Does Your Resume Have What It Takes To Survive The First Cut?
Qualifications" or "Personal Profile") uses bullets and succinct wording to highlight what is likely to most intrigue the employer. Before writing this section, make a list of the 5 to 10 criteria that are most likely to guide the employer's choice ? then summarize your qualifications in a way that speaks directly to the employer's interests. The last 15 seconds? If your resume is visually pleasing and starts with an effective summary, your reader will naturally want to scan the rest of it. At this point, the employer will look for: confirmation that you meet the job's requirements, supporting evidence for your summary section, and any intriguing details that add to the picture of what you would be like to work with. Your job is to consider where the reader's eye is most likely to be drawn, and use these places to your advantage. They include: section headings, subheadings, the first sentence or two immediately under headings, position titles, bulleted lists (especially the top one or two items), words in bold, words in italic, and numerals (i.e. numbers that are not spelled out). Consider all of these to be tools at your disposal when creating scan appeal. Is there an accomplishment, for example, that you want to highlight? Try putting it at the top of a bulleted list and including one or two numerals (such as "reduced costs by 10%" or "supervised a staff of 12"). If appropriate, use some bold or italic either within the item or in the wording that introduces it. Testing for Scan Appeal Your resume should be tested for scan appeal before any copies go out. You must be able to answer two questions? Given just 30 seconds to convince the employer to consider you, what must you bring to his or her attention? And, what does your resume actually convey in a 30-second scan? To conduct a preliminary test yourself, review your employment strategy ? i.e. list the top five things you think are most important for the employer to know about you. Then look at the parts of your resume most likely to be seen in a scan, and make sure each item has been highlighted in some way. For an even more telling test, give your resume to several people who don't know you well, and time them as they scan it for 30 seconds. When they are done, have them set the resume aside and jot down everything they remember. Would the information they noticed and remembered provide compelling reasons for the employer to hire you? If the answer is yes, your resume has excellent scan appeal. © 2005 Ruth Anderson Ruth Anderson is the owner of Vantage Point Coaching & Consulting and author of WRITE RESUMES WITH CONFIDENCE: How to Create Outstanding Resumes and Have the Confidence to Use Them with Success. Learn more about her products and services, including the unique INTRODUCTION TO COACHING and JOB SEARCH TUNE-UP programs, at http://www.vantagepointcoaching.com or write mailto:ruth@vantagepointcoaching.com. | | | | RELATED ARTICLES After Your Interview - What Must You Do Next? Other than actually landing the interview itself and living through it, waiting after the interview and wondering whether you will get a phone call or a rejection letter can be one of the most difficult aspects of searching for a job. What you do after the interview should actually start while you are still 'working' the interview. Change Your Life, Change Your Career And Get A New Job! Careers dictate resume format The Squirrel Effect An industrious black-tailed ground squirrel has his home beneath a stump not far from my office window. I've been watching him squirrel away provisions for winter. 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As a recruiter focused on a highly regulated and competitive industry experiencing significant growth nationwide, here are 3 reasons to hire from outside your industry: Fascinating Ways to Make a Living Doing What You Love May Be Closer Than You Think... You don't have to look very far to find fascinating ways to make a living. Opportunities are literally everywhere? if you're looking, that is. It seems I can't turn on the television or radio or open a magazine or newspaper without seeing at least one good business idea. Maybe that's why, as we were winding down a consulting session the other day, one of my clients said to me, "Boy, you sure have a lot of information in your head." I appreciated the compliment, but Julie was only half right. When you've been in the business of helping people change course for as long as I have, it's only natural I'd know a lot about creative income streams. But most of them aren't in my head ? they're in my Opportunity File.What's an Opportunity File? Basically anytime I happen upon an interesting story about someone who is making money doing what they love, I add it to a big file called Opportunities. If you don't yet have an Opportunity File, I encourage you to set one up. It's positively addicting!I thought it might be fun to just pull a couple of examples from the top of my Opportunity file and share them with you. Since they're on top, that means I've come across them in just the last week or so. Collecting is all the rage these days. As I looked more closely at my top of the pile examples, I realized that in one way or another, they all have something to do with collecting. Read on and you'll see what I mean.First there's antique Christmas decorations collector, Gerald Nixon (aka Mr. Pink? I'll explain in a moment). Gerald had so many antique Christmas decorations in his personal collection that he finally had to open a shop just so he could move about his apartment. Today he has over 10,000 ornaments as well as light reflectors, aluminum trees, rotating color wheels, rotating musical tree stands, vintage holiday cards, and wrapping paper. Okay, why is he called Mr. Pink? Well, it seems the guy owns a very fuzzy pink Santa suit that he happily dons every weekend in December. You can imagine how many tourists ask to have their picture taken with him! You can visit Gerald at his shop in Manhattan at 223 16th Street or online at MrPinkInc.com. If you hurry, you may even catch him in his furry pink suit!And speaking of winter? after his grandfather died and left him his old wooden skis, Mark Miller began collecting vintage skis. Soon neighbors in his small hometown in New Hampshire started dropping off their old skis. Then Mark began buying skis at auctions. Before long, he had over 100 pairs!In 1994, he decided to turn his hobby into a business and moved himself and his collection to Park City, Utah, where he became a ski instructor. Today Mark has the largest collection of antique winter sports equipment in the world. Two warehouses hold his collection of 3,000 pairs of skis, 2,000 pairs of snowshoes, 500 vintage sleds, and 400 pairs of wooden skates.Increasingly, Mark's collection comes from Europe where he managed to track down 500 pairs of American snow shoes used by the Army's 10th Mountain Division in World War II. The shoes were just sitting in an old barn in Turkey. Mark does all the refinishing work himself before selling his vintage finds through his web site at AntiqueSkis.com and through home décor shops in four western states. The next opportunity I found in an article in FSB magazine about hot franchises. I'm not usually very interested in franchises. I've got nothing against them mind you? it's just hard for me to picture someone who wakes up in the morning excited about opening their own Subway or Jiffy Lube shop. On the other hand, franchises can be the ideal solution for someone who basically wants to run his or her own business but doesn't want to build something from scratch.Anyway, it was my keen interest in recycling that peaked my curiosity about Canadian Brian Scudamore's franchise entirely geared around turning trash into cash. Brian got into the business of clearing out unwanted things from people's basements, garages, attics and the like when he was 19 and still in college. He bought an old truck for $700, and in an attempt to make his business sound bigger than it was, he named it Rubbish Boys. (Even though Brian was the only rubbish boy he thought big). His business was so successful, he ended up dropping out of school to haul junk full time.The junk hauling business itself is nothing new. But over time Brian got the bright idea of modernizing the business with uniformed drivers driving fancy trucks who show up when they say they will. So he decide to start a company called Got-Junk (think UPS but with junk pick up). Today this 33-year-old's Vancouver-based company is one of the fastest growing franchises in North America with 74 territories ? most in the U.S. Is there really that much money in junk? This year Got-Junk expects to post revenues system-wide of $12.6 million. To learn more, go to 1800GotJunk.com. A lot of people skip over articles or entire publications if they don't see an immediate application to their life. Not me. The more unrelated to my life, the more intrigued I am. Case in point was a supplement in my local paper that was dedicated to equestrians. I like horses and all, but am not even remotely connected to the horse world.While I scanned the articles, what I was really drawn to were the advertisements. Why? Ads reveal all kinds of interesting ways people with a particular interest have found a way to earn a living. 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