By

David J. Evangelisti, Resume Writer & Career Coach

https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidjevangelisti
davidjevangelisti@gmail.com

As David Duchovny’s character Fox Mulder stated in the popular “The X-Files” TV show, “The Truth is Out There” and I’ve come to realize some universal truths about job hunting since the economic crash of 2008.

Where do jobs come from in this down economy?

Most job coaches will provide you with similar statistics as reflected below:

85% = Networking including LinkedIn
11% = Recruiters, Employment Agencies
4% = Job Boards (i.e. Indeed, Beyond, SimplyHired etc.) and other Internet resources

I tell my clients that if they’re focusing the majority of their time on applying through job boards, good luck with the three-to four-year job search. You’re more likely to spot a Norwegian Elkhound circling the moon than land a real job via a job board these days.

“How do you want to spend your time?”

There are two things (essentially) that companies today care about in regards to your resume.

#1 = How did you make the company money?
#2 = How did you save the company money?

It doesn’t matter whether you’re an administrative assistant, a sales representative or a longshoreman. As a result, do your best to create accomplishment statements (OARS/STARS/PARS/SOARS) that address this as much as you possibly can with as many metrics (i.e. dollars, percentages etc.) as you’re able to include.

O – Opportunity
A – Action
R – Result
S – Statement

Ex. “At a recent employer, I developed, implemented and maintained 10 step-by-step procedure manuals for our auditing team. This saved the company money by reducing and oftentimes eliminating the need for a trainer, increasing productivity and shrinking the auditor error rate by 50%.”

You can be angry and stay a victim of the circumstances or you can refuse to accept it and take action and show why you are worthy of being hired.

“Summary Statements” have replaced the “Objective” on resumes today. The reason is simple: Most companies don’t care what YOU want; they care about what THEY want.

Cover Letters are a dying article in job hunting today. As far back as 15 years ago, I doubted that many hiring managers bothered reading these. And today, with the strong majority of people having the “attention span of a gerbil on acid,” good luck getting them to read your cover letter. Consider yourself fortunate if your resume earned a “15 second sniff.”

Read online about your industry and find out whether these are commonly requested in your industry or field. Or, better yet, only include them when they are required. I don’t mean when they give you an available place to upload one or a text box where you can paste one in. I mean required.

The reason is simple. You can spend several hours completing a single online application, a “customized” resume and a “customized” cover letter. Additionally, a cover letter can be a place where you put your “hoof in your mouth” and say something that turns off a hiring manager.

My wife said it best when she told me many years ago, “Smart people listen and stupid people speak.” Okay, excluding the fact that she grew up in a highly competitive developing country in Asia, and is very smart and very tough, her point is that the more you speak (or write in this case), the more chance you have of saying something that may mark you as “not the right candidate for the job.” Finally, most ATS scanning systems don’t like cover letters.

That being said, there are a few reasons for sending a cover letter: (a) you live outside of the employer’s geographic area but are moving there soon or will move if a job offer is made (b) you are re-inventing yourself and changing your field (c) you are explaining a layoff or a gap in employment.

There are many acceptable fonts that will be viewed properly after an ATS scanner digests it.

Acceptable fonts – Ex. Arial, Tahoma, Garamond, Calibri, Helvetica, Verdana, Georgia, Impact, Lucida, Trebuchet

Unacceptable fonts – Ex. Algerian, Jokerman, Matisse, Cambria, Comic Sans

Typically, “san serif” fonts are the best way to go.

Resume: Do’s and Dont’s

Make sure you have a header at the top of page two of your resume. Include your name, e-mail address and “Page 2.”

Avoid the use of first person “I.”

ALWAYS customize your resume to the specific job you’re applying to. Otherwise you might as well wad that resume up into a paper ball, drive your car down the road at 60 mph and hurl it out the window. The results will be the same.

Use online applications like Wordle.net or Tocloud.com to generate “word clouds.” It’s as easy as copying and pasting a job ad into the text box and clicking “enter”. It will provide the keywords that show up the most in large fonts and the keywords that show up the least in small fonts. Build these keywords accordingly into your resume.

A functional resume is effective in the following situations: (a) career change (b) concealing negative information (c) downplaying gaps in employment (d) you’re a “generalist” and not an expert in your field.

Here are reasons you might NOT want to use a functional resume: (a) many HR managers don’t love this format since it is difficult to pair your accomplishments or functions to your employer (b) they suspect you may be hiding something.

If you’re unsure about a functional resume you can create a morph between a functional resume and a chronological resume, which is called a “chrono-functional resume.” Look online for examples of both.

If you are a “generalist,” you are best served targeting smaller companies where wearing many hats will be more appreciated.

There are certain things you can count on in Southern California, like perpetual road construction projects in Orange County. However, someone handing you a job, any job, is not one of those things.

Exercise: “Get Moving”…searching for a job since 2008 has become a challenging task. Things that help include increasing blood flow via exercise. Do cardiovascular exercise, lift weights, etc. Even better, do yoga, Pilates or egoscue, which will do more to get your body right in regards to flexibility, strength and alignment. Also, the breathing aspects involved with these three activities will help reduce stress.

Meditation is also very effective for reducing stress and will improve your sleep.

There are many fake online job ads. The reasons include: (a) the company is “posturing” (b) an internal candidate was already chosen but legally the company must post the position (c) the company forgot to remove an old job ad they already filled.

Saddleback Church LinkedIn Class:

Check their website at http://svcareerministry.org/for details on days, times and locations. The free beginner class will help you achieve an intermediate level with your LinkedIn profile. It is a fantastic class, and by taking detailed notes and attending it three to four times, you can dramatically improve your LinkedIn profile. I recommend taking it multiple times because the instructor will change, the class interaction feedback will change and the instructor’s topics and tangents will change.

Companies don’t take hiring risks anymore because they don’t have to. They don’t want to train anyone, and they expect you to meet 85% or more of their posted job requirements. One recruiter recently told me that in regards to their clients they must send candidates that meet 95% to 100% of their requirements or their client will get angry with them for wasting their time. With 250 to 1,000 people applying for nearly every posted position in large markets, this is not surprising.

Even candidates applying for entry-level positions (0 to two years) may have to undergo four interviews (i.e. phone, teleconference, in-person and panel). Long applications, language tests, math tests, personality tests and behavioral tests are all designed to weed people out.

Companies really only want to hire candidates based on personal recommendations. Thus, you can see the power of networking. Utilize each and every networking opportunity. Always hand out your professional networking business card. You never know who may know somebody who can assist you.

Get OUT and network. Flash back to the first couple of paragraphs of this article. Don’t exchange one sit-at-home option such as applying to jobs via job boards for another – living on LinkedIn. While you should devote a lot of time to LI via building your profile page, building your connections to 500-plus etc., you don’t want to ignore the more personal in-person opportunities of networking.

Anytime you can hand-deliver your resume versus e-mailing it in or submitting via a company website, DO IT! Seek out opportunities before they are public.

If you are re-inventing yourself, you need to think creatively with ALL related skills you have for the position. It really doesn’t matter whether you were paid or not. Most companies only care that you can come in and do it without training. There are some industry exceptions to this rule, but “if it’s all you’ve got, it’s worth a shot.”

The Patriot Act had a dramatic effect on employer hiring practices as more and more companies began using ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) to scan resumes to ensure they were protected and compliant with government requirements. Even mom-and-pop shop companies often incorporate these systems in 2015.

For more on this, read the following article written by an excellent career coach:

http://recareered.com/blog/2012/08/13/why-almost-all-employers-use-an-applicant-tracking-system/

Remember, ATS systems are setup to “disqualify” candidates, not find the best candidate. Even HR managers aren’t trained to find the best candidates. They simply have some direction from the hiring managers which aids them in narrowing down the list. Typically only hiring managers are good at finding the best candidates for the position.

“BE GOOD TO YOURSELF!” When you’ve strung together several days in a row of working long hours on your job search, do something for yourself that you enjoy. Whether it’s attending a movie, going for a premium cup of java at your local coffee house, going for a smoothie or attending a wine tasting, you need to unwind and relax to alleviate stress.

Possibly I have an odd sense of humor, but I feel it sometimes helps to laugh at an unfortunate situation. If we don’t laugh we may cry, right? I wrote a funny quote after struggling with finding employment in this current economy.

“Be One of the few, one of the proud, one of the — employed.”

For me it added a little levity to the situation. And I realized I needed to get even tougher (like a Marine) and really go after what I was seeking.

It is never okay to sound like someone who has given up.

Whether it is the defeated sound in your voice or the look of being “beat up from the feet up,” this is not a place you want to stay in for more than a few minutes. People will smell it as easily as when you used to walk into a bar and the pretty girl across the room gazed your way and you quickly looked down at your shoe laces…or an imaginary fly on the wall. She easily recognized that you had very little confidence and therefore she approached your “peacock strutting” friend instead. Bear this in mind – always!

You MUST be relevant in social media and technology. Companies expect you to be Yelping and blogging, and to be well versed in things like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, even if you don’t actively engage in ALL of them. And of course you must always be very careful when it comes to your online presence and the message you are putting out there.

If you write intelligently and well-thought-out articles about your field and industry you look a lot more like an expert in your field than the person who doesn’t.

VOLUNTEER at a company where you want to work and ideally in the FIELD in which you want to work. Sometimes it pays simply to get a “hoof” in the door, so if you can’t secure the “field” portion, at least you got in the door where good things may happen. At minimum, it keeps you looking relevant on your resume. This may not be easy financially, but if it pays off in full-time employment within your field and industry, then it should be worth the sacrifice.

Behave like a boxer; if you had a bad first round, pick yourself up off the canvas and get right back to work in round two.

Behavioral tests are utilized by most companies these days, whether it is via behavioral questions in an interview or via an online exam as part of their application process. My recommendation here is – “don’t overthink the room.”

Writing accomplishment statements (OARS/STARS/PARS/SOARS) will assist you in facing these questions in interviews, and you can find sample behavioral questions and answers online. Beyond that, you don’t know exactly what they’re going to ask, so don’t worry about what you can’t control.

I have a friend who is a district manager in the retail dollar store industry. I asked him how you pass these written behavioral tests, which are very common these days, within the retail industry and beyond.

His response:

“There is no such thing as ‘neutral’ or ‘gray,’ you either “strongly agree” or you “strongly disagree.” If I see results on one of these exams and there are numerous neutral responses I begin to wonder if this candidate thinks that one day it’s okay to remove money from the till, and another day it isn’t okay. That is not someone I’m going to take a chance on by hiring. End of story.”

In today’s market, even retail jobs aren’t easy to come by. Many of them feature all or some of the following: (a) long online applications (b) math tests (c) language/grammar tests (c) behavioral tests (d) interviews with behavioral questions.

Read “The One Minute Manager” if you want to get additional useful information and more detail on how to pass behavioral tests.

At some point in your job search, you may have to accept the fact that “it is honorable to earn” and accept a position which is lower tier compared with what you were doing previously. Ideally it should be something where you’re not embarrassed if someone you know sees you there but at the end of the day, you must pay your bills.

When you get to the interview stage you must “wow” people. Convince them through your words and voice that you are what they are seeking. Sometimes you must be aggressive and audacious in order to stand out from the crowd. Blending in is not the key to success in this economy.

Positive Thinking is a tremendous energy source for your creating and achieving the job you seek. There isn’t any way you can “land” a job if your mind is full of negative thoughts.

Time management is one of the toughest obstacles when searching for employment in 2015.

Here are some examples of the things you should/must do: write a resume and customize for each job; write OARS accomplishment statements; write a professional bio; write a cover letter for some jobs; attend classes on how to get a job; attend classes to improve your skill set; write a LinkedIn profile; update your LI profile; engage daily on LinkedIn; contact recruiters and engage regularly; maybe use job boards and create search agents and apply to jobs online; network at local organizations within your community; attend job fairs etc.

That is a lengthy list, and there are only so many hours in day. That being said, go back to the first paragraph of this article and consider how best to focus your time. Analyze and reassess often whether things are or aren’t working and adjust accordingly. And avoid being in “chicken-with-its-head-cut-off” mode. Best of luck to you all!

Keeping busy and being productive aren’t the same things.

END

(7/18/15)