Posts Tagged ‘Résumé’
How To Write A Professional Resume.
How To Write A Professional Resume.
Learn The Secrets Of Writing A Professional Resume Fast! Step by Step Guide Shows you the way. Written by a Human Resource professional. Excellent resume advice!
How To Write A Professional Resume.
Video Resume Tips- How to Create a Successful Video Resume {youtube} {yahooanswers} {yahoonews}
Video Resume Tips- How to Create a Successful Video Resume
The global financial crisis is now having an obvious impact on every walk of life. Unemployment in 30 of the world’s wealthiest countries is expected to rise by some 8 million people in the next two years as the severest recession since the 1980s takes hold, according to an Economic Outlook report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This translates into 42 million unemployed in OECD countries in 2010.
As vacancies continue to evaporate, competition for any job available will become fiercer. After the Christmas holiday, there surely will be a range of intense competition for vacant positions. Want to improve the efficiency of hunting a job? Want more
“Total Candidate Profile™” – Not “Video Resumes”
The phrase “Video Resumes” is in vogue, but these talking head productions are different than “video interviews”. And whichever one you favor, they are really only one piece of a Total Candidate Profile™ which can contain most of the data out there on the web in one “showcase”.
Video is being used in Employment Applications in basically two categories:
1. Employer Branding Videos, wherein the employer company and its hiring managers are video taped evangelizing the company and/or the job and those videos are either placed on the company’s home page, or their career page (where their job listings appear) or are sent out in email campaigns or pushed out to YouTube and that YouTube link is used in email campaigns for hiring purposes.
2. Candidate Videos, which actually fall into two sub-categories:
a. Video Resumes which are canned, pre-taped videos of the job seeker basically speaking their resume… talking through the chronology of what they have done and why they are a good employee. Examples are InterviewClips and VideoResume. Neither of these are a Total Candidate Profile™ containing rich content data representing all aspects of a candidate’s asset value.
b. VIDEO INTERVIEWS which are either canned or live/interactive, but include one or more formal interview questions chosen by the employer, and answered on video tape (either via webcam or family video camera or by a professional videographer). One example is HireVue. Another is GreenJobInterview.
Video technology for the employment market is in its “first phase”, just as the written resume had a first phase and evolved to a digitized form. In the very near future, video will become just a part of a Total Candidate Profile™ that will be submitted for employment purposes rather than just a resume. These profiles will include readily available due diligence (data and media) about job candidates that can be grabbed from the web or input directly by the candidate themselves. For instance, InterviewStudio allows a job candidate to build a total online profile of himself that combines the traditional resume, his endorsements by former managers or co-workers, the results of a professional assessment test he has taken online, his LinkedIn or other social network links, his portfolio documents, and links to whatever Google or Yahoo or Zoominfo might present about him.
Gartner and other analysts call these new profiling software tools “mashups” since they mash together a lot of leading edge technology in one product or tool so that huge strides in time-and-dollar savings can be made with these combinations.
We call this a Total Candidate Profile™ and we believe they will become the standard in hiring and recruiting since they provide the employer or recruiting agency much more due diligence about a job candidate upfront, without the long drawn out iterative process that usually takes up to 90 days to seek this information online or schedule the job seeker to provide. In fact, a professional comprehensive profile can save recruiting departments from 2 to 6 weeks in the hiring process since they actually change the process that needs to happen: you may no longer need a phone screen or even a first face-to-face interview by a recruiter.
From Resume To Resume Video – In A Few Short Years !
As legend has it, Leonardo DaVinci created the first professional resume in 1482. For what purpose, I’m not sure, but it is likely he needed a real job, as did many unsung artists in history. Would that all historical greats had created a resume video for us to view!
Since then, the traditional resume hasn’t changed all that much, unfortunately:
Section 1: Name and Address
Section 2: Objective Statement
Section 3: Chronological Work History
Section 4: Education
The only significant addition in the last 20 years has been the introduction of KEYWORDS into the text of the resume, and that is only because computers are reading resumes now instead of people. A “Section 5” has been added in many online resumes that is simply a long string of words and phrases such as “C++, SQL, project management, PMP, program management….”.
With the advent of MySpace, Facebook, and Linkedin, the physical appearance of job candidates came back into play along with previously taboo data like age, lists of friends and hobbies, and various substance intake preferences.
And then it was a short stretch from photos to video. YouTube capitalized on this trend of ‘full disclose’ by the younger generations, and the first round of the YouTube Resume Video started to appear in 2006.
The Resume Video so far has no rules, no restrictions, and no governing standards board. They range from a simple talking head (a head and shoulders view of a candidate reading their resume out loud) to animated pleas for jobs and then more recently to professional productions that present many facets of a person’s work background, skill sets, and personality.
Early on, the human resources departments of many of the larger corporations balked at the viewing or use of any type of resume video out of fear of potential discrimination claims by those who were not selected based on something in their video. Employment attorneys counseled companies to “just say no” to the resume video in an effort to avoid even the slightest possibility of discrimination claims.
“‘Just don’t even deal with them,’ said Dennis Brown, an attorney in the San Jose, Calif., office of Littler Mendelson whose firm recently advised employers about the dangers of video résumés at a seminar.”
But in the 2007 Video Resume Survey by Vault.com, “89% of employers revealed that they would watch a video resume if it were submitted to them”.
So, it is 2009, and bloggers are proclaiming that perhaps the initial paranoia was premature, since there has not been one discrimination case yet due to a resume video. In addition, it appears as if companies may be saving money by not flying as many candidates in for interviews, and not having to put them up in hotels, or pay for cabs or parking. Then too, their interview teams are not wasting as much time in group interviews only to find out in the first 5 minutes that the candidate was not a corporate culture match at all.
Like it or not, the resume video is not going away. The good news is that they are morphing to include other pieces of due diligence – the electronic resume, links to annual reviews or portfolios, shortcuts to their social media profiles, reference checks and endorsements – in order to provide a cross section of candidate assets. In addition, the trend is away from the simple “resume video” and more towards “video interviews”, wherein the job seeker is not necessarily talking about his/her chronological history of jobs, but is answering behavioral and situational interview questions, much like those asked in a typical face-to-face interview.
As you can see in the History of the Resume chart, the pace of change has gone from centuries to months in the last few years. Technology integration has reached a point where multi-media is not just an entertaining YouTube video any more, but a true collection of multiple electronic data pieces all in one place at one time.
Just had to mention that, in a funny turn of events, YouTube videos are now teaching people how to write paper resumes. Technology marches on.
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How Video Resumes Came to Be
How Video Resumes Came to Be
Video resumes were the first attempt by job seekers to break out of the keyword trap and get around the computer screening programs. So how did the candidate screening market get to this frustration point for the job seeker, AND for the recruiter?
LIKE IT OR NOT, TIME MARCHES ON… Technology marches on… Tools get more progressive and disruption happens. Change happens. For about 50 years, the paper resume has ruled within corporations seeking new employees. People are used to it… People are comfortable with it. We were taught to write resumes in black ink on white paper and mail them out using stamps.
And then resumes became “soft-copy” (Yes there was a time when that was not a real word). The online resume became accessible instantly to several viewers at a time, and storable and retrievable.
And then came text search capability and KEYWORDS along with that. So today the comfort zone is not paper resumes anymore. It is soft-copy keyword-searchable resumes.
Today, the industry has deemed this as standard, and many vendor products have been developed to help parse, and poke, and rank and rate these KEYWORDS and their relevance to matching KEYWORDS in job descriptions, for instance.
RECRUITER FRUSTRATION
And, as most every system can be “gamed”, job seekers can now populate the KEYWORD section in their resume to match a job description and submit it with a keystroke, whether or not they are qualified. It is then incumbent upon the Recruiter to read through that mass of electronically “qualified” resumes to identify the truly qualified.
So Recruiters don’t have much time on their hands to really read a resume thoroughly –
- too much volume
- too many resumes look the same, populated with keywords from the online job description
- not enough time to do a thorough job — hiring managers need to hire NOW
CANDIDATE FRUSTRATION
Job Candidates were initially impressed when the Employer sent them immediate feedback after applying for a job. “Finally”, they thought. “This company cares.” Thoughtful “no thank-you” letters arrived minutes after an online resume submission. But this again was simply a production letter generated by the company’s ATS (Applicant Tracking System) and sent to all candidates who did not populate their resume with the correct keywords.
Enter VIDEO RESUMES
What does anyone do when they want attention? Yell louder.
The Video Resume is a louder yell: “HEY! Look at me!” “See how I talk – I’m 3-dimensional.”
As a headhunter, I talk to dozens of executives each week whose only objective is to “get in front of the hiring manager”. They don’t want tips about the newest keywords to use. Job seekers are tired of playing the keyword game, knowing full well that every other candidate for the same job is using the same keywords. And their patience is wearing thin with 22-year old internal corporate “recruiters” who call them up to ask simple questions – the answers to which are clearly on their resume. And lastly, job seekers have figured out the “mass email” tools that come with every ATS, and realize that no one actually reads their resume enough to grasp their total value as a candidate.
The first ever YouTube video was put up in April 23, 2005 by some guy at the zoo talking about elephants. And that was all it took. Now, every minute, twenty hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.
So, naturally, video would be the new channel to use to get noticed. And candidates looking for jobs are eager to find ways to stand out from the mass of keyword-laden resumes, and to virtually “get in front of the hiring manager”. Armed with a PC or a Mac, and a $50 webcam, a job seeker can easily create a video as simple as a “talking head” – reading their resume in front of a camera.
Granted, there are issues galore with “video resumes”, many covered in our previous blog, but every new idea starts out a little rocky.
In time (and in the not so distant future), Video Resumes, as all other new products, will enter the professional realm and become more relevant to specific jobs, more polished as a tool, and have more industry-developed rules around them.
The first step is to change Video Resumes into Video Interviews. Stay tuned for more on that.
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Resume Writing Tips for Executive Resumes: Tip #1 Length of Resume
How many pages are appropriate for Executive Résumés?
The one-page synopsis is a thing of the past. And now that I’ve said this, all you employers please put your teeth back in, take a valium and read on.
First of all, length is really irrelevant compared to content in executive resumes. Put yourself in the shoes of a hiring manager for a moment and I’ll explain why. The hiring authority must sift through dozens, or even hundreds, of executive résumés to choose a first list of candidates who MIGHT be qualified. Give him a break! And not by giving fewer words, but more meat. When you synopsize, you run these risks:
1. You assume the reader will read between the lines and come up with the correct evaluation of what it is you can do, or will do. As a recruiter, I get very frustrated with this. I can’t tell whether you are lazy, modest, or have no idea why anyone would want to hire you.
2. You assume the reader knows the size and structure, the product or service and the marketplace of your current employer.
3. You assume the reader will be impressed by your title(s) and know where you fit in the hierarchy of responsibility in your corporate structure.
4. You assume that using vague business platitudes on an executive resume will “sort of cover every possible job opening” and therefore, not limit your chances.
5. You assume the reader is in the business of using his own time and imagination to try to figure out what your potential could be within his company, in other words, what his company could do for you to help your career growth.
When you make these assumptions, you are putting the responsibility [of translating your executive resume content] onto the hiring manager. Your chances of being chosen for an interview are only 50 – 50, because the reader can only relate to your verbiage from his own experience in the business world, and his own pre-conceived ideas about certain companies, titles and résumés AND his own time table for filling this position. Don’t limit your job search chances by vagueness. TAKE CONTROL. BE SPECIFIC. Don’t make more work for a hiring manager than he already has. The only “limiting” this will do is limiting the amount of time wasted by you and the interviewer. Remember that executive resumes are a tool to obtain face-to-face job interviews.
Appropriate Length for Executive Resumes:
Unless you have only 1 or 2 short jobs to relate, executive résumés can easily be 2 pages without being overkill. The longest executive résumé I have seen without any fluff is 8 pages. Of course, this included 3 addendum pages of appropriate publications, languages, and key business relationships, and was a paper customized for a Marketing position that called for detailed technical writing skills.
The point here is that if you write a very full, factual, chronological résumé you should be covered. A skimmer-type of hiring manager should be able to skim and see the important facts jump out. A detail person will be able to glean the answer to all his basic questions and also get a good sense of you as a person.
Don’t be shy. Executive resumes need details. Not only will a hiring manager “get you” on the first skim, but the online ATS (applicant tracking systems) will find all those keywords and phrases that will catapult you to the top of the pile of executive resumes.
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