Tips for updating your resume

With Nebraska’s unemployment rate hovering at 3.2 percent, it might not seem prudent to dust off the old resume.

Omaha experts, however, suggest that it’s always good to keep your resume polished and up to date. A resume is a device used to get to the next step an interview with a prospective employer.

At Noll Human Resource Services, which has specialized in staffing and executive searches for 31 years, Executive Vice President Peggy Noll said the key to a good resume is an “honest presentation of yourself.”

Finding a job in tight market Take a step back and evaluate your industry. If you are in the financial services industry, for example, improvements in hiring may be months off. So explore other industries where your skills would also fit. Do some research and find out the sectors that are hiring the most (the Department of Labor is a good resource). Then redirect your efforts toward these. br /> Focus on results. Employers want to know what you’ve accomplished on the job, not necessarily a long list of skills. Think of yourself as a mini profit-and-loss center rather than just an employee. If you saved your previous employer $50,000, then highlight this. If you were responsible for $50,000 in sales, emphasize that. Put together specific examples of the benefit that your company gained from the work you performed, and be ready to rattle them off to a prospective employer.

Add achievements to your resume. Resumes are a valuable sales tool designed to accomplish one goal, and that is to get the interview. Add a specific achievement list to your resume. Then go one step further and point out the most notable accomplishments from this list. Describe the benefit that your employer gained from each item.

Sources: CareerBuilder.com and MarketWatch.com “This is a bottom-line world,” she said. “Hiring managers don’t want to troll through a lot of fluff.”

The best resumes keep it simple where you worked, when you worked there, what you accomplished and your job title, she said.

“The only caveat for marketing yourself is that you can always use better words, structured in a real positive way,” she said.

People don’t necessarily need to hire a professional resume writer, but resumes should be edited by someone with excellent grammar and spelling skills, Noll said.

And no typos, she said.

“You can rule yourself out with a poorly written resume, but usually can’t get yourself in with a pumped up, overly done resume.”

Another factor to keep in mind is that resumes are ranked and graded electronically in part, using key words from the job posting.

Vicky DeCoster, senior resume writer at Hemphill Search Group, said a good resume must “absolutely include a career profile with key words about accomplishments at the top.”

“The average hiring manager takes five to 10 seconds to review a resume. If they are looking for strategic planning, then searching for those words . . is how they find you,” she said.

Generally, DeCoster said, it takes up to five reviews of a resume draft to get to a finished product.

People have a difficult time marketing themselves and shifting to an “accomplishment-based resume, versus a duty-based resume,” she said.

“When you help a client identify their accomplishments and pull them out, it helps when they go into the interview,” she said.

Noll and DeCoster agreed that the old rule of a one-page resume is obsolete.

DeCoster said, “The rule is you should go back 10 years on a resume, and once the client identifies key accomplishments for each position, it is not uncommon for the resume to be two pages and sometimes more for executive-level clients.”

Elaine Heath, owner and operator of Elaine’s Resume for the past 22 years, warns that people shouldn’t limit themselves to a specific type of job.

“People change careers about five times in a lifetime,” she said. “I believe they can go into many different jobs.

“I believe employers are looking for someone with confidence, so go for higher jobs than you think you can get and ask for more money.”

Heath’s advice is to talk about salary in the middle of the first interview. “If the interviewer doesn’t bring it up, you should.”

She even suggests what a person should eat before the interview: protein, no sugar.

“That way,” she said, “you can think stronger longer.”

Heath also offered these tips:

- Be confident.

- Ask questions about the job in your strong areas.

- Allow another person to review your resume for potential suggestions that would make it more powerful.

- Look at help-wanted ads; go to the Internet; network and tell other professionals that you are available.

- Remember you can always say no.

- Contact the writer: 444-1087, chet.mullin@owh.com

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