Category Archives: resume writing tips

CEO Resume – Showcase Your Leadership Qualities

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A CEO resume can be somewhat difficult to write, especially if you have been with the same company for many years. Obviously, it takes a great deal of experience, skills, and some rather impressive qualifications to compete for a CEO job. However, your resume must also reflect your leadership qualities and your professionalism.

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Leadership Above All Else

Showcasing your leadership qualities is one of the most important components in a CEO resume. This can be done in a number of ways. If you have been at the top of a company before, then you’ll be able to show this in your work experience. However, if this is the first CEO position that you are working towards, then you’ll need to show leadership in other ways. It might be as a manager or head of a department. You may have led a team of employees for years, improving company revenue or their customer base. Perhaps you have been in charge of a branch of a non-profit organization. The best case scenario is to place your leadership qualities through every part of your resume.

You can highlight these qualities in your work experience, but also in your educational experience. If you graduated from college many years ago, it’s still all right to mention that you were the class president. You will want to show that you started out as a leader and that you still are today on your CEO resume. If you have worked for several corporations as a CEO, then it’s not quite as important to list your educational leadership roles.

Highlight Your Other Qualities, Too

You will want to show that your skills are not just limited to leadership on your CEO resume. You should also be able to quantify specific goals that the companies attained while under your guidance. The use of percentages and numbers helps draw the eye of the reader and can make a very positive impression. It’s also important to relate skills and experience that directly pertain to the type of industry that the company is in. For example, a computer company looking for a CEO may not be interested in hiring a CEO from the restaurant industry. If you have specific experience or skills that will work well within the industry, make sure those are highlighted in your resume. Use bullet statements to make this information stand out.

Proper Formatting

Your CEO resume should not be more than one page in length and that is often hard to do when you have a lot of skills, qualifications, and experience to list. Before you worry about the length of your resume, though, make sure you include everything you think might be needed. This will ensure that you don’t leave out important points. You can always go through your resume later if it too long and start removing parts that may not seem so important now. Use a traditional font and font size, as well as a very high quality resume paper.

In Closing

You want to grab the attention of the reader right from the beginning of your CEO resume. Use numbers and bullet statements whenever possible. Above all, highlight your leadership qualities to show you are the best choice for the CEO position.

Job Interview Tips: Clean Up Your Facebook Page

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Facebook is one of the most visited websites today. With over a half a billion accounts, this social media network is has revolutionized the way that people keep others informed about what is going on in their lives. However, Facebook has also been the downfall of many job applicants. In the following job interview tips, you will find all the information you need to clean up your Facebook page so that potential employers get the right impression of you when they do some research on you.

What Does Your Facebook Page Say about You?

While you may not think that employers look at Facebook pages, it really couldn’t be further from the truth. There is a wealth of information to be found online and social media websites are no exception. Think about what is on your Facebook page. Does it contain photos of you that might not show your best side? For example, the last night you were out at the club and dancing on the table may not be what you want a potential employer to see. Job interview tips include removing photos that show excessive drinking or even worse.

If you have strong political beliefs that may not coincide with a potential employer views, you may want to reconsider what your profile says. Consider what your likes and dislikes include. If you list your favorite activities as skydiving, riding motorcycles, bungee jumping, or other dangerous activities, an employer may not want to take a chance that you will be hurt and miss work. They could choose to hire someone who enjoys reading, poetry and basket weaving! These are job interview tips that really can help you in the long run.

Another thing to remember is that you don’t want potential employers to see any risqué photographs of you. You don’t need a photo of you on Facebook that shows you any type of compromising position. It simply isn’t worth it. Far too many college students post up pictures from fraternity and sorority parties that should be filed away for private viewing. Good job interview tips include those that limit the amount of skin that you should show online!

While there is no law against being yourself on your Facebook page, if you are job hunting, the wrong content can cause you problems. You may want to limit access to your wall or profile to only your friends. This means that potential employees will not be able to view all of your information unless you give them access. Other people have changed their name slightly so that their account will not come up when a search of their legal name is done. These are really important job interview tips that can help you stay in the running for your dream job.

In Closing

Facebook is quite a phenomenon, but it can also damage your chances of getting a great job. Employers do look at Facebook accounts of potential employees. Keep the above job interview tips in mind in order to stay in the running for that next job.

Resume Writing Tips: Clean Up Your Social Pages

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If you have been keeping up with the daily news over the past few years, then you most probably know about the various scandals and unfortunate occurrences that have taken place involving employees having their careers and reputations ruined by social networks. Facebook is without doubt the most prevalent of all the social networking sites. Other social networking pages such as MySpace and Friendster are also extremely popular among adults and adolescents alike. The difference in the situations of the adults and adolescents, however, is that adults have to be accountable for their personal material that is available on social networking sites while adolescents do not face such high expectations. This is one of the most important resume writing tips to keep in mind when writing your resume.

Thus while it might be perfectly acceptable for a teenager to post pictures on Facebook of himself getting extremely drunk at a party and engaging in various stupid acts, the same cannot be said of an adult. In the case of an adult, particularly an adult employed by a company, there is always the danger that his boss might decide to look at his photographs on Facebook and be shocked to discover that his employee was out partying on a weekday night when a business meeting or a presentation was scheduled for the following day. This is just one of the many examples that can be found in real life, and a great many employees have lost their jobs because they were careless with the personal information they divulged on social networking sites.

When it comes to important resume writing tips, one such tip is to ensure that your social networking pages are squeaky clean. This might mean having to delete your social networking pages entirely and start them afresh, but this is small price to pay to keep your job or to help yourself secure a new job. Among the important resume writing tips is also that you should discreetly notify all of your friends, family and acquaintances that you do not wish for any unsuitable photographs of you to be put up on social networking sites.

Privacy Settings Are Not Foolproof

Due to the sheer number of people who have had their careers ended by social networking pages, many social networking sites now offer improved ‘privacy settings’. These settings allow you to restrict access to your social networking page and the information contained therein. While this might be sufficient as a casual deterrent, it is definitely not sufficient when your job or prospective job is at stake.

One of the most important resume writing tips that you must keep in mind is that anything that is on the internet can be found, no matter how securely you hide it or lock it away. With these resume writing tips in mind, you can now go about cleaning up your social networking pages even before you finish writing your resume, so that you will not have a bright future ahead of you destroyed by a few inappropriate pictures or comments.

Law Enforcement Resume Writing Tips: Are You On The Internet?

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When you are writing a law enforcement resume, one question you should ask yourself before you go on is ‘are you on the internet?’ Your answer to this question will most likely be an unequivocal ‘yes’. In this day and age, with information technology prevalent throughout every aspect of our lives and the almost universal use of computers and the internet, there is almost nobody left on the planet who is not on the internet in one way or another. You have to keep this firmly in mind when writing your law enforcement resume. Even some of the poorest people living in undeveloped nations are on the internet in some form, even if it is just as the subject of a photograph in an article about the people in undeveloped countries – this is still considered being ‘on the internet’.

With that in mind, you will most probably realize that you have a much greater presence on the internet than you first suspected. The problem with being on the internet, especially with regard to your law enforcement resume, is that your internet presence can be highly counterproductive to your efforts to land a job. Of course, most of the time, it is perfectly okay to be on the internet and post photographs and other personal information or comments on movies and books. The problem, however, arises when an inadvertent part of your internet presence exposes something about your personal life that you definitely do not wish for your prospective employers to see even before you go in for an interview.

You can safely assume that these days, a prospective employer is sure to perform an active search for everything that they are able to find out about you, whether before or after your interview. Most of the time, this process comes after the interview. If they feel that you are a likely candidate for hire, then they will perform more in-depth research into you and your life, to see what they are able to uncover.

Make Sure Your Facebook Page Is Secure

The most common occurrence in recent years has been the numerous scandals that have popped up; most of them related to Facebook. There are several examples of people whose promising future careers have been sunk by an entirely inadvertent Facebook post or a couple of photographs put up on Facebook by friends or acquaintances. Several people who were inebriated at parties had their photographs taken in various states of undress and then put up on Facebook by friends just as a prank.  While, there may be nothing wrong with that, a prospective boss may take a dim view of your character, however unjustified it may be. Others have had politically incorrect messages carelessly posted on their Facebook pages by friends, only to have their bosses stumble across those messages.

The problem with Facebook is that the chances that you know someone who knows someone who knows someone else who knows you are very high – so you never know who might have access to the parts of your Facebook page that you restrict to being private and shared only with friends. So when writing your law enforcement resume, one key point to remember is to remove any and all material from your Facebook page that has even the remotest chance of being found and misinterpreted by your prospective employers.

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Human Resources Resume Writing Tips

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When applying for a job in the human resources sector, the one thing to keep in mind above everything else is that you are applying for a highly specialized job; one that requires highly specialized skills and your resume should reflect this reality. A job in human resources is ultimately about managing people, and your human resources resume should therefore be slanted towards showing that you have the requisite skills in order to manage people effectively.

Skills that are Valuable for Human Resources Personnel

Among the skills that would be valuable to someone working in a human resources department are the ability to judge a person’s character, to work well with others, to get others to support you willingly and enthusiastically and to gain the trust of others easily. There are a great many other skills that are applicable in the sphere of human resources, and these are but a few examples. An effective human resources resume should convey your possession of at least some of these applicable skills, as this will make you valuable and an asset to the company.

How To Make Yourself Look Indispensable On Paper

One area in which jobseekers consistently have trouble is with making themselves seem like a hiring opportunity that the company cannot afford to pass up. This is often more a problem with phrasing and language than with the actual content of the human resources resume.

This applies in particular to listing your past work experience. Most people have no trouble listing their previous work experience, and you might choose to do so either in reverse-chronological order or based on priority according to the applicability of the particular skill. The problem, however, is with job titles. In your previous company, you might have held a position equal to that of a direct customer relations officer.

Make your Job Title More Relevant

Many companies, however, have the habit of giving common positions uncommon names. You might, for example, have been an employee relations officer but known within the company as an internal communications assistant. Putting this down on your human resources resume could very well lead your prospective employer to think that you were some sort of engineer, and not an experienced hand at dealing directly with employees within the firm.

The solution to this problem is relatively simple – you need to change the names. Instead of listing your work experience based on your previous job titles, you should list them using the description of the position as the heading instead. If you were an employee relations officer, then you should put that down on your human resources resume.

While this might not sound as fancy as the name that your company concocted for your position, the truth is that it much more accurately conveys your true position within the company. It also allows your prospective employer to immediately recognize what your job scope was and thus what your level of experience with human resources matters is. This is very important because interviewers tend to skim cover letters and resumes when deciding whether or not to award an applicant an interview spot, so you must make it clear through your human resources interview that the company cannot afford to let the opportunity to interview you pass them by.

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Leadership Examples For A CEO Resume

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When you apply for a job as CEO of a company, the resume that accompanies your job application will have to be a true CEO resume and not merely a resume that would be suitable for an application for any other job. What this means, is that your CEO resume must reflect the qualities and character traits that a prospective employer would be searching for in a CEO. This, of course, means that your CEO resume will have to emphasize your leadership and organizational skills and abilities. The problem, however, is being able to emphasize those skills within the fairly limited confines of a CEO resume.

The problem with writing a proper CEO resume is that, ultimately, a resume is not much more than a list of your qualifications and achievements. It is relatively challenging to make a list convey more than just the detailed information concerning your educational qualifications and work experience. The manner in which you choose to present that information, however, can definitely work in your favor when you write your CEO resume.

Getting Started with your CEO Resume

The very first step to writing a CEO resume is to gather up all the resources that are available to you. This means making a detailed list of any and all achievements and experiences that might convey a sense of your having well developed leadership abilities. Any task that you were given that involved leading a team of your co-workers, any assignment that involved you showing a great deal of initiative to solve a problem or defuse a situation, any situation where you had to give directions to other workers in order for the company to continue functioning smoothly – these are all excellent examples of leadership and would be great in a CEO resume.

Conveying A Sense Of Leadership in your CEO Resume

Once you have all of your leadership examples and are ready to insert them into your resume, you will need to consider the matter of priority. The order in which you list your achievements is important not only because your prospective employer might only take the time to read the first few achievements on the list, it will also reflect on what sort of leadership you consider essential to the company, and this could have a make-or-break effect on your job application.

This means that you will have to consider what your leadership priorities are. Do you consider the welfare of your subordinates to be most important? Or perhaps the well-being of the company is the overriding priority. You will, of course, have to take the time and effort to do research in order to make an educated guess as to what sort of leadership traits your prospective employer would consider an asset to the company and which it would consider to be liabilities.

Finally, before you start inserting all of the leadership examples from your list to your CEO resume, you should take the time to go through each one and ask yourself just how important it is. The mistake that many people often make is that they list so many examples in their CEO resume that it becomes extremely difficult and confusing for your prospective employer or interviewer to clearly understand what kind of leader you are. Instead, you should only focus on those examples which you think are representative of the kind of leader that you are, and which had a great impact on the company in which you previously worked.

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How To Write A Simple Resume

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Many people who are looking for a job are so overwhelmed with the idea of having to write their resume that very often the task looms before them like the proverbial mountain. The truth, however, is that there is nothing complex about the idea of writing a resume. A resume is simply a document listing your educational qualifications, job experience and any other achievements that someone looking for a new employee might wish to know. That said, a simple resume that is clear and precise could sometimes prove to be much more successful than a more complex one.

How to write a simple resume? The key to the entire process is to keep the original purpose of resume writing firmly in mind. The basic purpose of a resume is to provide prospective employers with information about job applicants. In this regard, there are several ways in which a resume accomplishes this. A resume must include personal details and information such as educational qualifications, experiences and achievements. Beyond that, a resume must also include a cover letter which states exactly why the job applicant chose to apply for a particular job and in what ways he is suitable for the job.

Focusing on these key areas is exactly how to write a simple resume. All of the other fancy decorations and additional information that so many job applicants like to include in their resumes are, in fact, unnecessary.

Parts Of A Simple Resume

In any resume, the cover letter is almost always the most complicated and difficult part to write. This is because the cover letter goes beyond mere listing of achievements, but requires that you put your feelings and thoughts down into writing. There are, however, some elements that every cover letter must include.

First of all, you will need to state the exact position you are applying for and the reasons for which you are applying for that position. This section need not be lengthy, and your reason for applying for the job might be as simple as saying that the scope of the job interests you.

Next, you need to fit your qualifications and achievements into the context of the job you are applying for, and show your prospective employer how the most important of your qualifications and achievements make you uniquely suited for the position that you are applying for.

These are, in fact, the essentials of what you need to include in a simple resume cover letter. Any further information that you choose to put in may or may not help your job application, but without these elements your chances of landing the job you applied for are next to nothing.

Part of how to write a simple resume is not making things more complicated than they have to be. So when it comes to the rest of your resume, limit yourself to listing your most important and major achievements and qualifications, without adding any embellishment. All of the achievements and qualifications that are particularly applicable to the job you are applying for should be placed at the fore, and anything not completely relevant should be left out.

Once you understand the minimalist concept that drives a simple resume, you will understand just how to write a simple resume. 

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Writing An Ex-Military Resume As A Veteran

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Many ex-military personnel find it extremely difficult to write a resume when applying for a civilian job. This is because the general focus in the military is far different from that in the civilian arena. Therefore most ex-military resumes that interviewers receive simply do not serve the function of telling the interviewer more about how well that person would fit into the working environment at that company and how suitable he is for that particular job.

The problem that most ex-military people face is that their accomplishments while in the military service are just not directly transferrable to a civilian context. Interviewers have received many a military resume that contains a list of accomplishments over five pages long, simply because the veteran who wrote the resume included a full list of all of his military accomplishments. The problem with this is that accomplishments such as a long-range marksmanship award are just not relevant to a civilian employer – especially not when simply listed without some form of explanation.

You should not think for one second, however, that military accomplishments are totally irrelevant to jobs in a civilian setting. Resume writing for a civilian job merely requires a different focus from a military resume and accomplishments have to be interpreted from the viewpoint of a civilian setting. Rank, for example, may indicate an ability to command soldiers in the field but it can also indicate an ability to lead a civilian team just as effectively – everything depends on just how you choose to pitch your military achievements.

Making Your Military Resume Sound More Like A Civilian Resume

The first and most important thing may seem like something exceedingly simple, but it is something that many job seekers with a military background neglect when they write their resumes. The starting point for any veteran writing a resume must be that his interviewer knows absolutely nothing about the military. This means that even the most basic military terms should be clearly explained within the resume. This is because many interviewers are often confused and befuddled by terms and names used by military personnel that may be extremely meaningful within the context of the military but which regular civilians know nothing about.

Another thing to keep in mind is that, while most employers admire veterans for their loyal service to the nation, they would rather not hear about first-hand experiences of the battlefield. Some veterans feel the need to relate their experiences on the battlefield to their prospective employers but this may in fact backfire and cause your prospective employer to become squeamish.

Instead, focus on de-militarizing your military accomplishments, making them understandable and applicable within a civilian context. This may mean adapting civilian names and job postings to your military postings and jobs in order that your prospective employer might better understand what you have to offer the company.

Contrary to popular belief, turning your military resume into a civilian resume does not involve completely toning down all references to the military. In fact, your military experience is an asset, emphasizing character traits such as loyalty, perseverance and dedication. The key is simply getting your prospective employer to understand that about you.

How To Use A Sample Resume To Develop Your Resume

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Whether you have just entered the job market or you are looking to switch jobs, one of the first things any job seeker will have to do is to have an appropriate resume ready. While this use to be a huge stumbling block for most people a few years ago, the internet, with its treasure trove of information and resources, has made changed all that.

If you browse through the internet, you will find several websites offering guidelines, tips, guides and even sample resumes that are all geared towards helping you write a great resume. A sample resume can be among the most useful resources found online to help you write your own resume, but you must first learn how to use it effectively for it to be truly useful to you.

First and foremost, you need to gather the content of your own resume before you start looking at a sample resume. While sample resumes do offer some assistance in the way of content, they offer much more useful guidance on other aspects of resume writing, such as formatting and tone.

If you are unsure of the specific details and personal information that should be included in a resume, you need only do a simple search online to find hundreds of websites that will tell you exactly what details you need to include in your resume. You will also need to include a cover letter with your resume and this is where having access to a sample resume can be very useful.

Getting Ideas From A Sample Resume

The most common mistake people make when they make use of a sample resume to help them write their own resumes is that they tend to copy wholesale from the sample resume. The problem with this is that the resume that you then end up with is extremely generic and most interviewers will recognize that you simply copied everything from a sample resume.

The better way to go about making use of a sample resume is to use it to generate ideas for your own resume and for general guidelines. If, for example, you are unsure of how to format your resume, then the sample resume will provide you with an example of how to format your resume professionally. There are certain things that you can change, however, such as the order in which certain information appears, the font, and overall layout.

A sample resume is also an excellent resource to have if you are struggling with your cover letter. The resume cover letter is one area where most people struggle, since it requires that you write several paragraphs that should ultimately have the effect of making your interviewer want to hire you. That is definitely not an easy task.

A sample resume that also offers a sample cover letter will provide you with guidance as to how you should word your cover letter and what you should include in it. General guidelines such as emphasizing why you are suitable for a particular job and why you are applying for that job can be picked up by analyzing a sample resume.

Customer Service Resume Example Writing Tips

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There are many opportunities for customer service representatives. Virtually every industry today utilizes employees in these positions but that doesn’t mean a well-written, powerful resume isn’t in order. With all of the customer service openings today, there are just as many people looking for work, too. You must have a cover letter and a resume that stands out from the rest of the crowd in order to get that call for an interview. If you are not very sure what constitutes a good resume for this position, take a look at a customer service resume example or two over the internet.

Writing Tips for a Customer Service Resume

Some of the best writing tips include those specifically dedicated to formatting. Now is not the time to utilize colored, strange fonts, or any paper but a high quality resume paper. Traditional formatting is required. Standing out because your resume is formatted differently is not the way you want to be remembered. Standing out because your experience, education, and qualifications speak for yourself is what you want to be remembered for.

A customer service resume example should emphasize any experience you have in the field, but it should also list specific responsibilities. If you have trained new employees, include it under your employment history. If you can quantify one of the responsibilities, that’s even better. Numbers and percentages draw the attention of the reader. For example, “Implemented new training program for new employees” is not as effective as “Spearheaded the implementation of a new training program, which has reduced turnover by 30%.”

Whether you have worked in a call center or in a clothing store, you will have had training about how to handle your responsibilities as customer service representative. Include this training, even if it wasn’t formally obtained through a college. This is especially helpful for those who have not completed a degree program through a college.

What Not to Include

You’ll notice when you look at a customer service resume example online, there are several things that are not included. You don’t have to include references, as employers know to ask for them if they need them. You don’t need a resume that is so full of information that it takes up more than one page. You don’t need to shrink the text down to a minute size just so it will fit, either. Keep any abbreviations limited to those that any layperson would know, as the person reviewing the resume may not understand them.

What You Must Do

You should proofread your work carefully. Grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors tend to jump right off the paper. However, if you’ve been working on your resume for hours, those errors might not be so apparent. Have someone else look over your resume before you send it off.

You should always include a cover letter with your resume. This is often the first impression that a potential employer will get of you and it needs to be positive. Highlight your customer service experience and training, as well as any special certifications. Bulleted lists work great for any quantifying information you can add, as most people’s eyes are drawn to bulleted lists first. Always include your contact information, unless otherwise specified.

Use a customer service resume example to get ideas for your resume content, but don’t copy it directly. Many employers will check to see if any information has been copied. These are the best tips for landing your dream customer service job.