Joe Jobseeker's forte is helping start-ups get to the next level through strategic planning and marketing. Doing the same for himself, he says, is another story.
"I'm in marketing, yes. But I don't operate on myself. I don't do my own taxes," says Joe, who is 51.
Joe is an entrepreneur who started four companies, including a multicity airport-shuttle franchise. He was working as a consultant in a firm he co-founded when he sought help with his resume. He wanted to define his next career step and attract the type of employer he's after: a small firm looking to get bigger or a troubled company seeking a turn-around.
The situation: He'd once had a bad experience with a career-services firm: He'd paid it $2,500 to redo his resume and give him a few company names to send it to. So Joe took a different tack this time when he decided to seek help.
To find a resume writer, he signed up for an initial critique provided by resume writers at no charge through theladders.com, a jobs site for $100,000-a-year-plus positions. He received five responses he liked. He interviewed the writers by phone and narrowed his choice to three. He spoke with each again and checked references.
He chose Mark Bartz, senior writer and partner of ExeCareers Inc., a resume-writing firm in Tampa, Fl., impressed with what Mr. Bartz said about branding job hunters and writing a resume so it can be read by resume-scanning technology. They spent about 10 hours working together on Joe's resume and follow-up consultations. ExeCareers charges between $595 and $695 for a package that includes a resume, two cover letters -- one for recruiters, one for employers -- and unlimited job-search consulting.
"It wasn't about the money -- it was about the time I knew I would be investing," Joe says.
The challenge: Joe's "before" resume detailed his professional strengths and outlined the companies he founded. But it didn't quantify how successful he and his businesses have been. There were no numbers to show his ability to move companies forward and make them profitable.
The document also didn't clearly state the position he was interested in pursuing. Wordy paragraphs made it difficult to pull out his best abilities and major accomplishments.
The resume also was short on keywords -- the industry-specific words and phrases that resume-scanning software searches resumes for to quickly identify qualified candidates in candidate databases. |
The fix: Mr. Bartz and Joe decided to brand and market Joe as an interim executive to lead a company in transition. The two spent time focusing Joe on what he enjoys most. Mr. Bartz asked him about his areas of expertise as a business-development executive. Then he asked him to select seven and rank them in order of his passions.
"We never make the presumption that where you are going is based on where you have been," Mr. Bartz says.
The first change Mr. Bartz made to Joe's resume was to add a headline stating Joe's employment objective below his name and contact info: "Business Development Executive/Interim Executive."
Directly below the headline are his seven areas of expertise, including mergers and acquisitions, franchising, crisis management and media/public relations.
One of the biggest changes is the overhaul of the "professional strengths" section on his old resume. "We condensed the best of it and gave it a much stronger focus," Mr. Bartz says. "There is no fluff in there."
Below the outlined box, an "Employment Overview" provides a quick snapshot of the four major companies Joe helped found and grow. From there, the resume details his accomplishments, expertise and experience in each venture and highlights the major companies he has worked with along the way.
The new resume uses plenty of the keywords that employers are likely to look for when sorting through resumes to find candidates for jobs that Joe's applying to. The document also uses few boldface fonts, which resume-scanning software may not read well, Mr. Bartz says. Joe's name is in a larger font to draw attention to it.
"This resume is written for human eyes, and it's also meant for resume-scanning systems," Mr. Bartz says. Most major companies are using these systems, which scan for keywords and phrases that match their job descriptions. The more matches you pack into a resume, the better your chances of getting a call, he advises.
The result: Joe is conducting a targeted search, mailing his resume to only recruiters seeking interim-executive recruiters. Since he began using his new resume in March, he has interviewed with three companies, and is in talks with one about coming aboard, negotiating terms of their agreement.
"Mark honed me down to what I like and what I really want to do," Joe says. "Without that, it was very difficult. I'm good at marketing something else, but I'm not good at packaging myself." |
