Life Begins At.......

With the anticipated retirement of a significant tranche of the workforce and a lack of suitably skilled or experienced professionals to fill the void, there is a growing realization among many HR professionals that sending older employees out to pasture despite the expertise cited in their resumes isn’t such a good idea after all!

Not so long ago Statistics Canada stated that the number of persons aged 65 years and over doubled between 1981 and 2009 and is expected to double again by 2036.  They also stated that there will be more seniors than children (under 15 years) in Canada for the first time ever, at some point between 2015 and 2021.  Given the anticipated shortfall of skilled labour, it would seem that there is a clear need to develop strategies aimed at retaining employees approaching retirement age.

So what do you do if you are an older employee who has been released by your employer?  In my experience, the older generation have tended to stick with the same company for many years, sometimes decades.  In situations like this, there often has never been a need to have a resume.  Taking a step back from a 20-30 year long career to contemplate what you have to offer a new employer can be a daunting task.  Of course, the fact that you have worked for one employer for so long, in itself, solicits questions at interview as to how you will adapt to working with new processes, policies, procedures, products and people. 

How do you structure such as resume?  Clearly, you do not want spend 3 pages explaining your day-to-day work activity as it was 20 years ago. You will have to edit your career down to two, high-impact pages of successes.  Not an easy task for most people.  Nonetheless, if you intend for your resume to be read, that is what you must accomplish.

Working with a professional to develop a coherent personal brand, high-impact resume strategy, and perfecting your interview skills can go a long way to helping you understand what you can offer, what you want, and the best way to go about getting it.

The Screen Out

Having screened over 24,000 resumes in over a decade of recruiting and executive recruiting, I've mastered the art of (very) quickly determining the viability of any given job application.  When I was assessing an application against a specific job specification, I was looking for reasons NOT to bring you in for an interview.  

I'm still surprised by the number of clients who hadn't actually looked at the screening process through this lens.  After reviewing countless applications, with each resume blurring into the next, hiring managers become adept at finding reasons NOT to interview you.

This becomes the starting bloc for all of my resume clients.  Why wouldn't I want to interview you for this role?  At what point would I lose interest in your document and what you had to say about yourself?  How easy would it be for me to consign your resume to the shredder?  

Once we uncover the likely objections to your application, we can start to construct an outline of our strategy to take your project forward.  If we deal with this early, and build our project to address these issues head on, we start to tread the path toward securing you the all-important interview.

The reason so many job applicants fall at the first hurdle, is because they've all made it far too easy for the hiring manager to hit the delete button.

Quips'n'Quirks

Quick tip - do NOT make quirky quips in your cover letter!  I was contacted recently by a rather senior executive who had not been receiving any attention from her job applications.  Upon reviewing her cover letter, I uncovered the possible reason for her buzz-free blackberry.  Her cover letter was replete with quirks'n'quips - here's a modified example to give you an idea;

"I am a senior executive (with a sense of humour;) and 30 years experience (yikes!) of operating at the highest level.  I would very much appreciate an opportunity (begging bowl extended) to meet with you to discuss my suitability!  Despite my age (i feel 25!), I am a technocrat and regularly tweet on the twitter.." and so it went on - all 2 pages of it.  Although this letter is guaranteed to get passed around the department, this bears no relevance to the likelihood of being hired!

On the face of it there will be some who will think that this is refreshing - injecting a bit of personality into proceedings (the twitter bit was my favourite) and if i weren't a hiring manager I may see their point.  However, attempting to layer a cover letter with "personality" is like tap dancing on a landmine.  More often than not it will blow up in your face.  Remember - her blackberry wasn't singing.  Her strategy wasn't working.

It may seem obvious but, when you don't know the intended audience keep the "personality" for the interview.  The cover letter should focus on forming a narrative around your skills, abilities and achievements.

What Not To Say...

The "What not to say..." blogs will be dedicated to the random selection of answers to my interview coaching session questions.  Can you follow that?!

Question - What steps do you take to reduce personal stress during the working day?

What Not To Say - "I tend to Squeeze my squishy ball"

Luckily for that respondent he went on to receive a good 2 hours of interview counseling!

The Questionnaire Laid Bare

As part of the information discovery process, I usually ask clients to bring along to our meeting any additional information they feel is useful, relevant or in some other way important.  Last month, one of my clients produced an old "questionnaire" they had been asked to fill our by a resume writing firm about 8 years ago.

The first thing that struck me about the document was how impersonal it all was.  Stock questions, soliciting the inevitable stock answers, strengths, weaknesses, lists - endless lists of attributes to circle.  What i was looking at, was a template to build a template.

The end result, the resume, was as bland and uninspiring as you'd expect from such a process.  I was amazed by the blatant listing of attributes throughout the cover letter and resume without any supporting narrative to put the clients skills in context.

Here's a section from the cover letter;

"I am a great communicator, can multi-task, give and take orders, have listening skills, organizational skills, planning skills, speak french and have good computer skills".

The above extract is absolutely meaningless without context. It looks like every other D.I.Y. cover letter project out there and was clearly lifted verbatim from the questionnaire and deposited unceremoniously into the cover letter.

Is that what you really want from a process and service charged with the responsibility of demonstrating your unique qualities to a prospective hiring manager?  Templates are for the masses - let everyone else use them.

New Year! New Resume! New Job!

We've been rushed off of our feet lately by a deluge of pro-active job seekers desperate to improve their chances of landing their dream job by having a complete resume and cover letter re-work.

New Year! New Resume! New Job! seems to be the mantra, and I can only applaud them for their foresight. I was speaking to a real live-wire sales manager earlier this week and he said that over the holidays, when contemplating the new year ahead, the thought of labouring away in his current position for another 12 months cast a dark shadow over the festive celebrations. He resolved to strike out immediately after the break and commit 100% to the pursuit of a role with a better work/life balance.

Judging by the ever decreasing number of available appointments I have over the next 2 weeks, he certainly isn't the only one. That first day back to the grind on a cold January morning is usually enough to put even the most talented procrastinator into job hunt overdrive!

I've been asked if I'll blog about employee issues such as work/life balance etc this year and yes, it is on my 'to do list', although it is free time dependent. Thanks for your suggestions - keep them coming.

Happy New Year to all! I hope your career dreams come true in 2010.

Cookie Cutter = Job Hunt Stutter

The whole idea behind seeking professional assistance to create a powerful resume and portfolio of career documents is to get ahead of the competition. You do this by crafting a document that truly represents your strengths and achievements while never losing sight of the expectations of those likely to be reading it.

I was talking with a client who had previously sent off her resume to a multi-national corporation that promised to deliver a resume and cover letter for $50 based on answers to a questionnaire she had to fill out online. If you needed it real quick -for an extra $10 you could get it within 4 hours!

When my client received her freshly minted document, she was surprised to find that the resume she put together herself looked better than the resume that had just popped into her inbox!

Companies that claim they can produce a resume document without speaking to you are going to regurgitate the content of your old resume and toss it into a cookie cutter template. What else can they do?

If you've read my previous blog entry "Content is King", you'll already know why this mass produced, cheap, cookie-cutter approach will pretty much guarantee a stuttering continuation of your job search. If you think it saves money in the short term - consider the long term impact a poorly crafted document can have on your ability to secure an interview for a job that you really want!

If you have decided that you need assistance in crafting your documents, consider partnering with a consultant who will take the time to understand your career, aims and professional accomplishments. If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well!

Not All Resumes Are Created Equal!

I was contacted recently by a client looking to update their resume. The client wanted us to add in his most recent position but did not want us to re-write the resume as it had been "professionally done" by another resume writing firm.

After reviewing his documents, I was dumbfounded.

The format of the "professionally written" cover letter was unlike anything I had seen in a decade of reviewing resumes! The letter itself started more than half way down the page, with the entire top half dedicated to the inappropriate structuring of personal contact information and a sequence of bizarre spacing that made me wonder if a high school student had attempted to format it. The content of the letter repeated the detail found in the "Summary" section of the resume - never a good idea for reasons that will be explained in a future blog.

The resume itself looked like any other resume I've seen where job seekers have attempted to 'give it a go' themselves by using online templates and such like and the client had actually paid money for someone to produce this for him!

The content was bland, uninspiring and merely listed basic duties and alluded to "bringing value" and a "terrific ability to connect with people", without ever expanding upon these statements with facts, results, achievements or any other tangible benefit resulting from his corporate contributions or personal attributes.

The professional experience section gave as much weighting to his post-graduate entry level position 12 years prior as it did to his most recent advanced professional experience. They were afforded 4 bullet points each. WHY?

Tenses fluctuated from past to present within the space of a few words, full stops were missing in action, there was even a section on there where they had used a smaller text size to squeeze it all onto 2 pages. It looked terrible and I felt very sorry for him.

Here was a very nice guy trying to make his way and advance his career and who had invested in a service he thought would serve him well in front of hiring managers. Instead he was given a resume document that looks like he had thrown it together himself and a cover letter a high school student would receive a 'D' for (or a clip round the ear if it was 1960).

As much as I wanted to help him, I couldn't consent to working on the project as I could not associate my business with that resume unless I was tasked with completely re-working it. This was something which the client was unwilling to do as he had already paid for it to be "professionally done". I understood his predicament.

Choose your resume writing partner carefully. If a resume writer does not have an extensive prior professional background in recruiting, then they cannot possibly know how a diverse range of employers across a variety of industries hire, who they hire and why they hire them.

My background affords me the luxury of knowing what works and what most certainly does not work when it comes to grabbing the attention of a hiring manager.

Watch out for a future blog entry detailing 'what you should look for in a resume writer' and how 'telling isn't selling'!