# Responsible For
# Experienced
# Excellent written communication skills
# Team Player
# Detail Oriented
# Successful

Responsible For: You’re responsible for something. But how many? How long? Who? What? When? Rather than waste the hiring manager’s time reading a vague list of responsibilities, be specific and use quantitative figures to back up your cited skills and accomplishments. Employers want the numerical facts. Write percentages, amounts, and numbers to best explain your accomplishments. Be specific to get the point across quickly. Prove you have the goods to get hired.

So, instead of “Responsible for writing user guides on deadline” and “Responsible for production costs”, it will be better to write “Wrote six user guides for 15,000 users two weeks before deadline” and “Reduced production costs by 15 percent over three months” respectively.

Experienced: It is better to write, “Programmed an online shopping cart for a fortune 500 company in PHP” than just “Experience programming in PHP.” Hiring managers want to know what experience, skills, and qualifications you offer. Do tell them without saying, “I am experienced.”

Excellent written communication skills: Every resume seem to have this magic phrase — “I have excellent written communication skills.” A much better alternative would be something like “Wrote jargon-free online help documentation and reduced customer support calls by 50 percent.” If you’ve got writing skills, do say what you write and how you communicate. Are you writing email campaigns, marketing materials, or user documentation? Are you word smithing legal contracts, business plans, or proposing proposals? However you wrap your words, be sure to give the details.

Team Player: If you want to hit a home run then do explicitly say what teams you play on and qualify the teams’ achievements. So, instead of “Team player working well in large and small groups”, you better say, “Worked with clients, software developers, technical writers, and interface designers to deliver financial reporting software three months before deadline.”

Detail Oriented: If you have the details, do share them with the hiring manager. Give the facts, the numbers, the time lines, the money details, the quantitative data that sells your skills and disorients the competition. Better write “Wrote custom press releases targeting 25 news agencies across Europe.” and not just a para-phrased “Detail oriented public relations professional.”

Successful: Nobody list their failures in resumes. So if everything is a success, then why write them? Stick to showing your success by giving concrete examples of what you’ve done to be successful! Let your skills, qualifications, and achievements speak for you.

(Excerpt from Squawkfox)

Here is an excerpt;

When a startup CTO sees a resume that says things like:

* Responsible for $30m line of business
* Architected new ERP platform
* Managed team of 25 developers
* Optimized business processes

they think, “Spare me, that’s all we need, somebody running around trying to manage and optimize and architect when we just need someone who isn’t afraid to write code.” Here’s the stuff CTOs at startups want to see on a resume:

* Single-handedly developed robust 100,000 LOC threadsafe C++ service
* Contributes to OpenBSD file system in spare time
* Wrote almost 75% of the Python code running IsIt2009Yet.Com

Read the article in full.

# Include only an attachment and don’t write anything in the body of the email.
# Include a misspelling.
# Apply for a job which you are clearly unqualified for (it stands out like a sore thumb).
# Include a Word document that can’t be opened (something like Microsoft Word 2007 format that can’t be open in earlier version, OpenOffice nor Pages).
# Include only a resume and don’t explain why you think you are qualified for the job (believe it or not, a well written letter puts you to the top 20% pretty quickly).
# Send it from an email address with a goofy name.
# Apply for a job for which you are clearly overqualified for.
# Have your friend send in a resume for you.
# Don’t test your email on a variety of clients.
# Send it from free version of Hotmail/Yahoo!, which puts an advertisement at the end of your email. Looks very professional when one see is the ad and nothing else.So, you know what to avoid. And here are the tips on how to get into the final two or three pile which is what will earn you an interview? You need to stand out from the crowd somehow.

# Blog. Only one out of 98 included his/her blog address on the email. Make sure your blog’s content matches the job you are applying for, though.
# Demonstrate you did some research on the company you’re applying for.
# Make sure you write for a human, but include tags and things for electronic scanners too. Do some searches on Google for “how to write a resume” and you’ll find tons of tips on how to do this. But always assume there’s a human reading these things first.
# Don’t just apply for the job, apply for the career.
# Demonstrate that you’d be fun to have around.
# Make sure your email is perfect in every way. Have tons of friends look it over for mistakes. Even little mistakes get noticed instantly and usually get you rejected outright (there’s no excuse for sloppiness here).

(Via: Scobleizer)