Spin Your Resume Into Gold

When I was a little girl the story of Rumpelstiltskin fascinated me. If you don’t know or remember, it’s the Brothers Grimm tale about a miller who lied to the king and said that his daughter could spin straw into gold. The king locks the girl into a room in the castle and tells her to spin away or he’d kill her. Out of nowhere an elf appears and spins the straw into gold in return for a piece of the young woman’s jewelry. This goes on day after day until the young woman has nothing more to give the elf. The elf goes away after the girl promises to give him her first born child. (Why am I not surprised that a family named Grimm wrote this?) The king marries the miller’s daughter. Now a queen, the young woman has a son and the elf comes back demanding what was promised. She declines and the elf relents only if she can guess his name.  She guesses after spying on the elf and he gets so angry that he runs into the forest never to be heard from again. (I’m glad that my mother never read the other version that said that the elf was so angry that the queen guessed his name that he drilled himself into the ground and then tore himself in two).

For some reason, this story pops into my mind when I’m faced with a big job such as a mountain of laundry. I’m also reminded of it every time I write a new resume. It’s challenging to have a pile of “straw” or in this case accountabilities, responsibilities and notes and try to spin those into succinct, measurable accomplishments.

How do you spin the resume straw into gold?

1. Pick through your piles of job responsibilities and pull out the accomplishments for each position.
2. Research your former company and position and note the number of people served, budget/earnings, location. Research your position by asking yourself what you did and accomplished. Look up your job in the Occupational Outlook Handbook or another source and let the wording remind you of your actual duties and subsequent accomplishments.
3. Only bother with the past ten to fifteen years (if you go back that far) and bundle any other positions into a “Prior Employment”. You can organize these by company name, location and your previous titles.
4. List your education by degree, institution and location.
5. Categorize your strengths. Looking at these, draft a branding statement.

These five steps will take that jumble of thoughts and information and help you start to “spin” them into something concrete and manageable. Down the road you may tweak your resume for a particular job but with these steps, you will create a template to get you started. There’s no magic to creating a resume; just a bit of organization, creativity and data collection.

Job Search Tips for the New Graduate

It's that time of year again. Graduations are happening all over the place and if you're lucky, you'll have a new career to go to in June or July. A job that is in your new field and not the one you've been doing every summer since high school.

If I had to offer soon to be graduates any job search advice, what would I say? Since the unemployment rate for this age group is rather high, I'd want to give them some advice that would make them step ahead of their peers. I'd tell them what I'd tell my own kids. I'd break my advice into a couple of categories - resume/cover letter, interviewing and networking.

Resume

• Read all you can about how to design a resume and don't believe and it has to be only one page long.
• Get a professional email address.
• Make use of key words that match the job requirements.
• List your accomplishments in regard to past jobs, internships and school. You have them.
• If you're stuck about what tasks and accomplishments were in your last job, then look it up. Go to the Occupational Outlook Handbook or a job search engine like Indeed.com. If you were a server at a restaurant, look up the duties of that job and ask yourself, what kind of restaurant was it? Was it family-oriented? Was it upscale? Was it a moderate price place? How many tables did I have to manage? How many people on average did I serve every night? Did I have to train anyone? Who did I interact with (think other servers, customers, kitchen staff, management)?
• Include a tailored (specific to the job) cover letter. Try to figure out who the letter will go to and use their name.

Interviewing

• Study the job requirements and come up with specific examples of your actions and accomplishments that support these.
• Get a professional voicemail.
• Practice how to answer, "Tell me about Yourself.", "What and your strengths", "What are your weaknesses?", "Where else have you applied?", "Why do you want to work with us"?
• Don't wing the interview. You need/must prepare by researching the company, job, company culture. Look for recent news article about the company or members of the staff.
• Have questions for the interviewer. Here are a few sample questions for the first and second interviews.
• Never, ever ask about money, hours or benefits. Be prepared with a salary figure if the interviewer brings it up. Research the numbers at Glassdoor or any of the salary calculators that are available.
• Write individualized thank you notes to everyone who interviewed you.
• Find out with whom you are going to interview. Get their name and research them. If they wrote an article or paper it will be out there in the cloud. Read it. Be prepared to bring it up in the interview.

Networking

• Create a social presence with LinkedIn and follow people, ask questions and create a complete profile. Add a professional- looking photograph. Get recommendations.
• Delete or hide all unprofessional photographs. Delete or hide any words or statements that aren't professional. Hide your friend's stuff too because it is a reflection of you.
• Ask your parent's for help with networking connections. Ask friends and family too.
• Volunteer.
• Follow some of the steps listed here.

Generally, you have to take on additional steps in your job search that will set you a part from your peers and make you stand out from the others. It's work but in the long run, it will pay off.  Good luck!