More Than You Ever Thought You Knew...

Since October of 2008 when the US Economy took a nosedive, the advantage has shifted to the hiring side.  That means that we are in a strong buyer's market.  Companies are more selective than ever, and mainly for one reason: they can be.  There are a lot more great candidates out there than great jobs, so the companies that are hiring are doing all they can to make sure that they hire the best and the brightest from among all those who are candidates for a particular position.

One of the tools that companies use is a "personality assessment."  Certainly they want to know that you have skills and talents and can do the job well, but once they establish that, the bar is raised considerably in the selection process. You see, they want not only bright, talented, skilled employees...they also want those bright, talented, skilled employees to fit in well with the organizational culture and the other people who already work there.

So, enter the personality assessment.  These assessments measure things like compliance, independence, patience, creativity, leadership, attention to detail, how you process information, problem solving, your need for stability, and how you react to stress among other qualities as well.  Different positions require different qualities, so when a hiring manager is considering, for example, someone to work in the accounting department, attention to detail would be a very important quality.  An outgoing personality might be just right for the sales position they need to fill, while the Chief Technology Officer position might require someone who is a creative, independent thinker.  There is no single personality type that is right for every position.

With the cost of making a bad hire higher than ever, companies want to get it right.  The money they invest in training, benefits, compensation, and opportunity cost of hiring the wrong person can be a crippling sum.  So, I think you can see that when they are considering making an offer to a candidate, they want to know all they can possibly know about that candidate.

Do you think it would be valuable to you to know how other people perceive you and to know without question the "soft" skills you bring to the job?  In other words, would you like to know the same things about yourself that the companies who interview you will know?  What if you learned that how you think you are perceived by others is nothing at all like others really perceive you?  Would it be valuable information to know what, if anything, you need to work on and improve before you go to an interview?  If you are already great at something and do not realize it, would it be helpful to you to know about yourself what others have seen for years? 

I think that knowledge would be very valuable, indeed.  In fact, I think it would put you in a very advantageous position relative to all the other candidates to have that information.  In addition to all that I have already described, you will learn which historical figures had the same personality type that you have.

What if I told you that you can have this information immediately, and that it would cost you nothing?  FREE, in other words.  For a very limited time, that is exactly what I am telling you. 

On my website (http://www.newwaveresumes.com) you will see an offer on the home page that can make the information I just described available to you for free.  These reports normally go for $100 to $150, but from now until the end of September I am offering the best personality on the market...the DISC Report from Peoplekeys (http://www.peoplekeys.com)...for free with every résumé order.  There are a lot of good reports out there, and I have used most of them over the years, but the one I find most useful, most accurate, and most reliable (meaning that if you take it more than once, you will get the same results) is the DISC report.

The assessment will take you, literally, about five to seven minutes to complete online with an access code I will provide.  Once you complete it, you will receive your report online immediately.

A great résumé and the knowledge you need about yourself to go into any interview prepared and confident...I think that is a combination that is hard to beat.

Don't Let Ignorance Cripple Your Career

There is a lot to be said for stability and security in a career.  After all, there is a certain degree of comfort and relaxation in knowing that you are in a job that you can keep for as long as you want it and that you will have a steady paycheck coming in until you retire.  Maybe it's not your dream job, but the familiarity with it and your expertise in doing it offers a low or no stress environment.  Maybe it doesn't give you the rewards that you thought you would receive when you started on this career path years ago, but it could be a lot worse.

Here's some news...it very well could get a lot worse.  If you are in a position with any institution in the private sector in today's environment, you are not in nearly as stable an environment as you may think.  Capitalism is a brutally efficient system for rewarding the innovators and casting aside those who think things will always be as they are now. 

It has been a common cliché for a long time now, but we really are in a world economy, and because of the tremendous advances in communications technology and the ability to move things...almost anything...to somewhere else in the world quickly and inexpensively, no industry and no company is assured of staying in business or maintaining their position within their industry.

It used to be that graduates from the local schools competed with other graduates from the same or surrounding schools for jobs in the area.  There is still some degree of that, but it is rapidly disappearing.  Why? Because more and more jobs that used to require being on-site at an office or manufacturing facility can now be done remotely from just about anywhere in the world.  It is just as easy for an architect in Mumbai, India to design your house and send the plans to your local contractor as it is for another architect down the street from you to do the same thing.

It is not only a possibility, but a promise that someone, somewhere is working on a way that your job can be eliminated.  It's nothing personal, it's just the efficient market system at work, and the most efficient companies that can operate at the lowest cost will always win in the long run.  Do you want examples?  Here are two: Wal Mart and Southwest Airlines.  Both companies are their industry leaders in low-cost operations. 

So what is the take-away from this realization?  It is simply this...there is absolutely no assurance that your job will still be there tomorrow.  Just as it is always a good idea to have some money saved for a rainy day, it is also advisable to have a Plan B in place if your Plan A disappears. 

There are many experts out there who say that we live in a world today where those who are starting their careers will have eight to eleven jobs in their working life.  A few others predict even more than that.

A good place to start getting ready is to do an objective assessment of your skills that would be valuable and transferable to another organization if your job disappeared tomorrow.  We specialize in helping people identify just what those skills are and putting them in a document that can help you market yourself most effectively if the need or desire to do so occurs.

Ken Murdock
New Wave Resumes
http://www.newwaveresumes.com

Avoid These Résumé Killers

Think about what a résumé really is and its purpose.  It is a marketing document with the sole purpose of helping you get an interview.  That is its only purpose.  Without question, the best way to get an interview is to know an influential person in the organization.  The second best way is to know someone who knows that influential person in the organization.  However, the method that most candidates are relegated to is the most common, which is to send the organization a résumé and a cover letter and hope for the best.  With competition so tight, it is imperative that if this is your way of introducing yourself to the organization, your résumé has to be very, very good.

As a recruiter, I have seen many thousands of bad résumés, but only a few hundred really good ones.  I have seen many more that would have been good, possibly very good, if they did not have one of these very common errors that make a recruiter or a hiring manager immediately discard it and go to the next one.  What are the big offenders?

1. The wrong form of a word, such as "to, too, two", or "there, their, they're", "capital, capitol".   Probably the most common error I see is with "its/it's."  "It's" is the abbreviation for "it is."  "Its" is possessive, but you would be surprised at how many people do not understand the difference.
2. The wrong word altogether. The most common offenders? "Loose" (adjective) when the verb "lose" is appropriate "quiet" rather than "quite", "lite" instead of "light", "write" instead of "right", "insure" rather than "ensure."
3. Any spelling error.  This is the quickest way to have your résumé discarded.
4. Run-on sentences, even if they are grammatically correct, tend to become confusing the longer they go. This is especially true to a reader who is looking at dozens or perhaps hundreds of resumes to select a few candidates for interviews. 
5. Redundant or unneeded modifiers (where the first word is unnecessary or has the same meaning as the second), such as "completely finish (it's either finished or it isn't, "past experience" (is there any other kind?), "one and only" (no such thing as "two and only"), "honest truth" (is there another form of truth?), "free gift" (if it's not free, it's not a gift).  The one I see more than any other is when someone is describing the "end result" of one of their accomplishments.

Early in my recruiting business I submitted a resume to a client company for a candidate that I had personally interviewed and had every confidence that this candidate would be an outstanding hire.  The hiring manager sent the résumé back to me with a spelling error highlighted and a comment that made it very clear to me that if this person could not take the time to proofread and spell-check the résumé before sending it out, there was every chance that he would be just as careless in communications with customers, which was unacceptable. What was not said, but was certainly implied, was that I should have caught that error before I sent it to my client, and my client was right.  Since that time I have triple checked every résumé that I send to clients.

The job market is very much a buyer's market now and it appears that conditions will not change anytime soon.  You have only one chance to make a good first impression, so take the time to ensure that none of these errors are in your document.


Ken Murdock is the owner of Murdock & Associates Recruiters and New Wave Résumés. He recruits for the manufacturing sector, oil & gas, construction, and the packaging industry. New Wave Résumés offers professional résumés and interview coaching for executives, mid-level professionals, recent graduates, and anyone seeking to take their skills and talents into a new career.

It's All About The Packaging

Imagine that you are at the grocery store and that you need several different items in the packaged goods areas, that is, anything in a carton, can or box.  If everything you looked at had a blank front on the package and the only information available was the nutrition labeling, how much time and trouble would it take you to make a decision on what to buy, and how knowledgeable would you be about what the product could do for you?  Probably not much.

Of course, food is not packaged that way.  The boxes of brownie mix have images of fresh baked brownies that look attractive and delicious.  Canned goods often have the words "delicious" and "low fat" or maybe "excellent source of protein."  In other words, these packaged goods convey to the consumer the benefits they can expect to receive by purchasing and using the product.

The problem with most resumes today is that they resemble the nutritional label on packaged goods in the grocery store.  They are what I call "feature heavy / benefit light."  They convey all kinds of information about the candidate, but very few, if any at all, benefits that will accrue to the reader by setting up an interview and/or possibly hiring that person.  Most job seekers and most universities use and teach this old, tired model that was effective when we were in a strong seller's market prior to the economic decline that began in 2008.  Since that time we have been in a strong buyer's market, and one of the primary tenets of successful marketing is that when your demand conditions change, you must change your promotional strategy that is aimed at those you consider to be your target market.

Organizations today are very selective about the candidates that they choose to interview.  They can be this way because in a strong buyer's market there is no shortage of skilled, experienced, educated, and qualified candidates for every position (the nutritional labeling).  However, when a hiring manager or a recruiter looks at a resume and sees nothing but the ingredients (name, contact information, education,  and employment history), they are seeing a document that looks like everyone else who has the same data on their resume, and the candidate has given the reader no compelling reason to choose him or her over anyone else as someone worth bringing in for an interview.  That document is either discarded or goes into a tall pile of paper or an electronic file with very little chance of being chosen as a viable candidate worth a conversation.

If you do not provide some idea of the potential benefits that will accrue to the reader or the organization that the reader represents, you have very little chance of ever being invited in for an interview.  In today's market, you get one chance to make a good first impression, so you cannot afford to waste it with a poor resume that does not get you into the competition for the job.

You can avoid this by tossing the resume templates you usually find on the Internet and ignoring the guidance of career counselors who have not adapted their thinking to the buyer's market mentality.  The best resume writers today know how to present you in such a way that you not only have the right ingredients, as in the food label example above, but also as a candidate who can bring value and benefits to the organization.  That is what will separate you from the crowd and greatly increase your chances of getting the interview that you really want.

Good Riddance to the One Page Resume

Most high school graduates hear it.  Most college students are told the same story.  What is it that they are taught and what is so bad about it?  The high school and college experiences have several noble purposes...learning basic skills, maturing meeting new people and learning about other cultures, and one more very important purpose...to train graduates with the skills they need to get a job that is the best fit for their skills, talents, and interests.

The way that students are the most ill-advised during their school years in preparation for their career is that their resume should be a one-page summary of their experience, skills, and education.

As a recruiter, I see the same practice in job seekers who have been out of school for several years.  For reasons that have no basis in fact, students and anyone else who is in the job market have heard that their resumes should be limited to one page.  By following this advice, what these job seekers are really limiting are their chances of getting the interviews they want for the jobs they seek.

There have been many reasons, none of them valid, that seek to justify the one-page resume model.  One of the most common reasons is that recruiters and hiring managers are busy people and they want everything summed up on one page.  Reality paints a much different picture.  Recruiters and hiring managers are focused on finding the best candidates for the position they are trying to fill.  It is true that they are busy people, but that fact is really why they want to know more than what a candidate can put on one page.   Businesses often have several objectives, but one that is common to all of them is that they do not want to waste time interviewing job candidates who are not at least reasonably suited for the job, and a one-page resume does not give them enough information to make a good decision about bringing someone in for an interview.

The hiring decision is really a buying decision.  Assume that this weekend you are planning on purchasing a new car.  You go to several dealerships to look at various models, and as you leave each one you ask for some information that you can take home with you to help you make the decision.  Car dealers produce booklets of several pages show the vehicle in various settings.  They have pages about the various colors, the power train, the interior, and even the safety features.  But what if when you asked for this material, the sales person said "I can give you this one page handout that has a lot of information on it...I hope it's enough to help you."  If you are about to spend tens of thousands of dollars on this car, doesn't it make sense that you would want a publication that gives you all the information you could possibly want to help you make your decision?

Organizations today operate in a fashion similar to the example above.  If they are going to spend tens of thousands of dollars to hire, train, and employ an individual, they want to know as much as possible about that person...and a one-page resume will not give them what they want to see.

In the late 90's and for the first seven years of this century, a brief document that provided only your name, education, work experience, and contact information was enough to get you multiple interviews.  That was when were in a strong seller's market. That market does not exist anymore.  Today employers are incredibly selective for one simple reason...they can be!  We are now in a strong buyer's market where the number of great jobs is much less than the number of skilled, qualified people to fill those jobs. If your job hunt is to be successful, you must separate yourself from the crowd rather than blend into it.

Hiring managers today want much more than just the basic information found on a one-page resume.  They want to know as much as possible about the person behind the resume and the specific skills that the candidate can bring to the job.  One of the most important priorities that employers focus on in today's job market is whether a candidate will be a good fit into the culture of the organization. 

The point to remember is this: If the best you have to offer can be summarized on one page, you have not done enough.  If you make the first page good enough, the recruiters and hiring managers will read the other pages as well.

Closing the Sale

One of the most common interview mistakes I see in candidates that have otherwise done well in job interviews is a failure to "close the sale."  The hiring process is really nothing more than a sales transaction, and you are the product.

If you are in the market for a new job, it will be very helpful to you to understand that we are in a strong seller's market.  That means that there are a lot of good to excellent candidates available for employers to choose from, and an attitude that is common to all employers is that they want to  hire people who want to be there.

Where job seekers make a mistake is in assuming that simply because they have an excellent resume, strong work experience, a good education, and think they did everything right in the interview process, they think that the employer will have no reason not to make them an offer.  But here is the secret that can put you in a different league than the other candidates.  If you actually ask for the job, your chances of getting it go up by at least 60 percent over those who do not ask for it.

Unfortunately, most candidates take the approach of simply smiling at the end of the interview and expecting the hiring manager to either make the offer right then and there, at least asking them what type of compensation expectations they have.  The reality is that the employer is waiting for you to express your interest in the position and to indicate that you want the job.

Failure to ask for the order is what separates average to mediocre sales professionals from the great ones, and remember, a job interview is a sales transaction.  Even if you know that you should ask for the job, but you get sweaty palms just thinking about it, here is an easy way to express you desire to have the job.

You can mold these comments into your own words, but the basic script goes like this:

The interviewer will ask you if you have any other questions, and you say, "Jim/Jane...I really appreciate this opportunity to visit with you about this position and how I might be a good fit for it.  Based on all I have learned about the organization and this position on my own and from our conversation today, I believe that this opportunity is a great match for my skills, experience, and interests.  I would very much like to have this job and join this great team.  What can I do to make that happen?"

Then, you simply smile and look the interviewer in the eye.  Don't say anything else.  The interviewer may or may not make you an offer right then, but you have established that you can do the job well and that you want to be a part of the organization...and companies want to hire people who want to work there.

When you leave, you should already have a note, envelope, and a stamp to write the interviewer a hand-written note that once again expresses your appreciation to discuss the opportunity and your interest and desire to have the job.  Write it and mail it that day.

If you follow both of these guideline...asking for the job and writing the note...you will separate yourself from 90% of all the other candidates for this position and significantly improve your chances of receiving a job offer.

The Acronym You Don't Know Can Hurt You

I have mentioned in other posts (see "The Rules Have Changed) that we are now in a very strong buyer's market and that employers are being more selective than ever before simply because there is no reason not to be with so many outstanding, qualified candidates available for most jobs.  Because employers are being so much more selective, it is more challenging than ever to have your resume viewed by a pair of human eyes.  The reason is that most large employers and many smaller ones as well are using ATS, which is the acronym for "Applicant Tracking Software."  ATS is used for many reasons, but one of the main ones is that it is a time saver for hiring managers. 

When you submit your resume electronically for a job post, it is scanned by the ATS for key words.  If your resume does not have those key words, it is eliminated and will never get to any decision maker in the organization. 

Anyone who has ever tried to advertise or sell a product on the Internet is aware of how Google changes its algorithm that determines where a particular ad shows up when someone is doing a search.  Search Engine Optimization companies and individuals are always trying to adjust their tools to fit the changes in the Google algorithm so that their ads can get "high placement" on the first page of results when someone launches a Google search. 

Just as SEO operators have to continually update their tools, resume writers have to stay on top of the sophisticated criteria that ATS uses in evaluating resumes.  Finding qualified, technically proficient employees is not the challenge today.  There are countless numbers of experienced, skilled, and highly qualified candidates for every job. The real challenge that companies face today is finding the type of person who is not only qualified, but who will fit well within the organizational culture. 

In order to find only those candidates who fit this parameter, the ATS is set up to screen out any resume that does not have words that describe the type of person the company is seeking to fill the position.  If your resume does not have the words that describe the type of person who will do well in the job and fit well within the company culture, it goes into the electronic graveyard, never to be seen again.

Most job seekers and most universities that advise students and graduates on resume preparation, styles, and formats have not made this adjustment.  The result is a lot of frustration and disappointment for those who send their resumes out for job after job and never get a response.

And that is the main reason that if your resume does not fit these new parameters, you should contact an experienced and savvy resume writing professional to help you get your resume past the ATS and in front of a hiring manager who can invite you in for an interview.