Main Feature: New Web-Based Twists on Resumes: Best Ways to Construct a Resume?
Special Feature: Polish Your Resume Like a Pro: 7 Tips Any Job-Seeker Can Use
Bonus Feature: What's New in Resume Writing: Key Trends
Extra Feature: How to Choose a High-Quality Resume Service
Supplemental Feature: Pros and Cons of PDF Resumes
New QuintCareers Section: Customizable Closing Paragraphs for Job-Seeker Cover Letters
Quintessential Site: Featured Career Web Site of this Issue
Latest Additions: What's New on Quintessential Careers
Q TIPS: Quick and Quintessential Tips to Guide Your Job Search and Work Life
Editor's Note: About this Issue...
In QuintZine's decade-long history, we've annually had issues on resumes and
cover letters (sometimes separately and sometimes combined). I don't think,
however, that we've ever had one quite as jam-packed with content as this one.
While our five feature articles primarily address resumes, we're also introducing
with this issue the latest addition to our growing collection of cover-letter components.
Joining last year's Customizable Opening Paragraphs for Cover Letters
is Customizable Closing Paragraphs for Job-Seeker Cover Letters, introduced below.
Eventually, we'll add middle paragraphs to the collection. The idea is that while samples of
complete cover letters are helpful in guiding job-seekers in constructing their letters,
sometimes a "Chinese menu" approach makes it easier for cover-letter writers
to adapt letters to their specific needs.
We're delighted that AOL is spotlighting QuintCareers as a "Hot Job Site" this week.
Check out the writeup.
To our readers celebrating holidays this month, we wish you a wonderful season And a great start to 2011.
--Katharine Hansen, Ph.D., Master Resume Writer, Credentialed Career Master,
Certified Electronic Career Coach, and editor at
kathy(at)quintcareers.com
Feature Article: Web-Based Resume Builders
New Web-Based Twists on Resumes: Best Ways to Construct a Resume?
by Katharine Hansen, Ph.D.
Web-based resume-building services like VisualCV and Emurse have been around for several years.
In fact, as far back as 2001, a site called 10MinuteResume offered Web-based resume-building (10MinuteResume
has morphed into Pongo Resume, which also offers a resume builder, as well as a cover-letter builder.)
Recently, a number of new sites have jumped into
the resume-building game.
Our full article
offers an overview of some of them, as well as thoughts
on the value of Web-based resume builders compared to engaging a professional resume
writer or preparing your own resume unaided.
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Polish Your Resume Like a Pro: 7 Tips Any Job-Seeker Can Use
by Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D.
Most job-seekers understand -- or should understand -- that their resume is often the deciding factor in whether
they get invited for a job interview. The resume is the key tool that hiring managers use to categorize job
applicants (and virtually the only tool when networking is not involved). Given this information and knowledge,
it is still astonishing how many job-seekers are using bad, boring, and weak resumes.
Rather than rehashing the common problems and errors found on resumes -- which you can read in some of our
other resume articles -- our article
focuses on 7 tips that professional resume writers use when polishing the resume of a client. As one of my
favorite job-seekers told me recently (as she was going for her second promotion in less than a year),
resume-writing is an easy process once you understand the fundamentals, putting your own spin on the final
product, and polishing it like a pro.
Before you lose out on another great job opportunity or give up even trying -- and before you decide to
spend big bucks on hiring a professional resume writer, try using these simple, but effective tips to polish your
resume like a pro.
Bonus Feature: Key Resume Trends
What's New in Resume Writing: Key Trends
by Susan Britton Whitcomb
Susan Britton Whitcomb, author of the authoritative guide to resumes, Resume Magic, recently documented
trends she's seen in resume-writing as we enter the second decade of the 21st century.
Find Your Career Future. Learn More About Yourself
Career Maze is designed to help every job seeker, at every level, make smarter
career choices. Individualized to reflect your unique personality and written in
"plain English," it is thorough and easy to complete.
Once completing the assessmemt, your 2-part report includes:
A specific, career-relevant discussion of your workplace personality
A list of job types compatible with your personality
Career Maze encourages you to think about tapping your full potential to find your future.
In today's ultra-competitive job market it is more important than ever to be sure that your resume
is not only up to par, but a cut above the rest, and one way to achieve a distinctive resume is to use
a high-quality resume-writing service. While you may be top notch at what you do, if you can't
convey your value on your resume then all your skills will be for naught.
The real challenge these days lies in finding a high-quality resume service. Yes, you can find
a great number of resume services by simply conducting a search, but how do you know if
the companies the search returns are worth a darn? The last thing that you want is to be
handing your hard-earned money over to a less than adequate resume service that simply
spits out cookie-cutter resumes. Price, however, should not be the first thing that you look at when
deciding on a resume service.
As with many other things in life, all resume services are not created equally. A multitude of factors can
help you ensure that you hiring a high-quality resume service.
See those factors in our full article.
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Executive Resume Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Strategizing, Writing, Formatting, and
Designing Resumes for Senior Management and Executive Opportunities
From career experts Wendy S. Enelow and Louise M. Kursmark
A resume that looks virtually identical from one computer to the next sounds mighty appealing. It's comforting to
know your fonts, layout, and graphics won't change when they travel from your computer to an employer's.
But because of advances in technology and the way employers handle resumes, we've been standoffish
about recommending that job-seekers routinely send PDF resumes. At one time, PDF resumes were difficult,
if not impossible, to read and place into keyword-searchable databases using Applicant Tracking System (ATS) software.
Today, PDFs are gaining acceptance among employers, and some hiring decision-makers even prefer them. More
than a third (36.1 percent) of employer respondents in the 2010 Orange County Resume Survey said that when
receiving resumes electronically, they prefer them as PDF files.
New Section Added to QuintCareers: Customizable Closing Paragraphs for Job-Seeker Cover Letters
by Katharine Hansen, Ph.D.
What's the best way to end a cover letter? The closing paragraph of your cover letter should
accomplish at least two goals:
1. Thanking the hiring decision-maker for considering you.
2. Suggesting an interview and proactively indicating that you plan to follow up your letter (and when you say you plan
to follow up the letter, you need to do so) to schedule the interview.
In today's job-search climate, it's not always possible to follow up a cover-letter (and resume)
submission with a specific individual because employers often go to great lengths to prevent job-seekers from
learning the identity of the hiring decision-maker (because they fear being inundated with phone calls).
But you should try to learn the name of the hiring decision-maker, both so you can address your cover
letter to that person and so you can contact that individual to follow up.
A cover-letter closing paragraph can also address a third goal -- summarizing the idea that you are
the best fit for the job you're targeting. If you don't include this summary in your final paragraph, plan
to do so in the preceding paragraph.
BriteTab, one of the online resume-builders we discuss in our feature article, describes itself as
"a new kind of online resume, empowering job-seekers to show off their personality and experience and stand
out from the crowd by combining the best elements of traditional resumes and video resumes."
BriteTab resumes offer a variety of themes and customization options. Users can upload videos that
correspond to each particular section of their resumes so that hiring managers don't have to navigate through
one long video. Users can send BriteTab resumes to as many people as they want, as well as make, save, and
edit multiple resumes; each with a unique URL that is kept private.
BriteTab offers a no-cost basic level and a no-cost 30-day trial of its $7.99/month premium subscription service.
Find a Job, Post Your Resume -- on our Job Portal!
Even in a bad economy, there are still job postings and career opportunities!!
Go now to search for jobs, post your resume, build an online portfolio, receive career consultation,
and learn about continuing education opportunities.
Hoojobs --
a job board for public relations and communications professionals., where job-seekers
can search for full-time and freelance jobs (by keyword), as well as browse job listings
by job category and location. No cost to job-seekers.
job-applications.com --
where job-seekers can find downloadable printable employment application forms
from more than 1,000 employers in all areas (including fast food, retail, airline,
grocery, pharmacy, hospitality) -- or find your next employer by completing a job
application online. No cost to job-seeker.
QuantFinanceJobs.com -- a
job board for quantitative finance, financial engineering and risk management professionals,
where job-seekers can search U.S. and U.K. job listings (by keywords, location), upload your resume,
and register for job-search agent. No cost to job-seekers.
Social Media Jobs --
where job-seekers can search social media job listings (by keywords, job categories,
location, experience level), browse recent job postings, and register for job alerts.
No cost to job-seekers.
Find even more career and job site additions to Quintessential Careers by visiting our
Latest Additions section.
We'd Love You to Link to Quintessential Careers!
If your school, organization, business or other
entity has a Website, we welcome you to link to Quintessential Careers.
If you already have a link from your site, we want you to know we
appreciate it. If you don't have a link to us, please
send a request to your site's Webmaster to establish a
link to Quintessential Careers. Thanks so much!
For more details (including sample HTML copy), see our
Link to Us page.
Q TIPS:
Quick and Quintessential Tips to Guide Your Job Search and Work Life
In a recent study by ResumeBucket, 51.6 percent of surveyed employers said that "results stated in the
candidate's experience" was the most eye-catching aspect they looked for on a resume; 17.6 percent
found the list of previous employers was the aspect they look for; and 13.2 percent said they're on the lookout
for content tailored for the job the candidate is targeting. Only 2.2 percent of employers identified a candidate's
school as the most important area of a resume.
From our colleague Steve Gallison at the Maryland Department of Labor, comes this great idea for determining
what keywords a given employer will especially be looking for on your resume:
Copy the text from a job posting or want ad for a job you want to target.
Create a "tag cloud," using a tool such as TagCrowd
or Wordle.
The words that appear the largest in the tag cloud are the ones that should get the most emphasis and repetition
in your resume. To see an illustration of this technique, check out this post in our
Quintessential Resumes and Cover Letters
Tips Blog.
Personal contact on resumes is often more limited today than in the past, writes the multi-credentialed career expert
and author Louise Kursmark in Trends in Resumes and Career Marketing Communications. "An inflexible rule for
resumes for the past several decades was to list your home address and multiple means of contact -- email address,
home phone, cell phone, pager, fax number, and any other information that would help people contact you," Kursmark writes.
"That trend is shifting, for two reasons: the prevalence of online resume posting and the ubiquity of cell phones.
In response to identity theft issues, we now recommend that individuals not include their home address on resumes
that are widely e-mailed or posted on the Internet. It is enough to indicate just city and state if you want to give readers an
idea of your physical location. And because more and more people are reachable at all times via cell phone and email,
it is sufficient to list just one cell number and one email address rather than cluttering up the resume with multiple
data points that force readers to choose how to contact you."
Quintessential Careers Press Announces Our Latest Book: The Quintessential Guide to
Job Search 2.0: Advancing Your Career Through Online Social Media.
The
Quintessential Guide to Job Search 2.0: Advancing Your Career Through Online Social Media,
by Katharine Hansen, Ph.D., and Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D., provides six chapters to guide you
through the next revolution in online job search. Since job boards, vestiges of the first
revolution in online job search, should still be part of the job-seeker's toolkit, this
book helps you navigate those while also considering the future of job boards. The book
looks at building your personal brand, teaches you to make the most of social-media venues
in the job search, guides you in creating a digital presence, suggests you consider blogging,
and discusses ways to integrate multimedia elements into your job search.
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Follow QuintCareers; Read the Latest Advice
Follow QuintCareers Latest Job Tips and Career News on Twitter
Also follow @KatCareerGal for regular career-related tweets.
QuintCareers Network of Empowering Blogs
What are QuintCareers empowering blogs?
The Career Doctor Blog:
Especially for those who miss our former regular feature, Ask the Career Doctor, this blog each day features a question and answer from The
Career Doctor, Randall S. Hansen, PhD.
Need a career expert for a story or article you're working on? Searching for college,
career, and job news? Interested in learning more about Quintessential Careers?
Our Press Room
is your one-stop location for getting the information and resources you need.
QuintZine: Topics in Upcoming Issues
WATCH FOR feature articles on these topics in upcoming issues of QuintZine:
* Entrepreneurship Quiz
* Warning Signs You Won't Like Your Next Employer
* Contrasting Good and Bad Job-Search Techniques
* New Grads: Roadmap to Work and Play
* Working Night Shifts/Odd Shifts
* De-Stressing Before an Interview
* Empty Nest Job-Seekers
* How to Stay Motivated at Work
* Quintessential Career Profiles of YOU, our readers
* Q&As with well-known career experts
* Book reviews
. . . and much, much more...
