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New job seekers have a tendency to believe the first and most important step he or she must take is to sit down and write a resume. The next step is to have some folks look at and critique it, then personally refine it, and subsequently send it to hundreds of employers and await a huge response from those who received it. Those who take that course waste precious time, money, and are most often highly frustrated by the lack of response. Why? The reason is simple. They don’t understand the different kinds of resumes they must be prepared to write, nor do they understand how tough it is to get a job in today’s market.
Choosing the Right Resume
Not all resumes are equal. There are several different kinds of resumes that you should consider throughout your job hunt. They are used in very different situations and are designed to generate slightly different results.
Networking Resume
The networking Resume is the one you give to people with whom you network. You hope that they will pass it along to someone in their organization who might be filling a position, or they will give it to someone outside their organization who is about to hire.
It is usually a generic document. Why? Because when you write it, you don’t know that any specific job exists for you. You are simply hoping your Resume is passed along to someone who is hiring for a position. It may or may not list a career objective, and it tells about your background in general, with emphasis on the last 15 years. It cites what you have done and accomplished in the experience section.
It must be written in a language that any reader can understand. Keep it ambiguous. For example, if you have military experience but have no interest in working in a DoD-related business, don’t load up your networking resume with military jargon and acronyms.
When a potential employer receives your resume through someone with whom you have networked, that employer is not much concerned with the specifics in the resume. Rather, the employer is interested far more in the fact you have been recommended to him. Most people only recommend strong candidates to fellow professionals. They don’t recommend people who would make them look foolish. The bottom line of the networking resume is that it is a detailed business card, passed along from one professional to another.
Never send a networking resume to a potential employer for a specific job. Instead send the second kind of resume—the job-specific resume.
Job-Specific Resume
The job-specific resume is exactly what its name implies. It is written for a specific job. The rules for it are different from those of the networking resume:
- It focuses on the needs of the employer and not necessarily on your work history.
- It lists an objective. The objective can be the job title (as expressed by the employer, not as invented by you), or a line or two that highlights the job title.
- It lists your career history (or a summary) in three to five lines that directly supports the objective.
- It includes an experience section that is full of accomplishments and is not just a list of job descriptions.
Internet Resume
Many job seekers today post their resume on the Internet. The good news is you can do this on many Web sites for free, and some employers and executive recruiters search these sites looking for job candidates. Although it may seem smart to post your resume on as many job banks as possible in order to gain maximum exposure to employers, beware. Some job-search services are open sites, and anyone can access and browse the resume bank.
Do you really want everyone to have access to your resume? If you’re working, do you want your boss or co-workers to stumble upon your resume and learn you’re in the job market? Do you care if your resume is copied to another site without your permission? Even more serious, is the possibility that someone who reads your resume might steal your identity. Personal information such as home address, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses may aid the identity predator. Also, once your resume is on the Web, there is a good possibility you’ll experience a significant increase in junk mail.
The bottom line is, do your homework and weigh the risks versus the rewards of indiscriminately putting a resume into cyberspace. You may want to limit your exposure and choose sites where passwords are required to view your resume. Or, better yet, use a site where you must give approval before an employer can see your full resume.
As far as the rules for Internet resumes are concerned, there seems to be only one: THERE ARE NO RULES. Do anything you want with your resume regarding length, content, or configuration.
Electronic Resumes
It wasn’t that long ago that a resume referred only to a sheet or two of paper. Today, resumes also include electronic documents or interfaces that can be sent via e-mail or posted on the Internet. Although there are several kinds of electronic resumes, they all have one thing in common. They are optimized for presentation and retrieval on a computer.
E-mail Resume
Bypass the paper phase, and write an e-mail resume using plain text, rich text format, or hypertext markup language (HTML). You can cut and paste your resume directly into the body of your e-mail.
Online Resume E-form
These electronic forms are posted on Web sites. Most frequently, if you know you want to work for one company in particular, you can apply for jobs directly on their Web site. Either type in the information, or cut and paste it from another digital document. This information is then entered into a database where potential employers search for job candidates using keywords.
Personal Web Site, Home Page, or Multimedia Resume
These contain all the bells and whistles, and can be posted on the Internet or put on a CD, allowing for convenient perusal by employers. This is a good format for computer programmers, Web developers, graphic designers, and other professionals, where multimedia presentations containing images, sound, color, and movement would be of benefit.For additional information about resumes, feel free to search our blog for articles suchs as, 101 Resume Tips, The Scannable Resume, etc., or visit http://www.dreamfedjob.com/
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