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BEC : Resumes -George

Hi, it’s George here and I want to give you a few more thoughts and some of my ideas about looking for a job and the use of a resume. As we said in our first lesson, a resume is a key document.

AJ, I think, mentioned it should be short. The standard industry and the corporation thought process is that a resume really should be one page. Now, if you’re somebody who’s got a lot of accomplishments that may be hard to squeeze them all in. I’m not saying that it has to be one page, but the point is keep it short because it’s going to be looked at by a lot of people, hopefully, but it’s going to be looked at in a very short period of time probably.

In this day and age you probably submit your resume online and you may very well, depending on where you’re submitting it, be submitting it in the format that the company wants. Maybe it’s PDF, maybe it’s a Microsoft Word or maybe it’s an in-house program.

By that I mean a word processing program that was designed and developed specifically by that company for that company for the purpose of accepting things like resumes.

The reason that these companies do that is because the first thing they’ll do with an electronic resume is scan it. Screen it, in other words. They’ll run it through some kind of device and don’t ask me what it is, but something that will try to match the keywords in your resume against or with the keywords that came from the job description that was given to maybe the human resources people to match some skills so they can supply qualified candidates to the manager to interview.

So, again, short, precise language, proper spelling, here’s one of those cases where you’re going to have to watch your grammar and vocabulary, things of that nature, but the key spot where this scanning process is going to get you in the door for an interview is in the case of the accomplishments and achievements. When I say ‘gets you in the door’, what I’m talking about is it’s going to get you the interview; allow you to open the view and get inside the company so they’ll talk to you, okay? So the resume is an extremely important document, but let me tell you what in my opinion and my experience is the largest most important piece of trying to get another job and that’s this business of networking or developing a network. Some of you may be just like me. There’s been several times in my life where I’ve had to get a job from one company to another. There’s been several times in my life where I wanted a job within the company I was working in.

I’ll be quite honest with you. I’m not a great social person, so I didn’t have a lot of friends and a lot of people I hung out with and things like that. So my network I always thought was really very small, but as I look back on my life and my career and all the jobs I had I found out in thinking back on it that there was not more than one or two jobs that I ever got that was a result of the resume interview process. Almost every job I got.

I’m going to tell you that starting at about age 14 right up to not too many years ago I probably had 30 different jobs. I sound like a real vagabond, don’t I? You know, can’t hold a job, vagabond? You know one of those people who just goes from town to town and works in one store for a while and gets enough money to move on to the next town? Anyway, my point is that all these jobs I got I got to thinking about well, how did I get them if I didn’t use a resume. Well, sure enough, I got them through friends.

When I was in school my very first job I worked in what we call a drug store, a pharmacy, one of those places where they give out prescriptions that the doctor gives you. I’m not sure what they’re called in other countries, but that’s the kind of store I’m talking about. Well, one of my high school friends his dad owned the drug store. Well, this kid didn’t want to work in the drug store, but he said my dad is looking for somebody to work behind the counter and make milkshakes and ice cream cones. So I went down and I got the job.

I got a similar job in a hamburger place a few years later the very same way. A friend of mine worked there and said you know we could really use somebody else. I know the boss is looking for someone, why don’t you go talk to him? Almost every job I got.

I got my biggest piece of my career in a very large corporation called IBM, some of you might have heard of it. I got that job when I was a school teacher and a coach. I decided I didn’t want to do that anymore and, sure enough, one of the other coaches, the track coach in fact, his wife worked for IBM and, of course, we socialized a fair amount. I told him that I was looking to get out of teaching and she said well, I know this guy over in Tampa, Florida at this address and here’s his name. He’s looking for somebody, why don’t you go see him? A simple little thing like that, that’s a network.

It doesn’t have to be one of those formal deals where you go to these conventions and you walk around the room with 300 people and your business card in your hand and you keep trading business cards and say hi, my name is George Hoge. I’m a really good financial person, what do you do? Oh, I’d love to work for your company. Here’s my card. Will you remember me? That’s not the way to do it. It’s a natural thing.

I want you to sit down if you are looking for a job … No, even if you’re not looking for a job I want you to sit down and along with the idea of keeping that resume up to date I want you to sit down and I want you to write out your network. Who is in your network? I want you to keep that up to date and think about that, just casual meetings, people that you see on a regular basis, people within the company.

That’s a big one for big companies, people within the company, people that you maybe go down to lunch at the same time in the cafeteria. They work in the accounting department and you work over in the marketing department or vice-versa. Stay in touch and in conversations with those kind of people because something might come up that’s good for you and you would like to do and that is your connection. That’s your link to that next job over in that department that you’d like to have or it may even be your connection and your link to a promotion. So that’s how the network works. It’s not a formalized thing.

I know that when I’ve been to a lot of different kinds of meetings they put an agenda up and there are 600 people in the meeting. When I say an ‘agenda’, I mean it’s like a schedule. You know here’s what we’re going to do. The first speaker is going to talk about such and such and the second speaker is going to talk about something and something and this is all going to start at 7:00 o’clock, but from 6:00 o’clock to 6:55 in the bar is the networking session.

Well, that’s your invitation for everybody to go down there and do this changing of cards routine. Well, if there’s a lot of people that you know hey, that’s great, but the ones I’ve been to I didn’t know anybody so changing cards didn’t accomplish anything. I went home with a handful of cards, looked at them and said oh, he was a nice guy, put them in my drawer and probably never talked to him again. That’s formal, stiff. That’s not the way to do it, but let me just kind of recap.

The resume, keep that thing up to date. As the accomplishments occur add them to the resume. Don’t forget to change the dates also. Don’t go walking around with a resume that says you worked in your current from January 2008 to January 2011 even though you’re still in the same job because, oops, you forgot to update the date.

Keep it short. Make your accomplishments, your achievements, your successes solid, concrete, things that will excite people, saving money, reducing head count, reorganizing something that was a mess, a department that was in bad shape. Keep that thing up to date.

Secondly, keep your network up to date. First off, write them down. Write them down because I would bet you that you’ve got as many people that you contact and as a big a network as I ever had. As I said, mine turned out to be a pretty good size. Keep that thing up to date and, by the way, stay up to date on what each of these people in the network are doing because some of them go off to different jobs. Some of them get promoted. Whoa! How about a good opportunity there if you want to follow that person if they got promoted? Hum, I’m a good person. Here’s my resume. I know you’re a manger now.

So that’s kind of my thoughts on the subject. As I said in the first lesson, I know it’s a traumatic experience, but you can make it a meaningful exciting experience and a rewarding experience and see an awful lot of benefits from it.

So, until next time. I’m going to let AJ talk to you a little later.

The End.