توضیحات ای جی

BEC : Resumes -AJ

Hey, this is AJ. Welcome to my commentary for this topic ‘Resumes’, resumes. So I want to talk about the use of online resumes and online tools to present yourself, to advertise yourself as powerfully as possible. See, when we talk about having a business mindset for your career it doesn’t matter what your job is, even if it’s not business really.

You could be a school teacher, but this is still true. You need to think more like a businessperson.

So people create resumes, for example, and they never really think about what a resume actually is. They just get a book on resumes. They know well, I’m supposed to have a resume so I’ll get a book about resumes and I’ll put all my information and then I’ll send it to somebody. That’s kind of the normal way to think about it, but if you think like a businessperson you realize that a resume is just a marketing tool. It’s just a marketing tool. All it is is an advertisement.

Businesses use brochures. They use posters. They use information sheets to sell products or sell services. That’s all a resume is. You’re selling your services to some company and the first step of that is to get their attention. You have to get their attention first. So I can tell you what happens when you send a resume. You can send it electronically or a physical resume, a paper one. Either way if you’re applying for a job that was advertised then there are so many other people applying for the same job, especially if it’s for a bigger company or a bigger organization.

There could be hundreds, there could be even thousands of people applying for the same job so you can imagine the person who’s hiring. They get a big stack of resumes if they’re paper or if it’s online, if it’s electronic, they’re getting in their email box hundreds of emails with attached resumes. This person is busy. They’re already doing their normal job, now they have to hire somebody and oh, my God, for them it’s a big pain in the butt.

‘Pain in the butt’ means that it’s an annoyance, something that’s annoying. So hiring for most managers is kind of a pain in the butt. They don’t really want to do it because they want to be leading their team or doing their normal job and hiring a new person takes a lot of energy and a lot of time. So they get all of these resumes and they just look at them very, very, very quickly.

Let’s imagine they’re paper resumes, like physical resumes. They pick up one and they scan it. They read it very, very quickly. They look at the basic job history. They’re scanning it. They’re not reading every single word. They’re just looking at key things, accomplishments, basic history, that kind of thing. Now, most resumes I can tell you they’re very boring and there’s nothing different on them and so the person scans them, looks at them quickly and then he or she just puts it to the side or throws it away, picks up the next one, reads it very quickly, scans it, puts it down. Maybe 10 seconds, maybe 15 seconds per resume.

So if you just sound like everyone else, you just list your job and then you list the duties that you had at the job your resume probably will be ignored, but when you put accomplishments, solid accomplishments, then that catches their eye. It gets their attention and they might put you on the right side of the pile that they might want to interview. So it gets their attention.

The resume is just about getting attention, positive attention. It’s only the first step, so it has to be short, it has to be very easy to read quickly and it has to have strong accomplishments on there. If it’s your first job or you’re just going out there then you need to put accomplishments from school and not just grades. I mean grades; no one cares about grades in the real world. What I mean is that maybe you were a member of some club or organization during school or you volunteered, but you organized something, you accomplished something. Tat is what you want to get on that resume.

That’s the important thing, the history of accomplishments, the history of doing a good job.

So once you’ve got that you can have your normal physical resume on a piece of paper that you can print out and mail to people, but you should also create an online resume.

Now, there are many different ways to do this. The way I recommend is to just create a blog page with your resume. You can create a WordPress page. WordPress blogs are free. WordPress.org, I think it is. Blogger is another one. There are plenty, do a search for free blog.

Start your own blog and choose a template that looks nice and is fairly conservative. Put your name as the header on that --the title of the blog --and then on the main page of the blog you’re going to have your online resume. It’s the same structure as a physical resume, so you have your contact information at the top and then you have your job history and then your education history. Those are the main things.

Now, the cool thing or some of the cool things you can do with an online resume is you can add some links. So I what I used to do, for example, I would list a job that I had, a past job and then I would highlight the name of that job on the online resume. That would make it a link and it would link to the website of the company that I used to work for.

For my education I went to the University of Georgia. Well, I would put down the University of Georgia. That would be on my resume, but then I made that a link.

University of Georgia would be highlighted as a link so someone could click it and they’d go to the University of Georgia website. Actually, I made the link go to the actual department, the social work department where I got my Masters degree, for example.

You can add links so that your resume is clickable.

Now, if you really want to be interesting and cool here’s what you can do. You can create more pages on your little blog and each page can have more detail about an accomplishment that you had. Let’s say you organized a charity event to raise money for some organization and you were the organizer. You could make a blog page where in more detail you would discuss what the fundraiser was, how much money you raised and where it was. You could even have examples of marketing materials you made. You could just discuss the whole thing in detail and all the things you accomplished.

Then on your online resume, the main page that’s just your resume, you would have organized fundraiser and then you could make that a link. You could highlight it and make organized fundraiser a link and then that link when they click it would go to the page where you describe that accomplishment in more detail.

Your whole resume could be filled with lots of little links. So they get on there and they’re reading the resume and they click one of those and then they go read in more detail about that accomplishment. You’re getting even more attention from them and, of course, at the top of the resume be sure to have your phone number and your email address. You want them to contact you. All of this is about getting them to call you for an interview.

This is the last point I want to make about resumes, online resumes or physical resumes. You want to have a call to action. We call this a call to action in advertising. ‘A call to action’ means a very obvious action the person is supposed to take who is reading the ad. Well, your resume is an ad, so what is the call to action? What do you want them to do after they read your resume? Well, you want them to pick up the phone, call you and say hi, your resume looks interesting. Let’s talk. Or, you want them to email you and say the same thing. I liked your resume. I want to talk to you.

So you want to make that quite obvious, okay? At the top of the resume make your phone number big enough where it’s really obvious and they can see it and read it clearly. If it’s an online resume you could have a link, one of those email links so they just click it and it automatically brings up an email form or you can just have it there.

Whatever you do just make it obvious so they don’t have to look around your resume and it’s hard for them to find your number. Make it nice and big so they can see it. I think that’s my last point.

So make a regular paper resume, you know use a word processor and print some resumes and then make an online version of it and make it interactive. Add links throughout that resume. Some of the links would go to places you’ve worked and some of the links would go to pages where you describe even more of your accomplishments.

I used that kind of online resume as a teacher for many years and it really got a lot of attention. I got a lot of interviews because of that so you can too.

All right, that’s all. So make your physical resume, make your online resume. And it doesn’t matter if you are looking for a job now or if you already have a great job, still do this. If you suddenly lose your job and need one you want all this ready already. Also, when you’re out there networking with people, as my dad talked about, you want to have this already because then you can just give them the Web address of your online resume, for example.

You could say oh, yeah, well if you want to see my resume here it is and you write down the address. It’s an easy thing to do while you’re talking to people and networking, something that’s very, very quick and easy to do so do it now.

All right, have a great day. See you again, bye-bye.

The End.