Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
December 2008/January 2009
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter December 2008/January 2009 |
Let's say you see a listing for the perfect job -- one that exactly matches your skills, experience, and objectives. Even better, you just recently updated your resume, so you send it off and wait to be called for an interview. You get no response.
What went wrong?
Maybe you have the wrong idea about what a resume is and what it can do for you. Thinking of a resume as just a summary of professional qualifications and experience will put you in the discard pile almost every time, according to Jack Molisani. As president of ProSpring Technical Staffing (www.ProspringStaffing.com), Jack has evaluated reams of resumes over the years, so he should be in a position to know.
Rather than presenting a polished image of you, the successful and accomplished technical communicator, a resume has a very mundane purpose: To keep you from being eliminated in the few seconds it takes someone to scan what you submit.
For many, this requires a reversal of thinking, or at least an expansion of their notion of what a resume is.
Jack is an accomplished and entertaining speaker who engages his audience at every step. He solicited input from the group, critiqued what we suggested, and prodded us to examine our assumptions.
The thinking goes like this: It doesn't matter why you submitted your resume to the reader, or how he/she happened to come upon it. What matters is why the person is reading it: To see whether or not you match what the company is looking for.
If you work from that basic understanding, then you can take proactive steps to help readers find what they are looking for, and thus increase the number of interviews you get. The most commonly held beliefs about resumes are incomplete and do not focus on what you can do to increase your chances at receiving an interview.
From here, Jack revealed a series of "resume secrets," and each revelation reinforced the basic message.
They may scan, read parts, or search for keywords, but no one has time to read it from beginning to end. They probably won't even read entire paragraphs, or lists with more than three items -- anything that takes more than a few seconds.
You may be rejected, but not hired. This emphasizes the importance of brevity and targeting your information, because you don't want to give the reader more grounds to reject you.
If you are going to err, err on the side of brevity. Save the details for the interview, because it's the interview, not the resume, that drives the hiring decision.
Your distinguishing skill set may never be noticed because it is not prominent enough.
Jack cited the example of a client seeking a writer with patent writing experience. Jack submitted a resume that clearly stated the candidate had written patent applications, but it appeared in the middle of a bulleted list halfway down the second page. The client never saw it and rejected the applicant as lacking relevant experience.
Saying you were a "member of the technical staff" tells nothing about how you match what the company is looking for, and in fact may further frustrate the reader, increasing the likelihood of rejection.
An example might be someone who spends most of the time doing technical writing, but has the title "User Assistance Engineer" or "Project Support Specialist." The recommendation is to expand the title to be more explicit, for example, "XYZ Corporation, Technical Writer / Project Support Specialist."
This is also important for people trying to transition into a new career by leveraging their current experience.
You'd think it would go without saying, but applicants for writing positions still submit resumes with misspellings, inconsistent formatting, and mismatched structure. Someone in the audience said he'd received resumes in MS Word with change bars turned on. More subtle (but still fatal with savvy hiring managers) are simple formatting errors such as indenting paragraphs with spaces and a return at the end of every line.
The best part of the presentation was that Jack's approach puts the emphasis on what you can do to take some control of the situation. In response to the harsh realities listed above, here are steps you can take, straight from the presentation:
Prescott Williams recently moved to Northern California from Philadelphia. He has been writing and editing technical and business process documentation for 25 years. His experience ranges from bottling plant maintenance manuals to accounting department policies for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) audits. He recently began studying Java programming. He can be reached at pswilliams123@gmail.com.