Is your resume lagging behind your career?

If you’ve been ascending the career ladder, your executive resume has probably seen many changes throughout the years.

During this time, the real story of your brand and qualifications can get lost throughout job changes and new responsibilities.

This isn’t a problem, of course, until you‘re looking for a new job. That's when employers won't be able to see the meaning behind your achievements or figure out what you’re really offering.

If your resume doesn't capture your current status, you'll need to give it a fresh look and personality that reflects today’s trends, using these 3 steps as a start:

1 – Clarify your achievements and brand—past the point of keywords.

Skills and buzzwords are great for those in the early and mid-stages of their careers. You can quickly add these to your resume and get others to grasp the breadth of your experience.

However, this isn’t so easy once you’ve arrived (at a management or executive level, that is).

This is the point at which your overall brand message needs to bubble up through the individual accomplishments that you’re using on the resume.

Sifting through your successes and what they mean to your next employer is an important step, and one that I’ve covered here in more detail.

2 - Take a look at your resume presentation style.

Chances are good that, if you’ve just piled on your last few jobs, the format is outdated and won’t represent you at the correct level.

I frequently advise executive job hunters to surf for professional resume samples, not as a copying exercise, but to get a feel for what your competition is offering.

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Want better results? Run your job search like a PR campaign

It’s not exactly a news flash, but the strategies for a successful job hunt have changed considerably over the past several years—and possibly forever.

Like it or not, getting in front of the right audience for your search has become the equivalent of running a PR campaign, complete with brand development, market research, and message delivery.

If you’ve been striking out while trying to get noticed, it’s possible that your expertise is still a secret in the business world.

You’ll get better results by boosting your promotional efforts with these methods:

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Should your resume writer be social media-savvy?

Much has been written about the impact of social media in the careers industry, with plenty of accolades for the role of Twitter and LinkedIn in the job hunt.

Of course, there’s still many holdouts in the job-seeking community. But what about career professionals themselves?

Should your resume writer or career coach know how to use social media—and what are the implications of working with a service provider who is lacking this expertise?

Here are some ways (and reasons) to find a resume or career expert that can help you get faster results and higher-level interviews—all by supplying insider knowledge on leveraging social media:

First, find your expert using social media tools themselves.
Chances are, if you’re frequenting LinkedIn or Twitter, you’ll find a multitude of resume writers and other career professionals. Here is where you can perform some quick research on their social media savvy.

For LinkedIn, most professionals who are using the service to its fullest have grown their networks to include at least 100 contacts. Significantly less connections—say, 54—mean that you’ve encountered a newbie who recently dumped their address book into the site.

On Twitter, many people look for users that have a minimum of 1,000 followers as proof of their knowledge. While this number is arbitrary, you can at least get a feel for a provider’s expertise by reading a sampling of their Tweets and looking at how often their broadcasts are re-tweeted, which shows that they offer something of value to their network.

Take a look at the provider’s self-marketing efforts.
Can you quickly discern what a resume writer or career coach offers by reading THEIR LinkedIn profile?

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Leveraging your letters of recommendation in a job search

Letters of recommendation and other types of testimonials such as performance reviews are a great strategy for reinforcing your value proposition and of course, your personal brand.

One of the ways you can put these letters to good use is to add some snippets from each letter to your resume.

Why does this help? Well, a resume is written to tell your own story, presumably from YOUR point of view. While you can tell others about what you offer (along with quantifiable results), using accolades allows you to add proof of these results from other sources.

This tactic is most effective when your sources point to specific achievements and indicate the value of your work in the context of the challenges you faced.

Some job hunters approach their networks for reference letters, which can be a great strategy if done correctly. You see, some reference letter writers quickly nail your value proposition in just a sentence or two, but others sometimes write a full letter that doesn’t provide much value.

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How to use professional resume samples for your own benefit

So, you’ve realized that your own resume isn’t up to par, and you’re intent on making improvements or finding some help.

What you might NOT know is that using professional resume samples can greatly increase your chance of success.

Whether you’re polishing your own resume or finding a resume writing service to assist you, using examples of successful resumes can play a large part in the responses you receive.

Here are 3 ways that you can use resume samples to increase your odds of winning an interview:

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Think you're ready for a 2010 job search--but you're still using techniques from 2000?

Think you're ready for a New Year's job search? It's entirely possible that your methods aren't keeping pace with the times.

Despite an abundance of great job-hunting advice, many candidates cling to outdated job search and resume writing practices that negatively impact their success.

If you’ve continued to send resumes to “Dear Sir or Madam” while merely updating your tired resume from the year 2000, you'll find that these methods have quickly become obsolete.

See if any of these common job hunting problems apply to you, and then implement corrections that can improve your success in 2010 and beyond:

1 – Failing to assess your competition.

This is by far the biggest mistake most candidates make when they set out to launch a job search in today’s aggressive market.

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7 resume writing errors that make you look like an amateur

Want to write a resume that really cuts to the heart of your value and stands out for its professionalism?

It's going to be difficult if the writing style you use undermines your credibility--before an employer even reads your resume summary!

No matter how strong your credentials (and despite the fact that most resumes are written in sentence fragments that aren't grammatically correct by themselves) you'll still need to follow basic rules in order to convey your brand value.

Start by examining your resume for these errors (yes, even if it was written by a professional!) in order to ensure that your message comes through clearly and succinctly.

1 - Use of superlatives to describe yourself.

This is a huge problem for too many resume writers, both do-it-yourself and professional.

If you (not your skills) are described as brilliant, superior, or extraordinary, what's an employer to think? That you ran out of other descriptors for your superhuman qualities?

For what it's worth, I've seen several professionally written resumes that described the candidates in just such terms--seemingly grasping for words to convey that this job hunter must be somehow far above mere mortals.

Here's a tip: If you don't use a particular adjective when describing yourself in common speech, then don't add it to your resume.

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What's supposed to appear at the top of your resume?

Job hunters are often told that hiring authorities will give their resumes a quick, 10-15 second glance before moving onto the next candidate. However, during my recent survey of recruiters for an Examiner.com article, I found out that it's more like 3-5 seconds.
 While your initial reaction to this news might be panic, stop for a second and think about it – how are you obscuring your message with all the noise at the top of your resume? Are you making it hard for employers to figure out what you can do for them—and why they should tune in to your value?

First of all, you’ll need to delete that objective statement; otherwise, your chances of being noticed by a recruiter are slim to none. Instead, cut through the clutter and grab attention during that brief glance with just 3 elements: a powerful resume title, focused brand tagline, and perhaps a summary, as described here:

-Resume Title. Place yourself squarely in the role that you seek with this brief phrase (up to 4 words maximum, otherwise your goal isn’t focused enough).

The recruiter should be able to easily discern your intent by seeing Senior Sales Representative, COO, Marketing Director, Senior Purchasing Agent, Web Developer, etc. in this area.

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Why recruiters are rejecting your resume (part 1 of a series)

Wondering why recruiters don’t call you back, and how you’re ever going to get hired in this recession?

As it turns out, hiring authorities continually see problems with the resumes that come their way, with what one noted was “more pet peeves on this issue than Elin Woods’ attorney on the new pre-nuptial agreement.”

However, most recruiters are more than happy to share their advice for getting your resume into the “yes” pile, with recommendations for fonts, sentence bullets, length, file formats, and more.

This week, I talked with Raj Khera, CEO of email marketing firm MailerMailer, professional headhunter and Guerrilla Marking for Job Hunters 2.0 co-author David Perry, recruiter Angee Linsey of Linsey Careers Recruitment and Consulting, HR Director Greg Szymanski, recruiter Mitch Beck of Crossroads Consulting, Absolutely Abby careers expert and Lead Staffing Consultant Abby Kohut, and recruiter Mel Adkinson of RF Technologies, Inc. to gain insight on recruiter resume turnoffs—starting with length.

Surprisingly enough, even with all the advice piled on job hunters about keeping a resume to 2 pages, many professionals seem to have missed the memo. Recruiters say that they’re still being barraged with 4- and 5-page novels instead of the concise presentations they need.

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9 signs that your resume won't make the cut

In deep denial about your resume? Sure, a single-page rehash of your work life used to be the standard, but not there's a never-ending multitude of resume “sins” that can prevent you from landing interviews.

Take a careful look at these likely scenarios--and the fixes behind them:

1) You’re unsure as to what a resume should look like, but it turns out that Microsoft Word has a great built-in template.

2) You’ve added an objective statement because that’s the way it’s always been done. Besides, how will employers know what you want if you don’t specify it?

3) You’re worried that employers won’t see everything you’ve done and therefore you’ve had to write a lot of pages to explain it all. How else would they see all of your jobs?

4) You’ve crammed your resume into a single page because you’ve always understood this as a requirement. The font can always be adjusted, anyway.

5) You’re having trouble recalling all the revenue numbers, budget figures, and other facts of your career, but you’ve spent a lot of time describing your duties.

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