Should I Let Employers Think I am Still Working?

Q. I left my last job in early 2010. Should I show I left in 2010 on the resume or just leave it as “Present?”

Your resume has to be 100% correct. Showing you are still employed is not correct. I know candidates want employers to think they are still working when they review the resume. I get that, but here is what candidates don’t get when they have incorrectly stated, “present.” As soon as the company calls you and asks if you are still with company you have to reply, “No, I left in 2010.”  Now they know anyway. Plus your future employer is thinking you tried to deceive them. Deception is not a great way to start.

As a recruiter that is what goes through my mind when it happens to me. I’m going to find out anyway. Not being up front and honest only delays the deception and makes it worse.

To download the free chapter on Conducting an Effective Phone Interview from our book “This Is NOT The Position I Accepted” CLICK HERE and then click on the Free Search Resources link.

How effective is your job search?  If you are not sure, download our free 8 Matrix Job Search Self-Assessment Scorecard. CLICK HERE and then click on the Free Search Resources link.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

Showing Your Experience On a Resume

Question: What is the best way to show forty years of experience on a resume and still keep the length to two pages?

I recommend showing in chronological order your last ten to fifteen years of experience. For experiences prior to that simply list your companies, job titles and dates. For most candidates their most recent experiences are what recruiters and hiring managers are interested in. Let’s face it your experiences forty years ago should not be all that relevant. I hope in that forty year time frame you have grown. You should question whether this is the right position for you if the company’s decision is based on what you did forty years ago, when compared with the last fifteen years.

There are exceptions to this, if you believe some experience forty years ago is important to the new role, I recommend expanding that relevant experience in your resume.

To download the free chapter on Conducting an Effective Phone Interview from our book “This Is NOT The Position I Accepted” CLICK HERE and then click on the Free Search Resources link.

How effective is your job search?  If you are not sure, download our free 8 Matrix Job Search Self-Assessment Scorecard. CLICK HERE and then click on the Free Search Resources link.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

Four Things Candidates Do To Shoot Themselves In The Foot While Conducting A Job Search

As the job market begins to pick up, more opportunities for candidates will arise. For those candidates who have been looking for some time this may be your chance to land the job you really want. Here are the four things that I find that candidates continually do to mess up a good opportunity:

1)    Conducting your search the same way you did it the last time. Candidates  seem to think this is 2006 or 2007 and all they have to do is the same things they did back then to find a job. WRONG. It’s not only 2012, but the market and the tools are completely different than they were back then. Candidates need to come up to speed quickly. It is not unusual for me to meet candidates that wasted the first three months of their search.

To adapt to 2012 you must embrace social media. You must become an expert on LinkedIn and then leverage this tool, with groups, updates, postings and connections. Instead of sitting in your pajamas searching the job boards you now should be leveraging LinkedIn.

2)    Resumes and cover letters are another problem area. A one size fits all resume will not cut it. Companies are seeking very specific skills and experiences that more often than not a generic resume doesn’t address. It is acceptable to use this generic resume to post on the job boards, but if you are targeting a company, responding to an ad or attempting to connect with a recruiter for a search, you must redo the resume so it targets the specific issues they are seeking like a laser beam.

A cover letter is not a resume. You cannot just write a nice cover letter with these updates and attach it to the generic resume. What will happen if your cover letter gets separated from the resume? Then what? Take the time to update your resume.

3)    Interviewing is much more than explaining your background. It is about connecting with the interviewer. For most interviews, you wouldn’t even be there if the interviewer didn’t believe you met the basic skills and experience. So rule number one is listen, hear and answer the question asked. Do it in a way that connects with the company’s culture and the interviewer. For example, if your background is in very large companies and you are interviewing at a small company, constantly emphasizing how you managed a large staff and had a budget that was more than the sales of the company, is probably the best way to communicate that you need a large staff and a lot of resources to be effective. This is something a small company doesn’t have. You made the fatal error of not adapting your experience to the company. Think about your audience and what they want and need.

4)    Networking too often burns people out because they aren’t focused on the purpose of networking. Over the years people, especially candidates, have come to believe that networking is all about meeting a lot of people. Get a lot of first level contacts on LinkedIn. The one with the most contacts wins. Nonsense. Networking is about the right contacts not the number of contacts. The one that has the ability to take a contact and turn it into a connection generally wins. It is far better to have one hundred strong connections, than it is to have 1,000 contacts that don’t know you and forget you within twenty-four hours of meeting them.

Stop going to every networking meeting in Orange County. Instead, target three or four that really make sense for you. I suggest one in your functional area, one in your industry, one at a peer level, and one with the types of advisors that connect with the people who will hire you. Build strong relationships with the members of these four groups and it will do more good than running to all the other networking groups.

To download the free chapter on Conducting an Effective Phone Interview from our book “This Is NOT The Position I Accepted” CLICK HERE and then click on the Free Search Resources link.

How effective is your job search?  If you are not sure, download our free 8 Matrix Job Search Self-Assessment Scorecard. CLICK HERE and then click on the Free Search Resources link.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

Are You Blundering Through Your Job Search?

This blog post by Eliott Lasson in the Baltimore Business Journal triggered an observation I’ve been thinking about during this depressing job market.

Most of the executive job search candidates I come across appear to be “blundering” OR “stumbling their way through a job search. I’m not surprised it’s taking the average executive over a year to find a new opportunity. When are you going to stop the blundering and start using job search best practices.

Wait – do you even know what are the top ten job search best practices? If not, how do you plan to learn them?

Or, do you prefer to muddle through your job search in a state that Steve Covey called being “unconsciously incompetent?”

Although Elliot’s article focused on young graduates, the same concepts apply for more experienced executives. Here’s a comment Elliot made about resumes that I find are a major source of blunders:

Always have a resume that is good-to-go to include in your email or promptly forward after a phone call. A turn-off is a resume with spelling errors and spacing issues. It is always a good idea to have some sort of objective at the top as to what you are looking for. The resume should not be over-the-top for where you are at in life, whether educationally or professionally. Make sure to list your technical skills with software, systems, and professionally relevant social media. Just saying non-descriptive terms like “proficient in Microsoft Office” might be construed as “I have a 5th grade literacy level.”

Your move – what are you going to do right now to put your job search back in effective mode and land a great opportunity in 90 days?

Barry Deutsch

Have you test-driven our Job Search Workbook – This is NOT the Position I Accepted

To read the full article by Eliott Lasson, please click below:

Top 5 job search and networking mistakes of the young — and not so young – Baltimore Business Journal.

Resume Tweaking May Be Better Than An Overhaul

I was meeting with a candidate today, we will call him Andy, who recently landed. He had been on the market for about 5 months. He did all the right things, went to the networking meetings, drank more coffee than he should have, reworked his resume over and over, all for nothing. He would get interviews but never make the cut. He had sent out lots of resumes with moderate success.

About 2 months ago I met with Andy and a group of financial professionals, mainly CFOs,  to do a resume review exercise. You might try this exercise.  Everyone brings their current resume and passes them face down to the person next to them. Then at the same time everyone turns the resume over and for 10 seconds reviews them. After 10 seconds all resumes go  face down again. The next step gets to the real purpose for the exercise. The person that read the resume for 10 seconds gives feedback on exactly what they learned about the person’s background, companies, position, location and any other information they took away in that short period of time. Why you ask? That is about how long most people first look at a resume, so the purpose is to find out if the person reading the resume for 10 seconds captures from the resume what the owner of the resume wanted them to. If not, then they need to change the resume.

After the meeting I started working with Andy as part of our Job Search Coaching program. The first thing I noticed was Andy’s resume had him as a CFO. The reality was that compared to other CFOs in the group Andy could not compete. He was really a controller. Andy was trying to play at a level that he wasn’t competitive.  He lost out every time, either when the resume was submitted, or during the interview.

We made a small tweak to his resume by taking off  all references to CFO and changed them to controller. Everything else remained the same. Within two weeks Andy started getting interviews and within 6 weeks he was working. He credits all of the activity and the job to this one tweak of his resume.

Sometimes one small change can make all the difference. Make sure you are playing in the right league. Andy wasn’t, and his resume clearly communicated that. Like most candidates I coach, candidates think only about themselves and not the competition. Andy had clearly done this. He would have been working months earlier had he thought about this.

To download the free chapter on Conducting an Effective Phone Interview from our book “This Is NOT The Position I Accepted” CLICK HERE and then click on the Free Search Resources link.

If you would like to know if your job search is fully utilized and you are doing the right things, download our free 8 Matrix Job Search Self-Assessment Scorecard. CLICK HERE and then click on the Free Search Resource link.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

Is Your Resume Too Long?

Q. Is it acceptable to have a resume longer than two pages?

With rare exception two pages is still the generally accepted maximum length. I have helped thousands with their resume and I can’t think of a time when we couldn’t fit all of the relevant information on two pages.

Remember, the purpose of a resume is to demonstrate to the reader that your experience and background aligns with the position. It isn’t an autobiography. It doesn’t have to include everything you have done in 25 years. It is a summary, usually in a bullet point format. All a resume really needs is the right information necessary to get an interview. It isn’t designed to get a job.

Generally, your experience from 20 years ago or more is no longer critical. If it is one might wonder if it is the right job in the first place. So I recommend summarizing this by simply indicating the name of the company, your position title and the years you worked there.  Save the space to make sure that you list the important accomplishments that align with the company’s needs and will catch the reader’s eye.

I find that if more candidates would customize their resumes to the needs of the position they would get more interviews. Too often candidates make a one size fits all generic resume. Instead of a long resume covering every aspect of your career consider having a two page resume that is specific to the position. This might require more than one resume, but as long as everything is honest there is nothing wrong with this.

To download the free chapter on Conducting an Effective Phone Interview from our book “This Is NOT The Position I Accepted” CLICK HERE and then click on the Free Search Resources link.

If you would like to know if your job search is fully utilized and you are doing the right things, download our free 8 Matrix Job Search Self-Assessment Scorecard. CLICK HERE and then click on the Free Search Resource link.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

Resumes Miss The Most Important Keywords

Q. Are keywords on a resume as critical as everyone claims? I know the job boards use them, but  I have had a lot of different experiences so I’m not sure what keywords I should be using.

There is no doubt that keywords on a resume play an important role for the job boards and for companies with sophisticated resume tracking systems. Too often candidates focus their keywords exclusively for the electronic system scanning their resume and completely miss the most important scanner – the human scanner.

The vast majority of companies don’t have sophisticated resume scanning software. As resumes come in the door they are reviewed by a person. So from a candidate’s perspective the question should be, “Do I have the keywords that will stand out and catch the eye of the reader?” Often the person scanning or reading your resume has certain words or terms they are looking for on the resume. So your resume has to have these keywords properly positioned so the reader’s eye catches them. It is little help having a bunch of keywords for the computer to catch if they aren’t the correct words the human scanner is seeking.

In your specific case, since you have had a lot of different experiences this becomes even more important, as the wrong set of keywords could rule you out. So it is important for you that when you send in a resume, especially to a small to mid-size company, to think about the keywords and terms the human will want to see as they read your resume and make sure those words are positioned to catch their eye.

To download the free chapter on Conducting an Effective Phone Interview from our book “This Is NOT The Position I Accepted” CLICK HERE and then click on the Free Search Resources link.

If you would like to know if your job search is fully utilized and you are doing the right things, download our free 8 Matrix Job Search Self-Assessment Scorecard. CLICK HERE and then click on the Free Search Resource link.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

Q. How important are keywords on the resume?

Q. How important are keywords on the resume?

Most companies don’t have sophisticated resume software to search resumes. Large companies may have this, but most Orange County companies are small and therefore don’t have the software. The issue is with job boards. For companies that search online resume databases, having the right keywords is important. If you are going to post your resume, you should make sure you know the best keywords that will bring up your resume. Often it is title, industry, some functional keywords such as sales, marketing, employee benefits, accounting and so on. I would also include some of the commonly used terms in the function, B2B sales, RFP/RFQ, focus groups, SEC reporting, SAP software, international marketing, social media expert, etc.

One way I have found to identify your best keywords is to ask others what keywords they would use if they were looking for a person in your field. Collect these and embed the ones most often mentioned in your resume.

You can download a free 8-Point Job Search Plan Self-Assessment that will help you evaluate exactly what you need to do to improve your search. CLICK HERE to download.

Is your LinkedIn Profile going to get you noticed? Our FREE LinkedIn Profile Matrix will help you develop an outstanding profile. CLICK HERE to download yours.

Join our LinkedIn Job Search Networking group. Over 4,200 people have joined. CLICK HERE to join.

We realize that not everyone will agree with these answers and that is healthy. So if you don’t agree, or wish to comment, we encourage you to do so. Just click the link below.

Brad Remillard

How to show 40 years experience on a two page resume

These questions are from readers of my weekly column in the Orange County Register. It appears every Tuesday in the business section and on-line at www.ocregister.com

Q. What is the best way to show 40 years of experience on a résumé and still keep the length to two pages?

A. I recommend showing in chronological order your last 10 to 15 years of experience. For experience before that, simply list your companies, job titles and dates. For most candidates, their most recent experience is what recruiters and hiring managers are interested in.

Let’s face it: Your experience 40 years ago should not be all that relevant. I hope in that 40-year time frame you have grown. You should question whether this is the right position for you if the company’s decision is based on what you did 40 years ago, when compared with the last 15 years.

There are exceptions to this. If you believe some experience 40 years ago is important to the new role, I recommend expanding that relevant experience in your résumé.

Q.  Most of my career is in financial services. I want to get out of that industry and into health care. What is the best way to make this transition?

A. Making an industry change in this economy is difficult, unless you have one of those jobs in which the skills required are not industry-specific, meaning your skills and training are easily transferable to another industry. The issue you have to overcome is your competition for an opening will probably include people in the health care industry. Most companies will look at those with industry experience first.

The best way to make an industry change is through networking. You need to build relationships with people in the industry. To do this, consider attending professional associations, joining networking groups in health care, attending trade shows or conferences and connecting with health care people in your local area via LinkedIn. As they get to know you, they will be able to determine how your strengths outside the health care industry can apply to the problems they need solved in their company. Recruiters and submitting résumés via ads are long shots.

There are some barriers you should think about overcoming when changing industries, assuming your skills are not easily transferable. The first one is compensation. Chances are you are more valuable in the financial services industry than health care. Therefore, the position will probably be at a lower level and so will the compensation. Secondly, some additional training and education may be required.

I welcome your thoughts and comments. If this was helpful please forward to your network and connections on LinkedIn or facebook.

Brad Remillard

Why The Last Seven Resumes I Reviewed Failed

Sometimes I just don’t understand what candidates do or don’t do. This is frustrating because so many times I’ve heard from candidates, “I already know that.”  The problem is that candidates think they know it, but in reality either don’t know it or just don’t do it.

Let’s take the example of resumes. Not necessarily my favorite topic, but one that is important. I often review resumes for candidates and I do this strictly from a recruiter’s perspective. Most of the resumes I review are for senior-level executives, many with graduate degrees. I am so often amazed that these senior-level executives expect to be hired, especially in this economy, when they can’t even put together a resume without errors.  Why in the world would a CEO or president expect them to put together a board presentation? The CEO or president would be completely embarrassed.

The following are some common mistakes that I see on a fairly regular basis. I know you don’t need to read these, because these would never happen to you, so consider reading them for all of the other people that need help.

1) Spelling errors. I’m not referring to the obvious ones that a spell checker picks up. I mean the ones a spell checker doesn’t pick up and require proofreading by someone else. Words such as grow not grown, its or it’s, to or too, you’re instead of  your, using the instead of that, using and instead of or, and finally, a lot is two words.

2) Grammar, punctuation or formatting errors. Common problems are overuse of commas, no periods at the end of sentences, capitalizing some words and not others, capitalizing too many words, inconsistent format, phrases that just end, mixing plural verbs with a singular subject, and punctuation marks should go inside quotes and outside parentheses.

3) Incorrect use of words. Neither and nor, either and or, accept and except, lose and loose, a and an, are some mistakes I commonly find.

As a recruiter, I would be embarrassed to present these resumes to a client. What does this say about the executive if they can’t put together a resume without common errors? Don’t they have these proofed? What kind of presentation would they make, what would their reports look like, and how many errors would be in a white paper? One has to ask themselves these questions when reviewing a resume with these types of errors.

I am by no means an English major, and I sure have made many mistakes writing articles. I know this because people seem to get pleasure out of pointing out my mistakes. I have learned a lot from these comments. However, a blog article is not a resume. There is a big difference in the two. If I were submitting this article to Fortune or the WSJ, I would pay to have it professionally edited.  Like it or not, a resume has to be perfect. That is the standard. I didn’t set the standard, I just live by it and you should too.

Please help yourself. Take the time to have others proof your resume. Invest in a professional to edit it. Don’t DOUBLE check your resume, TRIPLE check it, and then check it one more time just to be sure.

Remember the golden rule, when in doubt check it out. Here is an excellent site to use to check http://www.grammarbook.com/english_rules.asp

Since all of the people reading this article never make these mistakes, one has to wonder (not wander) why I wrote the article.

One final point, these same principles apply to cover and thank you letters.

I hope this helps all of those other people that make these mistakes.

I welcome your thoughts and comments, even those that will surely point out errors in this article.

If this was helpful to you, please help others by posting it to your LinkedIn groups, Facebook page or Twitter.

To download the free chapter on Conducting an Effective Phone Interview from our book “This Is NOT The Position I Accepted” CLICK HERE and then click on the Free Search Resources link.

If you would like to know if your job search is fully utilized and you are doing the right things, download our free Job Search Self- Assessment Scorecard. CLICK HERE and then click on the Free Search Resource link.

Brad Remillard