Feature Articles: How to Get Started on Your Resume: A Five-Step Primer for Established
Job-seekers and Career-Changers and How to Get Started on Your Resume: A Five-Step Primer for College
Students and Recent College Grads
Special Feature: Branding Your Resume
Bonus Feature: Action Verbs in Action: Sample Resume Bullet Points that Kick Off with Powerful Verbs
Extra Feature: Six Tips to Rock Your Resume
A Quintet of Quick Questions: QuintZine's Q&A with a Career Expert
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
Editor's Note: About this Issue...
Although September is Update Your Resume Month, our focus in this issue is starting on a resume if you've
never crafted one, or haven't done so in a long time. We offer step-by-step articles for both established
job-seekers/career-changers and for college students and new grads. Happily, though, both articles are a
great refresher if you merely need to update an existing resume.
For resume neophytes and veterans alike, we also offer a new tool, sample bullet points that show how
to use action verbs in your resume. Plus, we give you And article on how to "brand" your resume and Joe Turner's
article on 6 Ways to Rock Your Resume. Resume writer and career-coach Laura Labovich shares resume insight
in the Q&A we did with her in this issue.
--Katharine Hansen, Ph.D., Master Resume Writer, Credentialed Career Master,
Certified Electronic Career Coach, and editor at
kathy(at)quintcareers.com
Feature Articles: How to Get Started on Resume
How to Get Started on Your Resume: A Five-Step Primer for Established Job-seekers and Career-Changers
by Katharine Hansen, Ph.D.
As an established job-seeker, you probably have a resume. Thus, getting started on the resume that will take you to the
next rung in your career ladder may be a simple matter of spiffing up your existing document using guidelines in this
article and many other resume resources on Quintessential Careers.
But some established job-seekers do have to start from square one. I sometimes hear from job-seekers that they
have been recruited into most of their jobs or obtained them through networking and have not needed a resume. Or they
have not needed one in such a long time that the resume they have is quite outdated.
Most people find the idea of creating a resume overwhelming. Even the notion of revamping an existing resume can be daunting.
How to Get Started on Your Resume: A Five-Step Primer for College Students and Recent College Grads
by Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D.
When we visit college campuses, here are the two most common scenarios we see with students and resumes. First, a solid majority
do not have a resume. Second, of those students who do have a resume, many are unhappy with it.
If you fall into one of those groups -- or are simply looking for a few tips to place your resume among the best -- this article
is for you. The same writer's block that many students face when writing papers seems to hold true with developing a resume.
To help break that inertia, this primer provides a clear framework for developing your resume, the single most important job-hunting tool.
Your resume is the tool that helps you get noticed and asked for interviews. Your resume helps brand you -- and can also be used with
networking and building an online presence.
Have Your Resume Ready in Case of Job Loss in the Current Economic Climate.
QUINTESSENTIAL RESUMES AND COVER LETTERS provides solutions
with unmatched quality in the areas of career planning, professional resume writing, and interviewing, having
successfully helped tens of thousands of clients, from executives through individuals beginning a career,
succeed in their career goals.
by Katharine Hansen, Ph.D., and Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D.
Today's resume establishes a brand relevant to targeted employers. The branding expressed in
your resume should capture your career identity, authenticity, passion, essence, and image. With
objective statements currently unpopular with hiring decision-makers, job-seekers and resume
writers are turning to branding techniques, especially branding statements, to sharpen the focus of resumes.
Action Verbs in Action: Sample Resume Bullet Points that Kick Off with Powerful Verbs
by Katharine Hansen, Ph.D.
Action verbs form the heart of resume experience sections, with most bullet points in these sections ideally kicking off
with powerful action verbs. You can find lists of action verbs for use in resumes (and cover letters) all over the Internet,
but this Quintessential Careers tool provides samples of how these action verbs can be used. These verbs, from resumes
for many professions, are shown in both past-tense (for past jobs) and present-tense (for current jobs).
Is your resume holding you back from a great opportunity?
As a recruiter, I've seen thousands of resumes over the past 15 years. The majority of them didn't make the cut and needed major revisions.
The stakes are higher today because the job market has intensified, and employers are getting more selective.
Having a poorly written resume can put you in the rejection pile. Don't let your resume hold you back.
QuintZine's Q&A with Career Expert:
Laura M. Labovich
Laura M. Labovich is a nationally renowned resume writer, certified career coach and job-search strategist.
"In my HR days," recalls Laura Labovich, "attention-grabbing
resumes were ones that:
spelled out the job the applicant wanted in detail, leaving
absolutely no unanswered questions for the recruiter;
contained relevant keywords found by analyzing a
job posting and sprinkling them throughout the resume
(I distinctly remember a hiring manager counting the number of
times an applicant listed java and c++ in his resume);
and were error-free," said Labovich in the Q&A
interview she did with Quintessential Careers.
Read more of Labovich's advice, including her thoughts on using social-media in the job search at the expense
of face-to-face networking, greater transparency in the job search, het hard work needed to land a job, and
resisting the "I'll take anything" job-seeker mentality
in our full Q&A with her.
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.
Master Resume Writer Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter writes this lively blog, covering such career and
job-search topics as targeting your ideal job, the value of partnering with a professional resume writer,
and how a cover letter is like a book cover and needs to be compellingly written to pull the reader in.
She also hosts a "blog carnival," offering advice from a variety of career gurus.
CareerBerg.com -- an international job site,
where job-seekers can search job listings (by keywords, industry, location, job type) as well as
post your resume and detailed profile. Registration required to use full services of site/apply to jobs.
No cost to job-seekers.
JobsTAXI -- a job-search engine that
allows job-seekers to search for job listings by keyword. Job-seekers can save search terms
and have matching new matching job posting emailed. No cost to job-seekers.
STEM Careers --
a great job and career site for science, technology, engineering, and math professionals and students.
Search job postings (by keyword and location) or browse latest listing. Find job profiles and
other career information, as well as industry news and trends, and much more. No cost to job-seekers.
Tax Jobs UK -- where job-seekers seeking
vacancies in banking, mergers and acquisitions, compliance, stamp duty, and tax jobs can search job
listings, post your CV, and register for email job alerts. Also includes career information,
industry news and conferences. No cost to job-seekers.
Find even more career and job site additions to Quintessential Careers by visiting our
Latest Additions section.
Q TIPS:
Quick and Quintessential Tips to Guide Your Job Search and Work Life
The blog Applicant.com has identified "7 Must Read SlideShare Presentations For Job Seekers."
They are:
Effective Job Interviewing from Both Sides of the Desk
10 Job Search Attitudes that Will Get You More Interviews
Although the Resume Writing Academy Web site is, as the name implies, targeted at resume writers, the site
offers resources that job-seekers can use in crafting their own resumes. These include:
a list 375+ great verbs for writing resumes, cover letters and other career communications.
a list of the most common fonts for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems to help you choose a resume font that will be
present on the most computers.
When writing a resume, the name of the file is a detail low in importance for most job-seekers. Unfortunately, this
inattention leads many to disregard the filename. Palladian, a career-coaching company, completed a study of filenames
used by actual job-seekers for their resumes, and identified a number of common mistakes and best practices.
Palladian indentified four elements that routinely appear in the filenames of resume. The most common was an
indication of the job seeker's name. Also common were the word "resume," a version number of the
resume, and the date the resume was written.
Ninety-two percent of resumes included some indication of the candidate's name, but
only 58 percent contained both the first and last name. Nine percent of the file names contained
no reference to the candidate and were called: "resume," "myresume" and "resume2009."
Other Information: A large percentage of resume filenames contained information of no value to a hiring manager.
Two common items were the date the resume was written and the version number of the resume. Some job-seekers
included information in the filename that had no meaning. Other job-seekers seemed to have used the resume of
someone else as a template, since the filename contained a different person's name. Others had random words with no
apparent meaning.
Best Practices:
Use your first and last name in the file name.
Include the word "resume"
Include a keyword phrase (1 to 3 words summarizing your job or industry)
Separate words with hyphens
Structure of a good resume filename: FirstName-LastName-Resume-KeywordPhrase.doc
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.
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.
If your school, organization, business or other
entity has a Web site, 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.
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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:
* Job Action Day 2009
* How Job Search is Like Online Dating
* The Confidence Factor
* Green Jobs
* De-Stressing Before an Interview
* More Cover-Letter Components
* Finding Your First Real Job
* 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...
