Free Resume Training – Section I

What’s in This Section

• The New Job Market
• Resumes Are a Teaching Tool
• Resumes Must Meet the Need
• Resumes Must Be Truthful

Overview of Training

All Right, folks listen, if ever there was a time where your resume really, really made a difference, I tell you what, it is today, in this economy. If you want to stand a chance at all of getting yourself an actual interview, then you got to have the kind of resume that really does the deed and that’s what we’re going to talk about here.

Really, a lot of the things that you’re going to hear are cutting edge as far as resume teaching goes, and a lot of them are contrary to the traditional kind of resume teaching. Such as those classes that you used to go to in high school and stuff. And even if you go to some vocational schools today, the resume stuff that they’re going to teach you in there, it’s so old and outdated. Folks listen, just trust me.

Do what you hear and see in this training and throw all that old stuff out the window because it doesn’t work anymore. The training that has been put together here is with years of research from the inside, as in actual hiring managers.

Once you hear what I’m going to tell you, it’s going to totally click and it’s going to make sense and you’re going to see why all those resumes that you sent out don’t actually get you anywhere. Why didn’t they get you an interview? Well, because you did it wrong. You did it totally wrong. You’re going to see what I’m talking about in this course. Let’s look real quick at an overview of what is going to be in this course.

The New Job Market

Today’s market is much different than yesterday’s market and I mean a lot different. Maybe twenty years ago some of those old school tactics could have worked and they probably did. But today that isn’t the case. Resumes are a teaching tool. This is totally contrary to what they used to tell us and really what they still do tell us in a lot of antiquated establishments.

With your resume, it’s like a marketing tool, right? Where you market yourself. That’s NOT what a resume is. It’s a teaching tool and I’m going to show you why. Resumes must meet the need, I’ll explain what those needs are and how you meet them and resumes must be truthful. How about that one? How many times have you been told in a resume class something like this? If you have ever even opened Microsoft Excel, then put it on your resume that you have experience with Excel.

That is such a crock. You know what happens there. I’ll get into this a little bit more, but you know what happens? People do that, they don’t fit the need, they get hired and then they can’t do the job. What happens then? I’ll explain what happens when we get to that part.

In the seventies, over a billion resumes were submitted in the US, over a billion! We’re talking like mid-seventies, that era, right? Well today, large corporations get about fifty thousand resumes per year, each one of them. And there’s a lot of large corporations out there. Just to give you an idea, Microsoft gets six thousand resumes a day. Now I want you to think about something here.

Let’s say there’s a job position that opens up. And you’re going to submit a resume and let’s say you’re going to submit one to Microsoft. In one day they get six thousand resumes. How’s yours going to stand out from the five thousand nine hundred and ninety nine other resumes? That large corporation that you’d like to get a job at, they get 50,000 resumes a year. How you going to compete with that? How are you going to possibly get your resume actually noticed? That’s the job market that we’re in today.

So like I said, over 40 years ago, over a billion resumes submitted in the seventies. So your little old school tactics, they might have pulled it back then, but they’re not going to pull it today. You go doing stuff like that, well I’m getting ahead of myself will get to that here in a minute.

Interviews cost time and money.

This is why corporations screen resumes. If someone’s actually going to sit face to face with a hiring manager, that costs the company money. That’s why a lot of companies even go to the trouble of hiring a recruiter because they don’t want to fool with interviews, because they know it costs time and money.

They might, with the recruiter, go ahead and let them pick out, out of the thousands and thousands of resumes, pick out half a dozen to actually interview. But getting that interview is tough folks.

Your resume has to give them exactly what they are looking for and come across to them in such a way that they can say, money spent looking into this individual is money well spent. That’s what you have to justify. You do that with a good resume and a good resume will get you lots of interviews and it enhances your professional image.

That’s the real job of a resume, a resume is not to make you look like you are the be all, end all. The resume’s job is to get you an interview. So the resume’s job is not necessarily to show the potential employer that you should pay me a whole bunch of money and I’m the man for the job.

No, the resume’s job is get you lots of interviews. So if you have a good resume, you send that good resume out, you will get a lot of interviews. If people are sending out resumes and they’re not getting an interview, what does that tell you? There’s something wrong with the resume. The only thing is the resume. That’s what’s at fault.

Who Does Your Resume Reach?

It reaches hiring managers, these are individuals within a company. It also reaches recruiters, these are people that the company has hired to fill a position. That recruiter can get, on average, 1100 resumes per position. How’s yours going to stand out? Let me show you how.

Resumes are a teaching tool. This is probably the single most important thing that you’ve got to change about your understanding of what resumes do. Resumes teach about you.

They are not supposed to try to sell you. They’re not supposed to say I’m the best one for the job. They teach exactly who you are, what you’re capable of, what you’ve done, and they do it in an informative manner to give the hiring manager what they need to make a decision. And that decision may very well be to not hire you, it might be to hire somebody else, but the resume has to do that job.

When you sit down to create your resume, this is exactly what you need to have in mind, you want to teach about you. They should not promote you. They shouldn’t be all me, me, me. They should just state facts and again, teach that individual about who you are.

Promoters, if you think about it for a minute, like marketers and people that promote things, they will basically do just about anything. This includes lying, in order to get somebody to sign on and buy into whatever it is that they’re trying to sell or to promote.

Promoters exaggerate. The thing about these tactics though, is that a really good manager can see right through that stuff. They can see if you’re trying to promote yourself and if you’re possibly exaggerating your capabilities. And here’s the thing, we’re going to get to this more in a bit.

But the fact is that the person hiring you don’t care one bit about you and who you are, what you can do and all this kind of stuff. As far as your little world, they’re not concerned about you. They’re concerned about what you’re going to be able to do for them, for the company. We’ll get into that a little bit more later on.

Resumes are a teaching tool in that they relate what you have done in a way that has been meaningful to a company, OK? Not yourself, not your personal accomplishments.

Sixty to eighty percent of all resume writers, and we have been taught this, so I’m not bagging on anybody if you’ve done this. I’ve done it on resumes when I was younger too. All that and a bag of chips, right? In other words, I’m the best thing since sliced bread. That’s what most resume writers actually try to accomplish when they sit down to create a resume. And I’m talking individuals and professional resume writers, sixty to eighty percent, just I’m all that and a bag of chips.

In other words, I am everything, you want me so bad. And the thing is, a good hiring manager, they can totally see right through that and it is nothing but a turnoff. Experienced managers can spot that kind of stuff a mile away, and what’s going to happen when they see that? You will not get an interview, and that’s the goal of the resume remember?

The goal of the resume is to get you an interview.

Later on in the course, I’m going to talk to you about the process that a manager goes through in reading your resume. You will find that if you try to write one of these larger than life resumes, you’re going to have about ten seconds of that managers time and then your resume is going to go in that round filing cabinet under his desk, and that’s the truth.

Your resume, remove distractions, in other words, things that are on there that are not relevant and not one hundred percent relevant, should not be on there whatsoever. Relate important information repeatedly, and by repeatedly, I’m talking about three times. In fact, it is better for you to relate two or three actual skills or accomplishments three times than it’s better for you to relate five or six different skills or accomplishments only one time.

Because that’s the way we learn. That’s the way things stick with us, they need to be reinforced over and over and over again. So that’s what you’ve got to show, I did this and I accomplished this. And then later on in the resume, find another way that we can bring that about differently, the same information.
Leave out irrelevant info. Again, if it’s not directly related to that job, to that position, forget about it.

Resumes must meet the need.

Who’s need? The hiring managers need, because guess what, that hiring manager, they don’t care about you, they don’t care about what you have done. You know what they care about? Their needs, what’s in it for me? They care about what you’re going to be able to do for them and for the company. A hiring manager, when they’re sitting there going through a stack of resumes, they’ve got this position that they’ve got to fill, right?

They’ve got somebody that’s over them, another manager or the owner of a company or a C.E.O. or something, right, and they got to hire somebody to fill this position. If they hire some yahoo that can’t do the job, they’re going to look like an idiot, so they don’t want to do that, so they’ve got specific things that they want out of that person that they hire and those are the things that they’re looking for.

They are not looking for a how pretty you are. They’re not looking for what you have done that makes you look good. They’re looking for what can you do for them. They have a list that has been put together of the things, specific things, that a hiring manager is interested in while they’re reading your resume. They want somebody that can increase profits or even just maintain profits.

Maybe they’re having a battle in the market and they’re having a hard time just holding on. They want somebody that can do that for them. They want somebody that can maybe reduce workload of other employees or a manager or something. They want somebody who can help out and increase the morale of the organization. They want somebody that can improve customer relations. This is a big one. They want everybody to love them, as a company.

Again, they’re not concerned with you as an individual. They want somebody that’s going to help the company. If you have fooled yourself into thinking that the hiring manager of a company is concerned about your career, guess what, it’s time to wake up. They’re not, they’re concerned about the company because that’s what’s going to make them look good.

If they hire somebody that can improve the company on these points, that’s going to make them look good in the eyes of their boss. Solve current problems, things that they’re not able to not effectively deal with.

Maybe there is a weakness with sexual harassment issues and they’re not able to remedy the situation. They don’t know exactly what to do. So if you have dealt with that in a company somewhere, that’s the kind of thing that you want to show them, that you have solved problems and benefited the company.

Streamlined processes, people that can do this, can say, get products created more quickly, more inexpensively, and a lot of times even increase quality and consistency. That’s the kind of stuff that they’re looking for. Again, for the company. If you read through these issues, can you pick one out that says me, me, me? No, they don’t care about you. They care about the company.

Every single one of these deals directly with what you could potentially do for the company. So if you can address these problems, if you can show and demonstrate in your resume that you were able to increase profits for another company or reduce workers workload or solve some problems or streamlined processes. If you can demonstrate that, then you’re the one that they’re looking for.

Don’t write your resume to make yourself look important. I see that all the time. People want to look big. Maybe they want to impress their friends. That’s not the job of your resume, to impress your friends because you’ve got all kinds of credentials. I even did this one time, I was fairly young. I was in my mid- twenties and I was getting ready to put together a resume and I did not know a 10th of what I know now about the real world.

But I had a lot of experience, back then I was in my mid-twenties, but still, I had a lot of real technical experience. And so what did I do? I was wanting to get a new job and I put together a resume and I threw in all my credentials.

Back then the techie stuff was still pretty new. So I threw in everything I could to make myself look really big and important. What did that get me? Not much of anything.

Don’t write your resume to get a higher paying job. If you sit down and the goal that you’ve got is to get paid as much as you possibly can. You’re not going to get anywhere with your resume. That can’t be your mentality.

Your mentality has to be, I am creating this resume to teach these people about me so that they know what I’m capable of, what I have done, and what I can potentially do for them. If you do that, when you submit your resumes, you are then going to get interviews and you’re going to be able to pick the job that you want.

Instead of you going out there and hoping that somebody calls you, you are going to be selective.

One common, and I do mean common, problem with resumes is that they tend to stretch the truth quite a bit.

Like I said earlier, some used to teach in the resume classes that I went to, they’d tell us if you had any experience with anything, you put it on your resume.

If you worked at some place where someone showed you how to use Powerpoint or you looked over their shoulder while they did it, then you put Powerpoint on your resume. You should never do something like that.

Here’s the reason. How would you like it if you were to need somebody to perform a specific task? OK, so you’ve got a job that you need to get done and they put on their resume that they have experience with the application that gets that job done. So you hire them and you find out that they can’t do the job. You’d be pretty upset, right? That could lead to a lot of problems, so you should never lie.

I know lots of people do it, but you’re not going to be one of them. Showing that you have experience with something that you’re really not good at, that is a lie, it’s basically lying. Simply because you know good and well that you’re not real good at it, and if they hired you based on that and then set you in front of a computer, for example, and said, OK, go. And you were like, I can’t do the job. So if you can’t do it, then you should not put that you have experience with it on your resume.

If you do, if you say you know how, you stretch the truth a little bit or out and out lie, which is really what it is. Then you get hired. Something comes up and they see that you can’t actually do the job. You could lose that job, that’s not going to look good on your future resume, right?

You could get sued because you misrepresented yourself, so don’t ever misrepresent yourself. Again, the goal of your resume is not to make you look like the best thing since sliced bread. It is to accurately, truthfully, teach the hiring manager or the recruiter who you really are and what you’re capable of doing. That way when they look at your resume, they will be able to sense the sincerity if you have done what you should do, done your homework beforehand, we’re going to look at that later on.

You will be able to address the specific needs that they have and show, here is what I am capable of doing. A lot of people, they kind of get the mentality that I can do the job, so if they’ll just hire me and put me there, I can do it. But guess what? I mean let’s be realistic. If you really don’t have out and out experience with it, you can’t do it, OK.

Plus they don’t have time to teach you how to do it. Here’s what you have to do. If you don’t have the kind of skills that you need in order to get that really good job that you really, really do want, you need to get those skills. You need to get them outside of the job, or find a job that you can get, that you can actually do and do well and then learn the skills.

Get involved in it and move up. God forbid that you would actually start at the bottom and work your way up. I mean, I know you got out of college. You should just start making 150,000 dollars a year, right? Your first job. Guess what? That’s not going to happen. So if you don’t have the skills, do not misrepresent yourself.

When they look at that resume, every single thing on there, you should be able to stand boldly and say, I am competent and capable of everything that is on that resume.

Now that means they might read it and they might say, this applicant doesn’t have the experience that we’re looking for. That’s perfectly fine. Do you know how much trouble people get into by getting into a job that they’re really not qualified for? I mean, it’s bad news folks. You go do stuff like that nowadays, you can get into a lot of trouble.

How humiliating would that be to call your Grandma up and say, hey Grandma, I got that job that I asked you to pray for me for, I got that job and I’m starting tomorrow. And then a week later, because come to find out you couldn’t do it, you call her up and say, hey Grandma, can I borrow $50? I have to pay my electric bill. I don’t have a job anymore. You know what I’m saying? And not only that, but they could even sue you, they could.

You misrepresent yourselves in some situations and it can get outright into a legal battle because it costs them money to hire people, it cost them money to interview people. So it’s just a bad, nasty, nasty thing, nasty practice and I think it was terrible of whoever started the trend of putting stuff like that on a resume. Not only that, but it’s just bad. Just don’t do it.

When you’re getting ready to put your resume together, and I firmly believe that resumes should be written specifically for a position. You can have a general resume if you so desire. But what’s more effective is one that is specific for a position at a specific company.

So what you should do is actually research the company and I’m just going to be honest with you here. I’m talking about somebody who is looking to get a career job. I’m not talking about getting a job at McDonald’s or Walmart. I’m talking about getting a real career job. Meaning you have probably found a job that you absolutely love, that you really enjoy doing, something that you want to do for years to come.

If that is the case, then what you want to do is research the company. You find out what they’ve succeeded at, what have they accomplished in their industry, what are their dreams? Where are they headed? What are they looking to accomplish in the coming years? What have they failed at? You want to just go to Google, type in the company name and look in the news.

Find out if there’s been some kind of press release, something in the news about them or they might even have stuff on their own website about things that they’ve failed at, things that they’ve accomplished. And then you will write about yourself, but you’re writing it for them. So you take into account, you’ve got the position in mind that you’re applying for. You take into account the things that I told you about earlier that they are looking for.

You take into account what they’ve succeeded at, what they’ve failed at, where they’re headed, what direction they’re going, and then you’re going to write about yourself, but you’re going to reach into your inner being, where you’ve got all these years of different kinds of experiences. All these things that you could do. You’re going to throw out the things that are not relevant to them. You’re going to write specifically for them.

Review 

Let’s review very quickly. You’re competing with 50,000 resumes at that job, if it’s a sizable corporation. Your resume has to stand out and it has to show them that you can meet their needs. Your resume does that by teaching the hiring manager or recruiter about you and allowing them to make a true, informed decision whether or not to interview you.

You need to focus on their needs, not yours, not your accomplishments if they do not pertain to their needs, and you need to be one hundred percent truthful.