It’s easy to make a list of all your great skills, right. Erm no. Not many people can magically whip up the things they are best at; in fact most people truly struggle with concluding on positive attributes about themselves. This is a sad scenario but we need to put baby in the corner and get a move on! When it comes to our Resume, we cannot afford to struggle with our skills.
Go ahead, right now, and list 10 things that you either know you’re good at (no matter the topic or category), or that people tell you that you are good at.
Excellent and well done! Glory and relish in that list! Look at it; read it again and again. This is you.
Now, if we were to place this list ‘as is’ in your Resume however, it actually wouldn’t make too much sense. We need the list to make sense within the parameters of job-searching.
Let’s get into it!
List these in such an order that it matches the Job Advertisement (Ad).
Eg: The Job Ad might require the candidate to have: excellent organisation, high attention to detail and a superb work ethic. Therefore, list your skills in that same order – shuffle the dot points around so that anything relating to ‘excellent organisation’ is listed first; then anything relating to ‘high attention to detail’ is listed second; and so on.
All of the above should fit on Page One of your Resume.
Just why must we do this? It comes down to simple psychology. The recruiter knows perfectly what she is looking for. After all, the Human Resources department (HR) has spent hours and thousands of dollars on analysing the company’s business needs and what kind of people power they need in order to achieve those business objectives. They were not about to let off the Recruitment department lightly. Human Resources would have spent a lot of time briefing Recruitment on exactly the positions that were available and reasons why; also on exactly what kind of person they need to fill that role. It is Recruitment’s job to follow these instructions.
The Recruiter has in mind, fair and square, that they are looking for – you guessed it – a person with excellent organisation, high attention to detail and a superb work ethic. So guess what their mind is geared towards when they are perusing a stack of Resumes: exactly, their mind is geared towards excellent organisation, high attention to detail and a superb work ethic (and in that order). A Recruiter’s best skill is matching the puzzle piece to the puzzle!
What we are trying to do is, effectively, match what we can offer to what the Recruiter has in mind. The Recruiter is busy and just needs a few Resumes to quickly capture her mind. What better and easier way to do this than to simply give her what she is looking for? It’s got nothing to do with modifying the truth and everything to do with ‘speaking their language’ and ‘giving them what they’re asking for’.
You know you’ve got it in you because you wouldn’t have been attracted to this opportunity otherwise. So go for it! Don’t uhm and ahh about how to present yourself. Just be yourself, go for gold, and give it to them in order of the Job Ad!
Best of luck to you.
If you need help with any part of your Resume, click on Contact to arrange a Consultation with me!
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Lucid Resumes 