Laboring under the delusion that one’s resume must, at all costs, be contained to a single page, too many applicants make the mistake of boiling their accomplishments down to succinct, trite phases.  While it’s still perfectly acceptable to present yourself as “an avid team player,” “bottom-line oriented,” and “embraces challenge,” it’s far more effective to expand upon those concepts in the text of the resume.

And if you opened this article hoping to find some of those choice phrases, we’re sorry to say that you are out of luck.   For your resume to truly shine, you need to take an objective look at your career in order to differentiate specific accomplishments from day-to-day responsibilities, and then highlight those achievements.   If you don’t, your resume will wind up sounding too much like those of your competitors — the very people you’re aiming to beat out for a job!   For example, instead of saying, “Reduced costs,” you might indicate, “Saved $1,500 annually by identifying and utilizing an alternate vendor,” or “Reduced labor expenditures by $65,000 annually by cross-training staff in diverse work procedures.”

If, for instance, your forte is sales, you are expected to increase sales and sustain existing business; that is your primary job function.  So, hone in on an accomplishment, such as, “Secured the business of a $500K per annum account on the verge of signing with the competition.”  Or, “Convinced a new account to sign a long-term (four year) sales contract.”

Oops; we just gave you some choice phrases after all!  They are simply to illustrate how you might best craft a powerful resume by expanding tried-and-true phrases to include your own personal accomplishments.  Every single employee, regardless of job function, has accomplishments.  Dig deep, if you must, to unearth and examine yours objectively.  Polish the words that will highlight your achievements, and your resume will shine like a diamond among a pile of coal. 

Given the plethora of often conflicting advice emerging from self-professed career specialists, one would assume that the answer to this pressing question is “Yes.”  Thankfully, in accessing this site, you benefit from our thirty years of experience in crafting career-advancement documents, including our expertise in monitoring and implementing the resume writing trends that make sense.  Therefore, our answer to this question is, “No!”

Think about it.  If you were to totally customize your resume for every single job in which you are interested and qualified, you would never get a moment’s sleep.  All you can honestly do is highlight your skills and accomplishments to fullest advantage.  If you invent proficiencies or lie about your successes, how will you support these fallacies during an interview?  More importantly, how will you support them if you ace the interview and land the job?

Some pundits believe that hybrid style resumes work best.  This format begins with a strong summary or profile, flows into a functional (skills-based) resume, and then follows with a traditional chronology (employers and their locations, dates of employment, job titles, and bulleted job functions).  While a hybrid strategy does seem to cover all the bases, you can kiss that so-called “one page resume rule” goodbye. Proof positive of how the “professionals” offer you conflicting, confusing, and erroneous information.  In truth, there is no such thing as a cookie cutter resume; no one resume will be an exact fit for each and every job.

How, then, do you give employers the information and phraseology that they seek when culling the thousands upon thousands of resumes that cross their information systems?   One way is to pepper your resume liberally with keywords that “pop.”   We recommend that you include keywords and key terminology early on in the resume.  Use bullet points, and then expound upon these keywords in the actual text of your resume.  Understanding that job descriptions use very specific terms, know that you are allowed some “play” with these terms, provided your job responsibilities truly reflect what the employer seeks. 

Therefore, if you have engaged in direct sales, as in a retail environment, you may not have been required to cultivate long-term relationships with customers.  But, you executed your job in a manner designed to invite repeat business.  So, if the job description reads “business development” and not “sales,” you may substitute “business development” for “sales” as one your keywords.

Similarly, if the job description calls for “logistics and warehouse management” and you were an inventory control supervisor, you may substitute the phrase “supply flow process,” which requires the same essential skill sets as “logistics and warehouse management.”  Odds are, you not only controlled cycle counts but you received and stored the inventory and facilitated its movement through the warehouse, onto the loading dock, and out to customer locations.  

“Marketing” is also an extremely broad term.  It can mean the planning of major marketing strategies as new product/service roll-outs, or the actual execution of these plans, which is more sales-oriented in nature.  When speaking of in-store marketing, the correct term is “visual merchandising” (design and set up of product displays in accordance with the company’s standards).   The term “merchandising” has, over the past fifteen or so years, come to demonstrate more of a purchasing and product allocation function.  So you see why you have that play with your words, provided your skills essentially fit the job description!

Instead of beating your head against the wall the next time you are tempted to totally rewrite your resume for one particular job description … and do it again and again, ad infinitum … take our advice and simply edit what you have on your resume.

If you feel that a job is absolutely ideal for you, reflecting skills you may have gained in another industry, the cover letter is the place for you to explain why you are that perfect fit.  Unlike the resume, the letters flows in narrative form, providing you with opportunities to really sell yourself and secure the interview.

Keywords and key phrases are those that reflect specific job functions and are industry-specific.  To illustrate, an accountant who labors in or who wishes to target the retail industry could select keywords/key phrases such as Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, General Ledger Accounts, Financial Statement Preparation, Inventory Analysis and Valuation, and Vendor Discount Programs/Terms.  While the first four phrases can and do apply to accountants in any field, the latter two will resonate further with retailers, whose revenue streams are linked directly to levels and condition of inventory, and who continually jockey for discounts with vendors, either in terms of special promotions or agreements to pay their invoices within stipulated, usually abbreviated, timeframes.

The presence of keywords in your resume is critical if you wish, literally, to be identified as a viable candidate.  The majority of recruiters and human resource professionals employ applicant-tracking software, also known as talent acquisition management software.  Thus, when scanning resumes electronically, those resumes rich with keywords and key phrases immediately pinpoint those applicants possessing the proper skill sets and, if applicable, industry-specific knowledge and background.

We can’t overstate this enough.  Most new employees are found in this manner, through the use of technology.  There are simply too many job seekers, for too few jobs, to allow hiring authorities to peruse each and every resume manually (meaning, a visual review of entire documents).

When employers outsource the applicant identification process to a third party, such as a headhunter/recruiter or employment agency, keywords and key phrases take on heightened significance.  Many third parties, and even some human resource generalists, are not completely knowledgeable in the demands of the open positions.  They rely, therefore, upon locating qualified applicants mainly through keywords and key phrases on their resumes.   For instance, a general recruiter may not understand the purpose or features of RACF, which is a highly specialized computer system, but she will be able to find applicants well versed in this application if the term RACF appears in their resumes.

How and where, then, should keywords and key phrases appear?   The most obvious place is early on in the resume, within the Summary, Highlights, or Professional Profile Section.   However, when writing the resume, candidates should also include the keywords/key phrases in the actual text.

Acronyms are fine to use, but our advice is to spell out their full meaning as well as list the acronym.  Again, the person screening your resume may not understand what the acronym stands for; play it safe, and tell them.

Logic and mathematical principles, of course, drive the creation of computer systems and the development of software applications, including those utilized by hiring managers and recruiters.  Therefore, many employ simple Boolean equations to narrow their searches further.  For instance, if a firm is seeking an account manager to service and expand sales within a particular geographic region, they may prefer the applicant to live within or close to that region.  Their equation (search command) may then read something such as:

“Account/Sales Manager” AND “New York City”.

It behooves you, obviously, to include your physical location in your resume.  If you are leery of hackers finding your personal data, as well as your current employer, you can remove your street address from your electronically-posted resume.  But do leave the town and zip code visible.  If this disturbs you, you can hide all of your personal information via anonymous posting features that are available on most Internet job boards.

If you are unsure of the keywords or key phrases that will have the most relevance for you, access the Internet to scan job postings and actual resumes.  You don’t need to limit yourself to major sites such as Monster.com.  You can also peruse sites such as LinkedIn and Ladders, where you will find your competitors!   Websites that service specific industries (check out our Resources page) are also a good source, and you can also find job listings on such sites.   Pepper your resume liberally with keywords and key phrases and you will have notably improved your chances for job placement success! 

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” wrote Shakespeare, but remember, the Bard lived in a world more than four centuries ago.  In today’s cutthroat job search arena, the presentation of your name could very well be the make or break factor in securing employment.

Employers confronting thousands of resumes do not have the time or patience to struggle with the pronunciation of a candidate’s name.  If your name is lengthy, intricate, or exotic, consider altering it to something easier to pronounce.  We are not suggesting that you legally change your name; we are advising you to modify it as it appears on your resume and cover letter.  Arpin Chanawalla, for instance, can be abbreviated to Art Chana.

Your best strategy is to use the name by which you are most easily recognized, or wish to be recognized, in professional circles.  Via this approach, an applicant named Katarina Alana Jones could alter her first name to Kathy or Katherine and discard her middle name.

Take care, also, in your use of professional designations or university degrees as suffixes (information that follows your name).  If you are confident that it would benefit you to have an employer see your education immediately, you may use, for example, John Smith, M.B.A. or Carol Alton, M.Ed.  Know your audience and understand the nature of the jobs for which you are applying.  If you are seeking lower-level positions as they may be easier to secure, advertising your higher education can brand you as “over qualified.”

Names extend to email addresses.  Anything remotely along the lines of angeleyes@gmail.com, kissmekate@optonline.net, and flutterby@yahoo.com will paint you as frivolous, not a serious applicant.  It only takes a few minutes to establish a new, professional email address.  If you are smitten with your furrykittens@gmail.com, keep that for purely personal usage.

While we are on the subject of email, be sure that the name of your document will enable pressed-for-time employers to find it easily among the sea of emails through which they must wade.  Resume1.doc, for instance, may mean something to you.  But it will remain buried treasure in the employer’s oceanic In Box — and that is the best-case scenario.  More than likely, it will be deleted, as it cannot be readily identified.  A document name such as KarlEkins.Resume.November2009 clearly identifies the sender, the contents of the email/attachment, and the date that it was created.

Every rational job applicant wants to put his best foot forward with his resume, and this includes the addition of formal awards and honors.  But, before you take up the valuable limited space on your resume with these, think about what you will include.

As God is our witness, we have seen grown men (a number of them, in fact) insist that we add high school awards from many years before to their resumes, and women bent on including their standing in local beauty pageants (who’ve applied for positions in which physical appearance was a non-factor).

Our list of irrelevant and ridiculous accolades goes on.  The Employee of the Month Award, when it was received but once and long ago, in a company in which the applicant had been employed for eight years.   The Rush Chairperson of the Semester Award.  The BTU Award for participation in the ABC-XYZ Project.  We’re not kidding about that last mind-boggler.  When a certain telecom giant divested, we were inundated with these.  Not only did the majority of the applicants not remember what BTU signified nor the full name of the ABC-XYZ project or even what it was designed to do (!), the fact that they’d received an award for simply participating in the endeavor said nothing!   Of course, they participated in it: it was a job requirement, not an accomplishment!

Ergo, if you are in sales, for instance, list your awards and why they were received (i.e., “Generated 10% of sales in new business over goals”).  If you are a chemist who contributed to the formulation of an innovative product, indicate what properties that product possessed that set it apart from its competition and, if you are able, what the product generated for your employer in terms of revenue.

We cannot stress this enough: keep your accolades relevant!  Remove anything that is ancient history, unless you’ve actually made history.  Remove anything that may make you appear frivolous or even dangerous (i.e., Hot Dog Eating Champion of Middlesex County, 2008).  Include only those awards and honors that genuinely indicate your achievements and work ethic.

Just as doctors normally make the worst patients, writers are often ineffective in conveying their skills and accomplishments on documents intended to create career opportunities.  And while core competencies may be apparent, the achievements of writers can appear elusive, at least, on a resume.

Unless one is a successful novelist or author of short stories, most writers hammer out and edit material in order to promote a product or a service, or persuade audiences to agree with a specific point of view.   The aspiration linked to this goal is usually the generation of revenue.  And while it can appear difficult to quantify revenue generation in terms of writing expertise, consider that “squeeze pages” have been known to spawn Internet campaigns netting hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars in sales volume, and that other forms of marketing material, at their most effective, have done the same.  If you can connect your abilities with similar feats, you will have identified your accomplishments for potential employers.Resumes for writers can be broken down into a number of categories, including copywriters, technical writers, public relations writers, communication directors, and editors.

Copywriters should not be confused with the process of copyrighting written material (submitting a request to the Copyright Office in Washington, DC to legally protect one’s work against plagiarism or unauthorized publication/reproduction).  “Copywriter” is a general term for anyone employed to write copy for a broad range of vehicles, not limited to company literature, catalogs, advertisements, product packaging, and Internet content.

Technical writers are those charged with distilling technical information into formats easily comprehensible by general audiences.  For instance, a programmer can develop a new software package and then issue instructions as to its use.  But the programmers, being of a technical mindset, may not be able to convey instructions properly to a non-technical audience of clients/users.  That is what a technical writer does.

Public relations writers are employed to create, enhance, and/or protect, via their words, the public images of corporations, product lines, or individuals, such as a government electoral-hopeful or a film celebrity.  A news  or press release is a typical “product” issued by a public relations writer.

Communications directors create the content of inter-company communications, including that which appears on Intranets.  They are, in essence, the voice of Corporate.  As such, they communicate policies and changes in it as well as news of acquisitions, mergers, promotions, transfers, new business initiatives, and the corporation’s accomplishments (e.g., successful transitioning into the engineering market).

Editors do not usually create original material.  Rather, they are called into service to edit the work of other writers, correcting the original material for syntax, spelling, and ease of interpretation.  Sometimes, however, editors receive good story ideas (as for Internet blogs) from people whose command of the language and its rules are poor.  In such cases, the editors will basically rewrite the stories.

In publishing houses, editors are often assigned on the basis of their areas of expertise.  A former chemistry professor-turned-editor, for example, will be assigned to edit the work of chemists as a sort of failsafe.  Should the author make a serious error in the text, the editor is positioned to correct it.

Regardless of the type of writing in which one is engaged, all writers must be cognizant of the vehicle’s target readership as well as respectful of editorial guidelines and deadlines, the latter of which are usually non-negotiable.

These days there’s dudes gettin facials;
Manicured, waxed, and Botox’d
With deep spray-on tans
And creamy lotion-y hands,
You can’t grip a tackle box.
With all of these men lining up to get neutered,
It’s hip now to be feminized.

(Brad Paisley, “I’m Still a Guy”)

The gods may be vain, but men are vainer.  As county music icon Brad Paisley points out in his hit song, aesthetics and cosmetic surgery are no longer confined to the female gender.  Individuals of both sexes invest in eyelifts, tummy tucks, personal trainers who whip them into shape, and colorists who convert gray hair into richly hued tresses.   Cosmetic subterfuge, however, cannot alter one’s circumstances in life.  And, after a while, one usually reverts to how one appeared prior to the transformation.  So why invest in something so transitory?

The answer, of course, is that when most people like the image that gazes back at them in the mirror, they feel happier.  Having been temporarily altered by special creams and injections, they, and the world at large, sees them as younger and more vital.  Beautiful people are perceived as more valued members of society.

When seeking employment, consider that resumes, too, can benefit from “face lifts.”   Although you cannot alter the basic facts surrounding your career history, you can change its presentation so that employers will perceive you as a valued potential member of their corporation.  If a reverse chronological work history portrays you as “too mature,” you can revise your resume into a modified functional format, thus highlighting your core competencies and downplaying your age.

If you have crammed your career synopsis onto a single page because you have heard (falsely) that this is the unbreakable rule, you may have denied yourself the space you need to convey some of your accomplishments.  Employers always view accomplishments favorably, as they are indicative of your future performance as well as past achievements.

If you have not included keywords into your resume, you’ve done yourself a disservice.  Keywords “pop” with relevance to specific job titles and industries and make the employers’ search for workers with perceived value that much easier.

So, the next time you head off to the salon to cover your gray roots and get a youthful cut in hopes of nailing interviews, give your resume a thorough going over.  You may look great when you slide out of the salon chair, but without a strong face-value resume, you’ll never have the chance to meet, face to face, with your future employer.

Consider the import and content of a resume.  The essence of an applicant’s work history, education, professional training, and other relevant data must be contained within one or two pages.  If this seems a daunting task for the applicant, consider the onus placed upon the hiring manager.  He or she is compelled to sift through a multitude of resumes in order to distill the sea of candidates down to a relatively small pool.  Even with the use of talent acquisition management software, the hiring manager’s task is enormous.

Make that manager’s task easier, and you’ll increase your potential for interviews.

When crafting your resume, be sure to include, early on in the document, a Professional Profile or a Summary of Qualifications.  This section should encapsulate your work history into a few brief but meaty statements.  It should also include strong keywords applicable to the position and the industry in which you are searching.

With such a Profile or Summary, your qualifications appear in a focused manner, front and center on your resume.  The employer does not have to peruse the entire resume to find it, and it informs him quickly of your overall skills and accomplishments.  A well-written Profile/ Summary can mean the difference between an employer’s serious consideration of your talents and his tendency to overlook you for another candidate. 

Does you resume truly need to open with an Objective?  As no two job-applicants share the same exact career goals and work history, this is a question that candidates must answer for themselves.  However, here are some solid guidelines.

1. An objective is most beneficial if you are applying for a very specific, posted position.
2. If you are contacting the employer in an exploratory fashion, a targeted objective may work against you.  It may close the door against another position for which you are suited, and which may indeed be open, but which you had perhaps had not considered.
3. If the objective must be written broadly, be sure that it contains references to your skill sets and experience. Otherwise, the objective will come across as dull and self-serving.
4. If you decide to omit the objective in the resume, is it permissible to insert it somewhere else?  Certainly.  A cover letter is a sensible option, as is an email message accompanying your attached resume.
5. One caveat with Step Number 4.  As the cover letter and email message enable a longer discussion, if you will, be sure that you tell the employer exactly why you feel you are a perfect fit for the job.

Your ultimate objective, of course, is to secure the interview and land the job.  Help yourself to realize your goal with these tried and true tips.

Often, deciding what to list on your resume in terms of education is to ride the horns of the proverbial dilemma.   Too high an academic level can remove you from the candidate pool as the employer may fear that a.) you will demand an exorbitant salary or b.) usurp him as manager, as his own education is not as impressive as yours.  The opposite side of the coin indicates that too little education could also knock you out of the ball park, and not in the way that you’d like, as the employer will view you as a.) basically unschooled and/or b.) not ambitious.

Certainly, those at the Master or Doctorate level are better positioned than those who possess an undergraduate degree or a high school diploma.  Job candidates holding Master’s and Ph.D. degrees can choose not to list their highest level of education, if the position seems to call for lesser responsibility.  But, candidates who do not hold those degrees can only tell the truth.  However, the truth can be viewed, as well as presented, in a number of ways.

If you hold a high school diploma, you may wish to list it so that the potential employer does not assume that you did not complete the requisite twelve years of education.  Or, you may choose to not list it, on the assumption that the hiring manager will, in turn, take for granted that you do hold the diploma.  The logic in the latter case is that this scenario does not call attention to your limited formal education.

Those who entered but did not complete college can also tackle the dilemma several ways.   Beneath the name and location of the school, you can list Degree Program, followed by a colon (:), followed by what the degree would have been, had you finished your education.  If you view “Degree Program” as subterfuge, you can list your major or general curriculum, thus indicating that you have pursued some level of higher education.

Remember also that regardless of how notable higher education may appear on a resume, not everything can be learned from textbooks alone. Other credentials include licenses, certifications, and certificates indicating that you have completed relevant (career-related) seminars or training programs — whether independently or via your former employer(s).  If these comprise the bulk of your education, you may wish to list them first, followed by your formal education.  And, dependent upon the industry in which you maneuver, these qualifications may be actually be more beneficial than a degree.  If, for example, management positions are few and far between and you are willing to return to a more hands-on type of job as a Stationary Engineer, a Black Seal License is more meaningful to a prospective employer than a Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.) degree.

Also, you might consider having your entire career and general life experience evaluated by an educational institution to ascertain what it would equate to in terms of college credits or even a degree.