Buzz for Knock ’em Dead Resumes “Two recruitment firms both gave me compliments on my resume. At Volt the recruiter said, ‘This is the best resume regarding format that I have seen in a long time.’ At Robert Half they stated the same thing, that the format was easy to read and very professional. Your Knock ’em Dead: The Ultimate Job Search Guide, and Knock ’em Dead Resume Templates have been life-savers for me!” —P.K., Operations Administration, San Diego “I was sending out hordes of resumes and hardly getting a nibble—and I have top-notch skills and experience in my field. I wasn’t prepared for this tough job market. When I read your book, however, I immediately began applying some of your techniques. My few nibbles increased to so many job interviews I could hardly keep up with them!” —C.S., Chicago, Illinois “This book is as good as it gets. Put the time into following step by step and you will have a dramatically different view of your own skills. Plus, you’ll end up with a fantastic resume.” —J.A., Boise, Idaho “After I sent my new resume and cover letter, I got four interviews in one week and refused two interviews. I want to say thank you: thank you for doing this for millions of professionals who work hard, and thank you for changing our lives—job seeking is life, it is for everyone who takes their life seriously.” —N.P., Chicago, Illinois “First of all, thank you soooo much! It was YOU who helped me move from under-evaluating myself to accurately presenting who I truly am on my resume [and, thus, at interviews]. As a result, this brought my salary up by a giant leap.” —E.A. (no address given) “I bought all three of your books: Knock ’em Dead Resumes, Knock ’em Dead Cover Letters, and Knock ’em Dead: The Ultimate Job Search Guide. I read each book cover to cover. I went for the interview yesterday with a mental health center. They said they would call me by the end of the week. Soon as I got home I wrote a follow-up letter; I mailed it express to get there noon next day. I got the call from the hiring manager within the hour letting me know that I have the job. I think he called me as soon as he put the letter down.” —K.G. (no address given) “This book was wonderful! I’ve been in a management role for multiple years and the ideas in this book helped me determine what I should be looking for. The information in the book was spot on and spoke to the reader in volumes in just a few short pages.” —K.W., St. Louis, Missouri “For job hunters of all ages this book is valuable. It provides a comprehensive guide to thinking about your experience, defining your personal brand and translating it into a resume that will get attention. The text and 100 sample resumes are up to date and should help the majority of searchers find a style and sample text in their field.” —T.K., Carmel, Indiana “After reading your book, Knock ’em Dead Resumes, I rewrote my resume and mailed it to about eight companies. The results were beyond belief. I was employed by one of the companies that got my new resume and received offers of employment or requests for interviews from every company. The entire job search took only five weeks.” —J.V., Dayton, Ohio “You resonated through your understanding of the realities of our current job climate and practical approaches, especially the resume Target Job Deconstruction Process. Awesome.” —M.M., Chicago, Illinois “I re-jigged my resume exactly as you outlined in your book and one employer said, ‘You can tell this person has a real love of PR from his resume.’ Within three weeks I had three job offers and was able to pick and choose the perfect job for myself.” —M.W., Detroit, Michigan “I am very grateful for your Knock ’em Dead series. I have read the trio and adopted the methods. In the end, I get a dream job with a salary that is almost double of my previous! By adopting your methods, I got four job offers.” —C.Y., Singapore “Your book is simply fantastic. This one book improved my yearly income by several thousand dollars, and my future income by untold amounts. Your work has made my family and myself very happy.” —M.Z., St. Clair Shores, Michigan “I cannot tell you what a fabulous response I have been getting due to the techniques you describe in your books. Besides giving me the tools I needed to ‘get my foot in the door,’ they gave me confidence. I never thought I could secure an excellent position within a month!” —B.G., Mountain View, California “I read and used Knock ’em Dead Resumes as I searched for a job. I was called for an interview and was up against ten applicants. To make a long story short, I interviewed on Monday morning and by Monday afternoon knew I had the job.” —E.H. (no address given) “I have averaged at least an interview per day for the last couple weeks, after two months of very sporadic interview activity. Some of this might be plain good luck, but I think revising my resume and cover letters several weeks ago had a positive effect.” —L.E. (no address given) KNOCK ’em DEAD RESUMES 10TH EDITION How to write a killer resume that gets you job interviews MARTIN YATE, CPC New York Times bestselling author CONTENTS INTRODUCTION The Facts of Life CHAPTER 1 Your Resume—The Most Financially Important Document You’ll Ever Own Your resume is the most financially important document you will ever own. When it works, you work, and when it doesn’t work, you don’t. CHAPTER 2 Your Customer Knows What He Wants—How to Get Inside His Head How to create a template for the story your resume needs to tell in order to be successful. CHAPTER 3 Your Resume Is a Garbage In/Garbage Out Proposition Fifty percent of the success of any project depends on the preparation. Taking the time to gather the right information for your resume makes the difference between interviews and no interviews. CHAPTER 4 How to Define and Build a Desirable Professional Brand In any job search you are selling a product: You are a bundle of skills and capabilities suited to a particular set of challenges. Like any product you will do better when you give a distinct identity to what you are taking to market. CHAPTER 5 Resume Formats A resume’s format can help emphasize or de-emphasize aspects of your professional background. CHAPTER 6 The Simplest, Smartest, Fastest Way to Write Your Resume—Keep It Simple, Stupid The most effective way to get a premium, powerful resume for a professional job in the shortest time with the least hassle. CHAPTER 7 How to Give Your Resume Punch First impressions are important. Editing polishes your content and helps it deliver a greater punch. CHAPTER 8 Resume Customization, Alternative Resumes, and Formats Needed for an Effective Job Search With the job search the way it is today, you may need to repackage your background into three or more different delivery vehicles. CHAPTER 9 Ready to Launch Everyone hates reading resumes, so here are some powerful strategies to make your resume data dense and visually accessible to distracted readers. CHAPTER 10 The Resumes One hundred-plus killer resumes that got real jobs for real people. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Knock ’em Dead books have been in print in America and in many languages around the world for twenty-five-plus years. They owe their success to millions of satisfied professionals. This is only possible because books like Knock ’em Dead Resumes work. This book can be the start of significant changes in the trajectory of your professional life. My thanks to my readers everywhere for bringing others in need to the Knock ’em Dead path, as well as for the fun and privilege of doing this work. Thanks also to the Adams Media team who helps me do it; especially my editors, Peter Archer and Will Yate, and Head of House Karen Cooper. INTRODUCTION The Facts of Life On the list of things you want to do in life, fixing your resume is right up there with hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. Yet owning a killer resume is the foundation of every successful job search; show me a stalled job search and I’ll show you a flawed resume. What you learn in these pages will give you the best resume you have ever owned, and if you pay close attention, you will learn how to change the trajectory of your career. Your resume is the most financially important document you will ever own: when your resume works, you work; when it doesn’t, you don’t. It’s the primary branding tool to introduce yourself to your professional world, and properly fashioned, it ensures that prospective employers and future colleagues see you as you want to be seen. Slack off on your resume and you can say goodbye to that new job and career success. No one likes writing a resume, but it’s an essential part of defining a commodity that your professional world is eager to embrace. When it comes to a job search, you are a commodity, and your resume is the styling and packaging that sells the product. This is critical in a world where your resume all too often disappears into resume databases with millions of others. When recruiters do find it, your resume will get a scan lasting five to forty-five seconds, and if a clearly defined and relevant brand doesn’t jump out, they’ll move on to the next one. Knock ’em Dead Resumes will give you control over these issues, delivering a resume that will consistently get pulled from the resume databases and will resonate with recruiters on that first scan and also on deeper, more careful readings. Remember: Managers hate to interview; they just want to find and hire someone who gets the job, so they can get back to work. Knock ’em Dead Resumes shows you how to convince hiring managers that you are a competent professional who gets the job. It will prepare you to talk about the job’s big issues and answer the tough questions in ways you never thought possible … and it’s all based on a commonsense approach you’ll be able to grasp and apply to your future. CHAPTER 1 YOUR RESUME—THE MOST FINANCIALLY IMPORTANT DOCUMENT YOU’LL EVER OWN Read this book with a highlighter— it will save time as you refer back to important passages. YOUR RESUME IS the most financially important document you will ever own. When it works, the doors of opportunity open for you. When it doesn’t work, they won’t. No one enjoys writing a resume, but it has such a major impact on the money you earn during your work life, and consequently on the quality of your life outside of work, that you know it needs to be done right. You didn’t come to this book for a good read. You came because you are facing serious challenges in your professional life. The way the professional world works has changed dramatically in the past few years, and nothing has changed as much as corporate recruitment. When hiring practices have changed beyond recognition, your approach to getting hired needs to be re-evaluated from top to bottom. In these pages, you are going to learn very quickly how to build a resume that works. But you’re going to learn something more. Since my approach to resumes is part of a larger strategy for achieving long- term career and personal success, everything I teach you about developing a kick-ass resume will apply to the broader challenges of the job search, interviewing, and career management. In other words, not only will you leave this book with a killer resume, you’ll leave it with critical job search and interview strategies, and even some amazing insights into winning raises and promotions. Self-Awareness: The Key to Professional Survival and Success Understanding what employers want and need from a specific job title, and how they express and prioritize those needs, will tell you what it takes to win and succeed in that job. It will also give you some hints about the story your resume needs to tell in order to get your foot in the door. Employers Just Want to Make a Buck Employees only get added to the payroll to help make a buck, to enhance profitability in some way. Think about this: If you owned a company, there just isn’t any other reason you would add workers to your payroll. So it is implicit in any employment contract that your job contributes to profitability in some way. Depending on your job, you can help an employer make a buck by: • Making money for the company • Saving money for the company • Saving time/increasing productivity No matter what your job, no matter how impressive your title, at its very core, your position exists to help an employer maintain and increase profitability by: • The identification of problems within your area of responsibility • The prevention of problems within your area of responsibility • The solution to problems within your area of responsibility No resume gets read, no one gets interviewed, and no one gets hired unless someone somewhere is trying to solve a problem. That problem may be finding a quicker way to manufacture silicon chips, speed up the accounts receivable process, leverage social networking for brand management, or any one of a million other profit challenges. The only reason your job exists is because your employer needed someone to identify, prevent, and solve the problems that regularly occur in this area of professional expertise; it exists because not having someone like you is costing the company money. Problem solving—the application of critical thinking to the challenges within your area of expertise—is what you are paid to do. It is why every job opening exists, and why every job gets filled with the person who seems to have the firmest grip on how to identify, prevent, and solve the problems that make up the everyday activities of that job. Why No One Wants to Read Your Resume You may think that resume writing is a tough job, but you’ve never had to read them. Go to the resume samples section at the end of the book and try to read and understand six resumes in a row. Your brain will first go numb, then start to melt, and by the sixth you’ll understand why no one is really that anxious to read your resume. No one reads resumes unless they have to, so when your resume does get read, it means that a job exists: a job that has been carefully defined, budgeted, and titled, with a salary range that has been authorized and for which funds have been released. Whenever a recruiter searches a resume database or reads a resume, she is doing it with a specific job and the language and priorities of that job description in mind. Why a Hiring Manager May Never Get the Chance to Read Your Resume The ongoing impact of technology on our world of work causes the nature of all jobs to change almost as rapidly as the pages on a calendar. Resumes today rarely go straight to a recruiter’s or manager’s desk (though I’ll show you how to make this happen); more often they go to a resume database. This means that before anyone actually looks at your resume, it must first have been pulled from that database by a recruiter with a specific job and the language and priorities of that job description in mind. Keep in mind that some of those databases contain more than 35 million resumes. With this in mind, you can see that if your resume’s just a jumble of everything you’ve ever done, or of everything that you happen to think is important (without reference to what your customers are actually buying), it is never going to work. Understand Your Customer “The customer is always right,” “the customer comes first,” and “understand your customer” are phrases that underlie all successful business stories. In the same way that corporations tailor products to be appealing to their customers, you need to create a resume tailored to your customers’ needs. Your resume works when it matches your skills and experiences to the responsibilities and deliverables of a specific target job. This requires that your resume focus on how employers—your customers— think about, prioritize, and describe the job’s deliverables: those things you are expected to deliver as you execute your assigned responsibilities. A resume focused on a specific target job and built from the ground up with the customers’ needs in mind will perform better in the recruiters’ resume database searches, and it will resonate far more with human eyes already glazed from the tedium of resume reading. This Is Not Your Last Job Change In a world without job security, when job and even career changes are happening ever more frequently, being able to write a productive resume is one of life’s critical survival skills. This is probably not your first, and almost certainly won’t be your last, job change. You are somewhere in the middle of a half-century work-life, a span during which you are likely to have three or more distinct careers and are statistically likely to change jobs about every four years; where economic recessions come around every seven to ten years and age discrimination can begin to kick in around age fifty.