Resumé Remedies

Let's assume you have read my book, Hired!, and you have followed the Four-Step process I describe there. That means

1. You have identified the skills or knowledge you have to offer a potential employer
2. You have identified the companies you want to contact, who will benefit from hiring you
3. You have made a first contact with one or more of these candidate companies

And now it is time to move to Step Four: Get to Know Each Other.

Getting to know each other means having a meaningful, planned interaction with a view of a possible job relationship. This interaction is normally a formal interview, but the interview is usually preceded by a presentation of your job qualifications in a written resumé. And the resumé is one of the major tollgates that can scuttle your job search in a digital heartbeat.  Here are some of the resumé factors I discuss in Hired! about making your resumé presentable and readable.

Fonts

One font is sufficient, and don't use more than two fonts in your resumé. Make sure these fonts are complementary. Serif fonts like Georgia or Palatino Linotype are easier to read and look better on a computer screen than a non-serif font like Arial or Verdana. I admonish you not to use Times New Roman. It may be the default font in Microsoft Word, but Times New Roman is not the best font for on-screen display. Keep your font size at 10 or 12 point. You may have great eyesight, but going smaller than 10 point will make your printed resumé difficult to read for a visually challenged reader. Going larger than 12 point will simply convey the impression that you are trying to be cute or fill empty space.

File Format

You may use Microsoft Word, but not everyone does. If you submit a resumé via an e-mail attachment the safest format is one that is available on all the major computer operating environments of Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. The best cross-platform file format is Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format). You can buy a program to convert your resumé to PDF format. Your computer or word processor may already provide a way to output the PDF format. If not, you can search the Internet for free conversion programs compatible with your operating environment.

Plain Text Version

You may need to submit your resumé directly in an email rather than in an attached PDF file. Or you may need to paste your resumé into an input field on a company's Careers web page. The latter situation will probably strip out all your resumé formatting, and the former scenario may result in a plain-text delivery to the recipient e-mail address which also means your formatting will be removed. So, to assure that your resumé layout still looks good, prepare a plain-text version of your resumé. On Windows you can start by pasting your resumé into Notepad! You will lose bold text, and all words will be in the same font. Insert blank lines to offset headings, change the width of your Notepad window and make sure the word-wrap does not result in distortions of the layout. When you get it the way you want it, Save it so you will have it ready when needed.

Naming Your Resumé

HR people have told me that a common resumé submittal mistake is that the candidate submits a file titled "Resume.docx." How is an HR person, or a hiring manager, going to find your resume with a generic name like that?  Put your full name in the name of your resumé file: "Resume of Gary K. Evans.docx."

Your E-mail Address

The last major mistake people make is to submit their resumé by e-mail from a totally non-professional address. Get an innocuous e-mail address from which you will send your electronic resumés. An address of "tootiredtopayattention@hotmail.com" will be an instant turn-off, as will "UFGatorman@yahoo.com." Use an e-mail address with your real name, and don't make it cute. You are looking for a professional position, not rushing a fraternity or sorority.

Defeating Discouragement

I have been inactive for a few weeks. Four weeks ago I broke 4 bones in my face playing soccer (but the striker did not score!). During my recovery I admit I have had some moments of discouragement. I am not healing as quickly as I wish. I am totally inactive and feel like a slug. I know I will be back on the field eventually, but as I reflected on my own discouragement I thought of how many job seekers are now discouraged to the point of just giving up.

Last Friday the March 2013 U.S. employment figures were released and they are dismal. What struck me profoundly in these statistics is the number of people who have just stopped looking for a job. And, in case you are not aware, if you are not looking you are not counted as unemployed. Think of that: if all 23 million unemployed and underemployed just stopped looking the unemployment rate would fall to zero! And the government would claim total vindication of its policies. Well, as it has been said, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Discouragement is erosive. It feeds upon itself. It becomes the focus of your mind...until you decide to focus on the POSSIBLE.

Is it possible that your difficulty stems from looking in the same, wrong place over and over? Is it possible that you are appealing to the wrong gate-keeper?

What I am referring to is Human Resources (HR). One of the main themes in my book, Hired!, is how and why to avoid HR at all costs. Let me explain why.

First, the role of HR is not to find a job for you. The central function of HR is to assure corporate alignment and compliance with Federal, State and other regulatory requirements regarding their current employees.

Second, the other role of HR is to eliminate you as a job applicant. When I was a hiring manager my own experience with corporate HR was occassionally adversarial, and too often confrontational. They would not bring me candidates with the skills I needed, and sometimes fought me tooth-and-nail when I wanted an offer made to a candidate.

Third, when you follow the conventional approach of filling out a web application form or paper form, that application is fielded first by HR. In the case of web applications there is now usually a digital tool that scans your application for keywords, and HR people have fallen into looking just for keyword matches rather than actually reading your application, which takes too much time for them to do. And, when you consider that in today's job market a company may receive fifty to a hundred applications or resumes in a single day, you can appreciate why they would cut every corner they can.

Last, when you follow the conventional approach you are joining dozens or hundreds of other persons following the same approach of appealing to a nameless, faceless entity you cannot contact until they contact you - if they ever do. You stand a very good chance of being lost in the crowd.

Is it possible that this is the situation which is causing you discouragement?

Your only options are a) stop looking entirely, which I certainly do not recommend, or b) pursue a different path, a new path of possibilities. I do not have space to go into detail about these other paths in this blog entry, but here are some ideas to consider:

1. Start your own contract business. I discuss how to go about this at the end of Hired!

2. Contact every temporary agency in your area. Pursue temporary opportunities in the area you have been working, and in other related areas so you can broaden your job history and prepare yourself for new job opportunities.

3. Personally seek out hiring managers in companies you would like to work for, and let them bring in their HR after the manager has first talked to you. This can be as simple as walking into a retail business and asking to speak with a department manager, or it can be as involved as asking for referrals from business contacts in your life. I found a client by asking my dentist if he had any patients running financial or medical businesses. He gave me a name and number, I called and said I was referred by Dr. Jones, and that conversation led to another that led to an engagement.

4. Read all of your local business magazines. Look for the names of "People on the Move" and call them. Tell them you saw the announcement of their promotion on the magazine. They will be flattered. After all these magazines are really "vanity" publications. People call the magazine to put these announcement into the publication just for the purpose of marketing their promotion, award, or accomplishment.

5. Follow TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines to get names of anyone who is already employed in a decision-making capacity in any business or industry you want to work in. Call them. Call the company's main number and ask the receptionist to connect you with them. If you get a voicemail announcement do not leave a message, and if you are really lucky the person's voicemail will give you their direct extension so you can bypass the receptionist on the next attempt. In Hired! I give examples of how to introduce yourself in 10 seconds. I did this for years in my business. It really is not difficult to get past the initial anxiety!

There are so many ways to do job search differently than you might be thinking. Is it possible for you to stretch a bit and try something totally new? Of course it is. Think about it, write down a little plan, and get started. If you mess up the first few calls that is part of learning. But you won't get any learning until you start!

Dressing for Your Job Interview

The phrase "dress appropriately" is easy to grasp if you think of it this way: if you dress for your interview in the clothing you will wear on the job, then you are under-dressed for the interview. If you dress one level up from what you would wear if you work for them, you are dressed appropriately.

For example, for a man, if the normal workday clothing is jeans and work boots (as in construction or trades), or just casual clothing (as in a shopping mall retail store) then one level up is a dress shirt and complementary tie, and chinos or Dockers slacks.

If the workday rule is business casual (as in most office work) then one level up is a suit.
The only exception to "one level up" is if the workday attire is a suit (as in more formal office environments). In this case you just need to wear a suit—not a tuxedo!—for your interview.

Guys, make sure your hair and facial hair is trimmed, your shoes are polished, and do not wear any cologne, after-shave, or scented hair-gel. Many people are very sensitive to various scents, and what you think smells wonderful could make your interviewer nauseous. You don't want to be turned out of the interview right after you walk in.

If you are a woman applying for a professional or management position, wear a neutral- or darker-color suit and high heels. If you are applying for a retail or any customer-facing position you have an almost infinite number of options from dresses to pant suits, and from high-heels to low-heels. Make sure your shoes are polished, and please do not wear any perfume! None! Not even a smidgen! Remember your make-up may have a perfumed scent in it.

Ladies, the quickest path to not even finishing the interview, much less getting a job offer, is to wear clothing that is too tight, too short, too revealing, or just too provocative. In other words, "too anything." If you have any question about whether an item is "too anything," then it probably is.

Body Ornamentation

Body adornment is common today in the under-30 age group, but most office or retail environments are focused on their clients and customers, not on your epidermal artwork. Unless you are applying for a job in a tattoo parlor, or as a bouncer in a Rave club, cover all of your tattoos with clothing or concealment-grade makeup. Remove all piercing jewelry. Women can still wear pierced ear rings, but both men and women should remove every other visible piercing.

Dealing with Job Gaps in Your Resumé

All potential employers look for evidence of job stability and progress in a candidate. But not everyone has a continuous job history. In these turbulent times, employment gaps are no longer the stigma they were in earlier, more economically stable times. Since job gaps are impossible to hide in the recommended reverse chronological resumé format, you need to think carefully about how to handle these on your resumé.

I know a woman who made a number of spectacularly bad decisions in her young adult life. As a result she did not have a continual working history. She had some very large gaps between the jobs that she could safely list on her resumé. How did she resolve this so potential employers would not immediately toss her resumé into the trash?

We talked about what was going on in her life during these times, and what her current goals were. She had resolved to get her life back on track even if she had to start in entry-level jobs until she learned new skills. So, we recast her sparse resumé to focus on the jobs she had held successfully and the accomplishments she could honestly talk about in an interview. For the three-year period when she was not working, we simply stated "Out of job market." No explanation of why, no spin to make up some justification—just an honest statement that between date X and date Y she was not working.

Why was this a good decision? Remember that the purposes of the resumé are to create interest in you as a candidate and as a person, and to lead to a face-to-face interview. Stating "Out of the job market" was both accurate and honest. The reader would perceive that she did not try to hide the gap. Now it was guaranteed to be one of the first areas explored during a face-to-face interview, so she just needed to be properly prepared to answer that inevitable question. If you have gaps in your job history, be honest and list them. And be prepared to give an explanation when you get your interview.

Technology - Threat or Asset?

If you were to choose a new career to pursue, would you pick elevator operator, or travel agent, or typewriter repair person? I doubt it, because each of these occupations, and dozens of others, have fallen prey to the relentless advance of technology. And the pace of this replacement is only increasing, which is not a happy story for people who have lost their employment in jobs becoming obsolete, or in declining industries. In a word, technology is replacing the need for people.

This almost seismic shift is slamming the middle-class in a double whammy. First is the loss of jobs because computers and machinery are taking over the repetitive and computational tasks that were done manually a generation ago. The second insult is highlighted by the continual government reports for the past 3 years that a) the economy is improving and b) millions of new jobs have been created as a result of government intervention. Regardless of your political persuasion the reality of these newly created jobs is this: they are primarily in the service sectors and pay well below the middle-class jobs that were lost through the recession that seems unwilling to loose its hold on the U.S. and the Western world. A recent Associated Press article reports that half of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the "Great Recession" paid middle-class wages between $38,000 and $68,000. Yet only two percent of the 3.4 million jobs gained since then are in the same pay ranges.

For the job seeker this means at least three things:

• Learn technology. If you can learn to use technology you can turn a loss into a gain. If you job is replaced by a computer or machine, then someone is going to have to install, operate, service, and design that device. History is replete with job loss, and with complementary job gain. The printing press eliminated manual scribes, yet hundreds of new jobs and sub-industries were created to support this new machine, which enabled unthought-of volume of production.

• Learn what cannot be mechanized. The job category of office secretary was decimated by the advent of the word processor. But in the hands of one who is ignorant of grammar, vocabulary, and communication skill, a computer is simply a device for producing vast pages of indeciperable or misleading gibberish. Computers let us communicate faster; they do not make us communicators. Skill in writing and speaking are tipping points in the team-oriented work environments of today. If you possess these skills, you possess an attribute that will weigh strongly in your favor in a job competition.

• Examine the encroachment of technology into your job area. Just think about your own experience in your everyday life. How often today do you you call a business and hear a human answer? Less and less often. We all hate Voice Recognition systems that "know" what we are speaking but it is simply a fact that these are cheaper than a receptionist. Read the industry magazines for your current job area. Read the industry magazines for the job areas you think you might want to move into. Pay attention to success stories of new technology introductions. Do not skip over the technology advertisements: these are the forewarnings of the shift away from people. When I was studying for my engineering degree I worked nights and weekends as a mechanic in a local gasoline station. I loved reading "Service Station Owner" and other trade magazines because they taught me new diagnostic skills that helped me pay for my education, and every issue had at least one article about a new device or automobile advancement using technology.

None of this news is encouraging. The future is not hopeless, but the future is changing. A prudent person will continually and carefully scrutinize the economic landscape, weighing the discomfort of moving to a new and hopefully growing career area against the comfortable - but possibly dead-end - choice of remaining in a declining job area until that area just disappears. My recurring theme in my book, Hired!, and in this blog is that I hope you will choose these life-changes on your terms and on your schedule rather than being hostage to external events that always come at the worst possible time.

Living Without Reserve (Funds)

A recent headline from the Associated Press laments that almost half of U.S. households are living paycheck to paycheck with less than 3 months of living expenses in reserve. This is a precarious position. I have been there myself and I will never forget the vulnerability I felt as a young, itinerant road musician, wondering when the next unmanageable expense would descend on me.

In my book I discuss this dilemma at some length including how to manage medical expenses during a period of unemployment. Here I will offer some additional comments on what to do if you are in this situation, and an amazinly simple technique to avoid being in if you have not yet fallen into this trap.

If you are out of work, or were unemployed previously and have not rebuilt a new financial buffer, you must start building that buffer now. This means that you first start with cutting your expenses. You may not have control over your current income, or even some of your mandatory expenses such as housing or a car payment, but you have control over other discretionary expenses. And you may not realize you have some control over your housing and car payments, too.

A young couple I talked with recently has no money set aside and no credit, but they have a passable income when the man's hours are not reduced. However, the tires on their sole automobile will need replacing in about ten thousand miles, and their washer and dryer are showing their age. Their comment was, "We don't have any money, how can we save anything for an emergency?"

They were so close to their choices they did not see the choices they had made, or the options available to them. They were spending about $5 each day on cigarettes, which is $150 each month, or $1,800 per year on this habit. Additionally, they were spending a bit over $100 each month on broadband Internet and cable. Rather than make lunch at home, the man was spending about $7 a day on food at his workplace. With 22 workdays in a month, lunch was costing another $150 per month. So, in just these areas they were spending $400 per month on cigarettes, cable and lunch-out. They have control over these expenses. Even if they cut these costs only by half, this would save them $200 each month. And a couple months of these savings will pay for a decent set of tires in the near future.

At some point it is prohibitively difficult to further reduce expenses, but most people have lots of fat they can trim away. As a personal reference point I can share that I would love a brand-new pickup. I bought one once - twenty years ago. Of the very few other vehicles I have owned in my entire life, that was the only new vehicle I ever purchased. My wife and I agreed to buy used cars and put the saved money into college funds for the children. It's just a matter of priorities.

If you are working but do not have the recommended six months of essential living expenses set aside, do not wait another day. Start somewhere, start anywhere. But start today. My wife and I started with $25 every two-week paycheck. When I got my first raise, we bumped our savings to $50 every two-week paycheck. We adopted that most exquisite of financial success plans: "Pay Yourself First". We still follow that plan over 30 years later.

Take the Job or Keep Searching?

You are desperate to find work. An opportunity appears but it pays less than your previous job, and barely enough to cover your expenses. Do you take the job? Do you pass on it and keep looking? What should you do? This is a decision each of us must struggle with, but here are some observations that may help your decision.

If you take the lower-paying, available job you will have less time each week to look for the better job. Some job counselors say a job hunter should not take a lesser position, but should allocate all of their time looking for that "best" job. In my humble opinion that is a very reasonable strategy in a growing economy. But our economy is barely holding its own in some sectors, and you have to evaluate if having some money coming in is preferable in the short-term to having none coming in. If you can get income for 20-30 hours per week that will

• Give you income for those hours, and
• Allow you time for continuing your search for that "best" job.

How do you find 20 or 30 hours of work if the economy is bad? One answer is that the hiring of full-time workers is suffering but there are relatively more opportunities for part-time workers. So if you are approaching a company about part-time work you are not competing against full-time workers and you might find your goal more accessible.  Additionally, if you have specific skills you can look into contracting for those 20-30 hours. This might raise your anxiety if you have never followed a contracting model, but engaging with temporary employment agencies is an excellent scenario to consider. They do the marketing, find the clients you can provide services for, and handle all of the payroll issues. And these temp jobs often turn into long-term or permanent positions.

Unemployment Benefits?

But what if you are receiving unemployment assistance from your state government? If you take a job won't you lose that income, and possibly be no better off working than if you just stayed on unemployment? If you take a part-time job you will have to start paying for gasoline to travel to work, maybe buy lunch every day, and won't you have other expenses that will make working a losing proposition?

You have to make your own decisions: financial, moral and otherwise. But the reality is that it is easier to find a job if you already have a job, even a part-time job. Put simply the longer you are out of work, the harder it is to be offered a job.

And consider this scenario from a potential employer's perspective. You apply for a position and you are asked, "Where are you working now?" Scenario A: You reply, "I am working at XYX Company." Scenario B: You reply, "I am not working right now."  Big difference in how you might be perceived, don't you think?

In scenario A the employer's next question will be "Why are you looking to leave XYZ?" and you can be honest that you are looking for a more challenging position, more hours, more stability, and so forth.

In scenario B the employer's next question will be "How long have you been out of work?" There is really no way to build a win-win in this conversation. Perception is reality in job search, and if you are looking for work you will be best perceived if you are currently working, even part-time.

Be open to different models of employment. Something is better than nothing, even if your "lesser" choice is just to get by the next couple months. Think critically about what is best for you and your loved ones. Holding out for the "best" situation may not be the best choice right now. Do the math, and remind yourself that everything can change in the next two weeks, or two days.