Refresh Your Resume for the New Year
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by Kim IsaacsMonster’s Resume Expert

The new year means a new list of resolutions. And let’s face it: Some are tough to keep. If you want proof, compare the number of cars packed into the parking lot of any fitness center in early January to the lonely few there in mid-March.

But a New Year’s resume refresher isn’t nearly as painful as four hours a week on the treadmill. And your efforts could pay off with big dividends. Arm yourself with an updated, high-octane resume, and 2007 could be the year that you land a better job.

Now is a great time to reflect on your recent accomplishments and add them to your resume. Let these ideas guide you.

Find Your Passion

Make sure your resume instantly communicates your career target with a descriptive headline (e.g., “CPA Backed by Corporate Audit Experience”) and adequately reflects your depth and breadth of experience in a brief, hard-hitting opening objective highlighting your top selling points.

If you’re thinking about changing careers or industries, be sure you’ve clearly defined your goal. Your job search will be more successful if your resume targets a specific field instead of being a one-size-fits-all document. Research positions to gain a solid understanding of what you want to do as well as the qualifications employers are seeking. Once you identify your career target, assess your background and identify transferable skills and experience that will enable success. Add an opening objective that spells out your goals and shows the relevance of past experience. For example: “Award-winning educator seeking to leverage five years of teaching experience to transition into corporate training.”

Add New Employment, Skills and Accomplishments

Refreshing your resume also means keeping it current. If you’ve changed jobs during the past year, earned a promotion or expanded responsibilities, your resume should reflect this. Even if you’ve remained in the same position, you’ve probably achieved noteworthy accomplishments in the last year.

Don’t forget about your new skills, including technical and computer ones. Add your new skills to the Skills section on Monster’s Resume Builder. Survey your Skills section to ensure your proficiency level and years of experience are accurate.

Keep Keywords Up-to-Date

Industry-specific jargon, buzzwords and technology keep changing, and your resume should be rich with these keywords. Study job postings on Monster that match your career target, and note which keywords appear repeatedly. Incorporate those keywords that match your background into your resume.

Include New Professional Activities

Add professional-development activities you completed last year, including certificates, degrees, courses and in-service training. Also include organizations joined and industry conferences attended. List training programs you’ve begun, even if you haven’t completed them. This shows your commitment to ongoing professional development.

Edit Ruthlessly

As you add new information to your resume, also consider the usefulness of older or less relevant experience. This will ensure your resume doesn’t become unwieldy. Unless you want to return to a former career, decrease the amount of detail you provide for older experience. For job seekers with 10 years of experience or more, this may mean setting up an Early Career section, where you briefly summarize employers, job titles and employment dates. On the Monster Resume Builder, you can present an early career history in the Additional Information section. Other expendable items include obsolete technology and your high school diploma once you’ve earned a college degree.

Proofread your resume carefully to ensure it’s error-free. Watch for information that needs to be updated from previous versions. For example, if your old resume included a summary that stated your years of experience, increase this number if necessary.

Start a Kudos File

Resolve to start a file for projects and successes you achieve during the year. Copy performance reviews and keep them in this file. Print out complimentary or congratulatory emails and file these away. List new committees you join. Jot down assignments you complete during the year. Include details of quantifiable results (e.g., percentages, dollar amounts, before/after comparisons) of your efforts while still fresh in your mind. Your kudos file will remind you where you excelled so you’ll be ready to punch up your resume.

Update Regularly

You should refresh your resume throughout the year, not just at the beginning. You never know when opportunity may come knocking.

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Copyright 2006 – Monster Worldwide, Inc. All Rights Reserved. You may not copy, reproduce or distribute this article without the prior written permission of Monster Worldwide. This article first appeared on Monster, the leading online global network for careers. To see other career-related articles visit http://content.monster.com.
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This article was written by Kim Isaacs, director of ResumePower.com and author of The Career Change Resume book. Visit the ResumePower.com site to learn more about resume services to jump-start your career.

Recruiter Resumes: A Question of Length
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If you’re wondering if you need a different resume for recruiters than for employers, the answer could be “yes.” Karen Hofferber, ResumePower.com’s senior resume writer, explains:

Whether your resume is targeting hiring managers at companies or recruiters, it must convey your key strengths and representative accomplishments powerfully and succinctly. Concise writing is important to both of these audiences, but this element is essential to recruiters, who may receive hundreds of resumes (many unsolicited) every day.

When targeting companies, a two-page (or sometimes three) resume is a good length for many professionals (the right length for you depends on your years of experience, career goal, and number of jobs held). Companies are hungry for the particulars of your achievements. Even though your resume most likely will not be read word-for-word in the initial screening phase, it will be given a thorough review once you make it to the interview cut. In order to get there, you must provide enough information to warrant closer review.

But when targeting recruiters, a maximum resume length of no more than two pages is preferable. If you can get your document down to a single page (while still providing enough compelling details to spur further interest), even better.

Many job seekers planning an aggressive search will be well served by creating two different versions of their resume:

  1. A detailed, keyword-rich, and accomplishments-packed document for employers; and
  2. A hard-hitting, abbreviated version for recruiters.

For the latter version, you need to be brutal in your editing. Pare down or eliminate your opening resume profile, cut your “Expertise” section, minimize your job descriptions, and combine your top accomplishments into three or four bullets for your most recent experience. You can group older experience into an “Early Career” section, providing just a few key details to save space.

Give Hiring Managers a Break…On the Eyes
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BrianBrian writes: “My resume’s font size is Times New Roman 9. Is this too small? I have a lot of information to fit, so reducing the font size enabled me to keep it to one page. Is this okay?”

Times New Roman in 9 point is tiny. As the workforce is aging, so are the eyes of hiring managers, so you don’t want your resume to be difficult to read. You will have better results if you enlarge the font size and go to two pages. Also, Times New Roman happens to be one of the most popular font used on resumes, so the result is that your resume looks like every other resume. Try using one of these fonts, which are standard on most systems: Arial, Garamond, Goudy, Book Antiqua, Century Schoolbook, Palatino, or Verdana. 10.5-11 point size works well with these fonts.

Resume Writing: The Importance of Keywords
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Is your resume optimized for keywords — terms that employers might use to search for job candidates? If not, you could be the perfect person for the job, but your resume is languishing unviewed in electronic databases.

A great way to start considering the right keywords for your occupation is to review a number of job advertisements. Study the ads that match your job target and look for skills/buzzwords that are mentioned in the different ads. If you see terms used frequently, they should probably be in your resume.

Another good way to determine keywords is to review employer websites. Look for terms that relate to your career area throughout the site, and try to incorporate related terms on your resume (if they match your skills!). The most important keywords to have are job titles (“accountant”) and important skills/credentials (“CPA”) that are related to your field. Hiring managers also use employer names and school names when searching resume databases.

The keywords may appear anywhere in the resume, so you don’t need to create a separate “Keyword” section. A “Key Skills” or “Areas of Expertise” section is a great place to include skills that could be keywords.

Older Worker Asks: Is a Functional Resume Right for Me?
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Amy job seekerAmy asks: “I’m an older worker, so with all of my work history, I’m thinking of changing from a chronological to a functional resume. Your thoughts?”

Keep in mind that many hiring managers report that they do not like functional resumes for a couple of reasons:

1. Functional resumes are the format of choice for job seekers with “problematic” backgrounds (job-hopping, extended gaps, etc.). So, when receiving a functional resume, many hiring managers have their antennas up – they are looking for what the problem might be!

2. Employers like to see how the candidate’s skills have developed by reviewing the career chronology. In a functional resume, many job seekers leave their accomplishments/skills hanging, without referencing the related position and time period. The hiring manager is left to wonder when and where each skill was developed or accomplishment achieved.

You don’t have to list every job ever held, so a “combination” format could be a great resume choice for you. One option is to briefly sum up early jobs in an “Early Career” section (dates can be omitted), enabling more space for recent accomplishments and keeping the resume concise.

Life Lesson #57823: “Don’t Touch The Tent”
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I loved to go camping when I was a kid – my favorite moments are from these fun getaways. We had one big tent for my mom, dad, brother and me. One night it was raining, and my father warned us, “Don’t touch the tent.” He had a deep, authoritative voice that should be listened to, but when my brother and I asked why we shouldn’t touch the tent, he just repeated, “Don’t touch the tent” without giving a reason. Of course, it drove us crazy and my brother and I had to touch the tent, and learned that touching the tent while it’s raining causes water to leak in.

My brother and I learned many of our lessons the hard way, but since my dad passed away last year, I find myself wondering if some advice needs to just be listened to — even if the reasons aren’t clear. As Monster’s Resume Expert since 1999, I’ve given a mountain of resume and job search advice over the years, and most people seem happy to receive expert guidance on a topic that can be so confusing. Around a year ago, though, a job seeker named Steve contacted us with resume questions, and I provided strategies for getting the attention of hiring managers given his career change goal and a history of job-hopping. Well, Steve didn’t listen to the advice and decided to keep using his resume that was in the wrong format for him (straight chronological, which highlighted his jumpy work history and unrelated skills).

Guess what? Steve came back to us – a year later – and he still hasn’t found a job. It made me wonder how different his life would be now if he didn’t “touch the tent.” Sometimes you need to listen to expert advice to make your own life better.

Maybe sometime I’ll tell the story of how I was on air mattress duty, and the only mattress I remembered to plug was my own. That was a rough, sleepless night for my family. Sorry!

Focus on Ability – Not DISability – On Resume
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I just interviewed disability expert Jonathan Kaufman on whether or not to include a disability on the resume. Jonathan says that Americans are in for a wake-up call if something isn’t done about opportunities for people with disabilities in the workforce. Right now, close to 20% of working-age Americans with disabilities are unemployed, and this figure is likely to double by 2010 due to aging baby boomers. Jonathan says:

When I give speeches, I ask the audience how many people belong to the disability group. The answer is “everyone,” because anyone can join the group at any time. It’s important to understand that disability issues are imperative to creating a diversity strategy. We don’t want to lose valuable human capital — that’s critical in being competitive.

The bottom line for job seekers is that they are at the mercy of the HR Department or hiring manager, and revealing a disability on a resume could limit opportunities. “The first thing job seekers need to ask themselves is: ‘Can I do the job?’ If yes, then don’t mention it,” Jonathan says.

Jonathan also recommends that job seekers do their homework to find out if the employer is supportive of diversity. Diversity Best Practices puts out information, and they can call national disability-related organizations (there’s a good list of disability organizations on the Section 508 government website) to find out which companies are supportive of disabled employees. Another approach is to go online and read about employers’ diversity strategies on company websites to see which employers are embracing diversity.

Interested Job Seeker…or Psychopath?
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You can get an edge with employers if you follow up on your resume after sending it, but don’t get too carried away like the lady who sent 70 emails to a love interest (see the video here – please note that clicking this link will launch your media viewer).Be persistent – not desperate – and you could end up with the job offer.

How’s Your Online Reputation?
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I need to clean up my online reputation!Have you revealed intimate details of your life in MySpace or other online venues? Have others trashed your good name all over the internet? If you’re like many internet users, you’ve accumulated “digital dirt” over the years – stuff that you wouldn’t necessarily want an employer to find.

ReputationDefender is banking on your bad reputation, and offering to clean up your online persona (for a fee, of course). More and more employers are Googling potential employees to see what they can find out before they hire you, so be ready. Start cleaning up your online persona by positioning yourself as an expert in your field – create a blog, write articles, create a professional profile on sites like LinkedIn, and network on industry-related sites.

Is Your Resume Spam?
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My resume is a no-spam zoneThe SpamHaus project says that 80% of email spam is being generated by a small group of around 200 spammers. There are even spam gangs – who knew?

Thanks to these lovely spammers, your resume could be getting lost in spam filters. After you excitedly hit “Send” to whisk your resume off to your next possible employer, you could be waiting a long time for a response if words in your resume or cover letter trigger employers’ spam filters. Some triggers include “opportunity,” “please read,” and “offer.” Avoid using exclamation points and capital letters in the email subject line. And if you were an academic whiz and want to tout your “magna cum laude” or “summa cum laude” designations, think again – these terms may also trigger spam filters.

You can give your resume a spam filter test using SparkList’s free tool.