The Top 10 Most Important Things I’ve Learned from Editing Career Books

Last week I spoke at the monthly meeting of the Indianapolis chapter of the ExecuNet business networking group. When I was invited to speak back in January, I decided that my particular expertise on the subject of job hunting is that I have been reading the collective wisdom of the top minds in the careers business for 11 years. Ten things stood out to me as being the most essential but overlooked secrets to all aspects of job hunting. For your reading pleasure, here's my outline for the speech:

1. Keep your network in good repair.

• Don’t wait until you need help to reach out to your network.
• Networking should be a constant reaching out to people you know (former coworkers, family, friends, service providers) and people you don’t (people you share something or someone in common with).
• Networking is about giving, too.
• Networking yields up to 80 percent of all jobs landed.

2. Treat your job search like a job.

• Spend 40 hours a week on your search.
• Get up on time, get dressed, and work in your “office.”
• Make a search schedule and stick to it.
• Don’t underestimate how long it takes to find a job.

3. Write a customized cover letter for every opportunity you apply to.

• Resumes can still be more general, but the cover letter must be very specific.
• Write to a specific person—get a name (hiring manager, not HR).
• Show, point by point, how you are a fit for the job.
• Show your enthusiasm for the job.
• Close actively rather than passively.

4. Emphasize accomplishments on your resume rather than job duties.

• Just one or two lines for your job duties. Use bullets to emphasize accomplishments (six for current job and three for past jobs).
• Accomplishments show how you affected the bottom line: How you made money for the company, saved money, grew customer base, created products, developed procedures, won awards.
• Accomplishments must be quantified with numbers.

5. Build a professional and appealing online presence.

• Get on LinkedIn, create a professional profile, reconnect with your colleagues, and get recommendations.
• Make Facebook settings as private as possible; still, don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your mom to read. Untag unflattering photos.
• Use Twitter to show your industry knowledge, connect with decision makers, and find out about job openings.
• If you are good at writing and information sharing, showcase your knowledge in a blog. Again, show some personality but don’t ever say anything that makes you look like a bad employee.

6. Use the Internet the right way in your job search.

• Professional networking
• Company research
• Applying for jobs directly with companies

7. Don’t waste a lot of time chasing job postings.

• Competition dramatically increases once a job is posted online or in the classifieds.
• Use your network to find the opportunities before they are posted.
• Don’t spend all day hiding behind your computer. Get out of the house and make connections.

8. Be prepared to back up anything you say about yourself in an interview with an example.

• Behavioral interviewing: Tell me about a time when you…
• Develop a success story to illustrate your top qualities and skills.
• Challenge, actions, result format.

9. Put off talking about salary as long as possible in the process.

• Most employers that ask for a range in the ad will still consider you without one (except those who state explicitly that they will not).
• Whoever mentions a number first, loses.
• You might name a number that is out of their range, and they will not consider you.
• You might name a number that is lower than they were prepared to offer.
• Defer the question by saying you want to focus on whether you are a fit for the job first. Can talk salary later.
• If you have no choice, name a range.

10. Hiring experts to help you with your search can be worth the investment.

• Trying to write your own resume is like cutting your own hair—difficult, and it probably won’t end up looking great from all angles.
• Professional resume writers can be objective and cut what needs to be cut, prompt you for accomplishments, and present you in the best light.
• Career coaches help you get to the truths inside you, promote what’s most impressive about you, show you the best ways to search, hold you accountable, and offer encouragement.

Use a LibraryThing Widget to Showcase Your Projects

Freelance editor Katharine O'Moore-Klopf generously shared a stroke of brilliance via Twitter today. She suggests using LibraryThing, an online book-cataloging service, to put a widget on your blog or website that features the covers of books you have edited. This is kind of an off-label use for the site, which was meant to catalog the books you've read, share them with others, and find new people who have "eerily similar" libraries. But how perfect for the publishing professional, whose accomplishments consist primarily of finished books.

As you'll notice, I put her advice to work immediately. To do the same, follow these steps:

1. Go to LibraryThing and register (it's free).
2. Search for books you've edited and add them to your list.
3. Go to the widget-making page.
4. Select your widget preferences.
5. Copy the "Embed this widget" code.
6. Paste it into your blog or website. (As Katharine tutored me, in Blogger you have to go to the Customize page, open one of your gadgets, and paste the HTML into the window.)

And there you have it: a rotating display of your bookly accomplishments. Thanks, Katharine!

Another Winner from Not Hired Gets Me Thinking...

Almost daily I have to check in with Not Hired for the latest examples of job seekers who just don't get it. Today's find was a real gem: a misogynistic ex-military actor who thinks a resume is a good place to tell stories about how all his employers, girlfriends, customers, etc. have wronged him.

Wow. At first I was sad, thinking about how many people just have no clue how to write a decent resume. But extreme examples like this turn up almost weekly. It's beginning to dawn on me that people who write resumes like this don't really want a job, do they? In order to continue collecting unemployment, people have to prove that they've been applying for jobs. So what better way to ensure that the checks keep coming (and you don't accidentally get a job) than to send out resumes like this one?

Sometimes I'm slow, but eventually I catch on.

Heads Up About CareerBuilder's Resume "Critiques"

On its home page, CareerBuilder is offering a "free resume critique." Blogger Amber Shah decided to try it, knowing full well she'd get a sales pitch for CareerBuilder's resume writing services. What she got was "way, way worse": a canned response that made it obvious that they never looked at her resume at all (see her post about it here).

What they told her is OK advice. It also could be applied to 99% of the resumes out there. I think we can all agree that adding a summary at the top and avoiding typos are good things to do, no? Maybe they couldn't find anything else bad to say about her resume.

The moral? Be on the lookout for a similar canned response and don't fall for it. I still advocate going directly to the source--a professional resume writer whom you can talk to--over paying a fee for a bigger company to find one for you.

Thanks to @cheezhead for the heads up.

Leaving for the Career Management Alliance Conference

I'm leaving tomorrow for the Career Management Alliance annual conference in San Antonio. I'm looking forward to mingling with leaders in the careers industry, learning about emerging trends and techniques for helping people find jobs. Clearly, this is an industry in the spotlight right now.

When I return, I'm sure to blog about what I've learned. But if you want to follow along on Twitter, be sure to follow @CMA09, or search for the #careers09 hashtag. Barbara Safani and Deb Dib, two of the most respected careers professionals, will be tweeting "highlights, insights, and a-ha moments."

See you next week!

Comic Sans: The Font We Love to Hate

I got a big kick out of this article in the Wall Street Journal on Friday. It's the backstory behind the invention of the Comic Sans font, the clownish one that looks like, well, a comic book. I laughed to read all the strange places this font, which nobody can take seriously, has turned up.

To this day, people still use it on their resumes, and I can't imagine what they must be thinking:

• Hire me, I'm friendly!
• I laugh at you and your company.
• It was either this or Times New Roman.
• My emotional development stopped at age 9.
• I am a clown-college graduate.
• Working with me is like spending every day at Disney World!

I'm sure you can add to this list.

I hate to be elitist, but that font just doesn't send the right message in professional correspondence. I feel for the guy who invented it because he has to watch it be used in so many ways he never intended. Don't let your resume be one of them.

10 Industries That Are Soaring

I'm starting to take articles like these with a grain of salt because it seems you see a new one every day, they all conflict with one another, and they use dubious sources. But I couldn't resist pointing out that this article from U.S. News & World Report (my 101-year-old grandpa's former favorite magazine) has ranked "resume editing" right up there with home gardening, McDonald's, and Harlequin romance novels as one of the things people just can't do without during this recession.

"All I know is I don't even have a life anymore," said one quoted professional resume writer in reference to the steady demand he is experiencing. Boy, do I hear that. Of course, how can you complain about having too much work when so many people don't have enough?

Another line from the article that I must point out: "Borders says its sales of career guides are up from last year." Oh yeah? I'd like some details on that one...

Not Hired: Get a Laugh and Learn Something, Too!

So, it's Friday and I don't know about you, but I'm intellectually fried. Thank heavens for Krisan Matthews, who (via Facebook), showed me this site. Not Hired is a blog featuring the worst collection of job search blunders I've seen yet. If you need a primer on what not to do, sink your teeth into these: people who drone on and on in their cover letters, send suggestive photos of themselves, and drop the f-bomb on their resumes--repeatedly. And this is just from the past week of postings.

Where is this stuff coming from, when posting it is surely a violation of some confidentiality agreement? Taking credit is an anonymous bunch of "HR monkeys and hiring managers who have worked with some of the largest search engines, vertical portals, and social-networking sites on the Internet, as well as for hardware and software manufacturers, universities, federal agencies, and accounting and consulting firms."

If you don't want to end up here, use some common sense and read some career-advice books.

Celebrate World Storytelling Day

Author, blogger, and career expert Katharine Hansen notes that today is World Storytelling Day. On her A Storied Career blog, she catalogs the various way this event is being celebrated.

This is relevant to this blog how? Because storytelling is the very essence of a successful job search. If you can tell stories about your achievements, both on your resume and in interviews, you will go a long way toward convincing the employer to hire you. And the most common interview question is "Tell me about yourself." Katharine's newly released book, Tell Me About Yourself, will help you build your story to answer that question--and all others--with style and substance. (Full disclosure: I edited this awesome book!)

Electronic Resume Formatting Disaster

As I mentioned a few days ago, I am hiring a new editor. Our parent company's policy is to have all jobs posted on Monster.com, and to not accept resumes that don't come through Monster. This has caused all of us job search specialists here to squirm a bit, because we're always preaching in our books that the best way to get a job is through networking. And in practice, we are all but banning that.

But okay, if using Monster keeps us on the right side of the EEOC with minimum hassle, I get that. What I am really upset over is having to look at electronic resumes. Have you SEEN a resume after it gets chewed up and spit out by Monster?

What is happening with about 90% of the resumes I've gotten is that the lines of text are too long. They break in odd places and wrap around again in such as way as to make it impossible to tell what is what. Even worse, the job titles (which I might argue are the first thing anyone looks at) are not boldfaced. So it's literally impossible to sum up someone with a quick scan.

What are those talented few whose resumes are at least aligned correctly doing right? I can't be sure, but I think they are following expert advice and cutting their lines off at the end of the screen with hard returns.

It's also worth repeating that if your Word resume has bullets in it and you just paste it into an online form like Monster, those bullets will either drop out or turn into some other garbled mess. Instead, replace them with asterisks. The whole point of using bullets in the resume is to make it easier to read, and this is the best online approximation of that technique.

Why Your Resume Should Not Begin with Your Objective

The career experts have been saying it for a decade, but most people just haven't been listening. Putting an Objective statement on your resume is not going to help you. And often, it can hurt you.

Professional resume writer Louise Fletcher has a good post on the subject here. An objective statement is usually all about you and what you want. Employers would rather hear what you can do for them.

Think I'm kidding? Take a look at this objective for a resume I just got:

...seeks sales position with a stable, growth organization with exceptional compensation and employee benefits.

Setting aside the fact the posting wasn't even for a sales job, what does this objective do to convince you to hire this person? Nothing. In fact, it probably makes you snicker at the naivety: where on earth would you find a stable, growth organization these days?

"But," you ask, "how will the employer know what job I want?" First off, you can start (after your contact information) with a boldfaced, centered heading that states the title of the job you seek, or a general approximation of it. Follow that with a short paragraph full of punchy sentences that sum up your greatest accomplishments and skills. When I write resumes, I always save that paragraph for the very last. That way, I can pull together everything I've learned about the person and bring to the fore his very most impressive points while also painting a cameo that makes the employer feel they know something about him before even diving into the meat of the resume.

And of course, your cover letter should state the job you're applying for.

Resume Tips from an Art Director

Wise, true, and snarky art director India Amos is trying to hire an assistant. But oh, the horrors she's seen! Read all about it here.

All I can say is: People! Get a clue! Proof your resume and cover letter--multiple times! Ask friends to proof your documents, too. Better yet, hire someone to edit, or completely overhaul, your resume. Use some common sense, pay attention to detail, and spend a little time learning something about the company to which you are applying (for example, how to spell its name). This is not a climate in which employers are going to be forgiving for slackness. There are still jobs to be had, but not for the people who don't put a lot of effort into honing their presentations.

FedEx Offers Free Resume Printing on March 10

This just in from headquarters in Memphis: If you stop by any FedEx Office location (formerly known as Kinkos), they will print 25 copies of your resume for free. See details here.

That's a stroke of genius, I say. This is going to spread like wildfire and FedEx is going to get lots of publicity--mark my words. Granted, a larger percentage of people are now just e-mailing their resumes or pasting them into databases. Still, it's good to have a printed resume when you go to the interview.

Beware of Resume Scams

I learned something last week that has really crawled up under my skin and stayed there. I got an e-mail from an online resume site called e-resume.net (lack of link intentional). They must have bought or stolen my address from the National Resume Writers' Association. The message said that the company is seeking freelance resume writers. If I wanted to be considered, I would need to submit my own resume and samples of my work. Fair enough.

But what made me drop my proverbial uppers was this: e-resume.net pays its freelance writers $35 to write a professional resume, have direct contact with the client, and work with them until the client is satisfied. Now, folks, I have it on good authority (my own), that such an arrangement would require an average of 5 hours to do adequately. So do the math. They are paying resume writers $7 an hour! Imagine what kind of quality you'll get from someone who writes for less than they could make at Taco Bell.

But it gets so much worse. e-resume.net turns around and sells that same professional resume to the poor client for $155. So for doing nothing more than serving as a net to catch clients, e-resume.net is walking away with $120.

e-resume.net boasts that they have been chosen by the LA Times as "the best of the bunch," and that they are CareerBuilder's only direct resume-writing partner. Really? How long before this all catches up with them?

While I'm busy exposing scandals, take a look at this one. Ask the Headhunter's Nick Corcodilos recently wrote this expose on supposed $100K job site The Ladders. The gist of it is that they are charging people to access their database of $100K jobs, but a great percentage of those jobs don't pay anywhere close to $100K. Also, they are allegedly employing low-paid resume writers and using deceptive tactics when critiquing customers' existing resumes.

Resume and career scams are as plentiful now as gypsy roofers after a hailstorm, and they have the potential to tarnish the image of the legitimate career professionals out there. If you need resume or career help, I urge you to work directly with a professional member of one of the following organizations:

• National Resume Writers' Association
• Career Management Alliance
• Professional Association of Resume Writers & Career Coaches
• Career Directors International

Job Search Expenses Are Tax-Deductible

Thanks to professional resume writer and career counselor Cliff Flamer for the reminder that many job search expenses (such as money you pay professional resume writers and career coaches) can be deducted from your taxes. Cliff goes into some detail here on his blog about the kinds of things you can deduct. Of course, you'll have to itemize, and that's a bummer. But if you own a house, you probably already have to do that, anyway.

Cliff is a really nice guy whom I met at the NRWA conference this fall. And I'm not just saying that because, as Certification Chair, he will hold my fate in his hands when I apply to become a Nationally Certified Resume Writer later this spring!

"Sulley's" Resume

Someone has managed to dig up and post the resume of "miracle pilot" Chesley Sullenberger. Check it out here at The Smoking Gun. I have no reason to suspect that it's not his own authentic resume, but I don't know that for sure.

Overall, it's a pretty good resume. He highlights his accomplishments and states but doesn't belabor job duties. Despite a long and impressive career, he manages to keep it to two pages. My biggest complaint would be the use of all caps for the entire resume. It's difficult to read and nothing stands out. But hey, I'll cut him some slack.

Ryan Healy on Job Hunting in the Tough Economy

Supposedly things are getting tough out there in the job market. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether that's really true or whether it's media hype. If you're in the financial field, yeah, I'd say things are probably pretty tough. And all indications are that publishers are holding off on putting out some products and hiring new people until January, when they will have new budgets, a new president, and hopefully new hope. I talked to an IT dude yesterday who reminded me that when the economy collapses, as it did in 2001, industries tend to collapse in waves. So things might be OK where you are now, but how long before the domino effect catches up with you?

Meanwhile, Ryan Healy of Employee Evolution and Brazen Careerist has five great, in-the-now tips for making yourself a more marketable candidate. He hits on the familiar themes of networking and managing your online identity. But I think we can all use a reminder, can't we?

Writing Resumes for McCain and Obama

File this under the category of "wish I'd thought of this." The Ladders, a job portal for $100,000+ candidates, asked resume writer extraordinaire (and, incidentally, one of my authors) Wendy Enelow to write resumes for John McCain and Barack Obama (see the story here). The results are stunning. Check them out. Regardless of your political leanings, aren't you in awe of both of them? That's what a great resume does: It distills the most impressive highlights of your career and makes the reader say "Hey, I want to hire this guy."

Kudos to The Ladders for coming up with an irresistible tie-in with the all-consuming election coverage. It landed them--and Wendy--a story on ABCNews.com.

What Color Is My Parachute?

It's a spooky time in the business world, and the publishing industry is no exception to the rule. When we had a wave of layoffs at my company this summer, it got the rest of us thinking about what we would do if it happened to us. I found my answer fairly quickly because it's the answer I've been sitting on for nine years, since layoffs were threatened at my former employer. In a word: freelancing.

So skittish was I about the prospect of going jobless that I have been doing freelance editing on the side ever since I left Macmillan in 1999. I was finishing up a big deadline for Alpha just weeks before my baby was born, and I picked it back up again when she was 1. I have always steered clear of doing anything competitive to my main gig, and have not allowed my performance to suffer as a result.

But dang, it's been hard. When I get a project from Frommer's, I work every night and all weekend for two weeks straight. I've just learned how to take "power breaks," rapidly decompressing and then getting back to work before wasting too much valuable time. I count on my husband tremendously to keep the child out of my hair. Recently she broke my heart when I shooed her away and she said "Mommy, you work too much."

So I've still got good connections in place. But with publishers delaying projects (in some cases, their entire lists) until next year, it's just one of the baskets I'm putting my eggs into. The other is--get ready--resume writing!

I have been enchanted with the art of resume writing since 1999, when I first met Susan Whitcomb and worked with her on reprint corrections to her classic Resume Magic. Since that time I have acquired and edited dozens of resume how-tos and collections, attended resume writers' conferences, and soaked up the best of the collective wisdom for how to optimize your personal marketing presentation. I know all too well how really difficult it is to do it right.

Recently I got the opportunity to try my hand at writing resumes myself--and I loved it. It uses every bit of reporting, marketing, writing, editing, SEO, problem-solving, big-picture, and tiny detail skill I have developed over my entire career. But best of all, it's a lot faster than writing or editing a book!

So the point of all this is that we all need to be thinking of what we will do if we lose our jobs. If you lose yours, I'll be happy to take you on as a client. :)

Resume Keyword Tricks and Traps

Another excellent speaker at last week's NRWA conference was Paul Forster, cofounder and CEO of Indeed.com, a job posting aggregator that pulls jobs from all over the web into one search. Paul spoke in detail about the concept of using resume keywords to make sure you get found when recruiters search online and company resume databases.

Career professionals have been conscious of resume keywords for close to a decade now, so this is not a revolutionary topic. However, more and more everyday people are beginning to grasp and use the concept. So his tips are insightful and timely:

• Use every commonly known synonym for your skills. For example, include both "security" and "collateral" to cover your bases in case a manager searches for one and not the other.
• Be sure to include brand names associated with your company, especially if they are more well known than the company itself.
• Include any possible spelling variations of your employers' names. For example, use both "Walmart" and "Wal-Mart." Of course, there was outcry from the group because this would be inconsistent and look wrong. Personally, I think it's better to seek out the absolute correct spelling and be consistent. If a potential employer is dumb enough to spell it wrong, do you want to work for them, anyway?
• Include abbreviations and acronyms in addition to the spelled-out terms. I generally like to put these in parens after the first reference.
• Account for "stemming." I'll leave this to the SEO experts among you to clarify (hello, Erik?), but I think what he meant was to be sure to use all variations on the words that describe your skills and titles. For example, be sure to include "editing" as well as "editor" (in this case, "edit" is the stem word).
• Don't compromise the reader. Even as you're trying to get the computer to like you, you also want a human reader to like your resume and be able to read it.

Paul also shared some general resume posting rules:

• Use a standard format with consistent font sizes; avoid automatic Word tables.
• Update your online resume and repost it periodically, but not too often. New resumes get fresh consideration. But if you pop up every week, people will start to ignore you.
• Clarify the location where you want to work--often for graduating seniors, it's not clear from looking at your college address where you want to go.
• Always write cover letters that are customized to each opportunity that interests you.

And finally, here are Paul's predictions for the future of the resume:

• Paper resumes are becoming less and less important.
• Resumes can incorporate rich media, including video, audio, and photos.
• Resumes are boundaryless--they can include links, testimonials, and other sources of corroboration.
• The hResume standard XML format bears watching. If you can code your resume to this format, you'll be able to send it via feeds to employers.