If you’re still sending out a job resume (or CV) with statements of the ‘bleeding obvious’ then its time to give it a make-over.

In Five Signs Your Resume Is Passe, Devine Caroline suggests avoiding sentences saying, for example, references are available on request. As she points out, of course they are available, would you refuse to send them if asked?

Overall I agree with four of the five points. I’d take issue with the advice about not squeezing a resume to fit on a single page of paper. While it seems silly, particularly in an era when the resume is going to arrive in an email and not in a letter, to cram many years of experience into 300 words or so, there’s a good case to keep things as tight as possible. Devine Caroline does make this point, but I fear some readers may not grasp the importance of brevity.

See: Five Signs Your Resume Is Passe

Punk Rock HR offers an even better piece on creating a modern resume: Fluffy Stuff on Resumes

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A great piece of advice at Lifehacker Australia. It says some employers worry about hiring overqualified staff. So the smart thing to do if you need a job in a hurry  is to send an honest résumé that leaves off some of your more impressive achievements.

Land Short-Term Work With A Dumbed Down Résumé | Lifehacker Australia.

Employers are often suspicious of unexplained time on a curriculum vitae (CV) or resume. This is a hangover from days past when people didn’t flit from one job to another.

They expect to see a list of previous employers along with starting and finishing dates. Nobody is likely to get excited about a missing week or two, but if there are one or more unexplained periods of longer than about four weeks alarm bells will ring.

We’ll look at strategies for dealing with blanks in a moment. First let’s look at why they make employers nervous.

I once interviewed someone for a job who had a six-month blank on his CV. It looked pretty solid until that point, but the job after the blank was a clear step down from the earlier positions. There might have been a perfectly reasonable explanation – six months travelling overseas or perhaps a full-time education course not related to career matters. In fact, I discovered the interviewee had been in prison.

This is an extreme case. Hopefully it doesn’t apply to you. The other serious negative possibility is a period of enforced inactivity following dismissal. Sacked people often have difficulty finding another job, particularly in a tight-knit industry. Less negative, but still likely to concern a potential employer is if the blank space was the result of illness. Companies are often unwilling to hire people with medical problems – despite skills shortages.

Blanks on a CV are hardly rare for modern knowledge workers. Nobody has a job for life and being made redundant is a rite of passage in the tech industry. Redundancy is often sudden, so it can take weeks or months to find a new job What’s more, people are often burnt out by struggling companies and need a rest between gigs.

Even without redundancy, knowledge workers are prone to CV blanks by the nature of their work. We tend to move from job to job rarely staying with one company more than two years. The process of moving from one company to another is not always smooth; it’s possible to fall between the gaps. Over the past 20 years I’ve twice started new jobs only to discover within days that I’m in the wrong place. No doubt most readers will have found themselves in a similar position.

Women have extra reasons for career gaps: children. And then there are short-term contracts – jobs that only last for a specified period. It isn’t always easy to finesse a smooth transition from one job to the next.

So, we all have blanks, most are reasonable but employers don’t like them. What’s the best strategy?

The first rule is to turn those blanks into meaningful yet honest CV entries. Leaving unexplained blanks is bad but not being truthful only makes matters worse. Be upfront about any time when you were not in paid work. If it was only a matter of weeks then be ready to say that you ‘took a holiday’ or ‘needed a rest’ or ‘painted the house’ between jobs. That’s often enough explanation. It’s also perfectly OK to tell an employer that you waited for the right opportunity to come along.

If the absence was linked to illness (or childbirth) tell the employer the truth explaining, assuming it’s true, that you are now fully recovered and keen to work to your full potential.

If you spent the time in prison… well that’s a whole different story that we’ll save for another post.

Squawkfox has posted a smart guide to help you write a better job application. In simple terms she recommends steering away from general terms such as ‘responsible for’ and being far more specific. It’s good advice and likely to help you stand out if your application letter and resume are read by human beings who care about what they are doing.

As an example, she suggest avoiding the word  ’successful’.

She writes:

Hopefully you only list the successes on your resume. So if everything is a success, then why write the s-word? 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.

BAD

• Successfully sold the product.

GOOD

• Increased sales of organic chocolate by 32 percent.

When it comes to your successes, please don’t be shy. Boast your best, sing your praises, and sell your skills.

This is in stark contrast the resume/CV advice being handed out by some outplacement companies at the present.

I’m not sure advice Squawkfox’s works so well if you’re applying to an organisation using computer technology or low-level juniors to pre-scan large numbers applications: some of the rightly-identified sucky words are likely to be exactly the kind of triggers a computer resume scan or an office junior will be looking for.

On the other hand, speaking for myself, I’d hate to work for an organisation that would treat applicants so inhumanly.

6 Words That Make Your Resume Suck.

Even at the best of times older knowledge workers can struggle to find a decent job. Employers view younger workers as cheaper and, with something still to prove, think they more likely to work hard.

Then there’s the currently fashionable ‘digital natives’ concept. It says the people who grew up with the Internet make better use of technology than the generation who designed it.

All of these ideas can and should be challenged. We’ll leave that for another time. In the meantime here are some practical steps older knowledge workers can take to get a new job:

Show where you add value

As a rule of thumb, older workers are paid more than youngsters because they have more experience and skills. Bosses may suspect those youngsters have more of the right kind of skills. Your mission is to show otherwise. Make sure your CV or resume lists up-to-date skills and shows at least a comprehension of modern technologies.

For example, if you’re a programmer ditch all the references to Cobol in favour of something more current. Demonstrate your practical understanding of Web 2.0 and social media. If you haven’t done so already create a Linkedin profile and point to it from your CV. By all means print copies of your CV if that’s what recruiters ask for, but have electronic versions and embed links to your Linkedin profile and other relevant sites.

It’s too late to start a blog if you’re looking for a job write now, but getting one up and running today might help in six months time. Make sure it’s about something useful and doesn’t read like the rantings of a grumpy old man or woman.

Crank up your personal network
Face it. We’re not all born sales critters. If walking into a function and handing out scores of business cards makes you feel like an Amway tout, then don’t do it. People will smell the desperation and unease.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t shake the contact tree. Over the years you will have worked with hundreds of other people who will know your strengths and talents. Some of these will have made through to the higher echelon. Others will be involved in hiring or can refer your name to people who are hiring. If it helps, don’t view it as networking, think of it as renewing old friendships. Get in touch, find out if they know of openings for your proven skills.

Use professional recruiters
You should at least let the professional recruiters know you are on the market. Many of them are particularly good at finding work for more experienced and highly skilled individuals. They can do a good job of selling you to employers and provide useful tips once you have an interview set up.

Some employers want grey hair
I was still in my 30s and dark haired at the peak of the dotcom boom when I picked up a consulting job. At the time the person hiring me said “we need some grey hairs on board”. His rationale was that having some mature people who understood his business would play well with customers and investors. This is still often the case – there are employers who want mature workers.

Prepare for a long haul
Sorry, there’s no sugar coating this pill. It takes older workers longer to find new jobs than younger workers. So be prepared for the long haul. And remember, it just takes longer that’s not the same as saying it doesn’t happen.

Get started straight away
Following on from the previous point, it will take older workers longer to find a new job so don’t hang around. Get organised the moment you hear talk of redundancies or lay-offs. Do not spend weeks having a well-earned rest, you may have an opportunity to do this before starting in your new role.

Target employers where the management is older
My teenage daughters think people in their late twenties are ‘old’. People in their 20s and 30s think people in their late 40s are old. Younger managers are far less likely to hire people they consider to be old. Older managers will understand your worth and will consider your age to be a good cultural fit.

See also:
Grey-haired knowledge workers get the short straw

Job-finding tips for older knowledge workers

Is there a substantial difference between a ‘resume’ and a ‘curriculum vitae’. The answer is that there may well be an important difference on the other hand there might not be any – it all depends on who is using the terms.

These days employers and recruitment specialists in Australia tend to use the term ‘resume’ when asking potential candidates to supply a written work history. Like so many other aspects of modern Australian language use, this follows the American rather than the British model. Although you’ll find New Zealand and UK employers are starting to use the same term, they still more frequently ask for a CV or a ‘curriculum vitae’.

While the British and Kiwis might prefer to use CV, they generally regard the two terms to be synonyms. For example, my Concise Oxford Dictionary says that the definition of resume is curriculum vitae. The dictionary definition is marked with an asterisk, which in loose terms means that the word resume is an Americanism for CV.

Americans on the other hand tend to make a clear distinction between the two terms. In their book a resume is a career summary designed to sell your key skills and experiences to a prospective employer while a CV is a fuller record of your work and life history. You can read how one American sees the difference between the two.

By all means read the essay, but I wouldn’t take what the headhunter guy has to say about European-style CVs too seriously. That’s because British employers prefer short, snappy CVs and they certainly have little relation to whatever it is he is describing in the essay.

For example, when I first started hiring people in Britain during the early 1980s most people would submit CVs that would fit on a single piece of A4 paper. Some would make it onto a second sheet, but anyone who required more than two sheets of paper would be regarded with suspicion. Admittedly I was hiring journalists and those days word economy was regarded as a virtue. Nevertheless, good British CVs are generally short.

On the other hand, when a recruitment consultant in New Zealand approached me about a particular job I was told a two pager would be insufficient. She said nothing less than six pages would be adequate.

The simple truth is that there’s a lot of confusion in the marketplace about exactly what employers expect of prospective employees. It varies from industry to industry, grade to grade and company to company. Some recruiters ask specifically for a two-page resume, that’s good; many more are vague.

Unless you have a reasonably good idea of what is expected my advice is to ring and ask the person handling the recruitment exactly what they expect to see. That way you do three things. First, you eliminate any ambiguity and can deliver to their exact requirements. Second, you’ve flagged an interest. You may get to talk more and reveal something interesting, that way the person at the other end will look out for your application when it arrives. Third, you’ll be able to figure out some clues about what kind of person or company your dealing with before making any commitment.

There was a time when employers expected or demanded loyalty. In return you would be rewarded with a job for life – or at least a sizable chunk of it, along with steady progress through the ranks and pay increases.

This still happens in some Asian countries.

Somewhere along the way the social contract broke down. Employers no longer expect you to stay for ever. Or at least most don’t. If they want to keep your skills, talent and enthusiasm they’ll offer you equity, options or another incentive.

From your career planning point of view, a move should not be directly related to money, but to the overall shape of your curriculum vitae. You must balance the variety of skills and breadth of acquired experience against the need to demonstrate some stability.

Maybe your next employer may not be concerned that you have only been in your current job for 10 months, but subsequent employers may well be.

It’s important that you don’t appear to be a butterfly that flits casually from one job to another. On the other hand, smart recruiters recognise that five years at a single employer might not mean five years of experience, but the same year of experience repeated five times. It might also indicate an unambitious nature or even a lack of gumption.

There are no hard and fast rules. The details differ from discipline to discipline and from region to region, but after talking to recruiters and people who successfully manage their own careers the following seems to be about the right recipe for the current market:

• It’s OK to have a new job roughly every year up until around your 30^th birthday. Assuming you graduate at 22, that means you can safely fit in seven employers before hitting your 30s. Less than three employers in this time means you probably won’t have learnt enough. Higher degrees, periods of self-employment and bar-keeping in London each count as a single employer.
• When you hit 30, you need to slow down. Individual jobs should last between 18 months and three years with an average of over two years.
  Aim for four CV items between your 30^th and 40^th birthdays. Don’t worry if one job lasts less than 18 months—but make sure you have a good explanation if there is more than one short-term job. Higher degrees and periods of self-employment are still cool. Indulgent goofing-off (i.e. bar-keeping in London) looks a bit flaky, but accomplishing something (writing a book, sailing single-handedly around the world or climbing Everest) is OK.
• Above 40 it’s OK to stay longer with employers, but not too long and certainly not if you remain in the same role. The lower limit of 18 months still applies but you should be looking to clock up some extended periods of more than four or five years with a single employer.

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CareerBuilder.com Survey Shows Almost Half of Employers Have Caught a Lie on a Resume.

A survey conducted by CareerBuilder.com found more than half of all employers have uncovered lies in submitted resumes. This news probably doesn’t come as a surprise to world weary readers. What might come as more of a shock is 36 percent of bosses who caught lies said they still considered the person anyway and six percent went as far as hiring known resume cheats.

According to CareerBuilder the most common lies are:

• Embellished responsibilities – 38 percent
• Skill set – 18 percent
• Dates of employment – 12 percent
• Academic degree – 10 percent
• Companies worked for – 7 percent
• Job title – 5 percent

Dumb bosses aside, lying in job interviews is unwise at the best of times. In fact, it is one of the five sure fire ways of sinking a job interview. Even if you’re not caught out initially, a resume lie may come back to haunt you later. In some cases with disastrous consequences – there are plenty of high profile example’s of people who’s careers have come to a slamming halt because they couldn’t resist boosting their qualifications on a CV or telling similar porkies.

One extreme case here in New Zealand was the chief of the government immigration department Mary Anne Thompson who lied about her Phd amongst other things (See: Immigration head’s PhD claim disputed by LSE and Police investigate former Immigration head’s CV).

To get around gaps or holes in your formal CV, the Careerbuilder story recommends using a covering letter to tell your full story rather than making up qualifications or other resume details. That’s good advice.

Some patently obvious resume and CV lies have come across my desk over the years. My policy is to instantly reject the person, regardless of any other considerations. Dishonest employees are more trouble than they are worth so it’s clearly better to not hire them in the first place than to turn a blind eye then deal with things later.

It’s more complicated when a lie is discovered long after the person has been employed, particularly if the person appears in every other respect to be a great employee. Apart from anything else, employment law considerations make any retrospective action difficult. On the other hand, if the person is a bad employee, uncovered blatant resume lies are powerful ammunition for any subsequent disciplinary action.

Dumb management
Employers who oversell their vacancies don’t help this situation. Bosses who exaggerate the benefits and positives associated with a job in advertisements and interviews are hardly on the moral high ground when candidates do the same. If you want honesty and trust in employment, you must lead by example.

Dumber management
For the moment we’ll leave aside the thought that dishonesty may be a prerequisition for some positions: hiring resume cheats is plain dumb on three levels. First, liars are rarely adornments to your company, department or team. They can wreck carefully nurtured external relationships with a few stupid words and land you in trouble or worse. Trust is more important than ever in modern business, it can’t be purchased, it needs to be carefully guarded.

Second, if someone can lie to you about their qualifications or experience, they’re not necessary going to be telling you the truth when they report back to you on performance or tell you they have to take a day off work because their kids are sick. A culture of dishonesty is destructive in any industry, in knowledge work it can be fatal.

Third, when high profile CV cheats are caught (as in the Mary Anne Thompson case linked to earlier, it doesn’t give you or your company a good look.

As an employer you need to have confidence in your knowledge workers. Hiring people who you know are untrustworthy simply isn’t wise. if you are a boss this is something you should care about.

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