sounds like: It follows your work history backward from the current job, listing companies, dates, and responsibilities.
2. Functional: A functional resume concentrates on the skills and responsibilities that you bring to the target job, and it de-emphasizes when, where, and how you got that experience. It is useful when changing careers, returning to the workplace or the profession after an absence, or when current responsibilities don’t relate to the job you want. It is written with the most relevant experience to the job you’re seeking placed first and de-emphasizes jobs, employment dates, and job titles by placing them toward the end.
3. Combination: A combination of chronological and functional resumes. Use this format if you have a steady work history with demonstrated growth and if you are continuing your progression within an industry or profession. It often starts with a brief performance profile, then lists job-specific skills relevant to the objective, and segues into a chronological format that lists how, where, and when these skills were acquired.
Check your resume against these six resume rules:
Place a target job title at the top of your resume, right after your contact information. This will help your visibility in database searches and will give human eyes an immediate focus. Use the most common job title for your target job title; because different employers use different titles for the same job, you want to use a title specific enough to put you in the running, but vague enough not to rule you out. One way you can make a job title “specifically vague” is to add the term “specialist” (Computer Specialist, Administration Specialist) or “management” (Operations Management, Financial Management).
John-Taylor Thomas, 4857 Jefferson Street, Arlington, Virginia 22205 646.555.6785 Marcompro@gmail.com
CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS MANAGEMENT
Performance Profile
Strategic communications professional with . . .
Following your target job title, give a summary of your capabilities as they relate to the demands of the target job. You can title this section Career Summary or Performance Profile.
I suggest you stay away from Job Objective or Career Objective for two very good reasons:
1. Your needs will not help your ranking in the database searches.
2. At this stage, no recruiter has the slightest interest in what you want.
If you do need to state a specific job objective—for example, if you are at the start of your career and have absolutely no experience—follow the advice in the following paragraphs for what you should put here.
I like the new term Performance Profile for this important section of your resume because it captures the essence of the professional you as it relates to your TJD, and until everyone and their dog starts using the phrase, it subtly positions you as a “performer” and separates you from other applicants.
No more than five lines of unbroken text, this section can be followed by a second similar paragraph or short list of bullets. Your intent is to capture your ability to do the target job. For what to put in this section, refer back to your TJD exercise and rewrite the major priorities as your Performance Profile. This will help your resume’s database visibility and will create immediate resonance when read by the recruiter. Always note any bilingual skills here, since we live in a global economy.
EXAMPLE:
CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS MANAGEMENT
PERFORMANCE PROFILE
Strategic communications professional with nine years’ experience developing effective, high-impact, and cost-efficient media outreach plans for consumer, business, and policy audiences in media, entertainment, and technology practice areas. Experienced in managing corporate and crisis communications. Goal- and deadline-oriented with five years’ experience managing internal and external communications team members. Adept at working with multiple teams and stakeholders.
If you are starting your career and have no relevant experience, that’s okay—your chief competitors will be in the same boat. You can tilt the game in your favor by starting your objective with “The opportunity to” and then, referring back to your TJD exercise, rewriting the target job’s major priorities as your job objective. This will make a big difference in your resume’s productivity.
Large blocks of text are less likely to be read by human eyes, especially if those eyes are older (which the hiring manager’s probably are) or tired (which the hiring manager’s definitely are). Depending on your skills, you may even consider a separate Technology Competencies section. This helps database visibility because it guarantees you are using the words employers use. You can repeat many of them again in the body of your resume in the context of each job in which you used them, further increasing your visibility. For the human eyes that see your resume, each word or phrase acts as a headline for a topic to be addressed at the interview and increases the odds of that interview happening.
You can also use keywords in these sections that won’t fit in the body of your resume; this will result in better performance with the database spiders and bots. Here’s an example of a Core Competencies section followed by a Technology Competencies section.
Strategic Planning ~ Full-Cycle Project Management ~ Technical & Application
Standards ~ IT Governance Process ~ Technical Vision & Leadership ~ Architecture
Roadmaps ~ Technical Specifications & Project Design Best Practices ~ Teambuilding & Leadership ~ Standards & Process Development
TECHNOLOGY COMPETENCIES |
|
Hardware |
Sun Servers; HP-UX; AIX; p-Series; Windows Server |
Operating Systems |
Sun Solaris; AIX; HP-UX; Linux; z/OS; OS/400 |
Languages |
C / C++; COBOL; Visual Basic; Java; Unix Korn Shell Scripting; Perl; Assembler; SQL*Plus; RPG |
Databases |
Oracle; DB2; SQL Server; Microsoft Access; Informix Visio; HP Service |
Applications |
MQSeries; Tuxedo; CICS; Microsoft Project, Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Sharepoint, and Visio; HP Service Desk; Provision; Telelogic Doors; Change Synergy; Rational System Architecture; Rational System Developer; Visual Studio; CA Clarity; LiveLink |
Other |
Cobit 4.1 |
It does not belong there. If salary information is requested for a specific opening, put it in your cover letter and don’t tie yourself to a specific figure: Give a range. If you are earning too little or too much, you could rule yourself out before getting your foot in the door. For the same reason, do not mention your desired salary. For details on developing a realistic salary range, see Chapter 27, “Negotiating the Job Offer.”
The standard for resume length used to be one page for every ten years of experience, and never more than two pages. However, as jobs have gotten more complex, they require more explanation. The length of your resume is less important than its relevance to the target job. If the first page of your resume is tightly focused and contains a target job title, Performance Profile, Core Competency, and perhaps Career Highlight section, you will have the reader’s attention. If the first page makes the right argument, the rest of your resume will be read carefully. A longer resume also means that much more space for selling your skills with relevant keywords and more opportunities to establish your professional brand. No recruiter or hiring manager, reaching the bottom of the second page of your resume, thinking you are a great candidate, and seeing that there is a third page will throw the resume down in disgust shouting, “OMG he was so good but a third page means I could never interview him.” The two-page rule is a hangover from an earlier age. Don’t get hung up on it. However, you should still make every effort to maintain focus and an “if in doubt, cut it out” editing approach.
Make your achievements, problem-solving skills, and professional brand the focus of your resume.
Your goal is always to save your resume from getting lost in the big databases, but inevitably this is going to happen. Many commercial resume databases and about half of all companies use some form of Applicant Tracking System (ATS), which helps organize, store, and access the sometimes millions of resumes in those databases. Understanding a little about how ATS works can help your resume gain maximum visibility in the databases.
An ATS typically asks you to supply the same initial information. This information is subsequently used as an initial screening tool by recruiters. The requested information generally includes:
1. Address, to determine commutable distance.
2. Career level (student, entry, experienced, manager, executive). Note that as you grow older, there is considerable social pressure in the professional classes to be seen as an executive. But when it comes to resumes, classifying yourself that way will put you into a category with fewer opportunities and fierce competition. If you are on the borderline or could be classified as either a manager or an executive, go for the category that will have the greater number of opportunities.
3. Education level (high school, vocational, degrees, certifications).
4. Occupational area.
5. Industry/industry sector.
If there are multiple-choice options offered in any of these initial questions, make use of them. You may also be asked about language proficiency, salary level, and employment status. It is preferable to define yourself as employed, even by consulting or temping if necessary.
Twenty-eight years ago ATS came into being to help recruiters find resumes in their growing databases. In the early days, the ATS programs had problems dealing with italics, lines, boxes, bolding, some kinds of bullets, the tables that give resume layouts a precise, snappy look, and some fonts, among other shortcomings.
We have come a long way in twenty-seven years, and just as you are not using the software you used in the mid 1980s (if you were alive and working then), neither are corporations.
The colleagues I trust on these issues don’t think formatting affects discoverability as much as it did years ago. Personally, I don’t think the precise formatting that comes with the use of grids and tables matters at all.
For example, last year, I wrote a resume for an EMEA marketing guy living in Vienna, Austria. His resume was built with grids and tables, and after uploading it to twenty-five databases, he got interviews with all seven of his top target companies within two weeks—and this despite the fact that you can usually count on the rest of the world to trail the United States when it comes to technology. The formatting had no negative impact whatsoever, and common sense tells me that while corporations tend to keep up-to-date with new software releases, even when they don’t, they certainly are not using twenty-seven-year-old software.
You can achieve the same look without formatting with grids and tables if you are feeling wary; it just takes longer. The decision is up to you.
When you have a choice to either copy and paste your resume section by section or upload the whole document, always choose the upload option, because it gives you more control over what human eyes will eventually see.
1. When you submit a resume, how you saved it becomes part of your messaging. “Resume.doc” says nothing; you’ll find saves like “Sales Manager/ABC Corp.doc” much more effective.
2. Sometimes recruiters use Windows Search or Apple’s Spotlight to find documents. Knowing this can give you an edge. In Microsoft Word, under the File menu, choose Summary Info and insert keywords and terms with semicolons between them in the keyword file. On a Macintosh, the File menu can help you find this same capability under Summaries.
3. Older versions of ATS cannot read header and footer information, so never put contact information there.
4. ATS doesn’t like surprises. You will have greater success with your resume when you use standard business fonts like Times, Arial, Georgia, Impact, Courier, Lucinda, Palatino (MAC), Tahoma, and Verdana.
5. If you have bulleted lists in your resume, stick to bullets and stay away from arrows, dingbats, and check marks, because some systems won’t be able to recognize them.
6. Use section headings like the ones in the following template, such as Performance Profile, Professional Skills, Experience, and Education. They don’t affect ATS performance and they help the reader.
Name
Mailing address (if appropriate) • Telephone & cell phone • Email address
Professional Target Job Title
This helps database visibility and tells people what they will be reading.
Performance Profile / Career Summary
No more than five lines of unbroken text, perhaps followed by a second similar paragraph or short list of bullet points. The idea is to capture your ability to do the target job. What goes in here? Take the most common requirements from your TJD exercise Step Three and rewrite them as your performance profile. (For more on this, see the Competitive Difference Questionnaire on the Knock ’em Dead website.) This will help your resume’s database visibility and will immediately resonate with the recruiter. Always note bilingual skills, since we live in a global economy.
Core Competencies (Professional Skills and Skill Prioritization)
Specific and detailed. This is the bulleted list of keywords that you identified in Step Three of the TJD. It can be as long as you like. This list gives the reader an immediate focus (“Oh, she can talk about this and this”), and each word can be repeated in the context of the job to which it is applied. Some of your keywords can be written in two or more ways; for example, a recruiter might use “Profit and Loss” responsibilities or “P & L,” and you have no way of knowing which. The solution is to use one variation in your Professional Skills/Core Competencies section, and the other within the context of the jobs where you used them.
Your professional skills are most readily accessible when they appear in three or four columns. This section contains a list of your important professional skills and so needs to be near the top of your resume, for the following reasons:
1. Coming after a Target Job Title and a Performance Summary that focuses on the skills you bring to the target job, skills reflect employer priorities. With accurate prioritization, you help both the discoverability of your resume and its impact with knowledgeable readers.
2. The ATS programs that recruiters use to search resume databases in turn use algorithms that reward relevant words near the top of a document as a means of judging that document’s relevance to the recruiters’ search terms. This means your professional skills need to be relevant to the target job and appear near the top of your resume. I have been suggesting this for years—perhaps because I have been using ATS since 1987, when it first came on the scene, and have an understanding of how it works.
3. A recent study showed that once a resume has been pulled from a resume database, recruiters spend an average of six seconds on a first-time scan of that resume. This means your qualifications have to jump out, and you achieve this by using a Target Job Title, followed by a Performance Summary that reflects employer priorities and a Professional Skills section that supports all the above claims of professional competency with a list of your relevant skills. This gives a recruiter plenty of time to see your abilities in that first six-second scan.
However, there is another issue at play when it comes to the Professional Skills section of your resume. Ultimately it will be read by someone who really knows this job—knows what’s a “must have” and what’s a “nice to have.”
The easiest way to explain this is with an example: A couple of years back I did a resume for a dental assistant. She gave me a list of all the important technical skills of her job. I put these into three columns for visual accessibility, and when I did so, something terrible jumped out at me: Her list started with “Teeth whitening” and ended with “Four-handed dentistry.” What was so terrible about this? After all, all the skills were there . . .
Yes, they were, but in the West we read from left to right and top to bottom, and common sense says that the most important skills for a job should come before the less important skills. I immediately switched these phrases so that “Four-handed dentistry” came first and “Teeth whitening” came last.
Bear this story in mind when you are creating your own Professional Skills section: By prioritizing your skills, you are subtly telling the man or woman who will ultimately hire you that you have a firm grasp of the relative importance of all the necessary professional skills of your work, and that adds to the clear focus and power of the opening first half page of your resume. This shows that:
• You can do the job
• Your skills list backs up your statements of ability
• You understand the relevant importance of the component parts of your job
The result is that within the first half page of your resume you have gone a long way toward making the short list of candidates who will be brought in for an interview.
Technical Competencies
An optional category, depending on your needs.
Professional Experience
Company name and location
Job title and employment dates
(Repeat this format as many times as necessary.)
Education
This may come at the front of the resume if these credentials are critical or especially relevant to the Target Job description, or highlight your greatest strength.
Licenses / Professional Accreditations
As with Education, this may come at the front of the resume if these credentials are critical or especially relevant to the Target Job description, or highlight your greatest strength.
Ongoing Professional Education
Professional Organizations / Affiliations
Publications / Patents / Speaking Languages
Military Service
Extracurricular Interests
If—and only if—they relate to the job.
References Available on Request
Employers assume that your references are available. Only end your resume with this if there is no better use of the space. Never list references on your resume.
An excellent final test for your revamped resume is to first reread your TJD and then read your resume from front to back. If it clearly echoes your TJD, then you are likely to have a productive resume. If it doesn’t, you’ll be able to tell easily where your content needs fine-tuning.
Sample Resume
Jane Swift, 9 Central Avenue, Quincy, MA 02169. (617) 555-1212 jswift@careerbrain.com
SUMMARY: |
Ten years of increasing responsibilities in the employment services industry. Concentration in the high-technology markets. |
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EXPERIENCE: 2004–Present |
Howard Systems International, Inc. |
|
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Management Consulting Firm Personnel Manager |
|
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Responsible for recruiting and managing consulting staff of five. Set up office and organized the recruitment, selection, and hiring of consultants. Recruited all levels of MIS staff from financial to manufacturing markets. |
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Additional responsibilities: • Coordinated with outside advertising agencies. • Developed PR with industry periodicals—placement with over twenty magazines and newsletters. • Developed effective referral programs—referrals increased 32 percent. |
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EXPERIENCE: 1996–2004 |
Technical Aid Corporation |
|
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National Consulting Firm. MICRO/TEMPS Division |
|
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Division Manager |
2001–2004 |
|
Area Manager |
1998–2001 |
|
Branch Manager |
1996–1998 |
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As Division Manager, opened additional West Coast offices. Staffed and trained all offices with appropriate personnel. Created and implemented all divisional operational policies responsible for P & L. Sales increased to $20 million dollars, from $0 in 1990. Additional responsibilities: • Achieved and maintained 30 percent annual growth over seven-year period. • Maintained sales staff turnover at 14 percent. As Area Manager, opened additional offices, hired staff, set up office policies, and trained sales and recruiting personnel. Additional responsibilities: • Supervised offices in two states. • Developed business relationships with accounts—75 percent of clients were regular customers. • Client base increased 28 percent per year. • Generated over $200,000 worth of free trade-journal publicity. As Branch Manager, hired to establish the new MICRO/TEMPS operation. Recruited and managed consultants. Hired internal staff. Sold service to clients. |
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EDUCATION: |
Boston University B.S. Public Relations, 1995. |
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Once you are on that new job, keep a low profile for three to six months while you learn the culture of the company, get up to speed with all your job’s deliverables, and determine who is in the inner and outer circles of your department and why. Acquire allies by your commitment to doing a good job and by your behavior with the group that will most support your career goals. Quietly identify the next step up the promotional ladder at this or any other company, and then start working toward it. Promotions don’t come as a reward for loyalty and tenure; they come as a result of capabilities.
Identify that next job, collect six to twelve job postings for it, and complete a TJD on the position. Then do a gap analysis: Identify the gaps between what you can do and what the next job requires. These gaps become your professional development program.
Resume writing is a major topic all on its own, so you can find more help:
• On the resume advice pages at www.knockemdead.com
• In the latest edition of Knock ’em Dead Resumes
• With a professionally written resume from the credentialed resume writers at www.knockemdead.com
Your professional brand should be communicated throughout your resume, but especially with opening and closing brand statements. The first place you begin to establish a professional brand is with your Target Job Title (TJT), where you consciously decide on the job that best allows you to package your skill sets and create a professional brand.
Your TJT and subsequent brand statement give the reader a focus for what this resume is about and what to expect. The brand statement is a short phrase following the TJT that defines what you will bring to this job. It says, in effect, “These are the benefits my presence on your payroll will bring to your team and your company.” Put this statement after your TJT and you have a succinct brand statement, or, if you prefer, “value proposition.”
Notice the following brand statements focus on the benefits brought to the job, but do not take up space identifying the specifics of how this was done.
Professional brand statements often start with an action verb: “Poised to,” “Delivers,” “Dedicated to,” “Bringing,” “Positioned to,” and “Building.”
Pharmaceutical Sales Management Professional
Poised to outperform in pharmaceutical software sales. Repeating records of achievement with major pharmaceutical companies.
Senior Operations / Plant Management Professional
Dedicated to continuous improvement ~ Lean Six Sigma ~ Start-up & turnaround operations ~ Mergers & change management ~ Process & productivity optimization ~ Logistics & supply chain.
Bank Collections Management
Equipped to continue excellence in loss mitigation / collections / recovery management.
Mechanical / Design / Structural Engineer
Delivering high volume of complex structural and design projects for global companies in manufacturing / construction / power generation.
Account Management / Client Communications Manager
Reliably achieving performance improvement and compliance within financial services industry.
Marketing Communications
Consistently delivering successful strategic marketing, media relations, and special events.
Administrative / Office Support Professional
Ready, willing, and competent: detail-oriented problem solver, consistently forges effective working relationships with all publics.
Senior Engineering Executive
Bringing sound technical skills, strong business acumen, and real management skill to technical projects and personnel in fast-paced environment.
Review the body copy of your resume to see that the messaging supports the professional brand you have defined. Refer to the list of action verbs for words that you can add to a statement and further clarify your brand. Make sure your branding is front and center in the following sections of your resume:
• Performance/Career Highlights
• Professional Experience
You will occasionally see a resume closed with a third-party endorsement:
I’ve never worked with a more ethical and conscientious auditor.
—Petra Tompkins, Controller.
This endorsement can act as a closing brand statement: a bold statement clarifying the value proposition of the product (that’s you, that’s the brand). It’s a great way to end a resume. If you have just the right kind of supportable quote, use it, but suitable quotes aren’t always as readily available as we would like.
However, you can achieve an equally powerful effect with a final comment of your own, a comment that relates to your professional brand and is written in the first person to make it conversational and different from the voice of the rest of your resume. Most resumes are written in the third person, allowing you to talk about yourself with a semblance of objectivity. Moving into the first person for a final comment at the resume’s end acts both as an exclamation point and a matching “bookend” for the brand statement at the beginning. For example:
I believe that leadership by example and conscientious performance management underlie my department’s consistent customer satisfaction ratings.
You have to be able to deliver on the brand you create. It must be based on your possession of the technical skills of your profession, plus those transferable skills and professional values that you take with you from job to job.
It is all too easy to overpromise, and while the employer might initially be attracted by the pizzazz of your resume, whether or not you live up to the value proposition determines the length and quality of the relationship. If a box of cereal doesn’t live up to the brand’s hype, you simply don’t buy it again. The same logic applies to your career, but the stakes are higher: Sell yourself into the wrong job with exaggerations or outright lies and it is likely to cost you that job, plus the possibility of collateral career damage that can follow you for years.
Conversations have to happen before any hiring decision is made, which means that getting into conversations with the people who can hire you is the prime focus of every smart job search.
1. Because the majority of resumes typically end up in resume databases, where cover letters often can’t help you, learning to use the more personal approaches where a cover letter can make a difference will greatly impact the productivity of your search. When you identify hiring managers by name (advice on how to do this is coming up), you can avoid the resume databases altogether, and when you have a name, your cover letter is a very effective marketing tool.
2. Many resume banks and corporate websites have a place where you can upload or paste a cover letter along with your resume, and employers look more favorably on candidates who take the extra step.
In a professional world where communication skills are a must for any job, your cover letter introduces you, puts your resume in context, and demonstrates your writing skills. In fact, from your first contact with an employer to the day you start that new job, there are a number of opportunities to use letters/emails to advance your candidacy. There are different types of cover letters for different situations: follow-up letters after telephone and face-to-face interviews, resurrection, negotiation, acceptance, rejection, and resignation letters, to name but a few. It’s a bigger topic than can be handled here, and for proper coverage you should get the latest edition of Knock ’em Dead Cover Letters, with over 125 examples covering all these categories and more; you can also find job search letter templates at www.knockemdead.com. Meanwhile, here is a very effective form of cover letter:
I developed this type of cover letter many years ago, and it continues to get rave reviews from users. You can use its striking format to clearly link skills to employer needs or to quickly customize an application when your resume doesn’t tell the complete story.
An executive briefing enables you to customize your resume quickly to any specific job and is especially helpful on the other side of the desk—for overworked recruiters, hiring managers, HR professionals, or administrative assistants who may not understand all the requirements of a specific job function. It is a powerful focusing tool for any harried resume reader. Furthermore, the executive briefing allows you to update and customize a more general resume with lightning speed without derailing the rest of your day’s mission or missing out on an opportunity.
Like many great ideas, the executive briefing is beautiful in its simplicity. It is a cover letter on your standard letterhead/email with the company’s requirements for the job opening listed on the left side and your skills—matching point by point the company’s needs—on the right. It looks like this:
From: A1coordpro@earthlink.net
Subject: Assessment Coordinator
Date: February 28th, 2014 11:18:39 PM EST
To: jobs@pepsi.com
Dear HR Staff,
Your advertisement on the New York Times website on February 27, 2014, for an Assessment Coordinator seems to perfectly match my background and experience. As the International Brand Coordinator for Kahlúa, I coordinated meetings, prepared presentations and materials, organized a major offsite conference, and supervised an assistant. I believe that I am an excellent candidate for this position, as I have illustrated:
YOUR REQUIREMENTS |
MY QUALIFICATIONS |
Highly motivated and diplomatic. |
Successfully managed project teams involving different flexible, quality-driven professional business units. The defined end results were achieved on every project. |
Exceptional organizational skills and attention to detail. |
Planned the development and launch of the Kahlúa Heritage Edition bottle series. My former manager enjoyed leaving the details and follow-through to me. Coverdale project management training. |
College degree and six years of experience. |
B.A. from Vassar College (2002). 6+ years’ relevant business experience in productive, professional environments. |
Computer literacy. |
Extensive knowledge of Windows and Macintosh applications. |
I’m interested in this position because it fits well with my new career focus in the human resources field. Currently, I am enrolled in NYU’s adult career planning and development certificate program, and am working at Lee Hecht Harrison.
My resume, pasted below and attached in MSWord, will provide more information on my strengths and career achievements. If after reviewing my material you believe that there is a match, please call me. Thank you for your consideration.
Sincere regards,
Jane Swift
An executive briefing sent with a resume provides a comprehensive picture of a thorough professional, plus a personalized, fast, and easy-to-read synopsis that details exactly how you can help with current needs. Using the executive briefing as a cover letter for your resume will greatly increase the chance that your query will be picked out of the pile in the Human Resources department and hand-carried to the appropriate manager.
The use of an executive briefing is obviously not appropriate when the requirements of a specific job are unavailable.
One of the buzzwords you often hear in job search is “branding.” The word is overused and tends to make people think in terms of surface over substance, but understood properly, branding is about establishing a reputation for your technical and transferable skills and professional values, and creating a consistent way of messaging that reputation.
To discover what sets you apart from others and will help you build a worthy reputation and viable brand over the years, download the Competitive Difference Questionnaire from the downloads page at knockemdead.com. The questionnaire will help you distill what sets you apart from others in your field to the point where you will have a single, condensed sentence expressing your greatest professional strengths and so give substance to your professional reputation and evolving brand.
We have covered a lot of territory in discussing how to put together a killer resume because your resume is the most financially important document you will ever own. Furthermore, the processes through which you develop a compelling resume (TJD, questionnaire, and PSRV) are also crucial in defining the professional persona you present to the world; this is almost as important as having a resume that tells a compelling story. Additionally, the process has prepared you for just about all the questions you are likely to be asked at an interview; this will become apparent when you start learning about how to turn job interviews into job offers.