Your Resume: A Work In Progress

Your resume. Your professional life summed up in one or two pages. I have lost track of how many times I have fine tuned, polished and picked apart my resume. Every time I think I have it perfectly done, I will submit it to a resume writer, or read another article that speaks of including or doing everything I'm NOT doing in mine. To put personal interest or not (it allegedly can either make you approachable or make you sound amateurish), to include years enrolled or not (some say it will tell your age), to open with an objective or not (many claim that this is "fluff" and that recruiters feel that this screams rookie) ... the arguments are endless to do this or that.

There are approaches that advocate countless directions so what to do? Polish it, fine tune it, read it over and over again, read your friends resumes, examine the job posting, research the company ... and then tailor your resume to what feel like YOU.

After years of getting the interviews I wanted (and some of which I wanted but didn't get) I can tell you this; get feedback. Often we are too close to our own resumes to really be objective. While I never used a resume writer, I did get their feedback. Often resume writers will provide you with critique if you ask for it, aiming to sell their services. A good resume writer sometimes cost up toward $500 (and more for execs) to rewrite your resume. Few can afford it, but if you can, I say do it. However, if you are a good writer and have good feedback, just keep tweaking your own. Invite feedback from your friends whose opinion you respect. People often don't want to critique someone's resume out of worry that it will offend the recipient. Let them know that you are looking for critique and welcome it. Trust me, suspend your defensiveness (even if you have slaved over that resume for months on end) and open yourself up to opinions. It will give you a whole new perspective.

FYI, I speak from experience: I recently landed an executive job with my dream company. It's another Fortune 500 company, but in an industry I'm fiercely passionate about. It took me months on end of tweaking my resume, but it paid off. It was a humbling experience at first. No matter how good you think your resume is, it will inevitably have to compete against several hundred others who also consider their excellent.

Remember that most recruiters and hiring managers get absolutely swamped with resumes for any good job. I recently received close to 200 resumes in one business week, for an entry level marketing position. Needless to say I was not able to read every resume I received, but I did scan through them and a few did catch my attention. The cookie cutter ones who read (and looked) like they had been taken out of a Word template did not make the cut. Beware of templates; they are widely recognized.

Imagine yourself a hiring manager ... what would get YOUR attention?

Interview Feedback

I recently contacted Jason Alba at JibberJobber asking him if he could put out the word to his (awesome) readership asking folks for their opinions as it relates to feedback from interviews. This is a topic that I think really deserves some spotlight as so many managers are confused as to best practice and/or what is appropriate.

I often get asked “What could I have done better?” or “Why wasn’t I chosen?” after turning down applicants. Heck, I’ve often wondered that myself if I didn’t end up getting chosen in an interview!. In today’s uber-vigilant HR world, where every action has to be guarded and closely monitored in order to avoid getting sued for discrimination or wrongful hiring practices, have we become so paranoid that we cannot help guide candidates along at all?

The general policy when folks ask for references is “Provide employment dates and confirm employment. Period.” While I fully understand corporations taking this stance and I realize that one cannot have hiring managers telling candidates “you should cut your hair, you look too nuts” to the right or left, I do feel that a manager could practice their best judgment and at least provide some high level comments on why they chose one competitor over another.

For instance, I would have loved to be able to tell a recent candidate that he/she had excellent skills in theory, yet had no actual real life examples or case studies to point to (where they had applied said theories). Unfortunately, I couldn’t. I’m sure it would have helped the candidate tremendously to dig deep and see where some of his or her ideas truly had been put into practice, if nothing else for future interviews where the candidate surely would be asked the same question.

One of my favorite personal comments was following an interview I had as a candidate many years ago; I was six months pregnant at the time. A day or two after the interview I received a thank you card in the mail with a business card attached. The note read: “Call us back in six months after your maternity leave ends. We will be interested”.

No, I didn’t sue but I did marvel at the sheer ignorance of the sender. Perhaps it isn’t such a good idea to have hiring managers practice best judgment after all? Are we too paranoid?

Being Nice

Recently my company hosted an event with a guest speaker that not only inspired me, but also validated what I've long held firm; nice pays off. Linda Kaplan-Thaler, the author of the bestseller "The Power of Nice: How to conquer the business world with kindness", spoke in front of a couple of thousand (probably somewhat jaded) executives where she transformed the crowds with humor, relevance and a genuinely valuable message. The book puts forth the notion that a) what comes around goes around, b) there IS a place for nice in the business world and c) you reap what you sow. It could easily be another typical non-fiction book filled with self-help buzz words and lofty vision, but it's not. "The Power of Nice" really speaks to a very simple concept; just being nice without being a pushover.

In my organization, a very large national Fortune 50, we sometimes forget to be nice to each other, the customer and/or vendors. Often it is believed that when one gets to be our size, one deserves the right to somehow be slightly arrogant or tough to please. To that I say "GET OVER IT!". Sooner or later the shoe will be on the other foot and you will pay the consequences when you are the one in some need or another.

I loved Kaplan-Thaler's speech. I loved her presence. I loved her NICENESS. However, more so than anything else, I loved that our CEO invited her to our quarterly meetings!

There is a lot of power to being employee centric, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The numbers speak to lower turnover, a boost in productivity, not to mention morale, and healthier employees (in an employee centric business model). We speak so much about customer centric marketing, advertising and sales, yet we often forget about employee satisfaction. Every happy employee creates one more happy customer. Southwest Airlines is a great example of that approach. A great blog on this topis is the Employee Factor and obviously there are a ton of great books on the topic as well.

What I don't understand is that the message is clear: Happy Employees Make For Happy Customers. So why are such few companies TRULY (I capitalize only because many talk the talk but few actually walk it) investing in employee satisfaction and team building? I would think it would be a no-brainer yet even at my organization we have many "old guard" managers, many of whom I work with, that believe "employee satisfaction" should be put within quotation marks like this because it's not a "real" word, or one without much credence. The Law of Scarcity seems to be more prominent than the Law of Abundance. If I could give a dollar for every time I have heard "they should be lucky to have a job" in my career, I would be a rich woman.

Somehow there is an upset on behalf of this type of manager that the employee today actually has the gall to feel entitled to medallion treatment. I always respond ... "no, we are lucky to have them". In order to change our fear based culture, it is my firm belief that the employer has to give first, with the disclaimer that if there is abuse on behalf of the employee, you didn't hire well in the first place and the trust or good will can, and should, be revoked.