The Resume: Can you do the job?

Unless you have been living under a rock, you have probably heard the term and have (some) idea of what it means. The purpose of a resume is to follow up your cover letter with a detailed explanation of why you think you’re the best candidate for the job. It is a summary of who you are, your objective and relevant education, experience and skills. Essentially the goal of the resume, combined with the cover letter is to get you an interview. So...where to start?

Before we start, I’d like to mention why HR people want you to write a cover letter and resume in the first place. When you look at it from an employer’s perspective, there are 3 questions a candidate has to answer to be a good eligible candidate for a job:

-          Can they do the job? – This is essentially asking “do you have the right education and skills to perform your duties on the job?” This is still about both hard and soft skills, but all they want to know is that you are capable of doing it. This is the stage which is assessed by your resume, cover letter and crappy IQ tests they put in front of you.

-          Will they do the job? – This is more in fairyland...its about whether you are motivated and will enjoy working for the company long term. It’s all about attitude...this is where the psychological tests and team building exercises kick in which are ultimately an exercise in verbal masturbation. This is usually also the most part of the first interview.

-          Do they fit in? – HR people call it ‘our company culture’ but really it all comes down to whether the senior people who interview you will like you (or at least don’t hugely dislike you). This is the final interview in the process. By this stage if there is one position, you will be one of no more than 5 people competing for it. You are the cream of the crop.

Now back to the topic. As with cover letters, give your resume file a good name (read the last post for further details). Keep in mind, as before, stupid mistakes will land your application straight in the bin. Now for the content...every resume should have the following:

-          Your name (at the top, in nice big letters)

-          Your address

-          Your contact details (mob, email, home)

-          Do not include your gender, ethnicity, religion or other personal information. Firstly because you will probably not get the job for being a dumbass and secondly because the HR person might hate the fact that you’re a black Jewish woman. Don’t risk people’s prejudices jeopardising your application.

Next you need an objective – this is what you want out of the job: it could be experience in a particular industry, it could be training/qualifications support, it could be to ‘broaden your horizons’, it could be to get a blowjob. It’s basically a one-liner that says “I want a job because I want to X”. X is your objective.

Next comes your ‘Key Skills/Strengths’ – this is a summary of your most attractive qualities in relation to the position. What you put in here are the top 5-7 things the job ad said they wanted. So mine are typically:

-          MS Office experience, Excel, Access, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook skills

-          Strong analytical and organisational skills

-          Effective interpersonal and written communication skills

-          Positive ‘can do’ attitude

-          Ability to work effectively in a team environment

-          Effective leadership abilities

The reason I have selected these are because they are mostly soft skills. The best part about soft skills is that unless you are horribly bad at them, it’s very hard to show that you don’t possess them. The other good thing about them is that HR people LOVE them. This is therefore the bread and butter of any application which cannot compete with superior hard skills. The first few things that you put down in this section should be directly from the ‘selection criteria’ or that ‘The ideal candidate will have the following skills’ section in a job ad. This shows that you know what they want, you have what they want, and you have the sense to address it first (making it easier to jump to the education section). The rest are to fill in space essentially while still making you look good. Just don’t make a huge list 7 is probably the maximum I would do.

Now to really answer the ‘can they do it?’ question. Your education – Institution, what you studied, year you finished, qualification at the end, final mark. If you’ve done a language course in a foreign country as I suggested earlier this is where it will stand out (ALOT).

Next up is your experience. This is NOT a comprehensive rundown of every last thing you’ve ever done since you were 5. It does not include the A you got in art class or your experience in quality control for services at a brothel. Just the stuff that proves you can do the job you’re applying for and you can do it well. The elements of each entry are:

-          Company name

-          Location

-          Dates worked there

-          Your position

-          Key duties/skills (make sure that some of these match to the skills required in the job ad and your cover letter while still providing with a broad overview of what you did). Try to extrapolate which soft skills you developed from certain tasks – for example experience as a sales clerk may develop your communication skills or experience as a bookkeeper may develop your computer literacy and organisational skills etc. This is particularly important for interviews.

Sample:

Finally after a few entries (again 5 or so should be enough) you have your references. 2 is the general number to go by, include their name, their company, their position and their phone number. Make sure these people know that they are your references (if they don’t and the recruiter calls, you auto-fail even if they say nice things).

To give you guys some guidance for design and formatting, you want it to look nice (like you’ve put effort in) but also easy to read. You don’t want to put so many colours in there that the person reading it has an epileptic fit or that their computer crashes from all the crazy effects you put in. Look at word templates to give you some ideas. In the meantime a generic basic version is here:

So I hope you’ve got a basic understanding of how to write a resume. Alot of it has to do with the values that you convey from it (I will cover this in later sections as this is a complex topic) but as for style, elements, format etc I think this should give you a rough guide.

A

The Elusive Cover Letter

So you’re on seek.com or some company’s recruitment website and they ask you to attach a cover letter. What the heck is it and why do you need one?

A cover letter is a supplement to a resume. Its purpose is to convince the reader to read your resume. It is the first thing a prospective employer will read about you so it better be good. Unless a job application specifically states that you do not need a cover letter, ALWAYS submit one.

Essentially a cover letter is no more than a one page summary of the key strengths you have that correspond to the things the job criteria and job description (basically the stuff on the job ad) require of the employee. The reason the employer wants it from you is because they probably have a pile of 500 letters to read and have to cull that pile to 10 interviews they will offer and cull those interviews to 3 employees they will hire. The easiest non-time consuming ways to cull people straight away are to find the following things in applications:

-          Not complying with the application instructions in any way or being too lazy to provide a cover letter even if they didn’t ask for it.

-          Stupid mistakes – spelling, grammar, formatting, dates, titles, people’s names etc.

-          Poorly presented applications (they don’t want to hire someone who has no taste or pride in their work)

-          Silly email addresses – please do not apply with the “to0_hott_4_u_sxc_grl” email address you made when you were 13. These are by far the easiest to immediately delete.

Please understand that if you do any of the above most likely you will never hear from them. They will dismiss you as someone who is incompetent, can’t speak English properly, has poor attention to detail, is lazy, or a combination of these things. For an employer there is nothing easier than cutting that intimidating pile of 500 applications to 50 in 30min just by reading the cover letters.

So how do you write a cover letter? I am going to provide you with an extracts of a cover letter and explain what it comprises.

First of all, as things these days are submitted electronically, you have to create and submit a file online. Ensure that the file is not named “cover letter” or a variant of that. Your goal should be to make it as easy as possible for the employer to read and approve your application. Re-read that last sentence, because that is ultimately what separates the winners from the losers and keep it in mind throughout EVERYTHING you do for any job application. Having 500 files by the title “cover letter” does not make things easy because you don’t know whose file you’re viewing. So, call it “John Smith’s Cover Letter for ABC Ltd May 2011” or something like that. Not only is it convenient but it will also make you stand out against the 500 “cover letter” files.

Now onto the content, read the sample generic cover letter. I will go through all the highlighted parts:

-         So firstly, ensure the date corresponds to the date you submit the application. Simple, but you have no idea how many people miss this. Address it to the person who will be reading it. If you don’t know, just say ‘The Recruiter” or some variant thereof, put in their title and the company you’re applying for.

-          Now while this is tacky, you have to tell them why you’re writing to them. Think of it this way, imagine you are the employer and you get some email from some random throughout the day. It could be anything – it could be a client wanting to discuss business, it could be their friend pranking them by putting horse porn on their work computer, it could be those Viagra pills they ordered last week or just some spammer who tells them they’ve won the lottery and all they need to claim their prize is to give some Nigerian dude their bank details.

Anyway I digress – you are responding to an advertisement that they put up and it sounded like just the right thing for you or because you came across their website and because of the amazing uniqueness of their company, that made you interested. Tell them a reason that you are interested in their company other than ‘I want a job, I want money and I want it now’. I understand that there is nothing special about any company unless they give crack to their employees on Fridays, but you pretty much just have to make up a reason. You also want to tell them what a lovely coincidence this is as not only did you majestically come across their job ad but you are looking for that exact job! How amazing.

-          The next step is to tell them why you want that job. This should be the ‘objective’ statement you put in your resume almost word for word (ensure that it is consistent!). An example of this is “I want to develop my skills and experience in the field of accounting” be sure to imply that you want to undertake further training (everyone likes that especially in grads) and that you want a long-term career (companies like to hear this from grad applicants because they spend time and money training you up so they want to think that whoever they hire will stick around once they’re trained up).

-          After you cover all this, you briefly tell them (1 sentence) what top skills/experiences make you the best candidate for the position. The purpose of this is not to be comprehensive, just to catch their eye so they read your next paragraph (many applications are thrown out by this stage). The other thing you tell them is that you want to join their TEAM. Use the word team. Alot. Its an HR persons wet dream. A ‘Team Player’. You are a team player from now on. You collaborate, you share experience, you learn new things, you focus on customers/clients and results, you are motivated, you smoke pot with the HR people in fairyland. All is well.

So you’ve told them why you’re contacting them, who you are and what you’ve been up to lately. You’ve also told them you’re interested in their position and expressed that your love for their company can transcend even the love between a man and his power tools. But why should they hire you? This is where the next paragraph kicks in. “I believe/think [NEVER USE FEEL] I am the right candidate because...”. Essentially you are the right candidate because you’ve read through the job criteria on the advertisement and your skills and experience matches everything! How amazing is that! So that’s exactly what you tell them. I’m going to pick a random ad from seek.com for a graduate position and highlight key things they want in their applicant.

So this is for a grad Mining Engineer. In your cover letter, you have to essentially say that you want exactly what they offer. In this case, you want to develop your experience in a projects role and be exposed to site work to gain time underground and ultimately want to become a highly regarded mining engineer through the ongoing training they offer. Now as for what you offer them:

-          A degree

-          High degree of motivation

-          Ability to think and act logically

-          As stated before you really want to complete a development program to achieve your objective of becoming a highly regarded engineer and deliver value to their team [that’s another buzz word...”value”]

I hope you can see that all I’ve done is extracted what they offer and tell them that’s why I like their company in the first paragraph of my cover letter. As for what they want, you can’t just list those things (unfortunately). You have to draw on your past experience (or make up a past experience) where you’ve DEMONSTRATED those characteristics.

So degree is easy, you’ve demonstrated a high degree of motivation from your previous job where you worked unsupervised and had alot to do under time pressure, you’ve demonstrated your Klingon-like logic through that time you managed a project crisis successfully at work/uni, you have a real love for learning and have demonstrated that you will be competent because you’ve completed your degree. Don’t be afraid to throw in other nice things like your leadership skills, analytical skills, communication skills, customer/client focus etc. Also make sure you refer to your resume (and whatever is in your cover letter is consistent with your resume) because your goal at this stage is to get them to read it.

Keep in mind that not everything has to be supported in super detail because a cover letter should be no more than 1 page altogether and 2 body paragraphs. Nobody wants to read War and Peace at this stage.

After you tell them why you’re a good applicant, tell them again that you think you’re really interested in their company and actually ask to ‘follow up’ (another corporate buzz term) your application with an interview.

Than sign off with your name and contact details at the bottom :)

Then print, proofread, make alterations, print, check for consistency with your resume and send!

So now (hopefully) you have a somewhat better idea of what a good cover letter is. The key now is practice, practice, practice. You probably won’t get it instantly but as you get more and more responses and keep doing cover letters (yes you have to customise it for each application if you haven’t already figured it out) you will notice you get more responses (strike rate). Any response other than ‘no’ is a strike. A phone interview, an offer to do some shitty psychobabble test or a proper interview are all good because it means you got to the next stage and they’re happy with your cover letter writing abilities.

Good luck

A

Getting their attention

Employers should look for how well you did at Uni i.e. your marks, whether you can speak English (or native language of your country) fluently, whether you have competent computer skills and whether you have a good attitude and aren't a complete psycho.

Unfortunately, thanks to HR Global, employers look for 'more' than these things. They characterise them as 'soft skills'. The reason for this is because anyone of reasonable intelligence can learn technical skills. Anyone can rote-learn a mathematical formula or laws or how to fix a busted pipe. These ‘hard’ skills are also easier to teach...you just go to a training course and you’re done.  In a competitive market, an HR person needs to pick the best applicant and so they decided to add new criteria.

Keep in mind that, as a graduate, you have virtually no hard skills they can’t get anywhere else. There are lots of people with engineering, maths, commerce, economics, science, medicine and law degrees and all of their employees have one. From a ‘hard skills’ perspective it is highly unlikely there is anything remotely special about you. Therefore you must play to the soft skills.

The trend these days, especially with grad programs is to select a ‘diverse’ range of people. This could mean just about anything but usually means range of backgrounds and skills...which translates to 70-80% commerce/law students with Distinction averages (i.e. the bread and butter corporate person who has good ‘hard skills’) and 20-30% ‘wildcards’ i.e. people who don’t fit into the super corporate mould, but are nonetheless interesting candidates who could bring a new perspective to the team.

If you fit into the bread and butter category, you should have no trouble in securing an interview, but, soft skills and other factors could boost your odds. If you don’t, then you need to fit into the wildcard category. Essentially all this means is that you need to appear interesting to the person reading your application. You do this through demonstrating the following attributes:

-           Leadership

-          Communication

-          Strategic thinking / ‘global perspective’

-          Charity

-          Relevant skills not covered by your qualifications (e.g. I was good at financial modelling but didn’t have a formal qualification)

What can you do during your University years to stand out?

-          If you don’t speak English well, learn it. Fast. People who have accents, use bad spelling/grammar and overall don’t have the ability to crystallise and communicate concepts in the native language of the country are auto-fail. It’s racist but it has its purpose. I can’t talk to someone about complex problems if they have a super thick accent and don’t know the vocabulary or use bad grammar (this is especially important with legal professions). If you have an accent, try to get rid of it. If you have a UK, US or Australian accent you give the person confidence that you speak English well. If you can’t get rid of your accent, get accredited i.e. do the IELTS test to demonstrate that despite your accent you are still a competent communicator. The whole purpose of a phone interview is essentially to determine whether you can communicate well and this is basically all you’re assessed on.

-          Vacation programs that are relevant to your industry are awesome but hard to get into. If you do however, you will immediately stand out because the HR person reading your application knows that you know what you’re getting yourself into by applying as you’ve done the work before and its a pre-selection tool because if Company A thought you were good enough to get a job then this company should also give you a shot.

-          Overseas Travel – Not just any kind of travel, go and do an intense language training course in another country – this will enable you to say something like ‘can adapt to new environments and undertake intense training’. This is important because at the start of any job is a steep learning curve. If you can learn a new language while being in a foreign country, you can do their shitty modules.

-          Charity work – I have no idea why this makes you stand out. Its stupid. If you’ve done charity work then it basically lets you say that you care about the community/environment/cancer (which are all worthwhile causes...they just have nothing to do with your career). You can also tie this in with your ‘work/life balance’ and your altruistic intentions for selecting the work. i.e. I want to work in a Big 4 Accounting firm not for the money, but because I like to help businesses reach their full potential. This can apply to any job...’I want to apply to be a toilet cleaner because making sure the toilets are fresh gives people confidence they won’t get aids when they sit on the toilet seat and I find that fulfilling because I like making people feel good’. HR people are convinced that if you work because you want money you won’t be there long term. The truth is that everyone wants the money otherwise they wouldn’t apply but you just need to tell them a nice story because that’s what they want to hear.

-          Attend their stupid functions and career fares. HR people, despite being horribly idealistic and misguided are people too. If you can make an impression on one of them (essentially by communicating that you have certain values which we will talk about later) then you basically have a golden ticket to an interview. There are many instances which i’ve heard of an HR person giving someone their business card and telling them to drop the HR person’s name in their application. Another good reason is that you learn how to talk and act like the ‘corporate type’. There is something very distinctive about them and the sooner you learn how to act that way, the better ’fit’ you will be for the company.

-          Develop other skills beyond your degree – if you’re interested in computers, do programming or MS Office, if you’re into business, do a business short course, small accreditations like that show 2 things:

o   You like to learn

o   You are rounded in your education

-          Do team sports or join the army reserves – a slightly radical idea but essentially this means you can follow orders, can work well in a team and lead. They are all soft skills which HR people are convinced enable you to do your job more effectively. Great to put into any application.

-          Learn a foreign language – this basically tells HR people you are good at communicating and are ‘diverse’ Their logic is something like this:  if you can speak Arabic, this will magically transform you into an expert on Arab culture, beliefs, communication and because Arabs are drastically different to white people because of the geographical region they were born in or what citizenship their parents happen to have, you will assist the company in communicating with them. Also, by hiring people of other nationalities simply because they have a different shade of skin colour to the bulk of the population demonstrates that the company is not racist and holds no grudges about 9/11. We’re all about ‘diversity’.

-          Get some hobbies – this is a minor point but HR likes employees to have work/life balance. Apparently this means that after work they assume that you will go and play footy or something...anyway...while silly, this does add a little bit to your application.

Hope this gives you some insight as to what you can do while you’re at uni to get ahead of the pack and improve your odds.

A

Starting your career: Introduction

So you’re probably at Uni and you want to make sure that after you finish, you get a good job and kick start your career. A good idea...but you probably have no clue how to go about it. Your friends don’t help because they’re your competition...how do you figure out what to say and do?

My Story

This blog has been created because of my passionate hatred for the human resources industry and my belief that if one is willing and capable they should be given a chance at a job. Unlike the vast majority of people who write about this stuff, who are unemployed and sit there at 3pm on a Wednesday in their underpants while eating corn chips and typing away their ‘advice’, I practice what I preach. I have held a job for some time at a Big 4 Accounting firm (one of the best places for a straight commerce student to get to after University) and got there despite my marks, degree, background and lack of connections. This isn’t an incredible feat but nonetheless its reasonably prestigious and given my background, would generally be considered to be well out of my league.

 A few years ago I came out of University with a straight Commerce degree from a middle of the road University. My average mark was 63% (very unglamorous). I have average (or maybe slightly higher than average intelligence at best), reasonable English and computer skills, no special connections and, at the time not much more than ambition and good intentions. Prior to completing University, I never had an office job, I never even got an interview to a firm that had more than 3 employees. My most prestigious jobs were making pizza and being a paintball referee on weekends. I did not know how to get past that stupid HR girl who was convinced that my favourite colour or my ability to build imaginary rafts in teams will determine my suitability for a job. In my penultimate year (year 2 out of 3) of university, EVERYONE was applying to secure a job after university. The best response I got was something along the lines of:

“Dear Applicant

Thank you for your interest. Despite the fact that you are competent, ambitious, driven etc. We have decided to select someone who has inferior skills, doesn’t speak English and is probably an alcoholic because they said their favourite colour was green (the colour of geniuses) and enjoy building imaginary rafts in teams. Actually that’s not true...it’s because their daddy is a Partner in this firm and yours isn’t.

Regards

Some HR lady.”

So my favourite colour is blue. I don’t like building rafts, I’m not into charity work and my daddy isn’t a partner in a big accounting firm. It doesn’t mean I can’t be a good accountant or finance advisor or anything else for that matter. I applied to 50+ firms and received nothing but polite rejection letters. Not even a single phone interview.

Over the next year I read a TONNE of material on how to make resumes, cover letters, pass interviews etc. When I finished University I had no job lined up and it was application season again. I was massively insecure about my career prospects. I applied to over 80 companies (basically every graduate job I could apply for). I got 62 offers for interviews. Picked the top 20 to show up to and got 16 job offers. By the end, firms were bidding for me, offering me increased salary, leave and perks to get me on board. A sharp contrast to the prior year. Subsequently, I accepted the offer to join a Big 4 Accounting firm.

I want to share with you what I learned to help you get into your dream job. The skills are transferrable. All you need is to listen up and be prepared to work at it. This is not quite a magic bullet (its probably the closest thing to it). There is no ‘easy’ way of doing this. But it is possible.

The scope of this series will include, but is not limited to the following:

-  What is generally considered “valuable” by employers and how what you do during your uni years can assist with getting their attention.
-  Resumes
-  Cover letters
-  Interviews
-  Probationary periods
-  Keeping the job

I hope this will be a comprehensive guide to anyone looking for a start to their career.

Happy hunting

A