Listing Your Benefits – Putting Only Your Best Information on a Resume

Barbara Pewterschmidt: “Honey, we’re rich again! I divorced Ted Turner and took half his money. We own half of CNN!”

Carter Pewterschmidt: “Hooray!”

Barbara Pewterschmidt: “And TNT.”

Carter Pewterschmidt: “…Neat.”

Earlier we wrote about the importance of limiting the amount of information on a resume. Your resume is designed to sell yourself – it is a sales document with you as the product. When you create your resume, you need to ask yourself: Will this information make the employer want to hire me more. If the answer is yes, you put it in. If it is anything from “no” to “probably not,” you take it out.

Most resumes have a lot of wasted information. Applicants put jobs that have no importance to the employer, accomplishments that are irrelevant, and so many clichés you wonder if they didn’t just get their resume from a random cliché generator.

Yet even resumes that understand the importance of good information often make mistakes. One of the most common mistakes is to list “features” of the product (you) that, while they make you look like a better employee, that effect is marginal at best.

How to Sell Your Features

More does not necessarily mean better. In fact, it can be worse. Let’s look at this using a product example. Say that you are looking to buy a cereal, and you look online to see the cereal’s benefits. There are two product descriptions, both for the same project. Which of these makes you want to buy the product more?

Product Description 1:

• 100% of your daily value of 27 vitamins and minerals.
• Tastes delicious.
• Made with organic ingredients.

Product Description 2:

• 100% of your daily value of 27 vitamins and minerals.
• Tastes delicious.
• Made with organic ingredients.
• Corn was milled using most modern technological equipment.
• Staff that milled corn recently got salary raises.
• Hand washing stations at manufacturing facility are well maintained.
• Shipping coordinators are handpicked for memory and reliability.
• Cereal is only shipped to retail companies with good business ratings.
• Cereal bags are clear so the cereal can be seen when the box is opened.
• Box tops are designed to rip open easily….

Reviewing the Two Sales Descriptions

Both the first and second description are designed to sell you the same product. Yet the second description lists off dozens of additional benefits. Knowing that the staff is well paid and that the box tops open easily is nice. The question, though, is do you really care? Does that additional information actually make you want to buy that product more? For most people, the answer is “no.” The first three benefits were enough to sell the product, and the rest is superfluous information.

Possible Downsides of Listing Many Unimportant Benefits

Still, even though the benefits are clearly useless information for most people, there may be the occasional person that sees those extra benefits and goes “okay, this is a cereal I can get behind.” So the question is: Is there any harm to listing that many benefits, even if they are only of minimal importance?

The answer is yes. There are a lot of possible downsides to listing that much information. The most common negatives include:

• Most important benefits are skimmed over, because the interviewer is short on time.
• Most important benefits are forgotten after a less important benefit is read.
• Most important benefits seem less important because they are part of a sea of uselessness.
• Interviewer is bored with you, confused, and forgets your best qualities.

There are a lot of reasons that listing many benefits that aren’t that relevant to the employer do more harm than good. For every one or two employers that think all of that information is useful, there are 100’s of others that don’t, and the ones that do think it is useful will still probably be impressed by your few best points.

Turning This Information Into Action

The key point to all of this is that when you write your resume, every single item you put in (your accomplishments, your education – even your employers) must do the best possible job selling yourself to the employer. If it doesn’t, it shouldn’t go in the resume, even if that information is still a mild benefit.

Take Away Tips

• More is not always better.
• Limit your information to only your best sales points.

How to Improve the Chances of Your Resume Getting Selected in a Semantic Search

In the last post, we looked at what a “Semantic Job Matching Engine” actually is, and how it is quickly changing the application process. Your resume now must contain good information, otherwise the semantic matching engine will not know that you are a good candidate for the job.

Changing Your Resume

There are several things you can do to improve your resume – and several things you cannot. You cannot make up experiences, and you cannot claim you have skills that aren’t there. If the hiring manager searches for those skills, you’re out of luck. In addition, there is no surefire way of designing a resume for the matching algorithm. The algorithms are too complex, and generally unbreakable. Even if you could break it, you wouldn’t know what the interviewer is searching for in order to guarantee you show up in the results. You can only give your best guess.

Adding Keywords With Accomplishments

Though the specific keywords matter less, keywords are how a matching system learns what you know and what you don’t know. Recruiters across the world advise that you put accomplishments on your resume, such as:

• Improved sales by 500%.

They are correct. You should have accomplishments all over your resume. However, you should not allow the accomplishment to stand alone. The algorithm does not know how important “500%” is without additional information. Add words. Good words, not cliché words. For example:

• Improved sales by 500% by instituting “authentic relationship building” techniques.

The keywords will improve the content of your resume, which will improve your chance of showing up in searches.

Replace Objective Statement with Professional Summary

This is a no brainer. The professional summary is a great way to add content into your resume without ruining the impact of your accomplishments. Use the professional summary to sprinkle great words throughout your resume.

Tailor Your Resume to Each Job

Finally, your best bet of showing up in a search is to make sure your resume is written with the job, job description, and probable tasks in mind. If you are applying for a job in Networking and your resume focuses on your expertise in web design, you are not going to show up in networking searches. Each job has its own expectations and needs, so you should review each job description and company and write your resume based on what you believe they value.

No Perfect Formula

There is no way to know exactly how to change your resume, or whether the company is going to use a semantic matching engine at all. The best you can do is design your resume with the semantic search in mind, but make sure that it is still impressive to human readers. That is the best way to give yourself a chance of getting the job.

Take Away Interview Tips

• Use professional summaries.
• Add good words as needed.
• Cross fingers and don’t break any mirrors.

What Are Semantic Job Matching Engines?

Employers have a limited amount of time to find good candidates. Unfortunately, the job market is dense, and as soon as a job is posted, the employer is bombarded with hundreds and thousands of resumes and cover letters that they need to review in order to find the right candidates.

Hiring managers need to make their jobs easier. So they are looking at new technologies that help limit the candidate pool for them, rather than force them to look at every resume by hand. One such method is using what is known as “Semantic Job Matching Engines”

Introduction to Semantic Search

Semantic search is like “Keyword Search 2.0.” When you search for something on Google, like “Awesome Interview Tips,” you are going to come up with a lot of websites that have that exact phrase. You are not guaranteed, however, to come up with websites that have any relevance to what you are looking for. All you know is that they have the phrase. They may not have the information.

Why?

Because to a keyword search engine, keywords are nothing more than a series of words. They have no meaning to the search engine. If I searched for “Kickass Interview Tips,” I would probably get a different website, even though the meaning of the words are the same, because the search engine doesn’t know that “Kickass” and “Awesome” and “Everyday Interview Tips” are synonymous (wink).

Searching By Meaning

Semantic search is the next step. When you use a semantic search engine, the search engine brings up results that are tailored to what you are looking for based on the meaning of your search, rather than the exact phrase. This, ideally, gives you much more accurate results.

What This Means to the Job Seeker

Job seekers are slowly becoming more and more affected by semantic job search engines. These search engines use their algorithms to search your resume for words that imply the meaning behind the search. So if the hiring manager wants something with leadership experience, the algorithm will search resumes to find words that either directly mean or imply that the individual has that experience. Then it brings up those applicants directly to the hiring manager, giving them far fewer resumes to view.

In the next post, we will look at what steps you need to take to improve the likelihood of showing up in a semantic job search engine.

Take Away Tips

• Resumes are changing.
• You absolutely must spend time creating your resume.

How Bullet Points Should Appear on Resumes

We can talk for hours about the content to put into each resume bullet point. Action verbs, accomplishments, etc… You can find a lot of information on those topics on this website and others. What we are going to go over today is how the bullet points on your resume should be formatted.

Yes, the format of your bullet points affects how well they are received by the interviewer. Remember, the main purpose of the bullet point on a resume is to draw the eye of the interviewer and use more powerful language. The problem is that if you format these bullet points poorly, you negatively affect how well they draw the interviewer’s eye. The best way to show this is with an example.

Example #1: One Sentence Too Long

Let’s say you have 3 accomplishments you want to list on your resume, but one of these accomplishments will take over a line to explain. There are two ways this can appear on your resume:

• Motivated a staff of 15 to riot against the company.
• Organized the largest company-wide walkout in United States history and possibly around the entire universe because we rock.
• Destroyed the entire economy in the state of Michigan.

Compare that to this:

• Motivated a staff of 15 to riot against the company.
• Destroyed the entire economy in the state of Michigan.
• Organized the largest company-wide walkout in United States history and possibly around the entire universe because we rock.

It may not be obvious at first, but if you take a step back and look at these bullet points, the second example draws the eye much better. That is because the word “destroyed” blends in with the second bullet point in the first example. It draws less attention, and you want every bullet point to draw the eye of the interviewer. Also, having the 3 bullets together makes them look much cleaner. Even though the difference is small, this way of formatting your bullet points is better.

Ideally, all of your bullet points should fit on one line. However, if you have a particularly long sentence, try to move that sentence to the end of the bullets, so that it does not cause another bullet point to blend with the end of the sentence.

Example #2: Line Length

This is a lot more optional, and should be based entirely on your own personal discretion. However, human beings like patterns, and they dislike awkwardness. Compare these two again:

• This is a much longer sentence than the two sentences that are going to come after.
• This is a short sentence.
• This is a medium sized sentence that is bigger than #2.

Or:

• This is a short sentence.
• This is a medium sized sentence that is bigger than #1.
• This is a much longer sentence than the two sentences that come before it.

Again, it may not look like much, but the second example does look a little cleaner. A lot of this will depend on your template, but you always need to remember to look at your resume as though it were an art piece, and that includes the order to place the sentences in bullet points.

It will not have much effect, but maximizing your resume’s potential is not just about giving it thorough makeovers. Sometimes the smallest change may be what you need to put yourself ahead of the competition.

Take Away Tips

• Bullet point formatting is not that important, but still plays a part in your chances.

5 Resume Design Tips

The content of your resume may play the strongest role in your ability to get the job, but the design of your resume plays a strong role in whether or not your resume gets a glance in the first place. Resumes that are designed on boring, terrible, or overused templates blend in with the crowd. The template and design that you use do effect how well your resume is received and how much of your content gets a look by the hiring manager.

Resume Design Tips and Strategies

• Clean is Better than Cluttered

One of the keys to a good resume design is that there is not much of a design at all. If you look right now at your Microsoft Word templates, you will see a variety of templates that have a lot of boxes and colors and lines, and you are expected to put your information within all of those boxes. These templates are too fancy. You want the focus to be only on your words.  A simple, clean template is always a better decision.

• Fonts Should Be Professional

The best fonts are going to be sans serif professional fonts. Calibri and Ariel, for example, are easy to read fonts that do not look awkward or computerized. Times New Roman is “okay,” but it is not as clean as sans serif fonts. Comic Sans is a terrible, terrible choice.

• Use Bullets

It cannot be emphasized enough. Bullet points draw the eye far better than paragraphs. Paragraphs may be tempting, but bullet points are simply a better option and may also help you save space. Use bullet points.

• Look At the Impact of Your Layout

Bullet points are only the first step towards drawing the eye of the interviewer. You also need to make sure that your bullet points look clean. In other words, you have to make sure that the way you have written your bullet points still draws the eye of the interviewer. Look at the following two examples:

-          This is a really short bullet point.

-          This is a much longer bullet point that is arguably too long but if you really have something to say then it is okay.

-          This is a really short bullet point.

Now compare that layout to this:

-          This is a really short bullet point.

-          This is a really short bullet point.

-          This is a much longer bullet point that is arguably too long but if you really have something to say than it is okay.

Because you have moved the long sentence last, the bullet points look much, much cleaner. All of the bullets are together, without spacing, and the end of the long sentence does not cause the 3^rd bullet point to blend in. The interviewer’s eye will go to all three bullet points.

• Look At Your Resume Like an Art Piece

Once you have completed your resume, print it out and look at it from far away. Does it look clean, professional and nice? Or does it look like everything is awkward? Stepping back and looking at your resume as though it was a design and not a resume is a good way to make sure that your resume will be well received by the interviewer. If your resume printed on two pages, where the second page was only the last part of the “skills” section, then as an art piece it would not look very strong would it?

Resume design may not be the most important part of your resume, but it certainly plays a role, and you need to take that role seriously.

Take Away Tips

• Pay attention to how you design your resume.
• Think clean, professional, and smooth.

QA – Wooing Job Recruiters With Video Résumés

Question:

Recently I heard rumors that people are creating video resumes instead of standard resumes. Do you think that video resumes are a good idea?

Answer:

That’s a tough one. Currently no, they are probably not a good idea. Before we get into why they will not be as effective, let’s recap what a video resume actually is.

What is a Video Resume?

A video resume is essentially any interactive, moving resume. That means that a video resume could be a video of you describing your work history, or it could be a PowerPoint presentation about your best features. As long as it moves on its own, it is a video resume.

Problems

Elle Woods from the movie “Legally Blonde” uses a video application to get into Harvard Law School. The video shows her wearing a bikini and floating over a pool, and discussing her work history through examples of what she did as a sorority sister. It was designed for parody, as she got into the school solely because the all-male reviewers thought she looked good in a bathing suit.

Still, it highlights some real problems – namely the ability to discriminate against the applicant long before the applicant is selected for the interview. Age, sex, race, marital status, attractiveness – these are all things that will be highlighted if you create a video resume of yourself. Though these may play a part in a job interview as well, it is easier for you to overcome this discrimination in person, especially if it is unintentional discrimination. On a video, you are not there to win over the employer. You are simply giving the employer an opportunity to discriminate.

In addition, the quality of your camera, your acting ability, and the website you use to host your video will all play a major role in how your video is received. You already have enough things working against you when you supply a resume. Why would you want to add some 100 more variables?

Possible Benefits

There is going to be a time when video resumes are more commonly accepted, so it is a piece of technology worth keeping an eye on. That time is not now. However, there may be a few potential uses. For one thing, a presentation that does not show your face may have its uses in competitive positions, but currently there is no generally accepted method of creating these presentations. Should you simply make your resume into a PowerPoint presentation? If you are going to do that, why wouldn’t you simply submit a resume?

For now, stay away from video resumes. They are a strange new way of creating resumes that does not appear to have any benefit over a traditional resume. Still, keep an eye out for the changing economic landscape. There may be a day that video resumes are more widely accepted. If we catch any word of a valuable way to create a video resume, we will be sure and mention it here.

Take Away Tips

• Don’t create video resumes

Additional Links

• Wall Street Journal article on video resume websites
• Article on video resume legal implications

How to Write a Résumé That Isn’t Annoyingly Terrible

Yesterday we reviewed “The Resume Kit” by Richard Beatty. Today we will address an article he wrote for the Wall Street Journal that entitled “These Resume Gaffes Do Immediate Damage.”

For a single job, resumes are compiled by the hundreds. The hiring manager for these jobs is one of two people:

• Someone that works for a large corporation handling many open jobs.
• Someone that works in some random department that is taking time out of their busy schedule to hire someone for an open role.

Either way, the person is busy. Very busy. They do not have time to go through a bunch of terrible resumes that belong to people that are qualified for the position. If you make some blatant and terrible mistakes, you’re out, even if the rest of your resume is sound and your experiences are vast. Here are several examples of mistakes that make an annoying resume.

• Long, Extensive Work History – If you held ten jobs, and you list ten jobs on your resume, chances are you are immediately out of the running. The only reason an employer would go through all of those jobs is if each one is extremely relevant and you are applying to some type of executive position, and even then it is unlikely. Keep your resume brief using only your relevant jobs.
• Sloppy Design – If you chose bad fonts or poor colors or you use blocky paragraphs, or anything that detracts from your content, you are going to be ignored pretty quick. Resumes that are poorly designed are extremely annoying, and no hiring manager wants to search to find the important points. They should jump off the page.
• Clichés – Clichés are unbearably annoying for hiring managers. If they read a million resumes that all say the same thing, they are going to find yours and want to gauge their eyes out. Be original and unique, and try not to sound like everyone else.

These are just a few of the many irritating things that hiring managers find in resumes. However, the above three represent the most common and annoying mistakes. Avoid them on your resume and you will at least pass the first inspection.

Take Away Tips

• Avoid clichés
• Use an attractive design
• Shorten your work history.

Additional Links

• David Silverman Article

Should You Remove Jobs You Held Short Term on Your Resume?

Resumes are your chance to sell yourself to a company. You want to make sure that the employer knows the experiences you have that should win you the position. It is like a sales letter for your employment.

Like a sales letter, you should only include the features that are going to win you the job. You have a limited amount of space to try to win over the recipient, and you need to use that space as wisely and as impressively as possible.

Lots of Short Jobs

It is not uncommon to find that you have a number of different jobs that you held for only a short amount of time, especially if you are a young worker that was employed through college. It is tempting to want to add these jobs to your resume. Most of the time you should not. Employment that you held for less than a year does not always speak highly to your value as a candidate:

• Short term employment makes it look like you can’t hold down a job.
• Multiple positions make it look like your career has no focus.
• Temporary positions do not appear to be great job experiences.

Ideally, you should only list either the most recent or longest term jobs you have held.

When to Remove Jobs

You should remove these jobs from your resume when they meet any of the following criteria:

• They are irrelevant for the position.
• Removing them will not cause a massive gap in employment.
• You have held several jobs for a longer period of time.
• You do not have any major accomplishments at these positions.

As you can see, most of the time you will remove these jobs from your resume. However, there may a reason to keep the job on your resume. Perhaps one of your short term jobs is your only job that was relevant for the position. When that is the case you should consider switching to a skill based resume, or doing your best to make it appear as though you held the position for longer (perhaps by removing the months from the “time employed” section of your resume so that employers cannot see how long you were actually employed, only the year(s) you were employed.

There are very few instances where you will want to place short term positions on your resume. See if you can omit them without affecting your job chances, and look at skill based resumes or fancy workarounds if you are convinced that listing the job is necessary.

Take Away Interview Tips

• Short term employment is not very useful on a resume.
• Omit any jobs that will not help your chances.



A Hiring Manager’s Perspective on Hiring in Today’s Economy

People lie. They lie a lot. When they are not lying, they are often stretching the truth so far that any farther and the truth would snap. On resumes, especially, people tend to put “facts” about themselves that may have some semblance of truth, but are exaggerated to the point of being essentially false.

Jeremy Bolt from Bruce Clay addresses this issue in his blog post:

“When you interview, you get about half of what the resume said, thanks to the resume writers and online resume tools. Then what you end up hiring is about half of what was represented in the interview. So 25% of the initial resume.”

In his post, Jeremy explains how these resume falsities can cause serious issues in the hiring process. People don’t know his field, so the company ends up spending countless hours giving each new employee an extensive training despite the “qualifications” they listed in their resume.

What We Can Learn From This Experience

There are a lot of interesting tips to take away from Jeremy’s blog post:

• Resume Writing (/job-interview-help/resume-examples) – It’s not a good idea to lie. You end up starting your employment off on the wrong foot. Instead, share your real experiences and tailor them for each job so that employers know what they are getting.
• Job Interviews – Stretching your experiences can cause you a lot of problems. It is better to admit a lack of knowledge than claim you have knowledge you do not actually have. Yes, you may get the job, but you are also asking for a quick layoff and the risk of being ostracized from future positions.
• Expect Testing – We see in Jeremy’s post that he recommends significant testing to ensure that an applicant can handle the work they are presented with. In today’s economy, you can expect this trend to catch on. If you want to continue to compete, it is important to take classes and make sure you learn the material, so that you can pass any test and be ready for the job.

Stretching the truth will always be a part of the application process, but companies can no longer afford to waste time on candidates and employees that are misrepresenting their skills. Do your best to be honest. You can talk yourself up as much as you want, but the accomplishments you list and discuss should truly be accomplishments.

Take Away Interview Tips

• Stretching the truth may help get you the job, but it will also cause you to lose it.
• Companies will soon find new ways to make sure you are qualified.

Free PDF – Resume Tips Available for Download

At Everyday Interview Tips, we strive to bring you more than just basic interview strategies. We hope to be a one stop resource to help you find a job in today’s difficult economy.

Every month we will create free informative guides with unique and interesting job interview tips and strategies to help you earn employment at some of today’s leading companies.

This month, we have a free resume PDF download available with uncommon resume writing strategies designed specifically for recent graduates.

In this month’s guide, titled “Beyond the Basics: Additional Facts About Resumes for Graduates” you will find:

• Information on Different Types of Resumes
• Information on Keyword Resumes and the Future of Applicant Review
• Information on How Graduates Can Improve their Resume and Avoid Mistakes

“Beyond the Basics: Additional Facts About Resumes for Graduates” provides great information designed to help graduates that are looking for employment get an introduction to useful resume tips and tricks designed specifically for those about to enter the workforce.

Get Your Free Resume Tips PDF:

Download your copy of “Beyond the Basics: Additional Facts About Resumes for Graduates”

For those who are new to the site, don’t forget to sign up to get free interview tips sent straight to your inbox. Also, bookmark www.everydayinterviewtips.com for more information on job interviews, resumes, employment and more.