The following article ran in the August 12, 2009 issue of Westport News.
Recent high school and college graduates don't need to be told that this is the toughest time in memory to find a job. They are bombarded with the news and they face that fact daily as they pour over the job ads on Craig's List or they are told by the manager of the local Starbucks, “No, we're sorry, but we're not hiring.”
What is a young person to do? Everybody has a different suggestion: use this time to focus on determining your career goals; stay out of the job market and continue your education; take the first job that comes along; wait until you find something you’re passionate about.
Take a Deep Breath
My suggestion: take a deep breath, take a step back, and take stock of the situation, both yours and on the job front. And keep the following considerations in mind to help guide you.
1. Demonstrate that you will add value to the business from day one. This year, you're not just competing with other recent graduates, you're also competing with last year’s class, candidates with more experience who lost their jobs and are prepared to accept entry level positions, and from those who haven’t been able to move up from their first entry level job.
You’re first objective is to show that you can be as valuable to a business as these more experienced applicants. For example, you can do this by showing how you have the ability, with minimal instruction or training, to ease the burden of the person you’re working for, enabling him or her to devote their energies for more productive pursuits.
2. Emphasize your skills. As a new entrant into the workforce, you’re most likely not going to have significant business experience, but you are going to have skills that can be employed in a business setting.
If you were an Economics major, you know how to use Excel and how to build spreadsheets for financial modeling or budgeting. If you were a dorm RA, you know how to deal with any number of difficult social or interpersonal situations. If your summer jobs were in retail, you have sales skills that are applicable to a wide range of businesses where customer contact is important. You want to lead with those skills.
Clean Up Your Facebook Page!
3. Remember that you’re in the business world now! That means demonstrating that you are an adult many subtle ways. Your body language sends a message about your maturity: always maintain eye contact; watch your language (limit your “you know”s and “like”s) and no street talk or profanity. Make sure that you know the dress code of the work environment and then dress one step up for your interview or a networking meeting. Make sure that your Facebook page is free of any pictures or comments that might not reflect well on you. If there’s any question about whether something is appropriate, err on the side of caution and delete it.
Pluses from Taking the “Not Perfect” Job
4. Take the job! There are positive reasons beyond an income stream for being employed. You’ll be in a business environment, learning how businesses operate. You’ll be learning how to deal with people and situations in a new way. Significantly, it’s much easier for find a job when you have a job: businesses have a preference for hiring those who are employed (you’ll have a current reference and you’ll have real experience). Finally, even if the job is in a function or an industry that you didn’t think you were interested in, you might find it something that really suits you. Good recruiters often have an intuitive sense of a candidate’s aptitude for a particular position or field. And even if it turns out that you really don’t like the job, you will have learned from the experience why it wasn’t right for you.
Understand that the job hunt may be a lengthy one but don’t lose focus. Make sure that you stay in contact with friends and peers who are in the same situation as you and share your positive experiences; learn from each other. You will find a position, but right now your job is finding a job—so treat it as such.
Showing posts with label job search. Show all posts
Showing posts with label job search. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Choosing the Right Resume
The following article ran in the July 8, 2009 issue of Westport News.
There’s a real debate going on among outplacement professionals about what kind of resume will best help you get a job. If you attend Matt Bud’s weekly meetings of FENG (Financial Executive’s Networking Group), where Matt helps his members refine their elevator speeches and provides tips on resumes, you’ll hear Matt shout his objections to functional resumes. On the other hand, if you were at the Westport Library a few weeks ago, you heard Steve Greenberg, the founder of Jobs4point0 and a commentator on the employment scene, extol the virtues of the functional resume, and then, just two days later, at another Westport library program, the speakers once again said no to the functional resume.
A job hunter could get befuddled! Who’s right? And what is a functional resume, anyway?
A Functional Resume—Defined
A functional resume typically lists the candidates skills, abilities and achievements without linking them to any particular job and are usually presented in an order that the candidate thinks best showcases what he has accomplished in his career, or those of his skills that are the most topical and will attract the most attention from a potential employer.
A traditional resume, on the other hand, usually describes the candidates job history in reverse chronological order (most recent job first), and describes what the candidate achieved in each position.
So why would it make a difference which resume to use—and why would employment professionals have such heated opinions one way or the other?
Hiring professionals admit that they have certain biases when they are reviewing resumes. They are usually looking for candidates who have followed a clearly defined employment history, moving from position to position, taking more responsibility as their career ascends. They’re looking at resumes to identify specific needs for their clients or companies to make sure that there aren’t any red-flags that would disqualify a candidate.
Recruiters fear that a functional resume may be hiding some problem about the candidate, like a gap in his employment history, an affiliation with a problem employer, or the candidate’s age. They like to be able to link achievements with specific periods of employment. Many professional recruiters say that they will not give serious consideration to candidates who submit functional resumes.
Functional Resumes May Be a Better Way to Tell Your Story
Here’s what I tell my clients: those who use functional resumes probably aren’t candidates that professional recruiters are going to consider anyway! If you have gaps in employment, if you’ve changed careers, if you’re a mom who’s returning to the workforce after raising your kids, most likely you don’t have the job history that would make you interesting to a recruiter. In your case, creating a resume that shows what you’ve done and what you can do—how you can add value to a business—is going to be far more important that showing how you rose from a junior copywriter to an account executive.
So here’s what I suggest: if you’ve climbed the traditional job ladder, stick with the tried and true resume format. Follow all the rules; make sure that your resume is chock full of action verbs that demonstrate the positive impact of what you’ve done for the companies you’ve worked for. But if a chronological resume doesn’t tell a clear story about you, rethink the resume, describing the skills you have, and the things you’ve accomplished, in a way that demonstrates you are the idea candidate for the position you want.
There’s a real debate going on among outplacement professionals about what kind of resume will best help you get a job. If you attend Matt Bud’s weekly meetings of FENG (Financial Executive’s Networking Group), where Matt helps his members refine their elevator speeches and provides tips on resumes, you’ll hear Matt shout his objections to functional resumes. On the other hand, if you were at the Westport Library a few weeks ago, you heard Steve Greenberg, the founder of Jobs4point0 and a commentator on the employment scene, extol the virtues of the functional resume, and then, just two days later, at another Westport library program, the speakers once again said no to the functional resume.
A job hunter could get befuddled! Who’s right? And what is a functional resume, anyway?
A Functional Resume—Defined
A functional resume typically lists the candidates skills, abilities and achievements without linking them to any particular job and are usually presented in an order that the candidate thinks best showcases what he has accomplished in his career, or those of his skills that are the most topical and will attract the most attention from a potential employer.
A traditional resume, on the other hand, usually describes the candidates job history in reverse chronological order (most recent job first), and describes what the candidate achieved in each position.
So why would it make a difference which resume to use—and why would employment professionals have such heated opinions one way or the other?
Hiring professionals admit that they have certain biases when they are reviewing resumes. They are usually looking for candidates who have followed a clearly defined employment history, moving from position to position, taking more responsibility as their career ascends. They’re looking at resumes to identify specific needs for their clients or companies to make sure that there aren’t any red-flags that would disqualify a candidate.
Recruiters fear that a functional resume may be hiding some problem about the candidate, like a gap in his employment history, an affiliation with a problem employer, or the candidate’s age. They like to be able to link achievements with specific periods of employment. Many professional recruiters say that they will not give serious consideration to candidates who submit functional resumes.
Functional Resumes May Be a Better Way to Tell Your Story
Here’s what I tell my clients: those who use functional resumes probably aren’t candidates that professional recruiters are going to consider anyway! If you have gaps in employment, if you’ve changed careers, if you’re a mom who’s returning to the workforce after raising your kids, most likely you don’t have the job history that would make you interesting to a recruiter. In your case, creating a resume that shows what you’ve done and what you can do—how you can add value to a business—is going to be far more important that showing how you rose from a junior copywriter to an account executive.
So here’s what I suggest: if you’ve climbed the traditional job ladder, stick with the tried and true resume format. Follow all the rules; make sure that your resume is chock full of action verbs that demonstrate the positive impact of what you’ve done for the companies you’ve worked for. But if a chronological resume doesn’t tell a clear story about you, rethink the resume, describing the skills you have, and the things you’ve accomplished, in a way that demonstrates you are the idea candidate for the position you want.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Welcome to the Blog!
In conjunction with our consulting businesses, we are creating a blog in which we hope to post helpful hints in two areas: dispute resolution and outplacement/job search/transition management and planning. We utilize prove problem-solving techniques and a real world approach to these areas and believe that our methodology helps our clients find faster, less expensive and more practical solutions to the issues that they come to us for help with.
We're going to focus here on case studies from our files and practical hints and suggestions that we hope will help readers resolve problems, whether, personal or business, legal or otherwise, and for those who are in job or career transition mode, we hope that our suggestions will be helpful to you as you pursue your job or career search.
Here's today's tip for jobhunters:
Today's employers can be, and in fact are, very selective about who they interview, so when they select the candidates for face-to-face interviews, they have already reviewed many, perhaps even hundreds, of resumes. So, if you are one of the lucky ones to get the call, you should know that you have passed all the major hurdles and that the employer actually WANTS to hire you! It is no longer a situation where, with full employment, employers were choosing from dozens of semi-qualified candidates. Now, they have many highly qualified candidates, and if you have been selected to interview, you know in advance that you are qualified. So now, it's up to you to show your interest in the position, by being prepared for the interview.
Be prepared; know who you're going to be speaking with, what his or her background is and history with the company. Make sure that you're armed with questions about the position and the company and most importantly, make sure that your questions are genuine and not loaded. Don't turn off the interviewer with negativity! Pretend that you're going to Carnegie Hall--practice, practice, practice!
Feel free to contact Stanley Witkow Associates at StanleyWitkow.com for help building a compelling resume, effective networking and interview training.
We're going to focus here on case studies from our files and practical hints and suggestions that we hope will help readers resolve problems, whether, personal or business, legal or otherwise, and for those who are in job or career transition mode, we hope that our suggestions will be helpful to you as you pursue your job or career search.
Here's today's tip for jobhunters:
Today's employers can be, and in fact are, very selective about who they interview, so when they select the candidates for face-to-face interviews, they have already reviewed many, perhaps even hundreds, of resumes. So, if you are one of the lucky ones to get the call, you should know that you have passed all the major hurdles and that the employer actually WANTS to hire you! It is no longer a situation where, with full employment, employers were choosing from dozens of semi-qualified candidates. Now, they have many highly qualified candidates, and if you have been selected to interview, you know in advance that you are qualified. So now, it's up to you to show your interest in the position, by being prepared for the interview.
Be prepared; know who you're going to be speaking with, what his or her background is and history with the company. Make sure that you're armed with questions about the position and the company and most importantly, make sure that your questions are genuine and not loaded. Don't turn off the interviewer with negativity! Pretend that you're going to Carnegie Hall--practice, practice, practice!
Feel free to contact Stanley Witkow Associates at StanleyWitkow.com for help building a compelling resume, effective networking and interview training.
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