Your Resume and Cover Letter
This resume and cover letter guide is designed to assist job seekers who are prepared to look at their accomplishments, skills, and experiences in relation to a job target or targets. If you're ready to get going on writing an effective resume, here's how. In order to keep process and product in perspective, it may be helpful to know that a resume is a marketing tool used to promote ourselves to potential employers for the purpose of first obtaining an interview and then being offered a position.
Simply put, resumes help get us interviews. Resume writing techniques should not be thought of as correct or incorrect, but as effective or ineffective. Effectively written resumes assist us in getting the interviews we want.
Resume and Cover Letter Guide: Writing Job Descriptions
Before proceeding, you may want to review your descriptions. This will prepare you for actually pulling your resume together.
Skills and Achievements
First, decide whether your explanations can be more concise. Effort should be made to create effective impact statements. Highlight skills and achievements, providing only enough detail to support your premises. Try to edit out pronouns and articles. Begin phrases or sentences with your verbs. You may find the Skills List on the following pages helpful in making your descriptions clear, dynamic, and engaging.
For resumes which will be submitted to organizations that will scan them into searchable computer databases, care should be taken to include as many industry and job-specific "key words" as possible. When searching databases for potential candidates, employers seek resumes with the greatest number of "hits" on key words. Key words are most often nouns.
Prioritize Description Information
Next, think about prioritizing the information you provide in each description. Present that which you think is of greatest interest to your potential employer first. For instance, consider the candidate seeking a job in interior design. The resume might reflect a retail experience in which 75% of the candidate's time was spent on the sales floor and 25% was spent designing window and floor displays. Priority, determined by relevance to the employer, dictates that design of window and floor displays should be listed before sales.
Example
Tech Support Level II, Software Giant USA, New York, NY October, 20XX - Present
- Deliver a high level of standard and consistent service to support all lines of business
- Manage application integration, including source systems
- Leverage best practices during and after each applications implementation with primary focus on business critical situations
- Provide strong business process focus to support continuous reengineering
Finally, quantify as much information as you can (numbers, dollar signs, percentages can all help to make your case).
Writing an Effective Cover Letter
There are three general types of cover letters:
1. The application letter which responds to a known job opening
2. The prospecting letter which inquires about possible positions
3. The networking letter which requests information and assistance in your job search
Your cover letter should be designed specifically for each purpose outlined above as well as for each position you seek. Do not design a form letter and send it to every potential employer (you know what you do with junk mail!). Effective cover letters explain the reasons for your interest in the specific organization and identify your most relevant skills or experiences (remember, relevance is determined by the employer's self-interest). They express a high level of interest and knowledge about the position.
Information obtained from www.jobsearch.about.com