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I learned about writing resume, I learned in Marketing In June 2001, I was rudely awakened to a new, unsympathetic job market. The start-up I worked for ran out of money and suddenly, I found myself turning from a dot com millionaire wannabe to an anxious, stressed-out recipient of the government unemployment checks. Of course, I was not alone. More than two and half millions Americans were laid off last year. Silicon Valley was hit harder than most regions, with unemployment rates higher than the national averages. Initially, I was not optimistic about my chances of finding new employment quickly. There simply were too many unemployed or recently laid off people with similar skill sets and experience competing for too few open jobs. Fortunately, I soon realized that the employment picture I faced was very similar to the many marketing challenges I dealt with before. The problem is the same, i.e., how do you build a market leading position with products that are at parity to those of the competition? Though I had diligently gone through the many resume books that I accumulated over the years, I found the advices and methods these books offered wanting. None provided a clear strategy to achieve differentiation, the key to winning for marketers. Did I just say “differentiation”? I knew this concept very well from my years of working as a marketer for Procter & Gamble, a venerable consumer products giant and a favorite “case study” company for many business schools. Drawing from the experience, I systematically applied the marketing lessons to the “dull” and “unexciting” task of writing my resume. How well did this “experiment” work? It turned out much better than anything else I tried before. Within four weeks of sending out my “marketing” resume, I received six callbacks and interviews with five different companies. I eventually had two offers and accepted one from an Internet company in Mountain View. This result was not remarkable if it happened during the boom time of Silicon Valley. Instead, it occurred right at the time where the unemployment rates here were near all time highs and news of lay offs came out daily. Well, enough for my sales pitch. Shall we go through what the marketing lessons are and how to apply them to writing resume? Identify your target customers -
Who are the gatekeepers?
This first step is critically important, but often overlooked by most job seekers. Job seekers commonly assume that the hiring managers will be the only people who read their resumes. The resume writers, then, failed to ask the question “Who are the gate keepers before my resume get to the hiring managers?” Failing to ask this question, most job seekers never knew what their odds are and why they never receive the call back they expected. Indeed, the odds are not good and keep getting worse. For every “real” job that is posted, several hundred to thousand of resumes come in, burying the poor souls that have to wade through them. Depending on whom you talk to, the odds could range from 1:100 to 1:1000 or more. The answer to the question “Who are the gate keepers” is not difficult to find. Your favorite human resources manager, recruiters, or outplacement consultants can tell you that they are:
It is easy to miss and dismiss the last category of “gate keepers”, the “scanning machines or software” as inanimate, dumb tools that cannot possibly perceive the sterling qualities of your resume. Whatever your feelings toward these tools may be, dismissing them is a big mistake. Instead, your job search would be much more productive (and possibly much less painful), if you give them a human dimension. Ask the question “How would I program the scanning machines if I want to screen the hundred or thousand of resumes that do not meet the requirements for the job?” Understand your target
customers and their needs
After identifying the gate keepers, the next step is to understand how they approach their job and what their key needs are. Again, with a little research, you can easily find the answers to these questions. I found a good articulation on how gate keepers think in a wonderful article, “Skeptical Resume Reader Tells How He Really Thinks” by Douglas B. Richardson on CareerJournal.com. Below are two paragraphs from the article that will give you a flavor. “As
a human-resources consultant, I spend a lot of time making judgments about
people on the basis of how they present themselves in resumes. In this role, my
highest priorities are to cull the few from the many and help my clients avoid
pigs in pokes. My job description doesn't include extending charity to job
seekers and resume writers. On the contrary, I find I approach every resume with
a certain impatient cynicism. Far
too many resumes reflect a naive belief that each and every word will be read by
a Rational Reader. Rational Readers are marked by receptive hearts, detached
egos, and lots of free time. They are more rare than unicorns. I certainly have
never met one.” Once you set the objective of understanding who the “gate keepers” and what their needs are, there are numerous way of finding the answer. For a start, you can ask your favorite executive recruiters for advices on the subject. Most good executive recruiters are more than happy to share with you their frustration if you show a little empathy or curiosity. Another way is to search the Internet or browse books in your favorite libraries or bookstores. Perhaps, the simplest way is to befriend the human resources manager or recruiter in your own current company and ask them about their work. Whatever methods you choose, by doing some homework, you will eventually arrive at the following learning: 1. Resume readers:
2. Resume readers’ needs are:
3. As a corollary of learning # 1 above, the job requisitions provide the job seekers with a wealth of information on the gate keepers’ screening criteria. Specifically, most common screening criteria are:
Present your product (yourself) as the solution to your customers’ needsWith the learning above, you are now ready to make yourself look like the solution to the gate keepers’ needs. The key is to provide the readers with the exact information they are looking for. Correspondingly, don’t clutter the resume or distract the readers’ attention with information they don’t care about. So, what is the information that resume screeners really don’t care for? Most often, it is the “Objective” section that so many job seekers feel compelled to put at the top of their resumes. Generally, getting rid of the “Objective” section is a good idea because:
The
next obvious question is “How do I provide these answers?”
A “Summary” or “Profile” section at the top of the resume will do
nicely. A well-written
“Summary” provides readers with answers to the following questions:
If
you have worked in the software industry, you probably will find the approach I
describe above very similar to the concept of “usability”.
Indeed, it is nothing more than “usability” applied to resume
writing. Except, in writing, the
concept is probably better named as “readability”! Deliver “Convincing Reasons To Believe”During the Internet boom, employers often encountered difficulty in hiring employees. It was so easy for most people to find job that the joke “the breath test” became very popular. The joke was “If you are breathing and want a job, you will get one.” The joke wasn’t very far from the mark. Good time as it was, the boom had also lulled many job seekers into a false sense of security and dulled their job searching skills. In this economic down turn, the employment picture changes completely. Employers now can afford to be very choosy about whom they hire. As such, they no longer just ask “Do you have the skills to do the job?” Most employers now will ask the additional question “How good are your skills?” Whereas before job seekers often only have to answer this question during the interview, today they have to provide the answers on their resumes. If they don’t, their chances of getting the interview are slim. Despite these changes, many job seekers still write their resume using the old formats of the 80’s and 90’s. They simply took out their old resumes, updated them with the experiences of their latest jobs, and considered their resume “perfect” and “finished”. What these job seekers don’t realize is that their resumes read like a “specification sheet”, not a “selling, marketing document”. As “spec sheet”, these resumes merely list the job descriptions and experiences in the candidates’ past jobs. The resumes therefore only answer the question “Do you have the skills to do the job?” They fail to answer the question “How good are your skills?” As my old colleagues at Procter & Gamble would put it, these resumes fail to give the buyer, i.e., the employer, “Convincing Reasons To Believe”. To effectively market the product, i.e. you, your resume must provide the ultimate human readers ample evidences that you are indeed very good at what you do. Providing these “Convincing Reasons To Believe” is how you can differentiate yourself from the hundreds or thousands of other candidates competing for the same job. How do you effectively present these “Convincing Reasons To Believe”? The most effective way I have learned is to write every bullet point in every job I ever had as an accomplishment, and not merely as a job description. An accomplishment, as I learned at a P&G interviewing training course many years ago, consisted of three components called CAR:
An
example of an accomplishment that meets the CAR criteria is shown below: “Analyzed
the return on investment for all promotions ran by Brand X during fiscal year
1992-1993. Recommended and gained
management agreement to discontinue promotion Y, an ineffective coupon program.
The discontinuation saved the brand $4 million in marketing spending.” By now, it should be obvious that unlike a job description, an accomplishment not only tells what you did, but also how well you did it. It tells the complete story and gives the reader a sense of your track record as a business contributor to employers you worked for previously. In
the hundreds of resumes that I have seen as an interviewer for many companies
over the past ten years, more than 95% contain little or no business results
that will raise the interest of a reader. Of
the few that did, none achieved the “perfect” state of having every bullet
point as a complete accomplishment. If
your resume can achieve this state, then you will achieve the ultimate
“differentiation” that all marketers seek. Execute with ExcellenceAn
important lesson that marketers learned time and again is that a successful
marketing campaign requires both the right strategy and excellent execution.
Writing a resume is planning and executing a personal marketing campaign.
All the hard work that you put into planning, i.e., identifying the
target audience, understanding their needs, presenting yourself as the
solutions, and finding the convincing reasons to believe, may still go to waste
if you don’t write every sentence in the resume with utmost consideration and
care. “Of
course I always write my resume with utmost attention and care,” you may
protest! Yes, but a fresh set of eyes (meaning not yours nor your
close friends’) will always pick out the one or two mistakes that somehow
escape your attention. Of the
hundreds of resumes that I’ve reviewed over the year (several rewrites of mine
included), I haven’t seen one that I couldn’t pick out at least one thing
that wasn’t quite right. Below is
a list of the common errors that I have seen in these resumes:
o Logical Inconsistency: The bullet points in the body of the resume do not adequately support the skills or experience the writer claims to possess in the summary section. o Writing style inconsistency: Unlike writing a novel, a consistent, simple sentence structure works best for resume. Almost every sentence in a resume could be written to start with an action verb. By maintaining the discipline to start every sentence with a strong action verb, you can convey to the readers that you are a focused, action-oriented individual. If you go away from this approach just for the sake of having variety, you may end up with many weak sentences that either confuse the readers or make it difficult for the readers to figure out exactly what did you do. Worse, it could convey an impression that you are a better talker than a doer.
Good
Hunting! Writing a resume is not rocket science. However, by now, it should be clear to you that writing a good resume is not as simple as copying the format everyone else uses and sprinkle in a few big adjectives here and there. By following the proven marketing principles outlined in this article, you will greatly improve your chances of getting your resume actually read and given due consideration. Applying these principles to your resume will take much more thinking and hard work. The reward is that you can much better differentiate yourself from the other thousand of candidates with similar skills. See in this light, the reward is well worth the investment. Good luck and good job hunting! Copyright 2002 Trinh Do May 2002
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