Reinvent your career

you do. You can find the resume and spend your time rewriting it ten ways for ten possible jobs, or you can invest your time following your dream. Continue your current career out of a sense of necessity or you can reinvent your career, with all the knowledge and skills you’ve earned over the years, and truly take charge of your life. … reinvent career change business downsize new resume dream s…

Taking The Resume Reader’s Needs Into Consideration

Before you write your own resume, examine professionally written resume samples to get ideas about writing styles and eye-catching resume formats. Then, write your resume with the reader in mind. If they are seeking someone with your background and skill set, be sure to make that the focus of your resume.

Do not use the resume templates that come with your word processor. They look like everyone else’s resume on the hiring manager’s desk.

Take the extra time needed to add visual appeal to your resume. If you are not able to do this effectively, you should seriously consider retaining the services of a professional resume writer. Be sure to ask them if they specialize in creating eye-catching resume formats in addition to their writing services.

Your goal should be to make a connection between what the hiring manager is seeking and what you have to offer in those select areas.

To get that message across at first glance, make your objective clear and highly visible. You can do this by creating a job title and positioning it prominently below your name and address. It tells the hiring manager what you are all about and sets the tone for the rest of the resume.

RESUME HEADING
Your resume heading should in bold and all caps such as this: REGIONAL SALES MANAGER

PROFILE
Your Profile or Summary section is a coutesy to the reader. It allows them to sum you up in short order. This important section sets the tone for the resume and highlights your key qualifications. This way the hiring manager can quickly get a sense who you professionally without having to read the entire resume.

Specifically, this section should list your number of years of experience, industry, credentials, and key attributes that are essential to the position you are targeting. For example, if the position is sales, your attributes would be strong communicator, strategic negotiator, and ability to establish and build key business relationships.

KEYWORDS
Keywords or industry jargon can be included in your Summary or throughout your entire resume (recommended) so you can communicate your select areas of skills by listing appropriate areas of interest specific to the job.

In the case scenario for a sales professional, these keywords might be as follows: relationship building, territory sales management, client consultation, public speaking, sales presentations, contract negotiations, value-added selling, client training and support. One of the best sources to find relevant keywords is in job ads.

ACHIEVEMENTS
This is no time to be shy and modest. You will want to toot your horn a bit by including your most impressive achievements. Your accomplishments should be presented in a factual or story telling way that gives the reader the sense that you do more than just your basic responsibilities and are not a clock watcher.

ACTION VERBS
Do not make the mistake of starting every sentence off with “responsible for”. That is understood. Try playing with action verbs such as led, directed, supervised, spearheaded, steered, guided, and executed. Instead of writing a sentence like this: Responsible for distribution operations throughout the Metro New York Area, consider revising it to read like this: Managed distribution operations throughout the Metro New York Area. Here is another example: Led the success of distribution operations throughout the Metro New York Area.

CONSISTENCY
Watch for consistency in present and past tense. If you are no longer with a company, be sure to make it past tense. Just as important, triple check for typos. Have someone else read your resume for misspellings, dates, missing periods and obviously poor grammar.

Again, review professionally written resume samples to get ideas about writing styles and eye-catching resume formats. But, make the effort to make it your own.

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Career and Employment Articles: http://www.article-buzz.com

Is Your Resume DOA?

In the exciting alternative job change program, “The World’s Fastest Job Search System,” we recommend that your resume should be used more like a business card. You leave it behind after you’ve had an opportunity to meet face-to-face with a decision-maker.

Most people, however, think that their resume will find them a job. NOT! And if you write your resume with that objective in mind, it’s DOA!

You see, employers don’t make hiring decisions based on your resume. In fact, in most organizations, your next boss won’t even see your resume until someone else (e.g. human resources) has screened your document . . . and probably you personally as well.

So, if you don’t use your resume the way we recommend in our highly successful alternative approach, then what can you do?

Well, regardless of how you decide to use your resume, there are five basic guidelines you must observe if you want your resume to have any chance of being read. Follow them and you will dramatically move the odds in your favor.

1. Resumes are initially scanned (not closely read) in less than 50 seconds. Something about you either attracts attention in that timeframe or your resume is trashed.

2. Your resume must have an attention-grabbing headline . . . a quick summation of what you have to offer.

3. Do NOT write some self-serving objective statement. An employer could care less what you want to get out of this for your self. He/she is interested exclusively in what you can do to make the bottom line look better.

4. DO write a short summary statement saying very directly what assets, capabilities and strengths you bring to the table that can make a difference to the organization you’re interested in.

5. Keep your resume brief and impactual. One page is best. But never more than two pages. No long-winded recitation of your past accomplishments. Employers want to know how your achievements can make a difference to their needs. So tell them . . . and use quantifiable results to do it.

Targeting your resume to specific employers rather than shot-gunning it through mailings or internet postings helps to make your effort more effective. But, the best news is that the most effective system of all–using proven alternative and non-traditional strategies–can help you lock up a high-paying job offer in as little as 14 days!

Article Source: http://www.articlesauce.com

Paul Megan writes for EEI, the world-class pioneer in alternative job search techniques and non-traditional career advancement strategies . . . since 1985. Grab our stunning FREE REPORT: “How To Lock Up A High-Paying Job In 14 Days (Or Less)!” Click on RSS. www.fastest-job-search.com

Your Resume and What Employers Want to See

The recruiting industry has changed dramatically since the mid-90s when the Internet began to catch fire as a networking tool. Prior to the advent of online job boards such as CareerBuilder and Monster, your local newspaper had a monopoly on “help-wanted” advertising going back pre-Industrial Revolution (I remember a few years back being quoted $450 to run a 3-line ad over the weekend–for $50 more I could add a black border around it).

Resumes came to you via mail or fax and the ones that got your attention arrived on expensive paper with signed cover letters–the presentation gave you as much insight into the candidate as the resume itself did. As an independent recruiter you were only as good as your database of candidates (which for most recruiters consisted of a Rolodex of business cards or a drawer full of resumes). You actively sought out individuals to network with, collecting every resume thrown at you regardless of the positions you were working on at the time. “Got a cousin in advertising sales? Have him give me a call!”

I think employers were more willing to take risks with less qualified candidates then (let’s say, pre-1998) than they are now. Hiring managers and recruiters recognize that online resources can provide them with exponentially greater access to candidates today than in years past. It’s not that the talent pool is deeper, it’s just more accessible (and more public) than it’s ever been. So the same company that might have been willing to take a chance on a good candidate from a different industry ten years ago now wants someone whose experience matches their position as closely as possible.

I am a big believer that the best candidates for a particular position are the ones who would be taking a step up in their career by accepting. They are inherently motivated because they’re improving their pay, adding to their responsibilities and increasing their exposure. But today employers want over-qualified candidates; people who are actually taking steps down in their careers or at the very least, making lateral moves. Most employers will not admit to consciously doing this, mind you; but they do. They want to know with as much certainty as possible that the candidates have “been there and done that.” They want people with track records that mirror the exact challenges and expectations of their opening, particularly if they’re working with a third party recruiter to fill the position. The employer feels they’re paying big bucks for the recruiter to minimize their risk; therefore they should deliver candidates that are tailor-made for their role.

As an independent recruiter, it is my job to provide the client with the candidate solution they want. Every client knows the type of person they’re looking for, even if they’re not always able to describe them in great detail before we begin the search. They may need to evaluate a couple candidates before they can put into words their exact preferences, particularly when it’s a new position. Keep in mind the candidate solution our firm provides is the one defined by the client, and in my opinion it’s not always the one that may be the best long-term employment solution.

As I discussed in a previous article (Remember: You’re hiring them to work for you, not to date you), many hiring managers allow their own personal biases to influence they way they evaluate candidates (often referred to as “gut instincts”) resulting in bad hiring decisions. My job is to provide the client with candidates that have a documented track record of success. The majority of companies we work with want candidates either from their own industry or industries that are a close parallel. Drilling down even further, they want to know that the candidate’s daily, weekly and monthly activities overlap with the expectations of the new position. This is why having a thorough, well-defined resume is imperative for today’s job seeker looking to advance their career.

I believe the criticism that most resumes are long-winded, over-inflated exaggerations of unspectacular accomplishments is completely unwarranted. Coming from someone who looks at thousands of resumes a month, the average person is more likely to sell themselves short, thereby limiting their potential opportunities than they are to misrepresent themselves on paper.

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Career and Employment Articles: http://www.article-buzz.com

Alternative Job Search Alert for Grads . . . Avoid the Resume Trap!

If you’re graduating this year, this alternative job search alert is for YOU! You must avoid the resume trap!

What’s the resume trap?

Well, we’ve all been brought up to think that the success of our job campaign depends on our resume. So we spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to get it just right. There are a thousand websites that show you how to write an award-winning resume . . . each one has their own formula. But this is a resume trap!

The fact is your resume is the least important part of your job search. And for a couple very specific reasons.

First, no one is going to offer you a job based on your resume. Employers make hiring decisions based on person-to-person contact. This is where you establish your credibility by coming to the table ready to demonstrate that you’ve taken the time to learn something about the decision-maker and his/her organization. And you have a proposal for addressing needs.

Secondly, if you make your resume the focus of your job campaign, you’re creating an enormous amount of competition. Just think how many others just like you are throwing their hat in the ring via their resume. You want to be in a position where you can bypass the competition instead of contributing to it.

And this is where the alternative job search alert comes in. You need to focus your attention on something else to avoid this resume trap. And that something else is the hiring decision-maker. You want to spend all the time you can researching information about each organization you want to be part of. And further, you want background information about the decision-maker you’ll be meeting with.

These days, doing this kind of research is a piece of cake. You have fabulous online tools like Google as well as online access to most of the trade association and product literature. You have the Chamber of Commerce and other business-related organizations like service clubs.

Best of all you have your contacts–people you know–from friends, neighbors and relatives to religious, business and political leaders. They’re all available to answer your questions and even make introductions or referrals to hiring decision-makers.

This kind of proven alternative job search alert strategy is just part of the whole alternative job search and non-traditional career advancement movement. The bible of this job hunting revolution is “The World’s Fastest Alternative Job Search System.”

Armed with this amazing plan of action, you can count on meeting face-to-face with a hiring decision-maker of your choice in a matter of days. And you could lock up a high-paying job in as little as two weeks! It’s the alternative job search alert that virtually guarantees your success!

Article Source: http://www.articlesauce.com

Paul Megan writes for EEI, the world-class pioneer in alternative job search techniques and non-traditional career advancement strategies . . . since 1985. Grab our stunning FREE REPORT: “How To Find A Job In As Little As 14 Days!” Click on RSS for instant info! www.fastest-job-search.com

Four Simple Steps To Write A Successful Resume

Your resume is your calling card, and it’s usually the first impression a potential employer will have of you. Looking your best on paper is imperative if you want to capture the interest of someone who may end up calling you for an interview. Many people, however, tend to find writing a resume a daunting frustrating task, but breaking the steps down into four simple sections can turn a difficult task into something rather simple.

The first thing you can do for your resume is limit the length to one page, so as to hold the attention of your potential employer. In our fast-past world, attention spans are short, and you don’t want anyone growing bored with a resume that stretches on and on.

Start with the simplest part – the heading. At the top of your resume page, you should clearly indicate your name. Below your name should be your address and contact information, namely your telephone number and e-mail address. Make sure it’s clear where an employer can reach you, otherwise you’ll never get that call for an interview.

After the header, the task of writing a resume becomes a lot harder, as you’ve reached the point where you need to indicate your objective – namely the position you’re applying for. Make sure you use the exact words that your potential employer used in his employment offer for the desired position, so that there’s no mistake what you’re aiming for.

Never put your objective as being money or other such similar tactless things. You want to maintain your professional appearance at all times. Continuing onward from your objective and for the remainder of your resume, you’ll want to present each bit of information in a bullet-point form; a short but concise sentence that imparts all the information you want to mention in one to three lines.

The third section is your work history, where you list your past jobs and any major achievements you accomplished while employed at various businesses. If you’re new to the job market, you’ll probably want to include as much as possible.

If you can’t fit the entire resume on a single page, start cutting items from this section and focus on previous employment experience with the most relevance to the position you’re applying for. You need not limit this section entirely to employment though. Volunteer work, business ownership, independent sale of your work, and other experiences showcasing your abilities can be listed in this section.

The fourth and final section of a resume is your education. As with work history, relevance to the position you want counts, if the one-page limit requires you to cut certain items from your resume. Focus on the most pertinent education you have that could relate to the position you’d like to land, or highlight special training you’ve received that makes you an attractive asset to the company.

All that’s left once you’ve completed the four sections is editing and formatting your resume to have it appear as professional as possible. While a typo may not always mean the difference between life and death, it can lower a potential employer’s opinion of you, so be sure everything on your resume is correct. If possible, try running the text past some else to check for your mistakes. Once that’s done, all you have to do is send it off to a potential employer and hope for the best.

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Career and Employment Articles: http://www.article-buzz.com

How To Safely Bulk Up A Thin Resume

Many individuals starting out in the world of being an employee have to begin by pounding the pavement to find a job. Being presentable for an employment opportunity can be difficult, however, when you don’t have any work history.

Bulking up your resume to show potential employers that you do, indeed, have skills and assets their company needs really isn’t that hard, and with some initiative, filling up the employment history section of your resume can be done.

There are a lot of easy, mostly hassle-free ways to add to your work history. Volunteer work is a time-honored favorite, as it allows for work experience without needing any prior knowledge. Since most local and state government institutions are perpetually under-funded, they’ll assign drudge work to just about anyone. The tasks aren’t glamorous, but the experience is better than nothing. Keeping in mind that, when volunteering and also in general, good job references are important and you should avoid annoying or irritating your supervisor, regardless of whether you receive compensation or not for your duties.

Public events are another potential place to earn work experience through volunteering. Galas and tournaments to raise money for a cause usually require a sizable number of volunteers, and since these types of events last only a few days at most, there’s no long-term commitment required for work experience that looks good on a resume. If you can manage to land a volunteer position at one of these events that involves organization or management, even better – these skills are highly desired by potential employers.

Independent enterprise is another possible source of work experience. Any serious attempts and efforts you’ve put into a money-making enterprise, whether your own or someone else’s, show initiative and motivation. If you hauled speakers for your friend’s garage rock group during a public battle of the bands in your area, you can list that on your resume. If you wrote a poem that was accepted for a collection, even an unpublished small-press business, you can mark the information down on your resume as well. You can also make independent enterprise opportunities happen as well. Independent enterprise isn’t quite as easy to come across as opportunities to volunteer, but it’s a very good option for gaining work experience.

Though the really important, money-making diplomas will take years to earn, increasing your education section on your resume isn’t much harder than doing some volunteering or venturing into independent enterprise. Certification programs, from computer programming to private investigating, often require little more than forty or so hours of instruction and can be taken at most community colleges or similar educational facilities. Ideally, what you learn can be applied to the job you’re hoping to land, but courses and certifications also show initiative, something all employers are looking for in first-time job seekers.

Bulking up your resume using these ideas involve stealth opportunities – easy to overlook yet potent, if applied properly. Doubtlessly, there are other ways to improve a resume when you have no prior employment, but in truth, anything that shows that you have dedication, initiative, motivation, and ambition is good to add to your resume. With that in mind, go out there and see what opportunities you can come up with – there’s always something better than nothing.

Article Source: http://www.articlesauce.com

John Edmond owns and writes regularly for Careerbuilder Jobs where you can find more information and advice on all aspects of a writing a resume and job searching.

What Resume Writers Don?t Want You to Know!

I came across a fascinating statistic recently. Resume writers beware. This is information they’d prefer you didn’t know. Here it is.

Robert Half Executive Director, Katherine Spencer, said in Certification Magazine that it’s estimated that between 70 and 80 percent of all jobs are filled by people who first heard about the position through word of mouth.

Kinda shoots holes in the whole notion that your resume gets you a job. The amazing thing is this information is not new. We discovered along time ago that you don’t get a job with a resume. Why? Because today’s savvy employers rely on much more to make a hiring decision.

For example, they want to know that you’re interested enough in being part of the team that you’ve taken the time to learn something about the organization and its goals. They want to hear you discuss how you’re going to make a difference to their organization. Resume writers can’t provide that.

But the truly amazing part is that most job candidates who have acquired a face-to-face meeting with a decision-maker who could be their next boss did so because some person intervened–not a resume. That intervention could be information or referral provided by a relative, friend, neighbor, religious or political leader, service club member, someone they do business with, etc.

In fact, Ms Spencer’s statistic, which should give serious pause to resume writers, is an authentication of the “alternative job search” and “non-traditional career advancement” movement. That’s because we discovered many years ago that the job market follows the same marketing rules as the business market.

You don’t seriously grow a business by shot gunning and mass distributing untargeted information randomly to lots of people in the hope that someone will buy what you’re selling. Businesses don’t do that if they want to stay in business. Or they’re willing to burn up their budget while waiting to see who calls in.

Businesses succeed through person-to-person contact. It’s called sales. And the same thing is true of finding a job. Resume writers cannot provide a substitute for personal intervention. Nothing is going to happen for you based on a resume–unless you’ve got weeks and months to wait for results from this crapshoot.

But the good news is there’s a systematic approach that takes advantage of the real way the job market works. It uses 21st Century strategies and techniques to accomplish the goal of getting you a job offer . . . and in record time!

It’s built on the credible statistic that most jobs are ultimately obtained through word of mouth. This amazing system is really a simple, step-by-step approach using proven marketing principles. They’re easy to master. And you see results almost immediately. In fact, you can be meeting face-to-face with your next boss in a matter of days. And entertaining a good job offer is as little as two weeks! Resume writers go figure.

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Career and Employment Articles: http://www.article-buzz.com

Resume Writing and Preparation is Free Online

Creating a strong resume is a very important part of applying for a job, either online or off line. There are many resume writing services that will help you build an impressive resume for job interviews.

You can also learn how to write a resume for free by surfing the Internet for resume writing help. Many sites will show you tips and advice on choosing a resume style that works best for you.

You can also find samples of resumes, resume templates, resume software, and examples of resume cover sheets or letters.

Whether you?re looking to create a business resume, marketing resume, military resume, electronic resume, accounting resume, nursing resume, acting resume, sales resume, teacher resume, executive resume, student resume or a customer service resume, you can find great advice online with a little research.

When preparing your resume, keep in mind that employers use resumes for several purposes:

** Screen Applicants ? Most employers will only look at a resume for about 30 seconds to determine whether or not an applicant is a good fit for their organization.

** Develop Interview Questions ? Statements on your resume can be used to formulate questions they may ask during an interview.

** Communication Skills ? Employers want to see how well you express yourself.

** Qualifications ? Employers will reference your resume when making hiring decisions based on how closely your qualifications match their needs.

Writing a resume isn?t easy, but by studying various tips and advice, you can learn to create a type of resume that will get you one step closer to your ultimate goal of finding a great job.

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When to use the ‘functional format’ for your resume?

The Functional format Resume lists your employment history into sections that highlight areas of skill and accomplishment. In this video, Steven Chong, Trainer, shares when you should consider using the Functional format for your Resume. Looking for more career advice tips and articles? Click here – … jobsdb.com jobdb “jobsdb singapore” “resume tips” cv “functional resume” “car…

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