Q TIPS:
Quick and Quintessential Tips to Guide Your Job Search and Work Life
Job-hunting tips from the December 13, 2010, issue of
QuintZine.
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."
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.
