Professional Development
First comes the résumé, then comes the interview
There’s been a lot of talk among the Gen Y blogs recently about interviewing. From 10 Crucial Questions on How to Interview (and the Answers) to 4 Common Job Interview Mishaps and How to Recover from Them, these articles, while helpful for interviewing, don’t help you actually get the interview. You do this by having a stellar résumé.
Here are a couple pieces of advice you may not get elsewhere:
1. Always include a cover letter.
I realize that nowadays you almost always email your résumé to HR or your company contact, but that doesn’t mean you should skip the cover letter. My personal preference is attaching the cover letter. This way I can see your formatting skills. But, it’s also acceptable to use the email you send as the cover letter. Either way, you need to sell yourself - basically answer this question: Why should they hire you?
2. Share your results not your duties.
Which one do you find more impressive:
a. Wrote press releases
b. Improved number of media spots by 80% in first year
That’s the impact of results vs. duties.
3. Print it out before send it.
Weird things happen with printing documents. I printed an email the other day that looked fine on the screen, but when printed, it had “Your Name Here” smack dab in the middle of the email. Bonus: Printing it out will also help you find mistakes.
4. Save it as a PDF.
Not everyone uses the same word processor and not everyone uses the same version of that word processor. If you want to ensure that the recipient sees it the way you intended, your best bet is to save it as a PDF (or mail it). You can do this for free (five times) at the Adobe website. All the recipient needs is their free version of Adobe Acrobat Reader, which I would think 99% of business professionals already have downloaded.
Above all, let someone else read it. I’ve proven time and time again that I cannot proofread my own stuff - chances are you can’t either. Let someone else take a look for those mistakes.
Your résumé is a reflection of you - Make sure it’s a good one.
Discussion
6 comments for “First comes the résumé, then comes the interview”
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Angela, this is a great post. How do I contact you, aside from through your blog? Would you be willing to email me so we can chat?
Thanks, Monica! Done.
Good advice!
One thing about cover letters… I recommend a half a page or so. Don’t over do it!
I don’t really mind a full-page cover letter as long as it contains meaningful information. That said, I’m certainly no HR expert, so thanks for your addition, recruitnik.
I always run my resume by my mentor, who is CFO at my mother in law’s company. She is the toughest resume screener I know; she’ll throw one out if she finds a cutesy font that annoys her, no matter what the content is.
One thing I learned in development writing is the awfulness of a “widow” in a letter. This is when you write a nice paragraph and one lonely word hangs out at the end on its own line. It looks sloppy, and I can’t stand seeing them.
Kate, I agree with the cutesy font thing! Although the “widow” should probably annoy me more, it doesn’t seem like as big of a deal to me. I can definitely understand, though. Thanks for your input.