I have been around the business for a long time. Early on and being far less intelligent, something debated to this day I might add, I was quick to use the resume given to me by candidates to present them to my clients. I did little to nothing to change anything on the resume.
I have gotten smarter over the years. Resumes have become very fluid over the years. Candidates, in their infinite wisdom, have put together their resume as best they could with advice from every expert in the industry. Some are told that function resumes are the best, others the chronological is best. For each expert you ask advice from on resume writing you could almost bet on getting a different answer. It often would appear that the expert would suggest it be fluffed up here, dressed up there and made prettier to attract the right attention. Did anyone ever ask what the audience, the Hiring Manager, was looking to see? Not very often.
Now, many times, we do not know the Hiring Manager as well as we would like to. Seldom can we read their mind. We should know what they are looking for in a candidate though. That, in and of itself, still should give us a good idea of how the resume should look. As an introduction to a candidate, the resume being a marketing or sales tool, should be able to grab attention quickly, concisely and completely. After all, we do want the Hiring Manager to be drawn into and read the resume, do we not?
I will not get into all the philosophy of resume writing here, such as the OBJECTIVE, what it should say and how it should be said, etc, but I do want to address the KIS. I get resumes in all shapes, sizes and fashion. Many times they are not focused, have too much irrelevant information and say things they should not. They just do not look right for presentation and need working over, and in many cases, dramatic working over. Here are suggestions I give my candidates on the most common elements I see that need reworking to create the KIS resume:
ONE: Functional, chronological, functional, chronological, that is the question.
* there is no absolute right way here but you should have one or the other that is factual, informative and straight to the point.
* I prefer chronological because my experience is that more and more employers want to see where you worked, when you worked there (more and more want month and year), and what you did when you were there. Chronological does that and I have never had anyone object on a chronological resume. I have, however, had Hiring Managers request a functional resume be replaced with chronological resumes.
* I find that technical positions and technical Hiring Managers tend to prefer chronological resumes because they can be more fact based and to the point as many technical people are.
* if a candidate is going to use a functional resume I suggest using it for non-technical positions.
TWO: The application that the resume is written in is important in that most resume databases employers use today accept only word doc resumes and/or work easier with word docs.
* PDF, TEXT and others are generally not as user friendly as the old standby Word Doc, so, to me, KIS with a word doc resume.
* I suggest not using some of the formatted resume templates that are out there for writing resumes because they also can be problematic with some databases, simply type out the resume on a Word Doc.
* I would not expect someone in HR to try an reformat your resume to fit it into their database if need be, it likely will not happen and if it does, it will not be the first thing they do.
THREE: Put “ALL” contact information on the resume and not in a header or footer.
* many resumes are looked at on a computer and no one I know wants to go to print preview to see the contact information; if the resume is not presented in hard copy, this becomes an unfriendly step that does not win friends or influence people.
FOUR: Paragraph format versus bullets.
* scope of responsibility for each employment is what Hiring Managers look for, chronological resumes usually are or should be laid out this way.
* paragraph format is usually hard to read and the reader has to generally figure out what is being said and has to search for what they are looking for, not something they want to take time doing.
* I find that bullets make for a quick and easy read and believe you can never go wrong with a bullet format, particularly for a technical resume; so, I recommend bullets, direct and to the point, they get quick attention and the reader can quickly identify what it is they either are or are not looking for in a background.
FIVE: Pictures, personal information, fancy resume borders.
* although the picture may be pretty and personal information interesting, it is likely that it is not relevant and Hiring Managers really don’t care; they are mostly interested in what you can do for them.
* an exception could be a sales, marketing or some sort of position where a person would have to be in front of others to do business, however, it should not be a qualifier and I would not go there; you can not go wrong by not having picture or personal information on a resume.
* fancy resume borders can not address a candidates qualifications for a job and usually come across as unimpressive; would not do this.
There is more to the resume that gets the attention of the Hiring Manager than I have brought up here. If the resume is not an easy read and does not get attention early in the read, nothing else will probably matter. Aside from these tips I give candidates I always suggest they keep in mind their audience and what the position is they are applying for. The resume should speak to both and attempt to sell the Hiring Manager on setting up an interview. If they do not get to the interview they will not be getting anywhere.
I do not want to imply here that I let the resume do all the talking when I present a candidate to a client. That may work but I believe that is not the best first impression and I do want to make the best first impression I can for my candidate. I do an oral and written presentation of all my candidates. What I am suggesting though is that I help the candidate with suggestions on what constitutes a great resume for presentation and I put the responsibility of a quality resume for me to work with on the candidate. When I do not get a chance to do an oral presentation I find having a quality resume, with presentation, KIS’d as described above, gives me a much greater chance to move my candidate forward to an interview. When the candidate and I KIS with the resume we can more readily expect to KIS our way through to the interview.
Do you "KIS" with your candidate's resume? - RecruitingBlogs.com
KPI's are bad for recruitment... - RecruitingBlogs.com
Thinking about that the other day made me realise that actually, KPI's, far from sorting out and highlighting the good recruiters from the bad, actually muddies the waters and can throw up a smokescreen behind which people who are not cut out for recruitment can hide. KPI's, just like Government statistics, seem so easily corruptible and therefore, are actually counter-productive.
From the mind of a recruiter...
Why You should be Blogging
Blogging gives you the best return on investment when promoting your company, your message, your ideas online. Bar None. Anyone not running a Blog on their site is fundamentally at a disadvantage compared to someone who is.
The visual above gives some indication into the time it takes to do each of the four primary text-based online content types. Press Releases typically take days to organise, especially if there are 3rd parties involved. News stories typically take half a day to organise since the content has to be extremely precise and fairly formal. Sourcing good media can also take considerable time. Status Updates / Tweets / Micro-blogs are much faster to create but they typically link to external blogs or articles, and do not generate any inbound links of their own.
Blog Posts on the other hand are easy to create and sit at the heart of the world wide web. The beauty of blog posts is that they can be informal, have personality, be rich in opinion or simple statements of facts. They are easy to create so you can create them much more frequently than traditional corporate communications. They are also something that people can follow.
The Blog itself is simply the start. The way the web works today facilitates the distribution of your Blog posts. Affino offers a number of great tools to leverage the posts so that they become the heart of your corporate message:
Search Engines / SEO
Search Engines love frequently updated pages. You can leverage your Blog content throughout your site to provide fresh on-topic content through using highlights design elements.
RSS Feeds / Syndication
All your Blog content can be syndicated. You should use the outbound feeds to seed key sites throughout the web. Users can also follow your latest updates using Google Reader and similar tools.
Newsletters / Content Subscriptions
All Blog content can be dynamically included in automated weekly newsletters or sent out in real-time content subscriptions.
Social Media
Blogs can be instantly promoted on the leading Social Media portals such as Facebook and Twitter. The Social Campaigns in Affino allow you to do this real-time.
Topic Channels
You can create aggregation pages which pull in all the on-topic news for specific topics. Blog content should be at the heart of this since few things come close in terms of the return on time invested.
Wrap-up
Affino allows you to easily create and leverage your Blog, and if your aim is to reach a wider or more targeted audience and to get your message out more effectively then this is the place to start
Why You should be Blogging
Blogging gives you the best return on investment when promoting your company, your message, your ideas online. Bar None. Anyone not running a Blog on their site is fundamentally at a disadvantage compared to someone who is.
The visual above gives some indication into the time it takes to do each of the four primary text-based online content types. Press Releases typically take days to organise, especially if there are 3rd parties involved. News stories typically take half a day to organise since the content has to be extremely precise and fairly formal. Sourcing good media can also take considerable time. Status Updates / Tweets / Micro-blogs are much faster to create but they typically link to external blogs or articles, and do not generate any inbound links of their own.
Blog Posts on the other hand are easy to create and sit at the heart of the world wide web. The beauty of blog posts is that they can be informal, have personality, be rich in opinion or simple statements of facts. They are easy to create so you can create them much more frequently than traditional corporate communications. They are also something that people can follow.
The Blog itself is simply the start. The way the web works today facilitates the distribution of your Blog posts. Affino offers a number of great tools to leverage the posts so that they become the heart of your corporate message:
Search Engines / SEO
Search Engines love frequently updated pages. You can leverage your Blog content throughout your site to provide fresh on-topic content through using highlights design elements.
RSS Feeds / Syndication
All your Blog content can be syndicated. You should use the outbound feeds to seed key sites throughout the web. Users can also follow your latest updates using Google Reader and similar tools.
Newsletters / Content Subscriptions
All Blog content can be dynamically included in automated weekly newsletters or sent out in real-time content subscriptions.
Social Media
Blogs can be instantly promoted on the leading Social Media portals such as Facebook and Twitter. The Social Campaigns in Affino allow you to do this real-time.
Topic Channels
You can create aggregation pages which pull in all the on-topic news for specific topics. Blog content should be at the heart of this since few things come close in terms of the return on time invested.
Wrap-up
Affino allows you to easily create and leverage your Blog, and if your aim is to reach a wider or more targeted audience and to get your message out more effectively then this is the place to start
Mostly Media - Definitely Digital
Image via CrunchBase
Noted VC Fred Wilson had a good post this morning, urging the Twitter community to get the creative juices flowing. He outlined five areas where additional growth would most likely occur.
Perhaps the most intriguing are the Enterprise and Vertical segments. Wilson references CoTweet, who merged with ExactTarget recently, and alludes to Chatter from Salesforce as the standouts thus far.That’s a strikingly bare bin considering Twitter launched almost five years ago.
If that activity points to anything, I think it’s that cumbersome CRM applications are quickly becoming a thing of the past. In some ways, the activity stream has replaced the CRM-based message.
Furthermore, if you look at the newer breed of social software entrants, much of their approach is rooted in lighter-weight tools and plug-ins – perfectly suited for Twitter’s API and evolving framework. Gone are the days of big back-ends and custom connector architectures. The mantra is loud and clear now — coexist and ease in to my enterprise accordingly.
Also, one enterprise company I thought was conspicuously absent in Wilson’s enterprise group was Yammer. It’s hard to point to another company that’s had as much influence inside corporations as Yammer. I think its recent push into customized communities (think external extranets) paints at least a partial picture of where things may be headed – a blurring of the lines between internal and external communities. That’s a huge opportunity that no one’s cracked that I’m aware of.
And I doubt anyone you know could name one vertical player in the Twitter ecosystem a la Stocktwits. It’s safe to assume one will likely emerge from advertising or marketing as social commerce continues to grow.
The real opportunities in that space will be helping brands harvest intelligence from the flurry of online engagement that will happen in distributed networks.
Below are Wilson’s five areas.
* Social Gaming – There have been a number of attempts to build social game experiences on Twitter. But I’m not aware of any successes of scale like we’ve had on the Facebook platform. I think we will see it emerge soon.
* Verticals – We have some successes to point to here like Stocktwits for finance and Flixup for movies but this is a wide open opportunity in most verticals and we haven’t seen as much effort here as I’d have expected.
* Enterprise – CoTweet comes to mind as well as the efforts that Salesforce has made to integrate Twitter. This is a huge opportunity.
* Discovery – This is one area where there is a significant amount of effort.Hunch, Listorious, TweetMeme, Cadmus, WeFollow, and MrTweet all come to mind.
* Analytics – While Twitter will obviously be delivering better analytics to its users, particularly its marketing and business users
The Ongoing Personal Brand Review | Brand-Yourself.com Blog
Use UnTweeps for Twitter
UnTweeps is a great tool to manage the people you follow. UnTweeps allows you to enter a day range, and if a person doesn’t have any tweets in the past x days, you automatically stop following them (30 days is the default setting, but I typically keep mine at 90 just to be safe). If someone hasn’t tweeted a message in 3 months, there is no reason for me to follow them and just have another number in my “follows” column.
Finding Real Work at Home Jobs
I've been updating the Work at Home Jobs section of my About.com Job Search site and I thought I should spend some time looking for work at home jobs to make sure that finding legitimate opportunities is really as hard as I say it is.
I've written that finding a real work at home job is like finding a needle in a haystack. It is. I honestly don't know how someone who doesn't know what they're doing can separate the scams from the jobs. One thing I learned today though, was that the more specifically you search (and, of course, the more skills you have) the more likely you are to find decent listings.
Searching for "work at home" doesn't cut it. If you have experience in insurance case management or IT skills, for example, it's easier to find home or field based jobs. If you have no experience, you can locate some jobs, but you need to really carefully investigate the companies to make sure that they're worthwhile opportunities and they aren't going to charge you to hire you.
I've updated my work at home job listings page, with the usual disclaimer that I can't guarantee (unfortunately) the legitimacy of the openings - web sites change, companies change, etc. so it's up to you to make sure that you're not being taken advantage of.
