Some good advice, will be reworking the resume tonight.
The way I had it explained to me was to have the skills summary at the top hence points like
Quote:Experienced in using techniques to generate positive client outcomes resulting in referral
•Experience developing and actioning new procedures to improve productivity
•Experience providing positive business outcomes through recruitment and selection
•Experience improving efficiency through coaching and mentoring of staff
Being broad because it is a summary, and the first section being the hook that gets them to look deeper to see where and how these things are explained/demonstrated.
Being broad because it is a summary, and the first section being the hook that gets them to look deeper to see where and how these things are explained/demonstrated.
As was pointed out earlier, I'm thinking that there might be a difference between resumes in our respective countries. Resumes in the fields I've worked in (law, tech) are generally one page (two if you have a lengthy and distinguished career) and scanned very quickly. I'm all about specifics (yay law school) and brevity (wait, what?) so when I read a resume I want to know what someone has done without reference to generalities.
When I read "Experience developing and actioning new procedures to improve productivity" that translates to "stuff" in my head. Most resumes in America get about 20 seconds of actual scan time, and I think it's much more important to have concrete performance indicators than an overview of skills. Again, these could be totally different from country to country, so I'll defer to someone who can speak to hiring practices in Australia.
That said, one thing that always makes resumes seem better is consistent and professional formatting. I put serious effort into making a resume template for myself that is professional and polished and it has paid off over and over again. Nothing fancy, but deliberate use of fonts and formatting. Best of luck in your search.
Taking on board your suggestions I've reworked the points so they look like this:
•Experience developing and actioning new procedures to improve productivity through the development of a strong workplace culture and streamlining process flow
•Experience providing positive business outcomes through recruitment and selection, and improving efficiency through coaching and mentoring of staff resulting in savings from staff retention and improved morale and workplace culture
Better?
Taking on board your suggestions I've reworked the points so they look like this:
•Experience developing and actioning new procedures to improve productivity through the development of a strong workplace culture and streamlining process flow
•Experience providing positive business outcomes through recruitment and selection, and improving efficiency through coaching and mentoring of staff resulting in savings from staff retention and improved morale and workplace cultureBetter?
My edit:
• Developed and implemented new procedures to improve productivity through cultivation of a strong workplace culture and streamlined process flow
• Responsible for recruitment and selection of new hires. Implemented program for coaching and mentoring of staff resulting in savings from improved staff retention and higher morale.
As Dramarent noted, there may be some cultural differences, but in general resumes which work best are concise and clear about what it is you actually did in a given job.
The times I've been in positions where I was in charge of hiring, I would have stopped reading after "Experience providing positive business outcomes".
[Edit to add]
In terms of pagecount, it's probably okay if you really have to run to two pages to fit all the relevant stuff you've done. Don't use that as an excuse to be unduly verbose, though - a resume with filler content is not going to be one which gets you an interview.
[Another edit because it's early]
Sorry to hear about your job situation, Arovin. Sounds like we had similar experiences. I also finished massage therapy school, only to realize that I wouldn't be able to earn enough to support our family. Fortunately, I'd been doing all my massage as an adjunct to day-job work, so I was able to stay in the technical arena fairly seamlessly.
Thanks dimmer, unashamedly copy pasting your words now
Thanks dimmer, unashamedly copy pasting your words now ;)
When it comes to things like this, plagiarism is your best friend.
My edit:
• Developed and implemented new procedures to improve productivity through cultivation of a strong workplace culture and streamlined process flow
• Responsible for recruitment and selection of new hires. Implemented program for coaching and mentoring of staff resulting in savings from improved staff retention and higher morale.
I think one of the important points of this edit is that action words are better than nouns. "Developed ...." rather than "Experience with ...".
You also want consistency, so always start with this type of bullet point. If a sentence has more than a few parts, people are likely to skip over it, so having "Did X by Y and Z" is going to be much better than "Have experience with X through improving Y which I did through Z and A which lead to B and C which was good because of D."
Alphabets confuse me Dan
Prozac wrote:Taking on board your suggestions I've reworked the points so they look like this:
•Experience developing and actioning new procedures to improve productivity through the development of a strong workplace culture and streamlining process flow
•Experience providing positive business outcomes through recruitment and selection, and improving efficiency through coaching and mentoring of staff resulting in savings from staff retention and improved morale and workplace cultureBetter?
My edit:
• Developed and implemented new procedures to improve productivity through cultivation of a strong workplace culture and streamlined process flow
• Responsible for recruitment and selection of new hires. Implemented program for coaching and mentoring of staff resulting in savings from improved staff retention and higher morale.
Good rewrites. As a general rule, try using as few adjectives as possible--use verbs instead. Passive voice is a quick ticket to snoozeville, and that's something you want to avoid with a resume
Dimmerswitch wrote:Prozac wrote:Taking on board your suggestions I've reworked the points so they look like this:
•Experience developing and actioning new procedures to improve productivity through the development of a strong workplace culture and streamlining process flow
•Experience providing positive business outcomes through recruitment and selection, and improving efficiency through coaching and mentoring of staff resulting in savings from staff retention and improved morale and workplace cultureBetter?
My edit:
• Developed and implemented new procedures to improve productivity through cultivation of a strong workplace culture and streamlined process flow
• Responsible for recruitment and selection of new hires. Implemented program for coaching and mentoring of staff resulting in savings from improved staff retention and higher morale.Good rewrites. As a general rule, try using as few adjectives as possible--use verbs instead. Passive voice is a quick ticket to snoozeville, and that's something you want to avoid with a resume :)
..and with that in mind, I'd go with
"Recruited and selected new hires" rather than "Responsible for recruitment...". "Responsible for" and "Experience with" and "Knowledge of" are so wishy-washy; make it sound like you actually did something, as opposed to being near something.
These days I don't see a resume unless it's been filtered through multiple levels, so my advice will be of no help for the keyword type of stuff that gets you selected initially from one of the job sites. I can only tell you about the things that affect my decision when reviewing resumes before deciding on interviews when hiring people for development and test jobs in commercial software and IT.
Lately I have far more applicants than I have open heads, so I can afford to be picky. Don't give me an excuse to toss you, and try like hell to find something in your past jobs that you can point to and call out as an exceptional effort. As others have said earlier, I like it when I read something in a resume that makes me curious to learn more. This is tricky to do, since being vague is a definite no-no. You want to show a little leg, but not give everything away.
Over the years, countless clients have said, "I'm not exactly sure what I want, but I'll know it when I see it." Resumes are like that. After you've read hundreds of them, there's some indefinable thing that leaps out at you whenever you come across a good one.
Recycled, but on point
The point of the resume
After I read your resume, you want me to have questions! If I don’t have any questions, then I don’t need to talk to you. If you want the job, then you want to talk to me! Make sure we have something to talk about.
SUGGESTIONS FOR RESUME MAKEOVERS
Have an expanded resume and a tailored resume
• Get rid of stuff that has NOTHING to do with the position you’re applying, especially if your resume is over 2 pages long.
• Before you send your resume, read the description of the position AND look for information on the overall employer as well. Tailor your resume to the position and the employer. If they are a proponent of Linux and OpenSource, don’t list things that are seen as antiquated to that segment of technology.
• Keep the long detailed resume, but keep it private! This has a lot of things you don’t want to forget, but not every employer needs to know about your entire history
• I need a project manager, so the year you were a car salesman does not interest me. The same goes for the year spent as a music instructor. If you are passionate about music, have a hobbies section to show you are a well rounded person.
The skills list
• Tailor it to the position!
• Do not list every computer program you had ever touched. Please don’t tell me that you are proficient in Mozilla, Foxfire, Netscape and Internet Explorer. If you can’t use a web browser, you are not the right person for a Program Manager at a technology company.
• Outdated technology – Unless the job requires it, get rid of it. The only thing it will do is mark you as “old” and make me look for dates so I can guess your age.
Dates
• You have the right to remain silent, but anything you say can be used against you.
• I can’t ask you about your age, marital status, children and many other touchy things. Use this to your advantage!
• If you tell me you graduated from High School in 1970, it shouldn’t be much of a jump to assume that I’ve pegged you as over 50 (56 plus or minus 2 years).
• Any experience longer than 10 years is more than 10 years of varied experience in the field. Twenty years is more than ten years, but doesn’t always sound as good on a resume.
Less is More
• Try to get your resume down to 2 pages. I’ll forgive 3 pages if you have RELEVANT stuff that is RECENT. More than 3 pages and you better be a superhero in your spare time or I'm bored.
• Jobs from more than 10 years ago should be summarized or not listed.
• Awards from 10 years ago are cool, but not good resume material. (The exception being Pulitzers and Nobel awards.)
• Professional training should be limited to 6 lines or less. You can group things together and let me ask about the specifics later.
• Drop sections that don’t make you look good.
• If you have 10 years of experience and only a High School diploma, drop the education section and put more into the professional training
This cannot be emphasized enough:
Make a single typo, spelling mistake, or egregious grammatical error on your resume and I toss you. If you can't do a good job on this document which you have prepared for the world to see, I can't even imagine how badly you'd f*ck up your day to day stuff.
Having been a working manager, i.e. a developer who got saddled with hiring duties, I had a few wants in a resume.
1) 2 pages. Yes, I know common wisdom says to try to shrink to 1, but I wanted 2. If a resume was only one page, I could infer an awful lot about the person, especially that they were relatively inexperienced. Not always a bad thing, but even if you are fresh out of college, you can probably come up with enough to push that tiny little education section off to page 2.
2) Skills should be short. Do NOT throw every tech acronym you've ever read an article about on reddit or slashdot. I might actually ask you a question about one of them and it will be readily apparent if you were padding or not. Just because you maintained a web app that had a connection to a database using a stored proc does NOT mean you should put SQL on your resume.
2a) This is in DIRECT CONFLICT with getting your resume noticed on places like Monster.com. How do you reconcile this? Keep no fewer than 2 current resumes. One for getting hits from recruiters using software to automatically "notice" resumes by keyword matching, and ANOTHER RESUME for when they send you an email asking for a current, updated resume.
Corollary to 2a) Update your resume CONSTANTLY. If you are treating jobhunting as a full time job, update EVERY WEEK. Not only do recruiters use keyword matching, they also use "recently updated" searches. You WILL get more headhunter calls the week following an update than a month after an update.
3) Unless you are fresh out of college, just give me a one-line education "section". School, Degree, Major, Date. It will have to be incredibly spectacular for me to care about more than that. Basically, it's to answer my internal questions of "Did he go to school? Did he graduate? How long ago? Was it a relevant field of study?" If I want to know more, I'll ask in the phone screen.
3a) If you are fresh out of college, tell me about a project you worked on. Not a novel, but treat it just like it was a job. Maybe make a section just after (or instead of) Employment History and call it Experience or Projects, and treat them just like they were jobs you held. Just because it was college doesn't mean it *can't* be meaningful experience. Did you use Waterfall? Agile? Some hybrid? What did you think of that? What were the "client"(read instructor) interactions like? What did you learn from that?
4) Experience - don't just tell me you were a developer at IBM. Tell me about a project you were responsible for or worked on. Tell me about your interdepartmental interactions. Tell me a (short) story, a precis, to get me interested. Give me something to ask questions about on the phone screen. Give me a hook.
The "relevant" part of a resume is different for each person. Find your "cool" parts and bring them to my attention.
Give me a reason to call you.
The resumes that followed all the "rules" were the easiest to "file".
The resumes that gave me something to ask about made it worth my time to schedule a phone screen.
This is your 30-second commercial, and that's being generous. If I don't find something to pique my interest in the "15-second scan", you better hope there's not many other resumes in my inbox.
Get my attention.
- Drew up policies, and procedures for every aspect of company work flow including but not limited to Marketing & Lead Generation, Sales Management, Proposal & Quote Generation, Technician Management, Order Management, Materials Management, Service after the Sale, Workforce Scheduling, Invoicing, Purchasing & Receiving, Customer Asset & Inventory Management, and Accounting Integration based on the CRM software work flow to increase efficiency.
The stuff that is italicized has been somewhat edited but I am not really sure what else I should do to it. Any suggestions?
It could still use some tweaking, but along the lines of...
Developed or redesigned business processes throughout corporate operations to maximize work flow and increase efficiency. Some areas include: Management of Information, Customer Data, Assets & Inventory; Personnel Allocation; Purchasing & Receiving; End to End Sales (Marketing Leads through Invoice and Tracking)
What a great collection of perspectives. This is the kind of thread that makes me happy I found GWJ.
I don't have anything to add, other than the suggestion to avoid using Microsoft Word default templates for resumes. My girlfriend brought home a stack of resumes to look at last year, and 5-10 of them looked almost exactly the same. They each got maybe ten seconds of her time. Then she came to a resume with a slick custom design and gave it at least two minutes (turns out the candidate sucked, but at least they immediately demonstrated that they were halfway competent at something).
Original design!
Any advice on cover letters? I've never written one before and I am applying for this job.
If you get that job you'll be working right down the street from where I live.
I haven't done a cover letter in a while, but I think the idea is that it should be short and explain at a high level what you are looking for right now career-wise. Try not to include much/any information that is also on your resume. If you are applying for a job in another city, you may want to include some information about your desire to end up in the target city: "I grew up in [city] and am planning to relocate there shortly for personal reasons." This is tricky -- it should be true and not come off as some canned fluff you use for every city in your search: "I have always wanted to live in [city] and this sounds like a great opportunity to do that." If there isn't anything you can say about the target city, you may be better off not mentioning anything about relocation.
Full disclosure: I work for Google. Yes, it is really that hard to get into the company. (Yes, I was very lucky.) While I do participate in hiring for my team, I have no influence on your application. We have a very rigid process for external candidates. All that being said:
I typically lead my cover letter with something along the lines of: "I am submitting my resume for position blah at XYZ."
My experience in these matters typically comes well after HR has already vetted the candidates (read tossed the bulk of the applications away). I personally found the tone of the letter to be... jarring? There are moments of confidence (I like confidence), over-confidence even, mixed with tones of supplication. Could just be me though, and one never knows if their approach is the right way to attract the eyes of a recruiter/HR person.
I will focus on grammatical/spelling issues.
To Whom It May Concern,
You want an IT Field Technician who is accurate, enthusiastic, and experienced. You want someone who cares about efficiency, who understands the needs of a company growing -> growing company, and who can work with others to get the job done. When you are ready to hire an IT Field Technician who is willing to work toward promotion, please consider me for the job. This last sentence's tone strikes me as off...
Working as consultant and then -> later as a network administrator for large companies has taught me how challenging a career in information technology can bewhy not instead demonstrate how you've met the challenges instead of mentioning that they're present?. Moreover,-> strike this My education in Information Technology will provide your company with a well-rounded asset-> what specifically? Pull one of your bullets from your resume. Most importantly, I can offer Google more than my six years of study and field experience. You will find that I'm interested in every facet of information technology, eager to take on newresponsibility, and willing to continue learning through -> sounds weak. Go for more active. Most people are willing to learn, show them that you live for it.¬out my career. Please look over my resume to see how my skills can benefit your organization. -> Again, be more active. Suggestion: "I have included my resume for your review, and I am confident that you will find my background demonstrates I am a perfect candidate for this position."
I understand that Google receives a insurmountably -> an insurmountable? amount of applications, and I would be pleased to start out with an entry-level position until I gain the necessary requirements. Could we discuss my qualifications? Because my skills are best discussed in person, I await to schedule an interview.
This closing seems off to me too. Instead, I would rather highlight a couple more ways in which you are the perfect candidate - specifically addressing points from the open req and how you hit them. If you can make it sound unique or more interesting, all the better. If you don't have all the quals, hit the ones you do and demonstrate that you not only learn quickly, but you master things quickly too.
Definitely leave out the plea that you would be pleased to start entry-level. To be brutally honest, Google often hires fresh Ph.Ds for entry level stuff. In lieu of "could we discuss" I suggest: "I look forward to discussing the opportunity with you." Plain and simple. If your resume is too long (as has already been discussed) they don't care - they want the relevant pieces in the resume you *do* present to them. It's good to hint there is more to you; as others have pointed out you want to intrigue them into talking with you. But if you're suggesting that there are important things left off your resume that can only be discussed over the phone/in-person, that's not good. Those things should *be in* your resume.
I hope that helps in some way. I think what most of the folks here have said on the resume is great. Sorry I couldn't help more directly. Good luck!
If Google is interested, you'll also find that there are 3 or 4 phone interviews before you're ever asked to interview in person, so asking point blank to come down and meet them may be a bit much. I'd stick with something a bit less aggressive there.
As for the letter itself, I'd drop the ass-kissing portion at the end and try to make it more consistent throughout. In general I'd suggest demonstrating a knowledge of and interest in what the company does. Mention one or two specific things that you're excited about and think you'd be an asset in doing for them, then tell them why. Beyond that, be confident but not cocky (difficult, I know). And for Google specifically, experience with open source projects seems to help (assuming you're applying for a position where that's remotely relevant), so you might want to consider that when tailoring your resume.
For the record, I don't work for Google (though I know a bunch of people there). I backed out partway through the interview process to accept another offer. As HedgeWizard said, even the first phone interview is tough to get through. Don't put something on your resume just because it looks good because they'll ask you about it, probably in detail.
The tone is good. If I had to nit-pick:
My education and experience in Information Technology will provide your company with a well-rounded asset that will provide Google
Rework it so you don't use "provide" more than once. Also, as a matter of personal preference, I'd rather not be told what I'm looking for (as per the first paragraph). It is a good way to talk about yourself without sounding like you are, but I personally feel it comes off as a bit... presumptuous, perhaps.
First, your letter reads much better with the edits. Good Job.
I understand that Google receives an insurmountable amount of applications, and because my skills are best discussed, I would be pleased to start with a phone interview. Could we discuss my qualifications? I look forward to hearing from you.
I don't think you want to use insurmountable in this sentence.
in⋅sur⋅mount⋅a⋅ble – adjective incapable of being surmounted, passed over, or overcome; impossible; insuperable: an insurmountable obstacle.Synonyms: hopeless, impassable, impregnable, inaccessible, indomitable, ineluctable, insuperable, invincible, unbeatable, unconquerable, unmasterable
I'd suggest that better choices would be implausible or overwhelming.
Thanks for the feedback. I thought of insurmountable because I guess, which is probably a bad idea, that there is no way for anyone at google to read all the submissions they get. Overwhelming sounds better though.
There was just something about saying that there no chance (insurmountable), that didn't go along with pointing out that you could be the one person able to wow the reader. Since you are trying to overcome the odds, I figure making the goal be challenging, but highly rewarding was probably better than impossible.
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