Category Archives: Resumes

Beat the job boards – electronic filters

Posted on January 7, 2014 | Leave a comment

When I put an ad on a job board I often get 100 replies, but only 1 or 2 candidates are viable.  Since people have to go through 100 terrible resumes to find one or two good ones, electronic filters have been employed.  Some of those filters are pretty good.  Most of the filters are terrible.

Filters are mostly keyword driven.  They have a list of words that have to be on your resume in order for you to be considered.  If you don’t have those key words, you will either receive an instant rejection, or nothing will ever happen because your resume is dumped. 

There is another reason for the filters.  Federal law says large companies have to be able to prove they don’t discriminate by race, sex, age, etc.  They have to keep records of everyone they consider for jobs, except for people who are filtered out immediately.  There you are!  Another government law with unintended consequences.  Because they don’t want to have to guess your sex or race, they eliminate you completely unless you are obviously qualified.    

The easy way past the filters is to carefully read the ad, and put in all the keywords they use.  Even if you do NOT have a particular skill or experience here is how you can put it on your resume.  At the bottom just put a line that says, “I know how to fish, but have never done underwater basket weaving, though I can learn.”  Because you mention underwater basket weaving, you get past the filters.  It is at the bottom of your resume, so no one reads it.

Another method that works is to paste the ad at the bottom of your resume with a note that says, “This is the ad I am responding to.”  Every key word will be in it then! Note: you have to do this on the RESUME because the filter is always applied to the resume.

One last note, if you are totally unqualified you will still be instantly rejected by the first human to see your resume.  Spamming still does not work.  Also, if you are qualified, your resume has to get past the human screener. Well talk about that too.

Something To Do Today

Go fishing for trolling ads.  Find a few ads that look very generic.  Start collecting them and seeing if they are out there for month or years.  Some are a decade old.

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Later: Beat the job boards – posting your resume

– beating hundreds

Now to get past the human filter

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Posted in Finding jobs, Job Boards, Resumes

How not to be a liar in resumes and job apps

Posted on October 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

I thought not lying was easy.  Then I got good questions from people who want to tell the truth, but don’t know what it is.  So let me help you tell the verifiable truth.  Here is how to tell the truth and stay out of trouble in question and answer format.

Q. I was laid off, but given three months of pay after I stopped working, and was allowed to use my office too.  When was my last day of work?

A. Call up the HR (Human Resources) Department and ask them when your first and last day of employment was.  Use those dates.  It doesn’t matter what you think is honest, a misrepresentation, or a lie.  The companies who check your resume will be given those same dates by the HR department.  Use them.

Q.  I was a temp worker at Boeing, working for McGraw Engineering, and paid by Kelly Services.  Who should I put down as my employer?

A. The company whose name was on your contract or paycheck was your employer.  You might want to put the job on your resume as:

Boeing, reporting to McGraw Engineering, contracted by Kelly Services.

Q. Can I leave out a job?

A. If it doesn’t apply to the job you are trying to get, maybe you can leave it off the resume.  A resume is an honest ad, not a confessional. You don’t HAVE to put every job on it.  However, it is safer to have one line on your resume where the job or jobs you don’t want to mention should go. Put:

Transportation Jobs 5/1999 – 8/2003

That way you account for the time.  You also make it so short it does not force the hiring manager to think about it.

All jobs must be put on the job application, even if they are not on your resume.  You can put that same single line about Transportation Jobs, but on the job application every single job must be accounted for.

The only exception is if you have 20 years of jobs, and the first 10 years don’t apply.  Then you can truncate, or cut off the oldest jobs.

The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. (Will Rogers)

Something To Do Today

Sit down and think.  Are you leaving something out in your resume to simplify it, or are you lying?

Your resume is not an FBI background check.  It is an honest advertisement.

There is no reason to disqualify yourself.  There is no excuse for lying.

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Later:              The incredible strength of weak connections

How many times do I have to tell them

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When recruiters become slaveowners

Posted on October 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

Your resume may have been thrown away because the wrong person submitted it.  You may have become a victim of recruiter ownership. (No, it is not slavery, it just feels like it.)

Paul recounted to me that he was presented by a recruiter to a company for a job.  The recruiter said, “I have great contacts there!”  Nothing happened. So Paul networked his way in and set up his own interview without the recruiter.  When the hiring manager found out that a recruiter had previously presented Paul, Paul was told that it would be impossible to hire him.  The manager would have to pay a fee to the recruiter even though the recruiter did not cause the interview to happen.  The manager didn’t want to pay the fee.

Did the recruiter lie?  I don’t know.  There may have been 4 other managers that would pay a fee that turned down Paul’s resume when the recruiter presented him. The problem is that the recruiter didn’t get Paul an interview.

Did the manager lie?  I don’t know that either. If the manager has no recruiting budget, Paul is out of luck.  If the manager has a recruiting budget and someone else who is free is almost as good, Paul is out of luck.  The manager may be hiring someone who is better and paying a fee, but is still using the recruiting fee as an easy excuse to get rid of Paul.

In the end, Paul doesn’t get the job.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. (Abraham Lincoln)

Recruiters have to get paid by the company when they find someone a job. They can prove they submitted your resume and a company accepted it.  In many cases that is all they can prove. So the contracts often say that is all they have to prove to get paid.  A company always has an incentive to hire someone NOT submitted by a recruiter–the recruiter’s fee.     But they will hire the best person despite the fee for critical positions.

Just as it can be a mistake to have a recruiter submit you, you can make a big mistake by submitting your resume yourself. If you submit yourself first, the recruiter can’t get paid.  Even if he can get you an interview because he knows the hiring manager, he won’t even try. You submitted through the website and got turned down by an HR receptionist, so the recruiter will not resubmit you. Your unpaid resume could knock one of his paying resumes out of submission.  He won’t submit you because he doesn’t “own” you.

So why use a recruiter?  Because the recruiter may know about a job opening you don’t know exists. Because in many cases he really can get you past the HR department.  He may be able to get you an interview that you can’t get without him.

So, what do you do? Hand your resume to the hiring manager personally if you can.  Use a recruiter if the recruiter will be more effective.  Submit yourself if you found the job yourself and a recruiter will be no more effective than you will.

Then wait patiently.  It may feel like you are being sold into slavery if you are told you are not being hired because the recruiter “owns” you.  But that is a risk you and the company take because in many cases the recruiter can get you a job you can’t get on your own.

Something To Do Today

If a recruiter tells you about a job you didn’t know exists, you need to be fair and let him submit you.

If you know about a job you have to decide whether you can network your way to the hiring manager (best), if a recruiter can get you an edge in hiring (next best), or if you should submit yourself to the HR department (still okay).

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Later:              Non-competes

Coyote traps – when to gnaw off your arm

Glass ceilings

The hours game

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Posted in Networking, Recruiters, Resumes

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The most critical part of a relocation resume

Posted on October 7, 2013 | Leave a comment

You want to move to a different area, but you want to have a job before you go.  Good idea.  So, you put together a resume and put on your real current address and phone number. You are 1000 miles away from where you want to work.

No one calls.

Can you blame them?

You have basically announced that hiring you will be a problem.  It doesn’t matter what your cover letter says.  You may have a place to stay there and be willing to pay for your move yourself.  It doesn’t matter until they actually talk to you.  They immediately assume they will have to pay for you to fly in and interview, pay for a relocation, deal with the first two months of lack of productivity while you settle in to a new home, and put up with you getting homesick.

The answer: Get them to see how good you are before they notice you are from out of town.

You have to get past the screener.  The screener is a computer or a human who is wading through 100 resumes, trying to find the 2 or 3 best ones.  Your phone number and address may be getting you excluded without any review.  So change them.

Get a local phone number at the very least. Try Google Voice.  Or, you can get a Vonage internet phone for $10-$25 per month.  For $5 more per month you can get extra phone numbers that have any area code you want.  You can have the Vonage phone automatically forward to your regular home phone or cell phone and never use the internet line if you want. You can switch where it rings as often as you like.  With Vonage, you can have a local phone number for your job search no matter where you really live.

Getting a local address for your resume is also a good idea.  You can use a friend’s house,  rent a Post Office Box at the Post Office, or get a box at a UPS Store or some other mailbox forwarding service. Put in a change of address form. Any letters sent to you may be delayed, but they will get to you.  More important, your resume will not get flagged for deletion merely because of your address.

If you have a specific place you want to move to, it may be worth your time to camouflage where you currently live.  You will have to deal with the relocation issue during the phone interview, but at least you will have a better chance of actually talking to someone instead of getting screened out by a computer because of your zip code or area code.

Something To Do Today

Try to figure out what may be keeping you from getting a call when you apply for a job.  Can you overcome that problem?  Do you need camouflage, better writing,  or stronger experience?

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Later:              Hiding real problems

When is your resume being thrown away?

Non-competes

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How often you should send a resume?

Posted on September 9, 2013 | Leave a comment

Do you want to get hired?  Do you want to be noticed? Do you want to get a job?

Fine.  Send a great resume.  Once.

Do not send a resume every 2 weeks.  You will be placed on the spam list and your resume will never be opened again.  You will be laughed at by receptionists and managers because they can’t believe you don’t get the hint.  Your name will get on the permanent reject list of losers they don’t ever want to interview.  It will stay on that list for 5 or 10 years.  Really.  People remember those who annoy them the most.  You will be blackballed in companies that those people you annoy move to.

When should you send the same resume again?

  1. When you find someone you know at the company, and ask them to drop your paper resume off at the hiring manager’s desk.
  2. When you ferret out the name of the hiring manager and want to send it directly to that person instead of to the HR department.  Email works.  Sometimes paper gets their attention better. Not always.
  3. After you have called them, and they ask you to re-send it.
  4. When they post a different job that you want to apply for.
  5. When you completely and massively redo your resume.  Then send a note with it saying that you completely rewrote your resume and hope it will be more helpful than the old one. Ask them to delete the old one and replace it with this one.
  6. When you change your email address, phone number, or house address. Again, ask them to replace your old resume with the new one.
  7. If your job title has changed.  Ask them to replace your old resume.
  8. If it has been 6 months or more since you sent the last one.

I was just talking with my partner about 6 different individuals who have poisoned their job search in the area they live.  They keep spamming the same companies with their resumes.  Sometimes the hiring managers even tell us, “Don’t send someone like Joseph Gordon.  We want people who are hirable, not just pretty resumes.”

Don’t expect your persistence to play off when you refuse to do more than send a resume.  You need to figure out how to be the best candidate for a job.  They won’t hire you to stop you from annoying them.

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Your resume should twinkle

Posted on August 29, 2013 | Leave a comment

Boredom gets many resumes thrown away.

What makes a resume boring is that you write it like a job description instead of an advertisement.  Boring resumes hide the most important information.  They are written the way HR forces managers to write job descriptions.  Let me show you what I mean.

Like HR or Like a star

There is a hiring manager in with a problem.  That’s why he spent hours writing a job description.  He could have sent a 3 sentence description, but HR wouldn’t let him.  HR said, “We need to really define what is needed here.  Can you be more thorough?” To be honest, HR really needed to know more to do their job.

So instead of a 3 sentences telling what would describe the job to an expert, you see a laundry list of 40 things that would be nice to have.  There are entries like: “Does not drool while typing”, or, “Shows up for work.”

You can’t afford to put the same boring and useless descriptions on your resume.  You ARE an expert.  Don’t let your resume say, “I showed up for work.” That is HR language.  That is not what you accomplished.  It is what anyone would do.

Your resume as a Star

A star is a point of light in a vast sky of bleakness.  Our eyes are attracted to stars, not to the inky places in between. You only need to shine like a star to attract attention.  You don’t need to shine like the sun.

So, make a list of things that are better only because YOU did them.  What did you do better than anyone else?  What did you do to get official recognition?  Did you win a contest at work? How did you make things go faster?  How did you save money or make more money for your company.  You don’t have to shine like the sun, only twinkle like a star.  If your resume is short but has irresistible sparkle, you will get an interview.

The way to shine is to talk about a specific thing that got done better because you were there.  If you talk about five things that only got done well because of you, you will shine like a constellation.  Hiring managers  will pay attention to your resume and give you a call back.

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Coming up

Back to job hunting

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Posted in Accomplishments, Resumes

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What to do about serial disasters in your job search

Posted on August 22, 2013 | Leave a comment

I lived a couple of summers on a dairy and hog farm.  There were only two things to do with manure, put it on the fields or in the creek.  Yes, once it went into the creek. The manure that went on the fields helped grow more corn and alfalfa.  The manure that went into the creek was a shame, dangerous, and very easy to get rid of. Dumping in the creek eventually became illegal.  It’s a good thing.  That was a bad choice.

The difference between fertilizer and pollution was not the ingredients, it was what we chose to do with our time and resources.

When you spend your time job hunting poorly, you flush your work down the creek.

You can be getting killed before you are interviewed, after the first interview, or when references are checked.

Killed before you are interviewed

If you make one poor resume and send it out 500 times in a year with no interviews, you are polluting, not fertilizing.  That resume goes on file at many companies and keeps you from being hired for job after job.  If you are getting no response, either:

  1. you are not qualified for the jobs
  2. the resume is not working
  3. you have a bad reputation

In any one of these cases, you need to change what you are doing.

If you are not qualified, get experience and certifications, or lower your sights to the jobs you really are qualified for.  If the resume is not working, you need to fix it.  Go to www.dilts.us/books to get the best resume book ever written. If your reputation stinks, you may have to move or try a new field of work.

Stopped after your first interview

If you are getting interviews every week, but never being called back for a second set of interviews, you are polluting.  The companies you are interviewing with are putting you on their “Not Good Enough” list for some reason. You need to do some practice interviews on camera, and practice with managers who can’t hire you but will critique you. You need interview help. You also need to get back with every interviewer you can find and beg them for honest feedback.  If they consider you a really bad match, they will often hide that for fear of angering you.  When you ask for feedback, listen meekly and probe.

Ruined by your references

Does your job search fall apart every time it gets to the reference check phase?  Someone or something in your background is killing you.  You may have a reference who is polluting your job search.  It could be a lukewarm or hostile person who smiles at you and moans during a reference check.  Some people are just negative.  They hedge and hold back and wouldn’t give Superman a good reference because of his “Kryptonite problem.”   If you know a credit check or criminal background check is stopping you, you may have to back down your job aspirations or get to know which companies will hire you anyway. Sometimes an industry change is necessary.  Changing states may help.

 

If your job search is not working, there is always a reason.  Always.  Where your search is falling apart may tell you what the problem is and how to fix it.  Getting to the same place over and over only to lose out because of YOUR problem pollutes the job market against you. Find out if you have a problem.  Honestly work to correct that problem and you’ll find a job.

Something to do today

Keep track of where your job search is falling apart.  Figure out if it is your resume, interviews, or reference checks that are killing you.  Now, start researching ways to overcome that problem.  Work at it.

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Posted in Focus, Interviews, References, Resumes

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Do these resume fixes apply to you?

Posted on August 20, 2013 | Leave a comment

I just sent the following email to someone to help them have a resume that works.

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The chances of a recruiter or manager reading your career profile are minimal.  No one likes reading a huge block of text.  At least you put your career profile into bullet points under core areas.  Be honest, would you read a dense 12 line paragraph packed with boilerplate terms?

What if you had 45 resumes to read through?  How much of the 40th resume would you read?

Your resume has only one job, get you an interview.  Even your core area bullets are hard to read through.  There are tooooooooo many. 15 core areas?   It may be necessary to have all those core areas on the resume so that a search finds them, but consider putting the full list at the end of the second page with your education and put only the 3 most important bullets for the job you are applying for at the top.  That way at least those 3 will be read.

Your education should go on the last page in case they care.  An unrelated degree with a MINOR in your field is not something to show at the top of the first page since it may get you excluded immediately when you could do the job.

Get the bullets with numbers in them on the first page. ($175,000 saved, 150 buildings, 6000 connections, 12,000 network connections, etc.)

In most cases the second page is never read.  If you put anything in the second entry on the second page,  you just hid it from notice.

And to make things worse, most people only read the first 6 words of the first 2-3 bullets in the first 2 jobs on your resume.  Put stuff that grabs them by throat in those first 6 words of the first 2 bullet points in each job.

Just some thoughts.

Bryan Dilts

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7 steps to a great resume cover letter

Posted on August 8, 2013 | Leave a comment

A mediocre resume cover letter may get your resume trashed before it is read.  I’ve trashed resumes before reading them because of the cover letter.

It is better to send a great resume without a cover letter, than to doom it with a poor cover letter.

But a great cover letter will get you an interview. They won’t even read your resume.

This article gives seven steps to write a great cover letter.  Follow them all, including step 7.  Everyone wants to skip step 7, but it is important.  And I am not really sold on step 4.

Read it and learn.

 

 

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How 2100 hirers say you should use social media

Posted on July 5, 2013 | Leave a comment

More and more companies are using social media to find and vet job candidates, and more and more often, social media is giving these companies reasons to not hire a candidate.

A survey conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of CareerBuilder found that two in five companies…Click here to read more about the survey of 2100 hirers.

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Posted in Finding jobs, Job Boards, Networking, References, Resumes

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