Are You Making These 4 Resume Mistakes

Are You Making These 4 Resume MistakesAre You Making These 4 Resume MistakesAre You Making These 4 Resume Mistakes?Is your current resume serving your needs? Your career is always evolving, and so must your marketing documents. If youre making any of these four mistakes, it might be time to sharpen your approach.1. Lacking focusIve heard countless job seekers say, Ill take anything or Im open, when asked what kind of job theyre seeking. The candidate wholl take anything, ends up with nothing.Look at your resume. What is your objective? Avoid either failing to state your objective or listing several objectives. Either extreme can work against you as youll appear unfocused, uncommitted or unqualified. While many of us wear many hats throughout our careers, its best to focus on only one hat, or specific job title, for the resume. Employers today tend to look more for talented players who understand and specialize in aniche rather than those who are more general in nature.So ask the ques tions, Whats my niche? or What special herausforderung do I solve? Then highlight that and drop the laundry list of qualifications.2. Not answering the employers most important questionMost resumes fail to answer the essential question, Whats in it for me the employer? Employers have a problem, not a job. That problem almost always revolves around money in some way. So, look for ways that you can show them a return on their investment. Since most resumes only receive about 20 seconds of actual read time, you have to answer this question quickly. A good way to accomplish this is by including a concise Unique Selling Proposition (USP) that distinguishes you from your competitors. This USP is a single sentence that describes three important thingsWho you areWhat your biggest strength isHow your strength translates into a measurable benefitEvery employee either makes money or saves money for an employer. Determine how you bring value in either or both of these ways. The best branding st atements usually incorporate figures in dollars or percentages of money, or time that was gained or saved over a certain time period.3. Selling skills and length of tafelgeschirrSkills are just a commodity. Leave behind that old mindset that your job-related skills or length of service are selling factors. The new mindset is to view yourself as a mini profit-and-loss center rather than just an employee. Employers today buy results and are less impressed when a candidate promotes a laundry list of skills. Instead, define the many ways your past and present job performances are assets to your next employer.How are you an asset to a companys balance sheet? Once again, focus on how your work either helps a company make or save money. Think beyond your skill sets and job duties and list every possible example of how you accomplish this.When you can, try to monetize, or put a dollar value on your achievements. This way, you separate yourself from your competitors and quickly gain the atte ntion of your reader by answering their most important question upfront.4. Blasting your resume to websitesKnowing how to use your resume is just as important as optimizing it. Most job seekers blast their resume to job boards posted openings. In fact, there are some services that exist to do just that for a fee. But is this the best way to approach it?Referencing the current economic crisis, Neil McNulty, Principal Recruiter, McNulty Management Group states that, now, more than ever, job seekers need to change their mindset from looking for openings to looking for opportunities Opportunities are borne out of crisis and chaos and exist even in the worst economy.This means that you, as a job seeker, must look beyond job postings and move into marketing yourself to the managers of the companies and organizations who are experiencing problems that you can solve. This can be tough at first because it means doing extra research and actually calling people who you dont know and developing conversations with them. Its those conversations, though, that will win the referrals, the interviews and the next job for you, especially when you have a great resume to back that conversation up.SummaryIf youre going to put forth the effort to build a resume, why not incorporate the elements above to make it really sell you? When you can avoid the mistakes so many others are making, youll more easily get noticed and get that phone call.