 The Advantages of a Tailored Resume By Tom R. Arterburn
When leading companies advertise to hire employees, it's not uncommon competitive job market. That's why creating a tailored resume each time you apply for a job is critically important; that's unless you want to be darting back and forth from Kinkos every couple of weeks investing in paper and matching envelopes. A tailored resume is designed around the specific needs of the company you're contacting. While the basic information remains the same, you should adapt your objective statement, career capabilities summary and other relevant sections to tie them directly to the open position. Hiring managers agree that resumes addressing their exact specifications are rare and always grab attention. "Only about 10% of [all] resumes actually provide the information necessary for a hiring manager to make a decision about a candidate," said Denise Foy, president of Adlab, a Chicago-based high-tech recruiting firm. "In this age of word processing, there's no excuse for a insincere query." The proliferation of generic, mass-emailed or mass snail-mailed resumes has doomed many candidates. Why? To combat the mountains of generic resumes that arrive after an ad is placed, most hiring managers will set up a specific qualifications criterion before they begin screening applicants. This makes it extremely easy to weed out the unqualified, no matter how much catchy terminology or creative wording they use. According to a corporate human resources director in Georgia, "If you send me a resume and don't provide a clear objective as to what your interests are, you'll go into a database that gets really large very fast. As a result, you get less exposure," she says. Here's How it Works When tailoring your resume, for a specific position, whether it's nursing, firefighter, law enforcement, physician, mechanic, police, federal government, sales, customer service, don't rush. Gaining a jump on the competition requires some extra effort, which is summarized in the following six steps:
1. Research the prospective company. Visit you local library's reference section to dig out information on the firm's financial well-being, latest innovations, new projects, top executives and related information.
2. With your research complete, start creating the resume by writing a concise and specific JOB OBJECTIVE. Remember, a generic statement that allows you to distribute your resume widely won't make the impression you need. Instead, opt for sincerity: To apply my skills and experience as a sales manager for the Detroit territory of ABC Company. Specificity and sincerity scores points!
3. Write a summary paragraph that highlights your professional background as it relates to the needs of the company. If the position if for a sales manager, for example, highlight you motivational and leadership skills, and note how much sales improved under your guidance in previous positions. If you want to keep your resume out of the "application morgue," this summary paragraph, like the job objective, should be revised every time you apply for a job.
4. When listing PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE, keep the information straightforward and concise. When readers have hundreds of resumes to review, they're rarely impressed by intricate details of day-to-day job duties.
5. With all the effort expended up to this point, your inclination might be to simply list your degree and the name of your alma mater under the heading of EDUCATION, then look ahead to the cover letter. This strategy might be effective, but only if the five or six other candidates you're neck-and-neck with in the selection process slack off as well. To be on the safe side, it's better to forge ahead and list educational achievements, such as published papers, awards and titles, that relate to the interests of the company.
6. Finally, list any affiliations, memberships, biographical information or volunteer work that may relate to the employer's business. For example, you may have found during your initial research that you and the potential employer share philanthropic or community service interests. Okay, this sounds like a lot of work doesn't it? But isn't that what employers look for? Hard Workers? Tom R. Arterburn is an award-winning job-search journalist and director of The Resume Institute. |
