Memory
You know you’re crazy busy when, not one, but two British career sites (one of which offered to pay me!) send you content to post on your blog and you can’t even take the time to compose a short introductory paragraph to accompany said posts. The good news is that I survived a busy eight weeks of work and school, specifically six papers, six quizzes, three homework assignments, two final exams, and a whole slew of reading – not to mention weekly and sometimes bi-weekly career events on the campus where I work (in between serving an average of 50 students per week), several new clients, and a job club catering to transitioning job seekers. I also barely observed to major Jewish holidays and missed two friends’ 30th birthdays, a baby shower, a wedding shower, and a lot of social gatherings. Needless to say, I am happy to have my life back and happy to be writing to you! Thanks to those of you who kept me in your memory during my hiatus.
Now on to the post…Position Ignition, a U.K.-based career-coaching firm graciously provided the following entry related to resumes and getting yours noticed by an employer’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS). I think you will find that the advice is not all that different from what you might hear on this side of the pond. Speaking of sides of the pond, I am excited that the founders of Position Ignition offered to meet me when I’m in London next month. Career coaches uniting across the globe – how cool!
Post by Nisa Chitakasem of Position Ignition
The way that hiring companies and recruiters are storing, evaluating and shortlisting new graduates’ resumes is already drastically different than to when I was a new graduate. Before, a recruitment agent or an employer’s in-house HR professional would go through a whole pile of resumes that had been submitted to them for just one graduate position. As you can imagine, the individual sorting through these documents only had time to quickly scan each submission for the type of keywords they were looking for. The keywords they were looking for were those words and phrases that indicated a particular candidate was right for the position.
Manually skim-reading each application was never going to be the most scientific or sophisticated way of identifying these all-important keywords, so it’s little wonder that recruiters and employers have embraced new I.T. technology with open arms in order to digitize the process. Nowadays, anyone in the business of hiring and with sufficient resources uses a computerized Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to rank resumes in terms of how pertinent they are to the position they were submitted for. Whilst this is good news for the employer, it’s potentially bad news for you, the graduate job seeker, if you don’t know how to tailor your resume to get you the highest ranking possible. Help is at hand though, with these tips on ensuring your resume impresses any ATS.
- Start your resume with a concise summary that’s rich with keywords pertaining to the job you’re applying to.
- Follow up the summary with short, bulleted points detailing your qualifications and accomplishments, again including keywords that match up with the advertised position.
- If you’re not sure exactly what keywords are relevant to the role on offer, look at the job specification and candidate criteria and identify the words that seem the most integral to the text.
- Be warned that the most advanced ATS technology will take into account the context in which the keywords are used, not merely the actual keywords themselves. Surround keywords with content that actually describes your relevant experience and expertise.
- Don’t misspell words. Misspellings are bad, not because the ATS will pick up on them, but because it won’t. If you misspell a keyword, the ATS won’t notice that word and the word won’t contribute to your resume’s ranking.
- Similarly, it’s wise to avoid using abbreviations, because the ATS may not recognize them. For example, when talking about your degree, type out ‘honors’ instead of using the abbreviation ‘hons.’
- An ATS can also be confused by complicated formatting, so keep the format of your resume as clean and clear as possible.
- Including logos or, in fact, any kind of graphic on the resume is a big no-no for the same reason.
- How you send your resume is almost as important as what you put on it. Before your resume even gets stored on a company’s ATS, it still has to get pass the organization’s email security screening. Attachments may automatically be marked as suspicious so copy and paste the contents of your resume into the body of the email message instead of setting it as an attachment.
- Because of belligerent spam filters, it’s also important to watch what characters and letter-strings you include in the email. Do not, for example, include any exclamation marks or potentially spammy words/letter-strings in either the text of the resume or the rest of the email. For example, if you went to high school in Penistone, England it’s perhaps better to just say that you went to high school near Barnsley in England.
- If you have the option of uploading your resume directly to the company ATS through the employer’s website instead of emailing it, do so.
- Submitting your resume via the website may require you to fill in additional fields as part of the online submission. Fill these fields in even if they are optional. Recruiters often use these optional fields to initially filter out a percentage of the original applications. Make sure you survive this first cut by putting the relevant information into all the fields.
- As the resumes may get sorted out according to these optional fields before they are even opened and read, it’s worth including relevant information in the fields even if you’ve already put it in the actual body of the resume.
So what do you do once you’ve emailed or uploaded your resume to an ATS? Of course, it’s a case of playing the waiting game to some extent but don’t forget to keep an eye on your spam folders when you’re waiting for that email reply to come through. Often, an ATS will automatically generate an email reply to your submission and such an automated email may well end up being recognized by your email filter as spam, even if it’s legit. If you check your spam folder and find that there is indeed an email marked as coming from the organization but you’re not sure if it really has or if it’s a phishing scam, it’s always best to check before opening it. Call up the company to see if its ATS would have started automating replies by now.
Once you receive the email reply, attentively follow any instructions it gives you. If the company wants you to contact it to take your application further, contact the company using the method it has indicated and within the time frame it gives. You will not only be guaranteed a response by doing so; you’ll be guaranteed the fastest possible response.
By following these best practices from start to finish, you have the best chance of negotiating a recruiter’s or employer’s email screening system, spam filters and ATS with optimal success. With the ATS in particular, it’s important for first time job seekers to know that there really is no mystery to it. It’s as simple as giving the ATS what it wants and pushing its buttons—and if you’re applying for jobs you’re actually suited to, pushing all the right buttons is not that difficult at all.
About the author:
Nisa Chitakasem, created Position Ignition to help support professionals through their career challenges. She has co-authored a range of ebooks to help people through various career challenges including: How to Get the Job You Want, How to Ace the Interview, 125 Twitter Job Search Tips, 125 LinkedIn Job Search Tips and 135 Networking Career Tips.
You can also find more career articles from Nisa on their Job Search and Career Advice Blog.
I Think I’m Gonna Like it Here – II
I had my last Strategic HR class this week and I was legitimately sad about it. Weeks of raising my hand and having something intelligent come out have come to an end now that quant classes are about to return. My friend E is probably saying “nerd alert” if she’s reading this right now. Plus, I earned a 98% on a paper I wrote about Cultural Intelligence (or lack thereof) in reference to an article highlighting the cultural incongruence of American-owned businesses operating in Israel. It was nice to feel smart while it lasted!
Getting an ego boost wasn’t the only good thing that came out of class this week (although it did feel really good to get that paper back – just saying). We talked about the importance of culture and the four major types. During our break my professor and I spoke about how sad it is that entry-level employees often give culture and overall fit with an organization little consideration when evaluating potential job opportunities. This is incredibly unfortunate given that those of us who have held a full time job would likely cite a cultural mismatch as the number one reason for job dissatisfaction (or a close second behind a lousy boss).
Here’s a quick (finals week, folks) overview of the four types. Where does your organization/department fit in?
We talked about several types of organizations that closely epitomized each culture type within the context of the Competing Values Framework. It's worth noting that most organizations are a hybrid of two or more, but knowing the differences can still be helpful. Check out this nifty color-coded image courtesy of the University of Michigan.
Clan (Collaborate): Southwest Airlines and Zappos (now Amazon - see their video embedded in this post)
Hierarchy (Control): Auto companies, utility companies, and the military
Adhocracy (Create): Netflix (they don’t track vacation days – where can I pick up an application?) and Apple
Market (Compete): GE and most professional services firms
Do you remember my entry from a few weeks ago on the changing nature of HR? Well David Ulrich (who created the HR model) got together with K.S. Cameron and R. E. Quinn (who used the Competing Values Framework) to combine the two models into something resembling this handy chart. The pieces all started to come together after I commented to my neighbor that Adhocracy is the ideal culture for my personality. When I looked up at this slide (after I eventually stopped running my mouth), it all became clear – I live for change. What’s your ideal culture? Does your current employer offer it, even in hybrid form?
Resources: Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture by K.S. Cameron and R. E Quinn .San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, http://competingvalues.com/
[Don't] Blame it on the rain
First, let me apologize for the delay on this blog entry. I had my notes ready to go since my flight home from New Orleans last week, but I went into freak out mode regarding my upcoming Finance midterm (which was yesterday). You may be feeling the same way about your job search as I did about my blog, i.e. you know you need to work on it, but other things seem to be more pressing (studying for finals, planning your trip overseas after graduation, or savoring every last moment with your friends on campus before you go your separate ways.
Perhaps you feel held back on starting your job search because you just don’t know where to begin. Several of my classmates and two friends approached me this week requesting career direction and guidance. Whether you’re about to graduate or embarking on a “quarter life crisis” like some of my friends and classmates, it’s time to stop procrastinating (i.e. blaming your lack of progress on the rain, or whatever is holding you back at the moment) and focusing on planting some seeds to sprout into opportunities.
It is a common practice for me to absorb all I can from every experience, thus I took advantage of my sister-in-law’s creativity en route to the New Orleans airport last week after my career coaching training. I asked Julie, “How can I make the comparison between the four steps in the career coaching process (that I learned at my training) and the advent of spring. “Gardening!” she replied with gusto. To which I replied, “Wow, I know even less about gardening than I do about sports, [an analogy I used in a previous blog entry in spite of my non-existent skill and limited knowledge], so I will need your help”. Fortunately Julie and Eric’s suggestions made for a productive ride to the airport!
Assessment – Know the landscape and your tools
If we were in my marketing class, my energetic professor would ask “what are your key resources and capabilities?” Perhaps conducting a SWOT analysis on yourself is a little extreme, but assessing (or taking inventory – to confirm that I retained something from Accounting) what you have in your own professional toolkit (i.e. your motivated skills, values, and general career interests) will provide you with a level of self (or horticultural) awareness to determine where to go next.
Exploration – What kind of garden?
Before you start digging up your yard or community garden, randomly applying for jobs, and blasting your resume to everyone you know and all over the Internet, you should think about your options you have for your garden (i.e. veggies, fruits, and/or flowers) and what to plant. Conducting industry and employer research on-line and through informational interviewing is an easy way to understand what kind of organization/garden and what kind of positions (seedlings), are best suited to your personality, strengths, and passions. From a gardening context for me, this would mean thinking about what plant can I keep alive? Trust me, there aren’t many! With the exception of our childhood pets (hermit crabs and beta fish excluded), I have killed every living organism I came in contact with.
Focus on a Goal – Answer the “What and Why?”
Once you have assessed yourself and come up with a few realistic career directions, it’s time to focus on the best and attainable option for you. To take things back to the gardening analogy…if you live in Alabama and have to plant in red clay, you may be limited as to what you can grow in your garden. Side note: I only know about the red clay because we used to track it all over the carpeting in the cheap hotel rooms my father used to book in Huntsville, AL halfway through the semi-annual road trips to visit our grandparents in south Florida. Be realistic about your ultimate career goal as it relates to what you learned in the assessment and exploration phases.
Strategy and Implementation
After identifying a realistic career goal, it’s time to develop a strategy and start planting! This is the final stage where you map out a detailed action plan with specific deadlines. You may want to think about these steps as “stretch goals” that will help you achieve your main objective. First think about how you will get to the main goal and what steps you need to take along the way. When should each of those steps occur? If you are anything like me, without setting deadlines for yourself, you won’t achieve your objectives. This is also the time to think about who can help you obtain more information in order to arrive at each stretch goal. To revert back to gardening…this is the point at which I would call my mother-in-law, whose yard looks like it was transported from an exotic tropical botanical garden far from Texas, to offer me advice on how to make my community garden fit my needs. If you are an activator (one of my top five strengths), you have a tendency to just jump into things without doing your homework (i.e. skipping the previous three steps). Working through the first three before taking action is absolutely critical as it relates to your own employability and vocational happiness.
“Dr. Unemployed” Career Blunder – Our instructor shared the story about one of his career coaching clients who was a receptionist (without a college degree) with a lifelong dream of becoming an art history professor. In most cases, we were instructed to let our clients arrive at their own answers based on asking a series of targeted questions, however when encountering in a scenario like the aforementioned, we were advised that sometimes it is okay to step in to offer a good dose of reality. After a series of questions related to the timing of obtaining each degree and the availability of post-doctoral openings, Dr. Unemployed started to evaluate some other options. Moral of the Story: Having dreams is important, but do consider seeking advice (professional, if possible) before pursuing them.
“Do You Know Who I Am?”
I traveled to New Orleans this week for a Career Coaching Certification training and had the opportunity to experience the Big Easy with my brother and sister-in-law who now reside there. You may recall my mentioning having three unemployed sisters-in-law (one just brought the first grandchild into the world, so we will let her off the hook for now). To my knowledge, my sister-in-law, Julie, has made the most progress with regard to her job search process.
Do you know who these people are? I bet Julie does!
When I asked for song title recommendations, Julie recommended that we search on i-Tunes. How brilliant! How come I never thought of that? In any event, we are hoping to put the band, Echo and the Bunnymen, who wrote “Do You Know Who I Am?” on the map.
Here are some job searching words of wisdom from Julie’s story:
Julie is a registered and licensed dietician (courtesy of Ohio State and the University of Houston) with experience in quality assurance and food service. Her most recent experience was a Quality Assurance Specialist role with Independent Marketing Alliance, a food distributor based in Houston. She has additional experience in meal planning and community nutrition, and is looking for a quality assurance position within the food industry. In addition to feeding my brother, who eats A LOT, she is a primo cook and baker as well (in moderation, she says).
According to Julie, “In a city like New Orleans, where everyone seems to know everyone, it is important that everyone knows who you are." Julie, more than most clients with whom I’ve worked, recognizes that it’s not who you know that counts, but rather who knows you!
She started her job search in November before my brother was transferred to Houston with his company, and has been diligent about networking, strategic volunteering, joining professional associations, and searching and applying for jobs ever since. In trying to get a sense of just how much she has done, I asked her to quantify her job search activities:
130 - Days on the job search
58 – New LinkedIn connections
40 – Thank you cards/emails sent
20 – Resumes forwarded to contacts
12 – Introductions facilitated for new contacts
9 – Networking events attended
7 – Companies actively following on LinkedIn
6 – Breakfast, lunch, and coffee meetings with contacts
5 – LinkedIn groups joined
5 –Informational interviews conducted (with contacts in her field)
4 – Professional associations joined
4 – New strategic volunteering opportunities (e.g. New Orleans Food Bank and Ronald McDonald House)
4 – Jobs applications submitted
2 – Formal interviews
1 – LinkedIn recommendations received (she is working on soliciting more)
…and a partridge in a pear tree (only kidding, Christmas isn’t even our holiday)
Julie recognizes that for her it’s not a matter of if, but when. There are days when she feels like she’s in a rut and it won’t go anywhere, but every networking event she attends reinvigorates and re-energizes her. She also knows that she doesn’t want to settle for an organization or position incompatible with her mission, vision, and values (all stuff I learned this week – she is good guinea pig). While she waits for the right opportunity to come to her (which is what happens when everyone knows who you are, your expertise, and interests), she is volunteering, making connections through networking opportunities, and getting acquainted with her new home in the Big Easy.
Julie requested that I close this blog entry with her new favorite New Orleans phrase (courtesy of the Cajun Buckeyes), Let’s Geaux Beaux! Translation: Let’s Go [Ohio State] Bucks! Julie can be reached for comment (or referrals) at julie.schwartz@live.com.
Grooming Blunder: The instructor leading my career coaching certification training this week was kind enough to invite our spouses or significant others (or in my case, siblings) to join us for our lunch breaks. I invited both Julie and my brother, Eric to join me today. As politely as I possibly could, I suggested that Eric shave his unintentional beard and consider putting on some slacks that weren’t covered in wrinkles (since I wanted to make a positive impression and provide a forum for Julie to get some free advice from a table full of career counselors). I could see that WWIII was about to ensue upon my recommendation, so I calmly suggested that we not join my group for lunch (at the smoke-filled Harrah’s casino - where I lost $1), but instead go to a deli around the corner. Then, I left the living room to dry my hair. Before leaving to drop me off at my training, Eric emerged clean-shaven in unwrinkled slacks with a smile on his face. Hooray for my subtle (and guilt-free) powers of persuasion!
6 Things Your College Diploma Won’t Do For You
Over the past several days, I thought to myself, "how will I ever get my blog done with all the studying I have to do and makeup classes I have to take (thanks to our visit from the ice fairy)?” It was as if a deity sent me a message from above in the form of a guest blog post from Pounding the Pavement, “a [witty] forum for career search insights.” EnJOY, and thanks for the break, Edward and team!
6 Things Your College Diploma Won't Do For You
Edward Stern is a guest blogger for Pounding the Pavement and a writer on electrician school for the Guide to Career Education.
After graduating from school, you are told that the world is your oyster (whatever that means, but hey, it sounds promising). You have the most important thing you need to find work and begin a fulfilling, rewarding, and lucrative career: a college degree, something only about 15% of Americans have. You're ahead of the game, you're smart, you've worked hard, and now you're ready for the real world.
Easier said than done. A college diploma is a big, big help, but it won't land you a job on its own. That degree in Ancient Greek may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but how are you going to use it to help pay off your loans in six months? Believe it or not, there are some things your college diploma won't do for you. Here are 6 of those, and what you need to do for them.
- Get motivated. So you took some time off after working hard to enjoy the summer. You worked as a busboy to scrape by and get money to travel. Traveling is done, it's February, and you're still living at home working at a restaurant with no plans to change. A college diploma will not give you the swift kick in the rear end you need to get off the couch and start looking for work.
- Find jobs you want. A college diploma will not point you in that one amazingly succinct and direct corner of the Internet listing the jobs that are exactly what you want and will be able to get, and that pay remarkably well. No, that you have to do on your own. Plus, economic times are tough, so be sure to check out this list of recession proof jobs as a good place to start thinking about what type of work you wish to pursue.
- Figure out how to apply your skills. Back to that Ancient Greek degree. How are you going to use that in the real world, especially when you want to embark in a career in public relations? First, poor planning on your part. Second, be creative. You wrote plenty of essays, yes? You did lots of research, taking meticulous notes and had an internship where you sent out e-mails to potential donors for the National Dead Languages Society, correct? You are marketable and have skills an employer would want. Break down what you did and learned in school and how it will be of use to a particular employer in a specific field.
- Face time with likeminded professionals. A college diploma won't help you find people entrenched in the field you want to break into, it won't help you contact them, and it won't arrange sit-downs over coffee (which you should offer to pay for, by the way). However, having a degree in business, or accounting, or art history, or English is a great first step to building a connection with a professional. Talk with your college career center to see if they have an alumni database, then find professionals in your area with your degree who are using them in ways you find interesting. Start networking, and good things will happen.
- Build a great resume. Having the fact that you're a college graduate is huge on a resume, but you need more than that on there. A college diploma will not create a mind-blowing resume for you, but you can certainly get help at your college for it. Talk to your counselor or career center; most likely they'll be able to walk you through it, provide online resources for crafting a good one, and critique your first draft to help make it even better.
- Keep your head up. The worst rejection you may have faced in college was when that one fraternity didn't invite you to their invitation-only beer pong tournament. When job hunting, be ready for rejection, and lots of it. It's easy to get down on yourself, but don't. With a college diploma, you are ahead of the curve and have a weapon may qualified individuals simply do not. With some persistence and creativity, you will find work.
Career Blunder: You didn’t think I’d leave you hanging, did you? The career blunder this week is my own. A networking contact I met a few months ago facilitated an introduction to a professor whose class I was already planning to take (if I ever make it through this grueling module and live to tell about it). I scheduled a face-to-face meeting with this professor for today. A few minutes before the time of the meeting a student came by requesting my help in advance of our Career Fair tomorrow. I encouraged him to come back 20 minutes later, assuming that my meeting with the professor wouldn’t be that long. Things went downhill from there.
For starters, I didn’t confirm the office location of the professor. Not only was she not located in the business complex; she was located clear across campus. I called her office (thanks to a resourceful contact in our mailroom) and asked if we could speak over the phone instead. She (the prof) was very kind and understanding about my directional challenges.
We started talking and all of a sudden it hit me that I had conducted zero research on her. This was further confirmed when I asked her a question about her Nonprofit experience and it turns out that she has held numerous roles professionally and in academia all over the country. Wow, did I feel like an idiot. To make matters worse, I cut off the conversation early to meet with the aforementioned student. Oh, and did I mention that I have this Professor’s husband for Marketing next module and that I stupidly mentioned that his textbook retails for $200? Yikes – why didn’t I just tape my mouth shut!?! Morals of the story: don’t overbook yourself, do your homework before meeting with anyone new, and send a thank you card stat especially if you made any of the mistakes I did!