Your resume isn’t an autobiography of your career. Resumes are marketing tools intended to take job candidates to the next step in the hiring process, which is to get interviewed by the hiring manager. To market yourself strategically requires presenting potential employers with a value proposition that aligns with the position they need to fill.…
Don’t get me wrong; college degrees are wonderful for a variety of reasons, but college degrees aren’t good predictors of employee success. Your college degree tells employers absolutely nothing about how well you’ll do on the job. When I was running human resources in financial services, telecommunications and a SaaS company, I routinely skirted hiring…
Allowing the headline for your profile to default to your title and the name of your employer is the biggest mistake you’re making on LinkedIn, and it’s one made by the majority of people on the site. Why is it a mistake? Well, LinkedIn is, in its own words, ” a business and employment-oriented online…
If you are a government employee about to retire and enter the private sector, be prepared for radical changes to your resume. The biggest – and potentially upsetting – change will be that most of what’s on your resume is irrelevant to companies that you’re interested in. Resumes for government employees entering the private sector…
Of course you need to prepare for a job interview, and there’s a ton of advice out there (including from me) about how to get ready. But the truth about interview prep is that no matter how much you discover about the company, the position you’re hoping to get hired for, and the person you’ll…
Cover letters are the most divisive topic in all of recruitment. Career coaches and other resume writers whom I respect are adamant that cover letters are a must; on the opposite side of the issue are resume writers like me – and a former human resources executive – who think they are a waste of…
Stop thinking of your resume as a history of everything you’ve done in the workforce and turn your resume into a marketing tool by using the strategies that successful marketers employ to sell their products. Get your head around the concept that you are the product and potential employers are the buyers. Marketers understand that…
The best resume writers understand recruitment Before you hire a resume writer, make sure that he or she has a background in recruitment or HR. Unless a resume writer understands how companies hire, little else matters. I often get asked if I have experience writing resumes for professionals in one field or another, but that’s…