Subscribe Feed (RSS)Creating a Résumé That Sells
November 28th, 2009 by pknockle | No Comments | Filed in Job Hunting
By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN
In today’s cutthroat job market, having a top-notch résumé is critical to success. But there’s a host of conflicting advice about exactly what makes a good résumé—and not every tip is right for every industry. To find out what hiring managers look for most in these documents, The Wall Street Journal introduces Résumé Doctor, a new feature in which recruiting experts and hiring managers critique readers’ résumés and suggest ways to improve them.
- The Job Seeker: Dawn Jordan, a 39-year-old marketing professional from Laguna Beach, Calif. Ms. Jordan, also a blogger for WSJ.com’s Laid Off & Looking blog, has been job hunting since her position as an operations vice president at Bank of America Corp. was eliminated in October 2008. She assembled her résumé with the help of an outplacement firm provided by her former employer and says it has helped her land several interviews but has yielded no job offers.
- The Job Objective: Ms. Jordan says she is looking for a mid- or senior-level executive position in marketing, preferably at a firm in Southern California. She is open to employers of all sizes in any industry.
- The Experts: Offering feedback on Ms. Jordan’s résumé are Peter Leech, chief marketing officer for Seattle-based retailer OnlineShoes.com; John M. Abele, global managing partner in the marketing-and-sales-officers practice in Cleveland for executive-search firm Heidrick & Struggles International Inc.; and Harry Joiner, founder of EcommerceRecruiter.com, a boutique recruiting agency in Atlanta that specializes in integrated marketing and new media.
- The Résumé: Ms. Jordan’s résumé is two pages in a classic format, leading with her contact information followed by a summary statement. It goes on to describe her career in reverse chronological order with bullet points describing each position and concludes with her educational background.
- The Positives: Our experts described Ms. Jordan’s document as well-organized and easy to read. They didn’t have any problems with its length, noting that two pages—or even three—can make sense for someone with her level of experience.
Before and After
See Ms. Jordan’s before and after résumés–along with a guide to the advice she received.
Mr. Joiner additionally gave kudos to Ms. Jordan for including in her document a variety of key words—terms that recruiters are likely to search for when combing their résumé databases. Job seekers can identify important keywords for their fields by looking at the language used in job descriptions. Words in Ms. Jordan’s résumé that Mr. Joiner says might help the document get noticed by marketing recruiters include “segmentation,” “analytics,” “cross-sell,” “P&L,” “CRM” and “SEO”—all critical for marketing roles. He adds that acronyms are fine to use but spelling them out in parentheses might be smart.
- The Advice: Our experts pointed to three flaws in Ms. Jordan’s résumé: a lack of essential details; ambiguous information; and grammatical errors.
For starters, these hiring experts say, it is critical to make sure a résumé has enough details and clarity about the work a candidate has done. Ms. Jordan’s résumé, like many they see, is missing specifics about her past positions, something that would help them get a better sense of how she progressed in her career. This is important, says Mr. Joiner, for showing that “an applicant can work their way up through an organization, and that they can lead and be led.”
Do You Want The Résumé Doctor’s Help?
To have your résumé considered for a future installment, please email a copy, along with a short description of your job search and employment situation, to cjeditor@dowjones.com. Please use the subject line Résumé Doctor.
Read Laid Off and Looking: Follow a group of out-of-work professionals as they search for opportunities post melt-down
For example, Ms. Jordan’s document doesn’t list the months she spent in each job at Bank of America, the regions or divisions she was responsible for, whom she reported to or how many employees reported to her. And lower down, two stints listed offer no description of what she did in those jobs. “People discount their early positions, but they can be helpful in explaining how they made their way up the ladder,” says Mr. Leech.
Some job hunters lump together descriptions for more than one position at a single firm, as Ms. Jordan did, to keep their résumés concise. Listed under each employer name are each job title and bullets describing all her responsibilities over three positions. But our experts say this made it difficult for them to see how she progressed from one job to the other.
Our experts noted another common omission from résumés in the education section. Ms. Jordan’s document failed to state what year she earned either of her degrees. She also didn’t say what she majored in for her undergraduate degree. While some professionals intentionally omit graduation dates to hide their age, “we always verify degrees anyway, so you might as well put them on there,” says Mr. Abele.
What’s more, hiding your age can raise recruiters’ suspicions about your integrity. “You’re asking someone to trust you enough to hire you, you might as well be open,” says Mr. Leech.
One piece of résumé advice to consider—and in particular for a marketing résumé like Ms. Jordan’s: a listing of your technological capabilities, because these can speak to your experience and credibility. In Ms. Jordan’s case, there is no mention of whether she has worked with market-research vendors such as Yankelovich or Mintel, or if she is proficient in market-research technologies like Oracle or Quickbase.
It turns out, Ms. Jordan is actually skilled in using Visio, SAS, JMP, Oracle, ComScore, Omniture, Webtrends and several other market-research technologies, all of which she has since added to her résumé.
“If your work has been touched or impacted by an important piece of software, then it makes sense to put that in a résumé,” says Mr. Joiner. Otherwise, recruiters may assume you’re lacking in this area.
If you aren’t knowledgeable in some areas you know recruiters will be looking for on a resume, be sure to include related expertise you do have, says Mr. Abele. Then prepare to talk about your ability to learn quickly and provide examples during the interview process.
But Mr. Abele, for his part, says it isn’t always necessary to list technological expertise if you are a management-level job hunter or above.
“For nonmanagerial positions however, technical skills do become more relevant,” he says. “Employers want someone who can plug and play pretty quickly.”
Our experts also say they would like to see more metrics in Ms. Jordan’s résumé that show how much savings or profits she generated for her past employers. And consistency is key; well-thought examples next to ambiguous ones can confuse a hiring manager. A good example from Ms. Jordan’s résumé is a bullet that says: “Cited by president for recouping $11 mil revenue by reversing deteriorating customer churn rate while achieving triple-digit ROI [return on investment].”
But other bullets come up short, such as one that says she “utilized real time customer data” but that doesn’t go on to describe any benefits that her employer gained as a result. “At the end of the day, that’s what a hiring manager is scanning for,” says Mr. Leech.
If you don’t have these details because the quantifiable results were meager, include them anyway—unless they are so poor they could eliminate you from consideration—and briefly explain why and what you learned as a result, adds Mr. Abele.
One element of Ms. Jordan’s résumé that the experts differed on was the summary. Mr. Leech says that Ms. Jordan’s summary, like many he sees, “doesn’t cut to the chase on what she’s done.”
Mr. Joiner argued that for a summary to be effective, it needs to be tailored for a specific position, something he recommends job hunters do for every job they seek—and ideally throughout the rest of their résumés. Executive recruiter Mr. Abele falls into the “who cares?” category; he says he skips past summaries.
Lastly, there is a piece of advice résumé-writers regularly give out (and job seekers sometimes forget): Check your spelling and grammar. If it isn’t your forte, have a friend check it for you.
Our experts noticed that in one sentence Ms. Jordan incorrectly used both past and present tenses. She also wrote “a” when she should have written “an.”
Such errors aren’t deal-breakers, but they do raise “a little bit of concern about someone’s focus on detail,” says Mr. Leech.
Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com
