RESUME HINTS FOR JOB SEEKERS

A good resume shows the Client what you have done, what tools you used to do it and the impact it had for your employer or Client. It is specific in the skills you used and developed.

Be as detailed as you can when sending a resume. Include the size of the team, what was your role, what the system did and what problem it solved. Remember, every company has two goals; save time and save money! Make sure your resume reflects how you can do that for them by showing how you did it for previous employers.

THIS:

Wrote Cobol programs

OR THIS:

Gathered requirements from international user base on three continents for inventory control and logistics system for $4B international retail organization.
Used requirements to create logical and physical application design.
Coded application on the IBM Mainframe platform using COBOL 74 and DB2.
Tested, fixed bugs and implemented application used daily by 6000 international users.

HOW LONG SHOULD IT BE?

This is one of the most perplexing problems. You want it to reflect your skills and experience but you also want to hold the readers attention. One of the primary mistakes in a resume is starting off with how long you want the finished document to be.

We suggest that you work harder on getting all the details committed to paper first. Don't worry if your resume is 5 or 6 pages long. You can refine it down to 1-3 pages once you have all the information in front of you.

Many experts say "never over one page or "never over 2 pages" but we feel that a one or two page resume that does not reflect your level of expertise or ability to do the job is not the most effective marketing message for you to send to a potential employer. Get all the details down on paper and let us help you "boil it down" or refine it.

WHAT SHOULD BE IN YOUR RESUME

If you are working on your resume, you are looking for a position. Contract or Direct Hire it is the same. You need to include your technical skills and experience you have garnered over your career and show your next employer why you should be hired.

At the top of your resume, have your name, address, contact phone and email address so you are easily contacted. We prefer the name that you use in daily business. If your name is Jonathan Charles Davis but you go by Chuck, your name should be Chuck Davis. If you use a nickname you could be Chuck "Skip" Davis. This lets the reader know that you go by Skip.

A manager will receive 100+ resumes for every position. From the 100, they will scan resumes quickly to get that number down to 20-25 resumes. If you do not capture the reader quickly by having your skills and experience easy to find you will find your resume in the rejected pile.

From that 20-25 resumes, the manager will sit down and read those resumes again quickly with the goal of getting that pile of 20-25 down to 10, from 10 they will select 5 to read very carefully. From the 5 they will select 3 to interview and from the interview select one candidate. Your resume has to make the cut several times before you become.... the ONE.

You should include technical skills, business experience, systems details that you have worked on etc. If it was BIG, tell how BIG. If you worked with remote Users, tell how many. If you worked on a financial transaction system, tell the reader what it did and how much money worked its way through your system.

If you programmed a system say that, but if you gathered requirements, designed the system, coded the system, tested the system, implemented it and supported it... Say it!

Education should be listed but if you have been working for more than a couple of years it can be relegated to the end of your resume.

Certifications should be listed if they are relevant to your experience. If you have been certified as a DBA put it on your resume but if you were in National Honor Society in High School, leave it off.

WHAT STYLE SHOULD YOU USE

The main goal of any resume is to make the job of the reader EASY! A resume should be written from a third person not a first person voice. Your resume should speak about you as if someone else is telling the story. This is done for a couple of reasons. First, using a first person voice gets you sucked in to using "I" and "My" which can make your accomplishments sound like bragging words coming directly from you. Using a non-personified voice allows you to speak about all of your accomplishments without YOU doing the talking. Secondly, is it sounds more professional and keeps the writer from saying "I did this" and "I did that."

We like bulleted resumes that start out with a table of your technical skills. Often we see resumes like this:

COBOL, COBOL II, DB2, DMSII, ALGOL, ASSEMBLER, VISUAL BASIC, ACCESS, MS WORD, MS EXCEL, CANDE, WFL, COMS, ERGO, MASM, .NET, RPGII, JCL, MICROFOCUS COBOL, SQL SERVER

A cleaner, easier to read version is:

COBOL	COBOL II	DB2	DMSII
ALGOL	Assembler	Visual Basic	Access
MS Word	MS Excel	CANDE	WFL
COMS	ERGO	MASM	.NET
RPGII	JCL	MicroFocus COBOL

Notice how much easier on the eye the table format is. Note too that we have changed the style from ALL CAPS to only using CAPS for acronyms and the first letter of common names. Upper and lower case is easier to read but technical acronyms should be ALL CAPS.

Using bullets for the rest of your resume is another technique that can make information easier to read and find in the document for the reader. Breaking out projects with sub-bullets allows you to tell the reader what you did in a concise easy to follow format.

WHAT SHOULD NOT BE IN YOUR RESUME

References – You can provide those later upon request. Adding them now only exposes those references to unwarranted calls from salespeople. When references are requested, contact each reference to make sure you have current contact info, ask permission to use them as a reference and send them the job description you are applying for so that they can speak to your experience as it applies to the position you are trying to obtain.
Religious affiliations – Unless you are applying at an organization where that could be helpful it is best to leave off personal information like this.
Hobbies – Spend that space talking about your technical abilities.
Marital Status – This again is personal information you can share later but in the initial resume review phase you don't want to include items which may or may not have effect.
Social Security Number – Believe it or not, we see resumes with SS numbers right on top and with Identity theft this is a bad idea.
I or My – Your resume should be in a third party voice speaking about you.

IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR RESUME

Send it to resume@cobolpeople.com for a free review.