Every job seeker
should understand they are a salesperson. For some this is difficult to accept
because they are not salespeople by profession and do not want to be. The truth
is even some sales professionals have difficulty selling themselves as opposed
to a product or service.
Regardless, here
are some things one must think about when searching for a new job.
Selling requires
collateral marketing materials, the resume and cover letter in the case of
job seekers. These collateral materials are advertisements.
Advertisements outline
the benefits of buying a product or service. The objective is to entice people
to buy. The resume and cover letter must do the same thing.
Job
seekers offer their services to a hiring manager (the buyer). The hiring
manager is the person who has a need to fix. The greatest search success is
achieved by those who can pinpoint that key need and show how they can fix it.
That is sales!
When creating
your advertisements, think like the hiring manager, the customer for your
services. He or she is the decision maker and the most important person to
impress. Put yourself in his or her shoes and ask yourself this: If I were the
hiring manager what would I want to see on my resume that would make me want to
interview this person.
Hint: Primarily it
is your accomplishments and the results of your work. Your responsibilities and
the companies you may have worked for are interesting but are usually not
likely to get you an interview by themselves.
So here is some
advice: Your resume needs to sell the benefits of hiring you. It must be easy
to read quickly. So cull out words and statements that don’t really address the
requirements of the job. Particularly, leave out fluff, things that are not
pertinent to the job. Once people begin to read fluff they tend to lose
interest quickly which makes your sale much more difficult. In addition to
things that are not germane to the advertised position, fluff includes those
self-assessing adjectives that say how great you are. Instead of making those
statements, use your accomplishments and results to demonstrate how good you
are without saying so.
It is also
important to use an easy to read font and type size. An excellent choice is 12
pt Arial, but no less than 11pt. Stay with one inch side margins and no more
than 2 pages.
Do not write in
paragraphs; they are not easy for the hiring manager to skim through.
Finally, make
sure you will score high if your resume is subjected to ATS scrutiny. Get help
if you do not know how to do that. It is not intuitively obvious what you might
do unwittingly in creating your resume that will cause you to be rejected
regardless of how well you fit the job requirements.
Karl has been providing resume critiques
for job seekers at no cost since 1999.