This week you’ll find excerpts here from my e-book, Upshift Now! The Executive’s Guide to Winning a Higher Position. Despite the title, it’s a book for anyone seeking help in a job search,  not just executives. If you have comments on the book, please post them here at the blog. I’m interested in your suggestions. If you would enjoy getting a complete PDF of the book, send an email request to Paul@ShimmeringResumes.com. You can find more information about resumes and other job search matters at ShimmeringResumes. Today’s excerpt: 

You on a Pedestal: The Art of the Resume (Part 3) Language: Have You Missed the Tripwires?

Language is complex and rich with subtle traps. So if you aren’t careful, you can blur a vital point or sabotage the resume in many other ways. Here are a few tips to spruce this document up:

•    Annihilate spelling and grammatical errors. Employers keep the trashcan handy for documents with such mistakes. Don’t depend on spellcheckers, as they won’t catch typos like ”wok” for “work.”

•    Eliminate clutter. Trim your prose and it will perk up. Here is a real sentence from another resume site: “A winning resume is a document that you should author, own and craft with a very specific purpose in mind.” Boil it down to “Good resumes have a specific aim” and you gain clarity and life while losing nothing.

•    Favor strong verbs. Colorful terms are more emphatic and interesting, and scientific studies show they linger in the memory. For instance, “Spearheaded the development of …” works better than “Initiated the development of …”

•    Omit the subject “I” and start sentences with the verb. The style is standard, if curt, and otherwise you repeat “I” endlessly.

•    Avoid rumbling run-ons. A four-line sentence is just a set of shorter ones waiting to be set free.

•    Vary word choice. Use “professional” just twice in two sentences and the reader will sense staleness.

•    Use the right words. Don’t say “continuous” when you mean “continual,” for instance.

•    Be precise. Don’t say “improved” when you can say “cut 64 percent.”

•    Rise above bureaucratese. “Facilitate” won’t facilitate your job search and “value-added” has negative value-added.

•    Extirpate clichés. Terms like “self-starter” and “team player” are so common on resumes that they numb the suffering screener’s mind.

•    Avoid terms the employer may not understand. Stay away from jargon and arcane acronyms.

•    Shun the passive voice.
Avoid jargon. Resist the temptation to flash expertise by using terms the reader may not understand. You risk clouding your argument and turning off the screener. Of course, specialized terms are sometimes essential, especially in science or high tech. “EBITDA,” mentioned above, is jargon to some, yet no substitute exists. Ultimately, the test is necessity: Do you really have to use a potentially unclear word?

Avoid egotism. Bragging can sabotage your case. Describe yourself as a “genuine visionary” or “born leader” and you raise questions about your authenticity. After all, what born leader goes around boasting about it? If you really possess these qualities, you can show them in your past achievements, to much greater effect. Don’t hold back—make the most powerful case you can—but be careful about forcing conclusions down the employer’s throat.

Show your care for detail. Both you and the employer know how important the resume is to you. If it has careless errors, the screener will reasonably assume the rest of your work is sloppy too. So no typos. No spelling or grammatical mistakes. No tiny formatting snafus. Don’t rely on spell and grammar checkers, which are quite fallible. Proofread your resume meticulously, and then get a fresh pair of eyes to do it again. Try to avoid thinking about content as you proof. When the mind seeks meaning, it is liable to skip typos. We grab the sense, move on, and literally don’t see the “tat” for “that.” Focus letter-by-letter and word-by-word, and the invisible yields up. The process will feel unnatural, but the resume is short and this effort can keep you out of the reject pile.

Make it attractive. You can really gain on competitors here, since so many resumes look like legal notices. Why is that battleship gray appearance so common? Some people assume it’s standard for resumes. This misapprehension comes from ignorance. Resumes do have certain requisites, but ugliness is hardly one of them. A second reason is subtler: the safety of the herd. If drab resumes are the norm, no one can attack you for fitting in. Maybe, but you also won’t gain an edge, and without an edge you won’t get hired. Job search is about winning, not fitting in. Third, many people think that the more they put on the resume, the better. So they cram text into all available space. The result is a detail swamp. But even if you highlight key points, a dense, crowded look will annoy the reader. If the employer finds your resume hard to read, chances are she won’t bother.

It’s all about impression, and a good-looking resume will convey the right subliminal cues to the reader. You don’t want a resume that looks decorative, but a resume with an elegant, distinctive look will convey the right overtones, linger in the employer’s mind, and help set you apart. If you think design doesn’t matter much commercially, look what Steve Jobs has done with it.
You can find more information about resumes and other job search matters at ShimmeringResumes.

This week you’ll find excerpts here from my e-book, Upshift Now! The Executive’s Guide to Winning a Higher Position. Despite the title, it’s a book for anyone seeking help in a job search,  not just executives. If you have comments on the book, please post them here at the blog. I’m interested in your suggestions. If you would enjoy getting a complete PDF of the book, send an email request to Paul@ShimmeringResumes.com. You can find more information about resumes and other job search matters at ShimmeringResumes. Today’s excerpt:  You on a Pedestal: The Art of the Resume (Part 2)

Highlight Your Achievements

To have impact, your resume must vividly state your accomplishments, not just restate your job description. Here are a few tips:

•    Stress achievements that increased revenues or saved money or time.

•    Underscore your most vital tasks, even if they weren’t your main ones.

•    Think in terms of larger meaning. State a problem, your solution, and the results.

•    If you enhanced processes or products, show how your contributions improved the company.

•    Quantify. “Supervised 50-person department” is better than “Supervised a large department.”

•    Don’t offer negative information.

•    Drop phrases like “responsible for.”

•    Check job performance reviews for comments on your value.

Stress your abilities. If you want to emphasize clever problem-solving skills, think of a knotty problem that arose and spell out how you resolved it. If you are strong on leadership, show how you provided a vision or developed and spurred a team to reach unusual heights.

Emphasize recent accomplishments. They are the most important, and you should omit or briefly sketch achievements from longer than 15 years ago. A resume is not a curriculum vitae, which lists everything you’ve ever done. It’s a pitch.

Don’t omit accomplishments. You probably won’t recall all your achievements at first, since you may take them for granted. This fact repeatedly surprises job applicants, who often send out resumes thinking they have included all their successes. So go over the ground again and again. Especially look for significant contributions you may have made toward company goals without the sense that they were your own. If you omit important achievements, such as your role in increasing EBITDA, the employer will naturally assume they never occurred. So accumulate a full roster of your deeds. At first, sit down at the computer and spill out everything you may have played a role in, without editing or second thought. You may also take certain skills for granted, such as fluency in Spanish, so itemize them in a separate list. Then go over both and weed out any that really don’t belong. Look at these lists the next day, and the day after that. Check your job evaluations for further clues. You may find that it takes time to put all your accomplishments in one place, especially if you have worked for the company for a long time. Then prioritize them, in order of importance to the company. The most important will be the takeaway items for the employer.

Be sure the key points jump out at a glance. Why? A glance may be all you’ll get. Screeners give an average of less than 20 seconds to each resume. But even if you get more, highlighting the most important points eases comprehension for the screener. As a result, your key points sink in deeper. One of the most common errors is the gray resume, the flat blur of text with no emphasized points. It doesn’t look professional or businesslike. It just looks dull.

Write it crisply. The prose of a resume suggests the caliber of your mind. At the very least, it shows what you will tolerate in an important document. A poorly worded resume implies you’d approve weak reports and sloppy letters to prospective clients. It suggests you are a bad communicator and worst of all, perhaps, it fails to drive home your points. Overall, a clumsy resume suggests that you operate at a lower level. This conclusion can be unfair, since many great executives are not great writers, but your resume is your speaking voice. It can’t sound awkward.
You can find more information about resumes and other job search matters at ShimmeringResumes.

This week you’ll find excerpts here from my e-book, Upshift Now! The Executive’s Guide to Winning a Higher Position. Despite the title, it’s a book for anyone seeking help in a job search,  not just executives. If you have comments on the book, please post them here at the blog. I’m interested in your suggestions. If you would enjoy getting a complete PDF of the book, send an email request to Paul@ShimmeringResumes.com. You can find more information about resumes and other job search matters at ShimmeringResumes.

Today’s excerpt:  You on a Pedestal: The Art of the Resume (Part 1)

Amazingly, some job applicants pay scant attention to their resumes. Perhaps they believe that employers will deduce their merits anyway, or think the competition will be weak, or just dislike the effort of creating one. Almost always, they haven’t thought the process out, for they are moving into heavy weather on a rowboat.

A resume is important even if you think you don’t need it and can get interviews through your connections. Why? You can’t be sure when you might require one, and you don’t want to toss it together overnight. A resume also helps you organize yourself and see the full picture of your accomplishments and abilities. Most people take them for granted and may not have them uppermost in their mind at an interview. A resume crystallizes them.

It’s essentially a marketing device. It’s a biography too, but a very special one: brief and almost all highlights.

Think of it as an argument. Your thesis is: I am the person to hire. I’ll give you the best payoff. The entire nature of the resume flows from that.

Here are basic guidelines:

Tailor the resume to the audience. One size won’t fit all, here or with any marketing device. To persuade—in fact, to communicate effectively at all—you must shape the message to the recipient. So adapt your resume to the position and company. Go back through past jobs, highlight accomplishments that are relevant to the employer, and prune back those that aren’t. For instance, while you would normally omit the person you reported to, include it if you know it will interest the company. Whatever you do, don’t create a archeological resume, by simply layering new jobs and achievements atop the old ones. Be flexible.

Focus on your benefits to the company, not yourself per se. See yourself from the company’s perspective. Ask yourself what you’d look for if you were hiring. Sell the scent, not the rose.

Highlight your accomplishments, not your titles and duties. Why? Anyone can warm a chair. And many people carry out their duties in a perfectly respectable way. But you are competing and you must stand above others.

Suppose you can say one of the two below:

1.    Was responsible for managing supply chain and allocating store space.

2.    Increased operating profit by 38.4%. Improved the return on invested capital 42.5% by streamlining supply chain and exiting unprofitable product areas.

As an employer, whom would you prefer?

The first approach describes the baseline of the job: the obligations. It indicates the minimum to keep the job. But it says nothing about how much you exceeded that minimum, or whether you even met it.

The second highlights performance. It reveals how well you did the job. And that’s what matters.

There are other key differences between the two. The second describes benefits to the company. It is active, and its tone suggests that you will be a dynamic executive. It is also more specific and informative.

Your most important accomplishments can have greater meaning and even dramatic interest if phrased as: problem, action, resolution. It’s one thing simply to say you increased operating profit 35%. It’s another to say that the company was facing a crisis, revenues weren’t increasing, and you solved the problem. You underscore the impact—and engage the reader.

As much as possible try to provide a result at the bottom line. Some results are simply milestones on the way, and you want to focus on the end benefits.

Don’t overdo it. If you describe your accomplishments in excess detail, the resume can become tiresome. You can also appear to be laboring too hard to prove yourself and the resume can suggest poor communication skills. Ironically, it can imply that you are not effective.

You can find more information about resumes and other job search matters at ShimmeringResumes.

This week you’ll find excerpts here from my e-book, Upshift Now! The Executive’s Guide to Winning a Higher Position. Despite the title, it’s a book for anyone seeking help in a job search,  not just executives. If you have comments on the book, please post them here at the blog. I’m interested in your suggestions. If you would enjoy getting a complete PDF of the book, send an email request to Paul@ShimmeringResumes.com. You can find more information about resumes and other job search matters at ShimmeringResumes.

The Cartography of Success: Career Management

According to one survey, people spend more time planning their vacations than their careers. The result? Their vacations turn out better than their careers. Some long-established professionals still don’t know what careers they really want.
You can’t reach your goals without understanding what they are, and they differ for everyone.
So the first step in a job search is self-search. Map out who you are, what you want, and what you can get.
Without this grasp, you will probably always feel somewhat adrift. You may not put full effort into the job search, and you may not feel successful even if the search succeeds. But if you honestly probe yourself and align your goals with your true instincts and interests, you’ll tap deep energy for the search and you may feel successful even if your job that moves you only partway to your goal.
Write Yourself
Most people think about goals casually, turning them over in the mind. That’s not enough. Do this analysis in writing.
Why? The reason is simple: It leads to insight.
First, writing clarifies your thoughts. The very act of externalizing them, bringing them into the light, forces you to focus them. You’ll often find that the idea which seemed complete in your mind has a blurry spot when you try to express it in a sentence, and that spot can be crucial. In fact, that’s why it was blurred. You didn’t know how to fill it.
Writing compels you to support your thoughts so they seem reasonable. The idea that glowed in your mind may look bare on the page, and you may have to provide backing for it. This exercise can save you from dreamy error.
Writing lets you develop your thoughts. The idea on the page is a memory saved, and it frees you to move on to the next one, and the next. You wind up thinking about implications, filled out uncharted territory, seeing and answering questions that may simply have lurked in the semidarkness before. Writing enables elaboration.
And writing lets you return again and again to the process. You rarely divine all your good ideas at one sitting. For instance, scientists have recently found that sleep improves our comprehension of context and problems, validating the wisdom of “sleeping on” an important decision. Moreover, you’ll want to discuss aspects of your career with your spouse and perhaps with good friends, and these ideas can enrich the document as well.
Maybe you’re still reluctant. If so, ask yourself: What is the cost? A little time and the toil of thought. That’s all. Now compare it to the potential upside: A more rewarding, purposeful life, bestowed by greater understanding of yourself and your options. It’s the kind of bet they don’t offer in casinos, because they’d go broke fast.
So answer the following questions and be utterly, even painfully, honest with yourself. Respond fully, with answers you’d never consider showing others. And keep working on it.
What Do You Want to Do?
The ideal job for one person is agony for the next. If you don’t enjoy your work, you’re wasting your life. Though many people may not savor their jobs, you don’t have to join them. In fact:
1. They may not be trying hard enough. They may have wound up in a position they merely tolerate because they never made a real effort to do better. The check pays the bills, job momentum consumes their time and energy, and even though they know they can do better, they never do. The years go by and life slips past.
2. They may be unable to do exactly what they like. Not everyone can be a professional marine biologist, for instance. But that doesn’t mean you have to flip burgers. You can always find work that comes closer to your ideal. And you can explore professions. The variety of positions seems infinite and you can learn about them, or go entrepreneurial and create your own.
3. They may not quite know what they like. People can end up channeled into careers without ever quite consulting what they really want to do. Often they’ll take a job just because they like the pay or prestige. Pay and prestige are important, but they aren’t everything. To get a better bead on what you really like, ask yourself:
•    What are my passions? What work would I do if I didn’t need to earn a living? What issues do I care deeply about? What skills do I love using?
•    Who am I? Do I like to follow or lead? Do I work better with others or independently? Is supervision a help or a harness?
•    Do I fear risk or love a challenge? Would I be more comfortable as a team member or an entrepreneur?

To receive a complete PDF of Upshift Now! send an email request to: Paul@ShimmeringResumes.com.

You can find more information about resumes and other job search matters at ShimmeringResumes.