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#JobSearch : Does Your Résumé Pass the Six-Second Test? How to Make your Résumé Stand Out in Today’s Job Market.

No pressure, but your résumé has six seconds to make an impression before it is sent to the don’t-even-bother pile.

That is how long a recruiter typically skims a résumé to decide whether to pass it on to a hiring manager, said J.T. O’Donnell, chief executive of career-coaching site Work It Daily. Recruiters often have hundreds of online applications to wade through, even with algorithms helping filter many of them out. They will likely give yours little more than a glance to judge whether you make it onto the shortlist of candidates.

In other words, your résumé has to be highly “skimmable,” Ms. O’Donnell said at The Wall Street Journal’s recent Jobs Summit. “The human eye works in a Z-pattern, and I’m going down, looking for four to five things that I was told you need to have or you cannot be considered.”

The CV won’t clinch a job offer, but it gets you to the next step, she and other career coaches say. A résumé that’s hard to skim or fails to mention key skills needed for the job could keep you from ever getting the chance to make your case in an interview.

Some ways to make your résumé stand out, and some job-search killers to avoid, according to the experts at the summit:

1) Forget the professional statement.

Job seekers have long been advised to include a short paragraph atop of their résumé summing up their skills, experience, achievements and goals. No more.

“Recruiters don’t have time for that,” Ms. O’Donnell said. Instead, open with a one-line “headline” stating your occupational specialty—ideally with words matching the role you’re applying for, like “digital marketing specialist” or “technical writer,” she said.

Follow the headline with two short columns of bullets with concrete skills. If you coordinated a team to pull off a big assignment and the job posting mentions project-management experience, use that same language, since that’s what recruiters and their applicant-tracking-systems will screen for, said Jane Oates, president of WorkingNation, a nonprofit focused on workforce development.

“Every job you apply for, you should customize your résumé just a little bit by putting in some of the words that are in that job description,” Ms. Oates said.

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What Skill Sets Do You have to be ‘Sharpened‘?

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We here at FSC want to thank each of our corporate partners for the opportunity to serve & moving each of their transitioning employee(s) rapidly toward employment!

Article continued …

2) Don’t be a jack of all trades.

It is tempting to pack your résumé with the entirety of your work experience, especially for those who have a lot of it. Resist the urge, and focus on your relevant professional work history. “You don’t need to have any more that you scooped ice cream at the Margate Dairy Bar,” Ms. Oates said.

Recruiters are looking for a match to that particular job opening, Ms. O’Donnell said. They aren’t interested in the twists and turns of your career, which could suggest you’re overqualified for the role.

“A lot of companies don’t want to overpay, and that’s exactly the message you’re sending when you put everything on your résumé,” she said.

It is OK for a résumé to be two pages, if necessary, she adds. But make sure it is formatted with enough white space to be easily skimmed. Start each line about your experience with the bolded job title, so that they are easy to scan down the left side.

3) Use numbers.

Avoid subjective, ambiguous language, such as “passionate self-starter” or a “dedicated hard worker.” The hiring manager or recruiter will assess your soft skills when they interview you, Ms. O’Donnell said. A résumé is about your hard skills, which are best told through numbers.

Her tip: Circle all of the nouns on your CV, because they can usually be quantified.

If you are describing your experience as a receptionist, for instance, don’t just say “Answer phones.” More effective is something like: “Work for a 300-person company, answering more than 100 calls a day, on a 12-line phone system,” she said.

4) Make your LinkedIn profile the priority.

“Your LinkedIn is really your best résumé,” said Brian Liou, founder and CEO of Rora, which advises tech-industry professionals in negotiating with employers. Recruiters trawl LinkedIn to find candidates for a given job opening. A few hacks can improve your chances of coming up in their searches.

First, set a reminder to switch up some of the keywords in your profile every two weeks. Changing the content helps prompt the site’s algorithm to re-scan your profile, keeping it toward the top of recruiter searches.

And take advantage of Creator Mode, which Ms. O’Donnell calls one of LinkedIn’s best-kept secrets. The setting alters the presentation of profiles to emphasize topics that users discuss most on the platform and lets them choose hashtags aligned with their skills, showing LinkedIn you are an active user. “This is going to help get your content showcased,” she said.

One LinkedIn feature she does discourage using is the “Open to Work” banner. Though more hiring managers say they don’t frown upon career breaks, discrimination against people between jobs persists, she said. Instead, tweak your privacy settings to signal more indirectly to recruiters that you’re open to invitations, she suggested.

5) Resist using ChatGPT.

The artificial-intelligence chatbot from OpenAI has quickly become a popular tool for creating and tweaking résumés. The trouble is, recruiters can spot a ChatGPT-built résumé “a mile away,” Ms. O’Donnell said, “and you get points off for that sort of thing.”

The chat assistant can be helpful if you’re building a résumé from scratch, but use it only as a starting point, she cautions.

One tool she does suggest is a free word-cloud app. (Wordart.com and wordclouds.com are two popular ones.) Paste the text of the job posting to see which words show up as the biggest—the ones repeated most often in the ad.

 “That’s how you’re going to find your top five or six things” to describe your skills and experience, she said.

WSJ Author:  Write to Kailyn Rhone at kailyn.rhone@wsj.com

WSJ.com | April 17, 2023

#JobSearch : The Secret to Getting a Better Job After 50. Even in a Hot Hiring Market, it is Tough for Workers over 50. MUst REad!

Even in a hot hiring market, it is tough for workers over 50 to stay competitive in workplaces that often value youth over experience.

The pandemic has been especially hard on older employees seeking to reclaim jobs lost in the early days of lockdowns. Many say they fear that the workplace upheaval brought on by Covid-19 has reinforced some bosses’ belief that professionals in their 50s and beyond are less inclined to return to offices or adapt to new ways of working.

Workers over 50 haven’t joined the jobs recovery to the same degree as younger peers, not counting the millions who retired early during the past two years. In January, nearly one-third of job seekers age 55 and older were part of the long-term unemployed, according to federal data, compared with 21.8% of those between 16 and 54.

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What Skill Sets Do You have to be ‘Sharpened’ ?

Did you know?  First Sun Consulting, LLc (FSC) is celebrating over 30 years in the delivery of corporate & individual outplacement services & programs to over 1200 of our corporate clients in the U.S., Canada, UK, & Mexico!  

We here at FSC want to thank each of corporate partners in the opportunity in serving & moving each of their transitioning employee(s) rapidly toward employment !

 

Article continued …

It is perhaps little surprise that in the AARP’s most recent survey, 78% of workers between 40 and 65 said they had seen age discrimination in 2020, the highest share since the advocacy group began tracking the question in 2003.

Professionals who have kept careers progressing well into their fourth and fifth working decades say they have developed a few strategies.

Tackle age discrimination head on

Rule No. 1, they say: Confront the reality of age discrimination head on instead of avoiding it. Some say they are doing so by appearing youthful—both in person, for hiring managers and colleagues, and in writing, to the bots that screen résumés. Others are pitching themselves as indispensable mentors to younger colleagues.

“You have to never give up,” said Jennifer Kay Rouse, who at 61 started a new job this month as a customer-success manager after losing her sales-account-manager position in a corporate acquisition last year.

Ageism persists as one of the most insidious forms of on-the-job discrimination, according to academic research and employment experts. In a 2021 study, researchers at New York and Stanford universities found people who opposed racism and sexism at work were still likely to harbor prejudices against older employees and to believe such workers should step aside for younger colleagues.

Meanwhile, many job postings appear to target younger job seekers with terms such as “digital native” or “recent grad,” and employers focus recruiting efforts on rising talent rather than on proven veterans.

This month, unsealed court documents in an age-discrimination case cited emails in which an executive at International Business Machines Corp. referred to older workers as “dinobabies” and a plan to make them an “extinct species.” An IBM spokesman said “some language in emails between former IBM executives that has been reported is not consistent with the respect IBM has for its employees and as the facts clearly show, it does not reflect company practices or policies.”

Punch up your résumé

Ms. Rouse of Waukesha, Wis., says that asking a job interviewer for constructive advice and punching up her résumé with language such as “solid reputation” and “high performer” helped her land her new job at an industrial automation company.

Ms. Rouse maintains a youthful look by staying fit and wearing what she described as an “edgy” haircut with hair on the back and side shaved underneath the top layer. After landing several interviews but not the jobs, she asked an interviewer to level with her “to satisfy my curiosity as to whether it is about age,” she said.

The interviewer didn’t address her age directly but suggested her lengthy experience might make some interviewers assume she had come in with a know-it-all attitude. So she tweaked her approach, emphasizing in interviews that she was a team player. And she acknowledged being older to make the point that she could mentor younger colleagues and was open to being mentored by them, too.

A résumé writer she found on LinkedIn for $125 also helped refresh hers with a more modern format and buzzy phrases, such as “exceptional customer relationships,” which she said yielded more bites from employers. Ms. Rouse now earns more in her new job than she did in her previous role.

“I love business, and I love strategizing to give customers the best outcomes,” she said. “I wasn’t ready to give all of that up.” 

Evade the job applicant-screening bots

Employers can’t legally reject applicants based on their age, but ageism can arise subtly in job postings and the algorithms that screen them. Applicant-screening software can potentially filter out older workers whose résumés show lengthy employment gaps. Other details can also date candidates, such as WordPerfect proficiency or an AOL email account, career coaches and recruiters say.

Laid off in 2018 from a middle-management role in delivery and logistics at the company where he had worked for 17 years, 56-year-old Dale Johnston said he was prepared for the algorithms that would likely screen his résumé. Instead of “17 years,” for instance, he wrote “over 10 years.”

“I had to be very conscious about what I put in and time frames to get past the bots and AI,” said Mr. Johnston, who lives in Bellingham, Wash. “I wasn’t lying. I just wasn’t disclosing the full age.”

He also kept his hair closely cropped while interviewing, because it looks more gray when it’s longer, he said. After landing a job as an analyst with a municipality in 2019, then losing it to cost-cutting a year later, he used the same tactics to apply for a job as an operations manager for a logistics-transportation company, where he works today.

Position yourself as a mentor

Ginny Cheng, a San Francisco career coach and recruiter, advises clients that it is better to delete early years of work experience from your résumé if they mostly date you.

“If your total work experience is over 25 years but your last 15 is most relevant to the new opportunities you are seeking, you can focus on the newer timeline,” she said.

The key, employment experts say, is putting the focus on your talents, not your age. “Employers value wisdom, so it’s important to emphasize what you’ve learned and what you’re good at, not the amount of time you spent in the labor force,” said Richard W. Johnson, director of the program on retirement policy at the Urban Institute.

Harry Moseley retired at 62 from his job as chief information officer at KPMG US in early 2018 but jumped back into the workforce a couple months later by repositioning himself as a mentor.

During what would be a brief retirement, he had let his network know he remained open to new ventures and helping coach at another company. A friend soon approached him with an opportunity as global chief information officer at Zoom Video Communications Inc. Mr. Moseley hadn’t thought he wanted to return to a full-time role, but the position excited him.

“It could be a lot of fun, and I felt like I could help,” he said.

At Zoom since March 2018 and working mostly from the New York area, where he lives, the now 66-year-old Mr. Moseley said he makes a point of not appearing resistant to change. “You kind of have to say, ‘OK, well, that’s how I used to do things,’ and you have to have an open mind and look at things in a different way,” he said.

At the same time, he uses his experience to guide colleagues. “I am who I am. Take me for who I am,” he said.

WSJ.com Author:  Ray A. Smith,  Write to Ray  at Ray.Smith@wsj.com

WSJ.com | March 23, 2022