Chapter 8

Content Makes the OnTarget Difference

In This Chapter

Understanding the parts of your resume

Dumping content that doesn’t open interview doors

Deciding whether to use an objective or summary

Using good judgment on salary requests

Shaping your content in application forms

A prospective employer makes a leap of faith investing money in you as a new and untried employee. Are you really a good match for the position and the company? A resume’s content is the first step toward answering that question.

How important is content? In comparing a position’s requirements to your qualifications (see Chapter 6), what your resume says is mission-critical.

The Parts of Your Resume

To make your contents easy to access, organize the facts into various categories. Here are the essential parts that make up a resume:

Contact information

Objective or summary statement

Education and training

Experience

Skills

Competencies

Activities

Organizations

Honors and awards

You may also include:

Certifications

Licenses

Work samples

Endorsements

To increase the likelihood that your resume positions you for an interview, take the time to understand the purpose of the different resume parts, which I explain in the following sections.

No more than you want to carry around 30 pounds of extra weight do you want fat in your resume — family, early education, favorite things, and so forth. Trim it! The rule for including data on a resume is simple: If the data doesn’t support your objective to be invited for an interview, leave it out.

Leading with Contact Information

No matter which format (Chapter 9) you choose, place your name first on your resume. If your name isn’t first, a computer may mistake Excellent Sales Representative for your name and file you away as Ms. Representative.

Use boldface to display your name in a size range of 14- to 20-point typeface, depending upon your preference. The rest of your contact information can appear in 10- to 12-point typeface. Keep adjusting type sizes until you get the effect you prefer.

Here’s a shocker: Except for specific and overriding reasons, limit contact information to your

E-mail address. This is your single most important contact data point because that’s how the majority of employers will initially contact you.

Additionally, if you have them, you can add a space and then your Web or blog site, Web portfolio, and social media pages. (Caveat: Don’t go overboard with social media extras or readers may wonder whether you’re too busy being social to work hard.)

Mobile phone number. Some employers prefer to pick up the phone and give you a call.

City and state of residence. This information shows you have roots. Employers understandably resist springing for relocation costs unless the talent they seek isn’t available locally.

Why has there been a reduction in the recommended amount of contact information? Long answer short: technology and crime. The need for a home street address has passed into history because employers are now far more likely to communicate by Internet than by postal mail. What’s more, rising concerns about identity theft and privacy loss argue against listing a home street address unless there is an overriding reason to do so.

The first page of your resume is valuable real estate: Ditching unnecessary text like your street address is akin to clearing weeds out of your lawn. Why not leave blank any unused white space to make your resume more open and readable, or use it for information that markets you?

Hooking the Reader with Summary or Objective

Your OnTarget resume needs a hook to grab attention. The hook immediately follows your name and contact information and is expressed as an objective or as a summary.

A summary is known by many names. Among the most popular are skills summary, highlights summary, asset statement, power summary, career highlights, career summary, career profile, career focus, summary of qualifications, and accomplishments profile.

The two types of hooks — objective and summary — differ in emphasis:

The objective is self-centered, stating what you want. For example, your resume might include an objective line like this one:

Objective: Assistant to Executive

The summary is work-centered, stating what you offer. Here’s how a summary line might look on your resume:

Summary: Over 10 years of progressively responsible office support experience, including superior computer skills, with an earned reputation for priority-setting and teamwork.

Sometimes you combine the job objective and summary. Here’s how an unlabeled combined objective and summary might look:

Assistant to Executive, to keep operations under firmer control, using computer skills, contemporary office procedures, and pleasant manner with people.

However you fashion it, the hook tells the recruiter what you want to do and/or what you’re qualified to do.

Debate rages among career pros over the topic of objective versus summary:

Objective backers say that readers don’t want to slog through a document, trying to guess the type of position you want and how you’d fit into the organization.

Summary advocates argue that a thumbnail sketch of your skills and other competencies allows your qualifications to be evaluated for jobs you may not know about specifically, or offers an easy way to itemize your matching qualifications for a specific job’s requirements. This factor is a serious consideration in resume database searches.

Focus speeds your resume to the eyes of people who can hire you, whether you style it as a job objective or as a summary — or as an unlabeled combination of both.

Choosing an objective

Your objective states what you want to do and the direction in which you’re heading. It gives immediate focus to your resume and is the hub around which all the other information in your document relates.

When to use an objective

The time is right to use an objective when you

Know the position being offered; make that job title your job objective.

Have a greatly diversified background that may perplex some employers.

Are a new graduate, a career changer, a service member exiting the military, a member of the clergy switching to the secular job market, an educator seeking another career field, or a homemaker reentering the paid workforce. A job objective says what you’re looking for.

Advantages of an objective

Most studies show that employers prefer objectives for quick identification purposes. They like to see the name of their job openings at the top of a resume. Because you cite those qualifying accomplishments that support your objective and forget random experiences, the finished product shows that you and the desired job appear to be a well-matched pair.

If you’re responding to an advertised job, remember to match the basic qualifications it requires in the body of your resume even if the job seeks a “window pane technician” and your objective says “window pane technician.” An objective that echoes the job title in the job ad is merely a first step toward showing that you’re a great match.

Disadvantages of an objective

Ideally, you write a customized resume for each position (or career field) for which you apply. You should even write a different customized resume for each position for which you apply at the same company. The downside to a narrow job objective is that you may not be considered by the same employer for other open positions that you didn’t know about. But if the objective is too broadly focused, your objective statement becomes meaningless.

Opting for a summary

If you choose to begin your resume with a summary, you can still target it to specific positions with the mix of strengths, skills, accomplishments, and other background elements that you include.

When to use a summary

The time is right to use a summary under these conditions:

You have widely applicable skills (an administrative assistant, for example). Recruiters especially like a skills summary atop a reverse chronological resume because it lets them creatively consider you for jobs you may not know exist.

You’re in a career field with pathways to multiple occupations or industries (an electrical engineer, for example).

You know that your resume is headed to a database. Because you want to be considered for multiple related positions you may not know exist — which may have the same or similar requirements — you try to design your summary broadly enough to accomplish this goal without sounding as though you’re a jack-of-all-trades.

Advantages of a summary

Recruiters believe that what you’re prepared to do next should be pretty evident from what you’ve already done. Another argument is premised on psychology: Employers aren’t known for being overly concerned with what you want from them until they’re sure of what you can do for them.

Summaries offer an easy way to identify the qualifications you have that match a particular job’s requirements. Or identify qualifications that position you for related positions unknown to you in a given career field.

Disadvantages of a summary

A summary doesn’t explicitly say what you want and why the employer would want you. The summary resume can backfire if it claims everything from soup to nuts yet misses the targets identified by employers for specific positions.

Making Education, Experience, Skills, and Competencies Work for You

When you begin drafting your core resume (see Chapter 6), carefully consider the following four categories of essential information. You include many other pieces of information for a core resume, but these four categories do the heavy lifting.

Education

List your highest degree first — type of degree, major, college name, and date awarded. Here are further tips for effectively highlighting your education:

New graduates give far more detail on course work than do graduates who’ve held at least one post-graduation job for one year or more.

Omit high school or prep school if you have a college degree.

If you have a vocational-technical school certificate or diploma that required less than a year to obtain, list your high school as well.

Note continuing education, including seminars related to your work.

If you fall short of the mark on the job’s educational requirements, try to compensate by expanding the continuing education section. Give the list a name, such as Professional Development Highlights, and list every impressive course, seminar, workshop, and conference that you’ve attended.

Experience

Describe — with quantified accomplishments — your present and previous positions in reverse chronological order. (See Chapter 18.) Include specific job titles, company names and locations, and dates of employment. Show progression and promotions within an organization, especially if you’ve been with one employer since the world was young.

Consider using more than one Experience heading on the same resume. Try headings such as Accounting and Finance-Related Experience, General Business Experience, and Healthcare and Administration Experience. Doing so is yet another way of reinforcing your qualifications for the job you seek.

Skills

Skills today are the heart and soul of job finding and, as such, encompass a variety of experiences. These are skills:

Collaborating, editing, fundraising, interviewing, managing, blogging (Internet), researching, systematizing, teaching

And these are skills:

Administering social programs, analyzing insurance facts, advising homeless people, allocating forestry resources, desktop publishing, coordinating association events, designing home furnishing ads, marine expedition problem-solving, writing police reports, updating Web sites

And these are also skills:

Dependable, sense of humor, commitment, leadership, persistence, crisis-resilient, adaptable, quick, results-driven

Skills are also keywords (Chapter 10). A skill, in job-search terms, is any identifiable ability or fact that employers value and will pay for. That means that “five years” is a skill, just as “social media marketing” is a skill; employers pay for experienced provable skills.

Where do skills belong on your resume? Everywhere. Season every statement with skills. Skills are indispensable. You must name your skills or be left behind.

The Internet is awash in lists of skills. Web search terms such as lists of skills, transferable skills checklist, and uncovering your skills.

Competencies

Competencies include a combination of knowledge, skills, abilities, and personal attributes. These elements collectively translate into behavior, contributing to superior employee performance.

Put another way, business results are the what of employee performance, whereas competencies are the how. Because competencies are observable, they are measurable.

Compentencies are divided into two groups: core competencies for an entire function or company, and role competencies for a target position. Competency evaluation in hiring is used more often in large companies than in smaller firms.

If you’re aiming for a job with a large employer, bone up on competency policy at each company. You can call the company’s human resource department and ask, “Do you use a competencies model in recruiting?” If so, ask whether you can obtain a lexicon of the company’s core competencies and the role competencies for the target position. Sometimes, the HR specialist will reveal the competencies and sometimes not. But ask.

A few examples of core competencies

Competencies do not come in a handy-dandy, one-size-fits-all package. They vary from industry to industry, and from company to company. The following very simple illustration of four competencies illustrates those a company might use for a technical sales representative.

Product knowledge Displays knowledge of products Explains product features and benefits Understands financial terminology Researches competitors’ products	Planning & organization Prioritizes and plans work activities Uses time efficiently Plans for additional resources Integrates changes smoothly Sets goals and objectives Works in an organized manner
Technology usage Demonstrates required skills Adapts to new technologies Troubleshoots technological problems Uses technology to increase productivity Keeps technical skills up to date	Sales skills Achieves sales goals Overcomes objections Initiates new contacts Maintains customer satisfaction Maintains and promptly submits records

Including competencies in your resumes

Most good resumes focus on knowledge, skills, and accomplishments. They only hint at competencies required to do the work. To capture behavioral competencies on a resume, you must show how your accomplishments confirm your competencies. Or to turn it around, you must show how your competencies enabled you to rack up home runs.

To connect your behaviors with your accomplishments, you might say:

Product development: Created new midmarket segment supporting an annual growth rate of 20% in a flat industry, demonstrating high energy and business acumen.

In the above example, the verb demonstrating connects the accomplishment (Created new mid-market segment supporting an annual growth rate of 20% in a flat industry) with competencies (high energy and business acumen). Other verbs you can use to bridge the two types of information include:

Confirming

Displaying

Exhibiting

Illustrating

Manifesting

Proving

Revealing

Verifying

Gaining Extra Points

You covered the meat and potatoes of your resume content. What can you add that will strengthen your image? You could, for instance, draw from your activities to show that you’ve got the right stuff. John Gill of Carlsbad, California, paid his own expenses to spend his college spring break building houses for the poor in Mexico. That act of sacrifice shows Gill’s character; he goes out of his way to do important things for others. That’s good resume content.

What’s in your diary that may strengthen your image? Here are a few thoughts on buffing your image.

Activities

Activities can be anything from hobbies and sports to campus extracurricular participation. The trick is to analyze how each activity is relevant to the target job; discuss skills, knowledge, or other competencies developed; and list all accomplishments. Make sure that this section doesn’t become meaningless filler.

In addition, avoid potentially controversial activities: Stating that you’re a moose hunter won’t endear you to animal-loving recruiters. If you’ve been able to research the reader and have found that you two have a common interest, list it on your resume so that it can become an icebreaker topic during an interview.

Organizations

Give yourself even more credentials with professional and civic affiliations. Mention all important offices held. Relate these affiliations to your reader in terms of marketable skills, knowledge, and accomplishments. A high profile in the community is particularly important for sales jobs.

Just as you should be careful about which activities you identify, so too should you be sensitive to booby traps in organization memberships:

Listing too many organizations may make the reader wonder when you’d have time to do the job.

Noting that you belong to one minority group organization may work in your favor, but reporting your membership in five minority group organizations may raise red flags. The recruiter may worry that you’re a trouble-making activist.

And, of course, you know better than to list your membership in religious or political organizations (unless you’re applying for a job that requires such members hip). These affiliations don’t apply to your ability to do the job, and some readers may use them to keep you out of the running.

Honors and awards

List most of the accomplishments for which you have been recognized. If the achievement had zero to do with work or doesn’t show you in a professional light, don’t take up white space with it; for example, you probably wouldn’t list a Chili Cook-Off award unless you’re applying for a job as a chef.

Certifications

A certificate verifies the qualification of a person. List on your resume the relevant certifications you hold in your field; they add luster to your qualifications and help you stand out from the competition. The heading can be a simple “Certifications” or “Professional Certifications.”

Certification as a job-search tool is gaining renewed respect because of the following points:

Certification is useful for resume triage by HR screeners who may not know the particulars of a given certification but nevertheless count it as a marker of extra knowledge and place resumes of cert holders in the coveted “interview” pile.

Certification is valued by outsourcing firms because the credentials add credibility to project proposals. Employees with certs in outsourced departments are thought to be (but not proven to be) more likely to keep their jobs than those without the credentials.

Certification is viewed as continuing education that indicates a job seeker has stayed up-to-date in a fast-moving field such as information technology.

Certification for new college graduates shows they offer more than school-taught skills and are willing to make an extra effort to excel.

Licenses

If you’re in a field or function that requires a license to do your work — such as legal, certified accounting, engineering, teaching, real estate, or medicine — show your license prominently on your resume. You can use a heading of “Professional Licensing” (if only one license) or “Professional Licenses” (for more than one license).

Endorsements

After citing an accomplishment, add immediately beneath it a short, flattering quote from your boss or a client. (Alternative placement: Present an endorsement in an italic typeface in a left- or right-hand column, or at the bottom of your resume.) Here are a few examples of endorsements:

For an information systems technician: Bob Craigman (my boss) told the entire office: I am basking in reflected glory that Charlie Pitman cut Internet access and telephone costs by 80%.

For a sales rep at a toner and cartridge shop: Jennifer Robertson’s resourcefulness in getting inside the SoapSuds account and expanding it by 15% after others had tried for months is truly impressive. — Kevin Jones, General Manager

For an administrative support person: Tom is the first to greet me every morning and always projects a positive attitude. — Kathryn Smith, Business Owner

Endorsements work, or advertisers wouldn’t spend billions of dollars to use them. Be sure to check with your source before adding a quote to your resume.

Shaping Your Content on Application Forms

Application forms that you must sign aren’t resumes. Once signed, an application form becomes a legal document. Lies can come back to bite and smite you. Stick to the facts by following these basic rules:

Verify all dates of employment and salaries.

Enter the full name and last known address of former employers. If former employers are no longer available, write “N.A.” (Don’t substitute names of coworkers.)

If asked for salary history, list your base salary (or add commission and bonuses), omitting benefits.

Give a complete employment history in months and years, including trivial three-month jobs that you left off the resume. When you don’t tell the whole story, you leave a loophole of withholding information that later can be used against you to deny unemployment benefits if you’re let go.

Unless you have a condition directly affecting your ability to do the job for which you’re applying, you need not elaborate on any disability.

Become a fountain of knowledge about disability rights; start with such specialty Web sites as the National Organization on Disability (www.nod.org) and Abilities Inc. (www.abilitiesonline.org).

Divulge any criminal record (misdemeanor or felony) unless your records are sealed; consult a lawyer about the possibility of expungement before job hunting.

In certain instances, a job seeker can legally and ethically answer “no” on a question about a past offense; for information, visit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (www.privacyrights.org/ar/rosencrim.htm).

Be honest about having collected unemployment benefits (but remember that repeaters are frowned on). If you’re caught lying about it later, practice your farewell speech.

Content to Omit: Your Salary Story

Never mention salary on your resume. Period.

Sometimes a job ad asks for your salary history (past) or salary requirements (future). Realize that revealing dollar figures in advance puts you at a disadvantage. This is especially true if you’ve been working for low pay — or if you’ve been paid above market.

In addition to job ads, profile forms on job sites and online personal agent programs almost always ask for your salary information. If you decide to participate, state your expectations in a range, and include the value of all benefits, bonuses, and perks in your salary history, not just cash.

When you choose to disclose your salary history or requirements online, make a distinction between general information forms and formal signed applications (legal documents). Include benefits (total compensation) on general information forms, but omit benefits on formal signed applications that ask for salary history.

Make sure you do these two things before you provide salary requirements:

Research the market rate for someone with your skills and experience. Start with the Web sites Salary.com (www.salary.com), Salary Expert (www.salaryexpert.com), and PayScale (www.payscale.com).

Find out why the smart money advises against being too quick to pipe up with hard figures on the money you’ve made and the money you want. What can you expect in return for revealing salary information, job unseen? You get a chance to name your price and hope you find takers, many of whom will want to talk your price down. (See Chapter 3 for salary advice.)

Exception to salary silence advice: Tell recruiters with whom you have a serious interest in working how much you’ve earned and how much it will cost an employer to hire you. Otherwise, know that recruiters don’t want to waste time playing games and are likely to fold up their interest and move on.

Accomplishments Are Your Content Aces

The next chapter (Chapter 9) speaks of selling, not telling, your worth. Citing your earned accomplishments is how you make that happen.

Focus on your most marketable content — you made or saved money for an employer, for example. Don’t rush the construction of your resume: If you build it right, the interviews will come.