Michael Betrus - Perfect Phrases for Job Seekers

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Perfect Phrases for Rsums 2005 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

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Perfect Phrases for Cover Letters 2006 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

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Perfect Phrases for the Perfect Interview 2005 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

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Michael Betrus conducts seminars and workshops in career guidance and has written numerous career guides, including 101 Best Cover Letters and 101 Best Rsums. A sales director and hiring manager for a Fortune 250 company, he has spent much of his career coaching candidates and enjoying the successes of how they execute their job searches.

T oday, resumes are more a part of a job search than ever before. They certainly are more important than they were 10 years ago, when many business experts embraced networking as the key source for finding a new position.

Okay. I do buy into that. Networking is a top source for finding a new position. But even when a candidate is brought to me through a networked source, the first thing I say is, Have them send me their resume and I will give them a call. Between you and I, after 10 job-search-related books and having managed hundreds of people, its hard to not be critical of poor resumes. Still, its table stakes for gaining an interview.

Now, in the e-mail age, all large organizationsand many small ones as wellpost jobs on web sites like careerbuilder.com and monster.com, not to mention major newspaper online job boards. What is the first thing you do when you find a job posted you like? You e-mail your resume! You see, in the electronic age of e-mail, resumes play a bigger role than ever before.

I wish you could take the time to sift through a few hundred resumes posted on career web sites and try to find a good candidate. The funny thing is, as difficult as it is for a job seeker, its pretty darn difficult on the hiring side too. You would be shocked how tough on occasion thats been for me, or my recruiting department, to find good candidates.

I bet as they, and I, have mined through the career web sites looking for candidates, we have passed on many great people. In fact, I would bet the odds are greater than Tiger winning another golf tournament.

Unfortunately, great people still write poor, unflattering resumes. Why?!!! When a hiring manager or recruiter is sifting through resumes, you have all of 10 to 30 seconds to impress them enough to read on. What makes them read on? Im smiling at the irony as I write this, but its perfect phrases. When candidates write great career summaries and great descriptors of past accomplishments, they get noticed.

That is why I wrote this book. Hopefully, it will help you craft some perfect phrases for your resume.

Perfect Phrases for Resumes

O n the front page of the employment section of a late 2003 Sunday edition of one of the largest newspapers in the country, there was an article debating the pros and cons of using a resume. One commentary was that the resume is outdated and that in todays world of electronic-based communications it will go away. It went on to say that the resume has long evolved and that the days of using nice stock paper and matching envelopes has passed. At one point it even questioned whether hiring managers want to be bothered with reviewing resumes.

The article was partly correct. The traditional uses of a resume have evolved. Among all the clients we have advised over the last year, none have concerned themselves with paper stock. However, hiring managers and internal and external recruiters do need resumes. What they detest are poorly written resumes that make them work to understand the profile of the candidates.

Resumes are still a huge part of the job search process. The first step in any selection process is to review the resumes of candidates, even those with inside sponsorship. In this section we want to teach you that:

You need to create an effective and useful career summary for your resume.

You need to document your accomplishments in the employment history sections and make them line up as closely as possible with the requirements of the company.

People pay hundreds of dollars to have professionals teach them how to present these two things. The career summary, in particular, is crucial. If you were to poll hiring managers, human resources recruiters, and external recruiters, fewer than 10 percent would say they read every bullet describing each job a candidate had. So, if the summary section is weak or nonexistent, theres even less likelihood that the whole resume will be read.

Consider this analogy: Recently I was traveling from Tampa to Dallas. At the Tampa airport I was looking for a couple of magazines to read on the plane. The magazine rack was large and the selection of magazines was broad. I browsed the news periodicals (like Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report), the sports magazines, and some others. I bought two magazines after very casually perusing over 50 magazine covers.

Why did I buy those two magazines out of the whole lot? Their covers and headlines.

In most cases this is not unlike the initial resume screening process for candidates. You can be deselected before you ever get to the plate. You need a good resumea well-presented career summary and employment history documentationto keep your job search process open and alive with options.

A good resume is no guarantee of obtaining a great position, but a poor one may very well result in your not getting the interview.

Being computer literate is an absolute requirement for any white-collar job today. To be considered a good prospect and a good candidate by hiring managers, good presentation skills can be critical. Hiring managers view the resume and the cover letter as an indication of how well you may perform in the job.