Five Lesser Known Facts to Potentially Include on Your Resume

Resumes are hard work. As one of the leading teams of executive resume writers, we’ve witnessed this fact up close several times over and we understand. It’s tricky to know just how to market yourself and appeal to potential employers, regardless of what industry you’re in. To help make it easier, we’ve put together this list of potentially great additions to your resume that could be of interest to a recruiter!

1. Qualifications

This could be a great piece of information to list about yourself as an alternative to the “objective” section of your resume. This is a surefire way to appeal to employers because it gives them an idea of what you’re capable of right away and reveals the most important aspects of what makes you hire-able.
Depending on what the job posting says, you may want to go into more detail with this section. Consider including how long you’ve utilized this particular skill in the workforce, as well as anything else that will help you look especially qualified, such as any related professional skills.

2. Titles

When you’re listing out your prior work experience on your executive resume bio, don’t skirt around your position there! Titles are an extremely important indicator of your status within the company and could generate further interest from a recruiter. They also give potential employers a better idea of what your responsibilities were at your previous jobs and what they can expect from you should they hire you to work for them.

3. Details and Numbers

Specificity can catch an employer’s eye, not just in the realm of job titles, but also in terms of your responsibilities and accomplishments while there. Don’t be afraid to brag a little, but be sure to stay truthful! Include precise numbers when talking about how you’ve made a difference in your previous positions. This includes percentages and other quantifiers. Recruiters will latch on to this and keep it in mind.

4. Languages

While bilingualism wasn’t necessarily as desired in the past, it is becoming increasingly important to today’s recruiters, especially as industries across the board become increasingly international. If you speak any additional languages, it may be a good idea to include them on your resume, depending on what your field is. Though it’s a small detail, it could create an important tipping point as far as whether you’re called in for an interview or not.

5. Education

Again, adding in your education depends largely on the type of job you’re applying for and, potentially, how long you’ve been out of school. Your educational history will be more important if you’re a recent graduate as opposed to a seasoned professional who earned their last degree 15 years ago. However, if the job you’re applying for wants a degree of a certain type, it may be a good idea to include your degree information if it matches, regardless of how long it’s been since you received it.

While these suggestions aren’t guaranteed to get you hired, they could serve as an eye-catching factor for an employer. Of course, to make your resume a true standout, you’ll want to turn to the best resume writing service available. Never hesitate to get in touch and learn the newest tips and tricks for fine-tuning your resume!

Functional or Chronological: Which Is the More Effective Format for Your Resume?

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The differences in resume formatting seem to be a little-known fact among job hunters. Most people have learned to write out a resume in one way or another and learn about any alternative methods later on in life, either when they no longer are submitting resumes to recruiters or are in the throes of a job search. Currently, there are two types of resume formats: functional and chronological. Both of them have their advantages. It will serve any executive resume writer well to know about both formats in order to decide which will better suit their needs.

Functional Resumes

You can think of a functional resume as something of a professional showcase. It is meant to underline what you can do. In other words, it’s about the experiences you’ve had and the skills you’ve gathered and developed. These two elements of your career history should receive the most focus on this type of resume. While chronological information can still be included, it should be kept brief and be written last.
Generally, you will write a functional resume so each skill you’d like to discuss serves as a header. You can then devote a few lines underneath to discuss what this skill entailed and how you’ve utilized it throughout your career positions. You will also have to talk a little bit about yourself at the top of the page, mainly about your academic and career history. Again, this should also be brief.
This format may prove useful for some executives in the middle of switching careers. However, it isn’t the best executive resume format in the eyes of hiring managers and recruiters. Using a functional resume may give off the impression you have large gaps in your work or academic history or you otherwise have some other detractor from your hireability you don’t want to divulge.

Chronological Resumes

Unlike functional resumes, chronological resumes basically serve as a timeline of your career history. Resumes of this type list out your full work history from your newest position to your oldest, as well as a bit about your skill set and similar information. Under each position you list, you’ll also include a bit about the tasks you fulfilled, along with any accolades you’ve earned while there.
Those with a lot of experience in their chosen field will find this resume format the most helpful, as will newly graduated college students. Recruiters will also find this format much easier to sort through and read. However, this type of resume can be misleading when it comes to shorter career positions you’ve held, and your skills will be downplayed considerably.
We consider this to be the most useful resume format because it displays all important information up front with no risk of miscommunication. It is especially useful for downplaying any existing gaps in your work history. Every recruiter and hiring manager will recognize and accept this format so you’re far less likely to hurt your chances of gaining their interest. We recommend making chronological resumes your first choice!
Writing a resume is understandably tough. However, picking the right format can help move things along. If you’re still unsure of the best way to organize your resume, you can always consult the best resume writing services for suggestions on which resume format to use! Be sure to get in touch to get the help you need and land the job of your dreams!

Want to Know How to Knock Your Finance Resume out of the Park?

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In today’s increasingly digitized world, the resume is becoming more important than ever before. Your resume is one of the first ways potential employers get to know you, after all, which means it needs to be as polished as possible in order to make a good impression. However, crafting an excellent resume can be tricky, even if (or perhaps especially if) you have a lot of experience under your belt. If this is the case, let us offer you a few tips on how to achieve the best executive resume format and really “wow” your potential and future employers!

Research the Best Keywords

You’ve likely noticed how rapidly keywords are growing in significance in the business world. It turns out keywords are just as important to personal marketing as it is to commercial marketing. But just what are the best keywords to use?
Specific job titles are a great place to start. Use any and every high ranking position you’ve held in the past on your resume to help catch an employer’s eye. This is one of the easiest and best ways to display your credentials. Additionally, anything you frequently performed or used on the average work day, from PC programs to basic duties, are fair game. You’ll also want to give employers a clear image of what your previous positions entailed and what they can expect from you if you’re hired. The idea is to be very detailed since you don’t know what keywords will prompt a prospective employer to look at your resume.

Have a Point

There are very few instances where people like rambling. Don’t lose sight of the point of your resume as you write. While this may sound obvious, it is very easy to get lost in the slew of details you’ll need to include and forget to get to the heart of the matter. The most important goal of your executive bio is to get hired for the job you want. Showcase who you are and what you can do for the company you want to work for by listing your skills and strengths with relevance to the company’s needs. Before you even start on your resume, we recommend scoping out the industry so you can fine-tune your expectations and objectives.

Be Brief

You want to detail your expertise on a point-by-point basis. Being concise will automatically score you points with an employer because this shows you understand and respect that they have one minute—at the most—to review your resume. This will also help them to understand more about you as a professional in that amount of time.
You can accomplish this by writing out a summarizing paragraph on your resume’s first page. If you need help properly paring down your credentials down to a short paragraph, you can turn to a cover letter writing service for help.

How to Craft an Eye-Catching Executive Resume Brand

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If you’ve followed us for a while, or just have ample knowledge of how job searching and the professional world work, then you know the importance of crafting a personal brand. This is how you appeal to other professionals, especially those who may hire you to work for them later on. The main issue for anyone attempting c-level personal branding, however, is figuring out how to go about it efficiently. In this blog, we’ll give you a few tips on how to brand yourself efficiently and catch the eye of recruiters in an instant!

Include Your Accomplishments

While this goes without saying, your accomplishments within your industry will be some of the most important elements of your personal brand and should not be ignored. The key aspect here is how you incorporate them. You don’t want to splay them all out like playing cards strewn on a table. Rather, you can frame them in a way that appeals more readily to employers.
For a few ideas on how to do this, you can always rely on a team of the best executive resume writers in your area or do a bit of independent research. While you should strive to keep your entire resume brief, you can add a bit of color to your stories by describing them in the form of a (very) brief story—three lines maximum, to be precise.

Think About How You’ve Contributed to Your Industry

This part of brand construction may prove a bit challenging, but it is the perfect method of showing any recruiter or hiring agent how you are a valuable employee. By creating your personal brand, you are effectively telling other professionals a story. Make it appealing by getting to the meat of the action! This means displaying your contributions to the past companies you’ve worked for. It may help to follow the C-A-R formula for these contribution stories, ‘C-A-R’ meaning Challenge, Action and Result. Think about what was being asked of you at the time, how you completed the task at hand and what happened afterward.

Research as Much as Possible

Oftentimes catching a glimpse of others’ work and ideas can help inspire you. If you’re stumped as to how to start or flesh out your personal brand, looking at how others have constructed theirs can give you a boost. We don’t mean lifting someone else’s work entirely, however! Writing an effective resume means showcasing your own strengths and individualizing yourself. Copying someone else entirely defeats the purpose.
As you surf through your Google results and check out what other people are doing, be sure to evaluate your own methods and ideas. How can you apply what they’re doing to your own strengths and accomplishments? Think about how you have influenced your previous employers in ways no one else did. This will help you figure out how to brand yourself well.
Additionally, it may help to get in touch with a professional resume writer to learn what you can do to better market yourself. You may come away with a new perspective toward your career and professional potential that you’ve never considered before, one that will wow employers on the spot!

Four Effective Ways Career Changers Can Spruce up Their Resume

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Career changes are becoming increasingly common in today’s ever-shifting world, especially as people with multiple skills and access to different, better options are leaving less fulfilling careers to move toward new opportunities. No matter who you are and how secure you are in this decision, switching to a new field can be incredibly daunting. This holds especially true if you’ve spent several years within your old field and are just now gaining the chance and confidence to move onto the new. How can you market yourself and get your foot in the door? Will any of your old experiences and skill sets help you gain the job you want?

Luckily, there are a few things you can do to help boost your chances of successfully breaking into a new industry.
1. Don’t Forget Your “Extracurriculars”
Not every experience included on your resumes and cover letters has to be on the job. As long as it applies in some shape or form to the jobs you’re applying for and the industry you’re trying to get a foothold in, it will appeal to potential employers. You can include such things as internships and organizations, among others.
2. Rewrites Are Likely
After spending so much time building up your resume for your current field, it may feel like a waste to scrap it and start anew for a job change. However, it’s worth it for a variety of reasons. Each job you’ll apply to will have different interests and needs, which you will have to analyze in terms of how well you’ll fit. Tailoring your resume to different jobs makes sense because it gives employers a sharp idea of how well you’ll fit in with the company. If this idea seems daunting to you, you can always turn to a professional resume writing service for ways to rewrite your resume effectively!
3. Keep It Brief
You may feel tempted to pad your resume if you don’t have quite enough experience in your new field. Don’t! You have merely a few seconds to catch a potential employer’s attention, and overloading them with information about your experiences, whether true or embellished, is just the right way to turn them off completely. Make the most of your resume by including only the most important experiences and other bits of professional information.
4. Format Your Resume Properly
Not even the most spectacular resume will make the cut if there are noticeable formatting errors. The good news is you have a bit of wiggle room when it comes to acceptable resume formats. There are letter resumes, which amount stylistically to experience-based cover letters; functional resumes, which focus on any skills you have in relation to your chosen field; and chronological resumes, which organize your experiences from newest to oldest. Feel free to pick whichever format is right for you!
No matter what field you’re trying to enter, you can rely on top rated resume writing services to help you craft an appealing resume! Don’t hesitate to get in touch to learn how you can improve your prospects and earn the job you deserve.

What Not to Do as a 50+ Job Seeker

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Navigating today’s demanding and ever-changing job market is tough—no matter what age you are. If you’re 50 or over, however, learning the ropes can be even more of a challenge. It’s highly likely that it’s been years upon years since you last searched for a job, and the market has changed tenfold since you were in this position.How do you navigate this strange new territory?How do you reach out to the people you want to hire you?Just what is the key to writing resumes that get you hired in today’s world?We have a few tips on things to avoid to help make your search easier.

Personal Stagnation
Regardless of age, it never hurts to learn new things—information, viewpoints and especially skills. Think about the skill set you have now. How well does it sync up with the job listings you’ve seen this decade? Are there any skills you’ve seen that have stumped you, or that you know you have no idea how to perform? Don’t let this become a detriment to you and hurt your chances of getting hired!While you’re searching for a new career, it would serve you well to start looking into expanding your skill set by taking some adult educational classes. If you aren’t good with computers and other electronic devices, now is the time to learn. If you need to be familiar with a certain kind of software to qualify for the positions you’re seeking out, consider seeing if your nearest learning center has classes for it.
A Lacking LinkedIn
You’ve very likely heard of LinkedIn at some point during your professional career. It’s a business-oriented social networking site and has become increasingly important in recent years. Most professionals today use it to network with other people in their industry, meaning if you don’t have a LinkedIn account of your own, you’ll want to invest some good old time and effort into putting one together and keeping it active and updated.You never know who might notice you on LinkedIn, especially since so many of today’s hiring managers use the site to find potential candidates. If you can’t make heads or tails of LinkedIn, you can even hire a professional LinkedIn profile writer to lend you a hand.
Ego Trouble
Because you’ve been in the workforce for so long, especially as a senior-level professional, you’ve racked up a lot of accomplishments. While this is certainly commendable and even worth acknowledgment, you should keep in mind that by looking for new work, you’re much closer to square one than it may seem. Be humble about your skills, and don’t limit yourself as far as the positions you can acquire. Similarly, you don’t want to be too meek and cheat yourself out of a great position. Simply communicate, connect with every fellow professional you meet and don’t let your personal opinions get in the way of your search.

And don’t forget you can always rely on a professional resume writing service for help with your job search and to help you maneuver through today’s job market!

Are Job Boards Still Worth the Effort?

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Make no mistake about it: job boards are a thing of the past. In the past, you may have posted your resume on a job board and had a reasonable shot at getting a new job opportunity; however, the way skilled workers find jobs has changed. The vast majority of these boards have become black holes for your executive bio and resume.
Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and, most notably, LinkedIn are beginning to make traditional job boards obsolete. Recently, around 2-4% of people posting resumes on a traditional job board found employment. Individuals employing networking tactics on various social media sites found a career 40-50% of the time.
We’re not mathematicians, but it seems like networking is just a little bit more successful for most seeking employment. If you look at things from a recruiter’s or hiring manager’s standpoint, we can see why. Would you rather hire someone you only know from a piece of paper or an individual who has been personally recommended to you by someone you know and respect?
Your job search doesn’t have to be rocket science. Here are a few more reasons why traditional job boards don’t work:

The Black Hole

Companies get hundreds, if not, thousands, of responses to online job board postings. Then they send every resume to a system that reviews and ranks their skills, experience and more. The hiring manager only looks through the top 10-20% of resumes sent in. The vast majority of resumes never even see human eyes when you submit via a job board.

Not the Best Gigs

Most of the best jobs never even hit the jobs boards. Many hiring managers have stopped posting on these boards altogether. Companies have started using recruiters and networking to find the right type of talent without having to spend days under hundreds of resumes.

The Wrong People

When you submit your executive profile to a job board, you’re not putting your information in front of any decision makers whatsoever. Your resume ends up in front of a lackey whose job is to reject you for any reason. If you want to get in touch with someone who can make a decision, you’re much better off using social media sites and developing your networking skills.

LinkedIn is King

If you get a hiring manager to speak honestly, they prefer to find candidates through LinkedIn more than any other way. LinkedIn is up-to-date and current. Successful employees use LinkedIn to further their career. People with decision-making power know this. That’s why they use the site to find the people they really want to hire before aggressively pursuing the candidate.
Getting Back in the Game?
Are you looking for employment? Ready to dust off the ole’ executive bio and profile? If so, you’ll want to be on the top of your game. It’s a competitive job marketplace out there, it’s important to give yourself an edge whenever you can. Successful job seekers know how to work their network and find the best job.

Consider These 2016 Job Trends as You Transition Into New Work!

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Are you ready to wipe off the old resume and update your executive bio? Before you do, you’ll want to pay attention to a few things. Each and every year brings new trends in the job market. One industry’s demand rises while another is on the brink of extinction. This is simply the nature of the job market.
If you haven’t been looking to change jobs for some time, you may notice a lot has changed since the last time you searched for work. While it can be tempting to completely change careers and reinvent yourself, most find a company culture change is all that’s needed to ramp up their enthusiasm for work.
No matter your situation, here’s a few things to consider when transitioning to a new company or career:
Skills Pay the Bills
While a degree used to mean many things, times have changed. Most employers aren’t as concerned with your degree so much as what you can do with it. In the modern job marketplace, your skills will ultimately pay your bills. The university you graduated from is less important than the critical skills you need to succeed in a career.
If you haven’t been in school for some time now, continuing to develop your industry-related skills is essential to changing jobs and improving your earning potential. Investing in a cover letter writing service before you start applying elsewhere could help you highlight the skills you’ve worked so hard to hone over your career.
Tech Still Growing
Many experts are sure the tech bubble is due to pop at any moment, but couldn’t have been further from the truth. The tech bubble hasn’t popped; it has simply evolved into bigger and better things. The mobile and analytics sector is booming, and the opportunities in these areas are endless. Automation has been rising in popularity as well, opening up great new opportunities for highly skilled employees and executives. Health care is one area in the technology industry that will always require more skilled employees and innovators.
Mobile is Where the Money
As we discussed, mobile is growing – rapidly! In fact, if you’re looking for new work you’ve probably used some great new mobile job search tools. Similar to Tinder, people looking for jobs (not dates) can swipe left or right on jobs they like or don’t. If they’re interested, and the company is too, then communication can begin between the two parties. Two popular job search mobile apps include Jobr and Switch.
Talent Trumps Career
Talent communities have popped up in nearly every industry. These communities allow industry professionals and recruiters to communicate, share information and more. Many of these communities have become the go-to source for information in their fields for individuals in the industry. Recruiters have found they prefer these boards much more than general job posting sites. Most people looking to switch careers or companies love these communities as they give them a chance to “search” for a job – without actually looking for one.
Unbounded Opportunities
If you’re struggling to find work in your exact location, you may want to look around for virtual work. As the freelancer economy comes into play, it’s important to open your eyes to the possibly of working virtually. If you have the right skills, this will open your job search up to unlimited opportunities and, potentially, a pay raise! Just understand: the competition is fierce for some of these positions, which is why you may want to hire the best executive writing service to give yourself an edge.