Although most if not all of us were taught to write our resumes using horrible, zombie language like “Motivated self-starter with a bottom-line orientation,” it is easy to see that if your resume sounds like everybody else’s resume, no one will notice your brilliance!
You have to stand out, right in your resume. You have to sound like yourself.
You can’t pitch your resume into anonymous online recruiting portals. Those things don’t work. You could wait months to hear back from an employer when you apply for jobs online. You may never ever hear anything.
You have to take a different route to get a job these days, and contact your hiring manager (a.k.a. Your Next Boss) directly.
You’ll send two documents to your hiring manager and skip the online job application. You’ll send your two documents together in the mail, stapled to one another with one staple in the upper-left corner. The two documents are your Pain Letter, written specifically for this hiring manager, and your Human-Voiced Resume.
Your resume has to sound like a human being wrote it in order for it to catch your hiring manager’s attention. He or she is crazy busy the way we all are. Here are ten mistakes that will keep your resume from doing its job for you.
Make sure your resume isn’t holding back your career by failing to brand you as the capable and unlike-anyone-else person you are!
Ten Mistakes That Kill Resumes
- Your resume doesn’t tell us what you intend to do professionally.
- Your resume is so choked with Corporate Zombie Speak that it looks like everyone else’s resume.
- Your resume focuses on Tasks and Duties instead of your accomplishments.
- Your resume doesn’t show your career progress.
- Your resume is so long that no one is willing to read it.
- Your resume includes too much irrelevant information.
- Your resume doesn’t show the reader (your hiring manager) why you are a good fit for his or her company or department.
- Your resume has typos, misspellings or grammatical or usage errors in it.
- Your resume talks about your personal qualities (in your own view) or “Skills” instead of telling us how you’ve used your strengths and skills to make good things happen.
- Your resume doesn’t sound like you (or anybody). There is no personality in it.
Your Human-Voiced Resume will open with a Summary paragraph that tells the reader what you do professionally and why or how you do it, like this:
“I’m an IT Project Manager who specializes in customizing off-the-shelf packages for my employers’ needs and working with developers to build smart and nimble internal systems.”
In one sentence our IT Project Manager makes it clear what s/he intends to do in the next job. We don’t have to read down to this job-seeker’s career experience to see how he or she can help us, if we need help with IT Projects. If we don’t, we’ll just ignore the resume, and that is the way our job-seeker wants it!
Notice that the IT Project Manager doesn’t use precious resume real estate to say “I’m a results-oriented professional”? That’s a good decision! Boilerplate, done-to-death corporate zombie filler is the worst kind of language to use in your resume.
Empty phrases like “Results-oriented professional” mean nothing and brand you as a sheep or lemming who wants to sound like every other job-seeker.
When you tell us about the jobs you’ve held already, don’t tell us what the tasks and duties in the job were.
We can pretty well figure out your duties from your job titles. Tell us what you got done in each job, instead, by sharing a quick Dragon-Slaying Story. A Dragon-Slaying Story is a short story about a time when you saved the day or made something better at work, like this:
“In my manager’s absence I helped our largest customer untangle a thorny billing issue, and kept him from taking his $75K account to a competitor.”
Stories pack a lot of punch. You only need to share one or two short Dragon-Slaying Stories for each job you’ve held. More stories than that will tire the reader out, because as he reads he is picturing you in action, inside his head.
Look how much powerful information you’ve packed into this little story! We can see that you didn’t say, “The boss is out of town, so this customer’s problem will have to wait.” You jumped into action.
You knew you had to act. You stepped into a tangled billing issue that may have taken hours to resolve. That is painstaking, gnarly work that a lot of people hate to do, especially when the customer is angry. You did the work, and you saved the account.
You know it was a big account for your company.
A lot of working people are not as switched on and tuned in as you are. That’s what your story conveys to the reader — your awareness of your surroundings! Sad to say, most people go to sleep at their desks and would rather let the customer wait for the boss’s return than jump in to solve the customer’s problem.
Your resume tells a story — the story of your career. You’ve got include transitions so the reader knows why you left each job and began the new one. You can do that in a bullet point, like this:
- When Acme Explosives was sold, I joined the Toontown Industries team to help with the transition and now am seeking my next challenge.
Now your departure from Acme is crystal clear. As a reader I’ll stop worrying that maybe you punched out your boss one day and were asked to leave. Keep this in mind: One of your resume’s jobs is to answer any questions that are likely to arise in the reader’s brain as he or she reads your resume.
A resume that’s too long to be easily readable won’t get read. You can get rid of anything in your resume that isn’t relevant to the job you’re pursuing now. A Human-Voiced Resume is one to two pages long.
Your reader has to see in your resume that you understand the kinds of challenges he or she is facing and that you can handle them. That means you’ll need to customize your resume every time you use it.
There won’t be any such thing as “my resume” on your hard drive anymore. Instead, there will be versions of your resume. Some of our clients have eight or ten versions. That’s okay — the more relevant your resume is to the reader, the better for you!
Double- and triple-check your resume for typos, misspellings and English errors. Get a word-loving friend to look at it, too. Get rid of the zombie language like “meets or exceeds expectations” and “superior communication skills.” It’s your resume, and it deserves to have your voice in it!
No one cares about your “Skills” (apart from technical and function-specific tool-using abilities). We don’t care that you think you have Excellent Negotiation Skills. That means nothing to us.
A quick story would put to rest our doubts that your Negotiation Skills are truly Excellent. You are a person with a human story no one has ever had and no one will ever have again. Tell your story in your resume and leave the zombie language for the zombies!
Gallery – 14 of the Most Memorable Resume Errors
http://www.forbes.com/pictures/fmlm45eifim/14-memorable-resume-erro/
Read More:
How to Write Your Human-Voiced Resume
How to Write Your First Pain Letter
Reprinted from: Forbes/Leadership – www.forbes.com – April 24, 2016
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