Jun 4 2018
Your New Career – Part 4: Your Resume

Boy time flies when you’re not writing.  It’s been a couple of weeks since my guest writer, Jordan Corn, posted his very astute piece, and its high time I get back to it!

This brings me to my next section, and it involves what is usually the first impression you will make to a prospective employer.  Your resume literally becomes your calling card, and you want them to call you back.
Now, there have been plenty of in-depth articles written a great deal about resume-writing.  I don’t intend to provide that level of detail; there are others who are much more qualified than I am to provide that.  However, I would like to provide some high-level pointers on the traits of a good resume.   And frankly, each year what looks good on a resume changes.  Remember that short time when applicants put small headshots of themselves on resumes?  Thank goodness that era is gone!
And now, in no particular order, some pointers on your resume.

  1. Minimize the colors.  I’ve recently been the recipient of resumes that were a Calliope of colors.  Reds and yellows and blues.   Kee your resume to black and white, or at worst case two muted colors.  You should be going for maximum readability and not vibrance.
  2. Drop your street address. Nowadays, all you need on the resume is your email address, your phone number, and the city/state where you live.  Keep it simple.  They’re not going to mail you anything!
  3. Use an email address that is professional. I covered this in a previous part.  Given that it’s so easy to create a new email address, pick something with your name on it, or something benign.  “TheDogPound@aol.com” is probably not a message you want to send.  Is that your rap name?  Are you a fan of the Browns?  What does it mean?  You don’t want it to mean anything, if possible.  Also, avoid mail domains that may reveal your age. “@aol.com” says “I got an email address in the early 1990’s and never looked back.  Avoid “hotmail”, “aol”, “myspace”, “earthlink”, “*.rr.com”, “msn.com”.  Stick to gmail, icloud or yahoo.com.
  4. List no more than about three or four previous employments.  Unless your vocation lends itself to short engagements (e.g. consultant), keep the number of previous employers short.  If you’ve held multiple positions at the same organization, perhaps group those under a single name.  Also, list years as the start and end date.  It’s not necessary to list months any longer.
  5. Leave certifications, education and accomplishments to the end.  Your experience is the most important part of your resume.
  6. Simply put “references available upon request”.  You should already know this one.
  7. No more than 3 pages.  Honestly, two should be sufficient, but three should be the absolute maximum length.  There may be some exceptions if you are applying for a C-level position.
  8. Spell and grammar check – and do it again!  Use the tools of your word-processor to spell and grammar check your resume.  Then have someone else read it.  And then someone else.  So many resumes I’ve received over the years have typos and incorrect punctuation.  Here you’re pitching that you’re detail-oriented and then you provide a resume where you use “your” instead of “you’re”.  Bad.
  9. Stay serious.  Unless you’re applying for a job as a comic writer (and maybe even if you are), avoid funny quips, images, sarcasm.  The resume is supposed to be a professional discussion of your experience.
  10. Optimize your resume for job scanners. Most organizations put your resume through an online scanner to do a quick review of it.  It’s vitally important that your resume is easily scannable.   JobScan will scan your resume for you and provide feedback http://www.jobscan.co  I would recommend using this or a similar organization to make your resume as easy to process as possible.   Below is a sample output from a resume scanning site.Resume scan sample
  11. Customize your resume for each job you apply for.  As noted in #10 above, your resume is likely to be sent through a resume scanning service.  This is then used to see if your skills match the job requirements.  It’s very important that you put words in your resume that meet the skill requirements of the job.
  12. Be honest on your resume. Most people tend to stretch the truth on their resume because often it’s difficult to tell whether an applicant actually has the depth of experience that is being sought.  However, if you start adding experience that you don’t have, you may ask a question in that competence area.  You don’t want to sheepishly have to answer that you really don’t have that experience.  Instead, keep your resume as honest as possible.
  13. Do include a cover letter in most cases. It can’t hurt to have a cover letter and in some cases, it can help.  Often a recruiter will scan the cover letter to determine whether the applicant has the appropriate level of writing skills.  Sometimes you can explain certain extenuating circumstances by using a cover letter.  But usually, it’s just considered professional to include one.  You can actually create a very simple cover letter template that you can re-use.  Make sure though that you customize it to include the date of submission, the name of the organization to which you are applying, and the position for which you are applying.
  14. No headshots, please.  That practice has thankfully died out.
  15. Drop the “Career Ambitions” section – or whatever you call it on your resume.  List a description of your strengths in a few sentences and let your experience reinforce those skills.  The days of “Looking for a whatever at a great place where I can show my whatever skills” are gone.
  16. Pay a company to write your resume.  This is well worth the money.

Other non-numbered points:

Do not despair if you don’t receive any feedback.  In the olden (golden) days, you would usually at least receive a rejection letter in the mail (or an email).  Nowadays, you may not receive anything.  Or you may not receive anything for months.  Part of the reason for this is that the application process has become so easy that a job opening may have hundreds of applicants.  Organizations typically can’t respond to each one.   Another cause of this is that the relationship between organizations and employees has degraded over the years and the modicum of effort required to provide a professional response to every applicant has been deemed not important enough.  In either case, log in to your Job Search Log (see the previous article) that you applied for the job and, if you don’t hear anything in a month, go on the job site and see if the position is still open.  If not, then you can assume that you will not be contacted about it. Note: in one case I received a response back three months later.  I had to go back to my job log to remind myself what position I had applied for.

Print out copies of your resume and bring them to your interviews. Always have spares in case someone forgets to bring one with you.  Make sure it’s printed on nice paper, though you don’t have to use expensive parchment anymore.

The perfect resume won’t get you hired. It doesn’t matter how good your resume is.  The thing that will get you hired is your interview (coming to a new part of this series soon).   The resume is just supposed to open the door for you to get a chance to speak to someone where you can use your charm, wit, and job experience to convince them that you’re the person they should hire.

You may have the perfect resume but still lose out to someone with a lesser resume but better experience.  Your resume is not a substitute for experience.

willrwills 0 Comments
Apr 24 2018
Your New Career – Part 1: So You Lost Your Job

If you’re reading this, you’re likely out of a job.  Maybe you were laid off, maybe something else.  Or maybe you’re in a dead-end job and you are longing for something better.  Maybe you’re more adventurous and you quit your current occupation without having another one waiting for you?  It doesn’t matter because this is about finding your next career opportunity.

There are certain people who go through life and experience hardships, and then success ,and are happy with celebrating their good fortune privately.

That’s perfectly acceptable. There are others who feel the same way but then have the urge to help others who were in the same circumstances.   I would fit into the latter category.   That’s why my blog contains articles on fixing PS3’s and touch-sensitive faders.

If I figure out something useful, I want to share it with others.  And that’s the purpose of the forthcoming articles.

Now I can’t guarantee that if you follow the suggestions I will present in this series that you will end up as gainfully and happily re-employed as I am.  But I know the knowledge I will impart can only make your circumstances better.  And some of it is not intuitive.

I took notes for myself through the re-employment process and based on those notes I think this will at least a six-part series, maybe more.  I won’t come back and edit this paragraph if the actual number is different.

Let me kick this off by saying that losing one’s job is painful and scary.

There are certainly financial implications. You may lose your health coverage, or it may suddenly triple in cost via COBRA.   It’s a “job” to search for a job; it takes a lot of effort. It can be twice as bad if you don’t have solid support behind you in your family.  But you can overcome it.

Be aware that nearly all of those people who were your work friends will remain your work friends. By that I mean, you will lose nearly all of them as friends.  Be prepared for about 10% – 15% of your former acquaintances reaching out to you to offer help after you are unemployed.   This could be because they are afraid for their own jobs and don’t want to be seen interacting with someone no longer working at their organization.  It could be they are uncomfortable or embarrassed and don’t know how to interact with you now that you don’t share that commonality.  There could be politics involved that would make it impossible for them to interact with you going forward.  Or in a few cases, you may no longer be useful to them now that you are not influential in their organization.  Don’t let any of that bother you.  The folks who do reach out to you are special and you should focus on them.  And focus on your network outside of work (more on that later…)

Finally, there is a book that helped me through the process and that I probably should have read long ago.  It was suggested by a former co-worker who turned out to be only a work friend unfortunately, but that did not devalue the suggestion.  The book is called The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (Amazon: The Power of Now ).  It’s described as a spiritual book, and in many ways it is, but it’s really about how to live your life in a way that puts the most emphasis on what is going on at the moment, and not dwelling in the past, or having your hopes hanging on some future event.  It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it.  And it’s somewhat difficult to read; I had to read it in parts.  I often go back and re-scan sections.  It puts things in proper perspective and makes for a much calmer experience.

Look for a new article every week or less and please let me know your thoughts or share your experiences.  Let me know if anything you read actually helped you get interviews or, hopefully, landed you a great new occupation.

Are you ready for your next big opportunity?

Well, let’s go find it.

willrwills 4 Comments
Jul 22 2017
The Unrivaled Leader : Part 8 – Hearing (and acting upon) Negative Feedback is Part of the Job

Ooof, it’s hard to take feedback, isn’t it?  As a layperson, you might be subject to negative constructive feedback from your boss.   You should, in my opinion, seek that sort of feedback.  All ☀️ sunshine☀️   and 🍭  lollipops 🍭 comments feel good but aren’t that useful. Constructive feedback from your boss,, assuming it’s legitimate,  provides specific information that you can act upon to improve your productivity.

But often that attitude changes when you become a manager.  For some, being given a management position appears to endorse an inner feeling of superiority.  “Hey, I’m something special and I must be doing all things perfectly for me to be given this position!”  For others, they may have not developed the skill of properly managing upward feedback.  In either case, not seeking and not being receptive to subordinate feedback can be career limiting.

(Note: I say “can” because there are plenty who have made a very successful career by only “managing up” and not caring much what their subordinates think.  But for this article, let’s assume you want to be a servant leader)

Let me make this clear, you desperately need feedback from your staff.  Without it, you’re plodding along, unaware that trouble is brewing and that often means it will rear up at the worst possible time, such as during a full staff meeting, when one of your staff members asks publicly about something you were unaware or unreceptive about.  (another note: in such a situation, your boss should know better than to endorse such feedback publicly and instead just receive it and promise to look into it).
Here are some basic thoughts about the feedback you receive:

A)  Is it Legitimate?
The most challenging part of hearing feedback is whether it is legitimate.  You have to consider whether it represents something that could be possibly true.   In nearly all cases, I think you’ll find that such feedback will have at least a shred of truth linked to it.  A small percentage will be feedback that is based on improper perception or a misunderstanding, but one could argue that this still makes it legitimate.  The perception of issues is as strong as the existence.  So you treat all feedback initially as being true.

B) How You Should Comport Yourself When Receiving It
Here’s a good guideline: pretend your staff person is you, and you are presenting this feedback to your boss.  How would you want your boss to treat you?  This is a good yardstick for many things you will say and do as a manager of people.  Treat yourself as the third person and consider what you would prefer.

In general, listen.  Receive the feedback.  Take notes.  Be receptive.  Repeat what you are hearing to make sure you understand.  These are basic listening techniques.
A couple of general rules:

  • Find a private place to receive feedback.  You want the provider to feel comfortable speaking freely and you may not want others to eavesdrop.
  • If the feedback is about something dangerous (“Janie’s got a gun!”) or something unethical (“Bill stole a computer”) or a violation of HR policies (“Jordan had porn up on his laptop”) you need to act upon this information right away – which often means contacting security or human resources.
  • You don’t have to offer immediate feedback, whether acceptance or repudiation.  You should use good judgment in this case, but I’ve found that taking the feedback, giving yourself time to think and explore the information you received, and then scheduling a follow-up is usually the better tact.  Blurting out “that’s not true!” or “the hell you say!” is not appropriate usually.
  • You may be receiving confidential or private information.  Don’t blab to others about what you’ve heard.
  • If the feedback is about you, before you reject it, ask yourself if there’s any chance it is true (whether in reality or by perception).  Nearly in all cases, you should be able to find the possibility that the feedback is reasonably valid.  And in general, you should again just listen and take notes rather than argue.

Bottom line is that if you wish to keep receiving feedback from your staff, you have to create an environment that is professional and receptive, even if you find out some of the feedback is not legitimate.   Blasting back at a staff member providing input will inevitably be shared with others in your group and presto, you now have a reputation.

C) Closure
In some cases, you may not be able to provide closure.  It may be that it’s information that requires follow-up or a timeline to receive additional feedback before you can determine legitimacy.  Let the person know whether you expect to be able to address their feedback in a short time or that it will take longer.

In many cases, beyond a verbal closure, you’ll want to provide an email/written closure – especially for serious circumstances. This both provides the individual with well written (hopefully!) feedback and provides you a paper trail should this discussion take an awkward turn.

D) Formal versus Informal
You’ll want to have both formal and informal communication paths for feedback from your staff.

Formal

  • Set up periodic staff meetings that have a good chunk of the meeting related to receiving feedback or Q&A.  You don’t want it to become mob rule, but having a place where people can comfortably provide feedback is useful.
  • Set up meetings with groups of your staff in a casual place to get specific feedback.  Mix and match the group so that you have people from various disciplines and with various personalities.  Don’t pull together a group of all introverts, or all extroverts.  I called mine “Fireside Chats with Bill” – though we didn’t actually have a fireplace in our cafe.
  • Set up a Comments Box where staff can write anonymous feedback and place it in this box – and remember to check it (!)
  • Perform a periodic “climate survey” where you ask questions that can be used to determine staff sentiment.

Informal

  • Sometimes you can rely on your Administrative Assistant to be your “ears on the ground” and alert you to brewing trouble.  It takes an Assistant who is close to staff and isn’t perceived as a shill.
  • Use peers you have in other departments to listen for scuttlebutt.  Return the favor, of course.

E) Destructive Feedback
There are going to be times, hopefully very infrequently, where you’ll hear feedback from someone simply trying to be destructive to the department, a project, a team member, or you.  This is the most difficult feedback to manage appropriately for two reasons: 1) it’s very hard to listen patiently to severely stilted, personal, and negative feedback, 2) you may not be able to address this person’s concerns or make them stop providing inappropriate feedback.

Part of this can be managed by making sure the hiring process weeds out such staff people.  In a future article, I will discuss my “no jackasses” policy related to hiring the right kinds of staff people.

Assuming this person made it through your “no jackasses” policy (or was inherited), you may not be able to assuage this person’s concerns.  If this person is unable to accept that their feedback is either not actionable or illegitimate, and/or this person attempts subversive behavior, you may need to work through your Human Resources department to correct this behavior or ultimately release this resource.

If the person shouts or loses their temper, you have to quickly decide whether you cut that session short or whether you make an attempt at calming the person down.  These days, you also have to be aware of whether violence upon you is impending.  In such cases, it’s best to capitulate in order to defuse the situation, and then head on down to HR (or Security) for assistance.  Obviously, do not get into an altercation with your staff member, whether physical or verbal.

F) Feedback That Cannot Be Acted Upon
You may receive feedback that you cannot act upon or resolve.  It may be general feedback that would require much more senior authority than you to address.  It may be feedback that is legitimate but cannot be resolved due to workplace policies.  It may be feedback about you that, to address, would force you to deviate from what you believe is the right behavior or policy.
In any of these cases, and others, you should be able to document the feedback and let the person know that you cannot (or are prohibited from) addressing the request.  You have to count on this person to be reasonable and empathetic (reminder, “no jackasses”).

If you’re a person that never accepts feedback, then it will be very difficult to appear that you want it.

If you receive suggestions that need to be mitigated at a higher level than you, do a follow-up with your senior management if the suggestions are appropriate.  Let the requester know the progress.

G) Public Dissemination of Feedback
There may be some suggestions or feedback that you receive that you should or could share publicly with your staff.  This could be during a staff meeting or via email.  Make sure you get approval from the provider to share this information (perhaps anonymously) with others before you do.  Sharing suggestions reinforce that you’re receptive to such things.  You may even receive personal feedback that you can share with the group, for example:

“Recently someone suggested that the strict working hours I’ve been enforcing have been causing stress to those folks that have long distances to commute.  I can see where inadvertently this is the case and thus have agreed to allow people an extra 30 minutes to arrive in the morning.”

Sometimes you can read suggestions out loud, but be prepared to hear some stiff feedback or unexpected notes.  In either case, keep a sense of humor.

Summary
Everyone wants their feedback heard, and so do you.  When you approach your boss with suggestions, you’d prefer she/he is receptive and supportive.  You should be the same way with your staff.  Lead by example, be humble, and make them know that your job as a manager is to give them the tools and support that are necessary to do the job, and then get out-of-the-way.

Will R Wills 2 Comments