Interesting post and news this week on Monster.com and Microsoft Office Online, “Four steps to your next job,” creating a new partnership to help the active job seeker. In the example they start to cite a specific individual’s pain and launch into this combined marketing program. A suggestion is made to utilize the Microsoft Office templates to help develop your resume. Now, unlike many of my peers or other resume writing service providers, I am not opposed to this and thus writing a negative post. Nope, I think it’s a great idea if you have no resume to work with and/or can’t afford or are unable to seek out help.

Living in “the land of resumes” as the electronic age has provided to HR and recruiters alike, I can tell you that a resume DOES make a difference in your job search. Having just the right ingredients, as Greg Miller has pointed out in previous posts, makes all the difference in the world. Too much and it’s usually overlook, not enough and it’s overlooked. I say equally important are the style, format and key selling points.

Take for example sales people which I work with on a daily basis as one of our key niche areas. When a client looks to our firm to help hire a true sales professional they are looking for a resume and candidate profile that speak sales. Duh say most of you. Duh is right but how come I still see what accumulates to the hiring manager or client as a non-professional? No stats or highlights on their successful sales career, recent accomplishments, numbers, ranking related to peers or their industry, deals won, and so forth. What happens is a lot of time spent with me or my team in creating a separate document or re-writing their resume to reflect these highlights that all VP of Sales or CEOs are looking for in true professionals!

As I wrote about in both ATS issues and resume formats, having a very complex format or even the new Office 07 .dox can be detrimental if the recruiter or hiring authority on the other end is not able to open it. That’s it, game over, done. Well not quite as if you get your career coaching from me, follow-up, follow-up, follow-up! Would you rather start with a tool which helps your job search or a template which might inhibit it?

In short, templates are a great tool and how I got my first job as a recruiter coming out of the military with no resume (boy that was a sad resume), but I strongly suggest seeking guidance in some fashion to help put you ahead of the pack. The best templates are those with simple and standard formatting. The templates I would stay away from have text boxes, rows, columns, etc.

Good luck in your career search!

Chris

For assistance with your resume from The Wellington Group staff visit The Career Store or Get in Touch.

Chris Wellington “The Recruiting Guy”, President, The Wellington Group

Released just over three hours ago and already a lot of web-chatter, news announcements, emails and calls to my office about the latest job numbers from the US Department of Labor. The summary report can be found at Department of Labor New Release.

So what is all the hype about? 331,000 reported job losses for the month of July. Now that may seem like a very high number but its more “normal” than the losses from November 08 to April of this year, which averaged almost twice as many at 645,000 job losses per month. Total unemployment was down by.1 percent to 9.4%, not a significant change. The sector which had job gains continues to be Health Care with an increase of 20,000 jobs.

Since my ear is constantly to the ground for the staffing and recruiting industry, I had to take notice and point out the impact of the past 10 months. The temporary help market has lost 844,000 jobs while the entire business services sector has been impacted by 1.5 million jobs lost. The release notes this decline has lessened Substantially over the past three months. These numbers reflect the contract, contract to hire and consultant employment areas and not so much the direct hire or executive search services.

While this appears to be good news, the job losses we are still seeing in the staffing and recruitment industry to me is a key indicator that the US is yet to hit the “bottom” of the job loss portion of this economic turndown. In studying trending data for the last 25 years, until we begin to see a rise in staffing numbers we have yet to make a full turn in the positive. With staffing companies (IT, Engineering, Administrative, Day Labor, Etc) still laying off internal staff I don’t see a lot of confidence or stability in overall employment for the US.  

So, is it good news that perhaps the US is slowing on the job loss front? Unemployment seems to have stabilized for now right at 9.5%, not at the 10% plus which so many news media and talk show host predicated. Unfortunately I foresee these numbers rising again for a short period of time this fall as government and state budgets get approved, many of which will call for job cuts.

Chris