As a Third Party Recruiter, recruiting for the plastics industry, one of the least pleasant things I have to ask a job seeker is “why did you leave your last employer?”.   This question must be asked because, it is one of the first questions the company’s hiring manager or human resources representative asks us, and if the candidate has had several recent job changes, they want to know the reason for all of the recent job changes. 

I am writing this blog to suggest to unemployed job seekers, as many unemployed job seekers are now doing, to place a brief reason for each recent job change on their resume.   Reasons for being unemployed include; downsized along with 1/3 of the plant production employees, plant is closing, operations are being relocated to Asia, company has ceased doing R&D, etc.   Stating the reason for being unemployed on the resume can be a big help for the job seeker because some potential employers feel that anyone who is out of work is because of poor job performance.  The hiring manager may pass on a candidate simply because they are not currently employed, if the reason for unemployment is not included on their resume.

Obviously, some companies have used the economy as an excuse to shed poor performers but  the majority of  unemployed job seekers are unemployed because companies have to make deep cuts (sometimes deeper than they probably should have).   If you were terminated from a company for performance reasons, you might not want to include that on you resume, but if you were merely downsized, I see no reason not to include an explanation on the resume. 

There has been a great deal of upheaval in the plastics industry over the past couple of years and being unemployed in the plastics industry should no longer have the stigma attached it once did.

I am a Third Party Recruiter (Headhunter) specializing in finding employees for the Plastics Industry.  In today’s buyer (employer) driven market, well written resumes are even more important than ever.  Unfortunately, I continue to see many poorly written resumes.  In order to help job seekers write better resumes, I am relisting a Blog I wrote a couple of years ago.   This is a basic chronological resume in an outline format that you can use to develop your resume.  The Chronological resume is good to use for mailing, hand delivery or sending to recruiters.  This assumes you are using a word processor, which should be Microsoft Word 97 or more recent.   Adobe .pdf files are also acceptable.

 I.  PERSONAL INFORMATION
      A. YOUR NAME IN CAPITAL LETTERS  WITH BOLD PRINT. 
           a. Use Ariel, New Times Roman or Courier.  Nothing fancy.  
      B.  Your Mailing Address in slightly smaller type.
      C.  Your Telephone Numbers.
           a.  Home telephone number
           b.  Cell phone number
           c.   No work number.  Just too dangerous if working.
      D.  Your email address.
           a.   If you are still working, do not include your company’s email address because the company has access to it.

 II.  OBJECTIVE -  This is the most controversial part of this type of resume, and I recommend that you do not include it.
       A.  Provide an objective only if you know where resume is being sent and it matches the job.
       B.   Probably better to attach a cover letter to the resume and leave off the objective. 

III.  WORK HISTORY
        A.  List every major position since starting your career in descending order (military service is optional but should be include if it relates to the position you are appling for).
               a.  If you have worked for many years and can bunch some jobs, do so.
        B.   Show dates that jobs were worked starting with most recent.
               a.  If you had several jobs at the same company,  make sure the
                    first date covers entire time at the company.
               b.  Then provide dates for different positions held within the company.
        C.   List company where you worked in bold print.
               a.  If company name has changed, reference the new name.
        D.  Write a single sentence telling what the company manufactures or sells, this is very important.
               a.  In today’s market, this is one of the most important things you can write because companies want people who have experience in their industry.
        E.   Job title or titles
        F.   Write a brief statement of job responsibilities, do not provide a job description.
               a.  The key here is brief so you have room for accomplishments.  
        G.   List your major accomplishments!
               a.  This is the most important part of your resume.
               b.  List accomplishments using specific accomplishments, i.e. saved $2
                    million on project xxxx.
               c.  Make sure to list your accomplishments, not a team’s.  Estimate your
                    part of team savings.
               d.  Do not be afraid of looking like you are bragging.  
               e.  If  your list of accomplishement do no make you look like you are bragging, write more accomplishments.
         H.  Mention any significant awards the company may have received. 

 IV.  EDUCATION
         A.  List Degrees with the most recent first.
               a.  If you list part of a degree, make sure it does not look like you have a
                    degree.
               b.  If you have a A.S. degree and you received a B.S. in the same field,
                    do not list it.

  V.  SKILLS
        A.  Try to chose skills that relate directly to the job you think you might
              be applying for.
               a.  Do not list skills that everyone is expected to have these days.
                      i. Microsoft Word.
                     ii. Excel
         B.  Technical skills that relate to you degree(s) are best, i.e. product design, injection molding, etc.

 VI.  PERSONAL INTERESTS OR INFORMATION
        A.  Never, never list personal interests, even if you think they relate to the 
             job.
              a.  An exception might be if you know the company supports 
                   Junior Achievement, etc.
        B.  Do not mention your family on the resume.
        C.  Never list Church or Secret Society affiliations on a resume.
        D.  Never mention any physical or mental problems on the resume.
        E.  Even though it is easy to figure out, do not list age.

VII.  LIST PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
        A.  This is not a requirement but it is a good thing to do.

IIX.  DO NOT LIST REFERENCES
         A.  Just state that references will be supplied upon establishment of mutual
              interest.

Finally: The optimum length for a resume is probably two pages so expect to do several re-writes.  Also find someone that can be brutally honest and ask them to critique the resume.  This is very important.

I have been a third party recruiting doing staffing for the Plastics Industry for the last 12 years.  I receive about 100 resumes each day and after all this time I am still amazed by how poorly written so many of these resumes are.  I am not talking about the obvious mistakes such as misspellings (is it possible that there are still people in the US that have not heard of spell checkers?) but about structural problems such as listing job duties instead of accomplishments and not giving any indication about the product(s) their employer manufacturers. 

Since my past posts on resume writing appear to have gone unheeded, I am appealing to a higher power, GOD, to help resume writers.  God’s resume can be found in the first two chapters of Genesis in the Bible.   

The first thing worth noting is that GOD used a chronological format for his resume.  He carefully lists each of his six jobs or tasks and states that each one of them took a day.  Theologians can argue how long each day really was but the important thing to note is the basic format GOD used.   He did not start the first chapter of Genesis with a list of key words.  The keywords are contained within the text.

The second thing to note is that GOD told us his accomplishments intead of presenting us with  his job description.   I don’t know that a job description for being GOD would have been very informative, just as a candidate providing his or her job description is not very informative for the recruiter reading the resume.

The third thing worth noting is that GOD went to a great deal of effort to describe his products, e.g. “In the beginning GOD created the heaven and the earth.”  He went on to describe the animals, humans, etc. that he created.  Companies today want to hire individuals that understand their products and clients.  Long gone are the days that individual were hired based on their potential with the belief that they could learn everything they needed to know to make them successful.  Companies just don’t have the time to train like the use to.   Companies want to know that you can hit the ground running so showing that you are familiar with the products and customers that the company makes and serves in paramount.  So many candidates think that recruiters should be familiar with all the companies in the United States (the World?) that they do not have to provide any information about the company(s) where they have worked.  This is a big mistake because third party and corporate recruiters do not know or have the time to research every company on a resume.  If information about the candidates past companies is not on the resume the recruiter must assume the candidate does not have the requisite experience and pass over the candidate.

Also worth noting is that GOD provides the method(s) he used to create his products in Genesis, chapter 1 verse 9, “GOD spoke”.   Obviously, we cannot create planets by speaking but we can motivate people or lead product launches by speaking.  More importantly we can improve the products our company manufactures by using methods, such as, Lean Manufacturing, 5S, Six Sigma, etc. methodologies to get the job done so make sure they are included in the resume.

I know that I am a lowly third party recruiter so taking advice from me might be difficult but hopefully looking at a resume written by God will help with resume writing process.

I am a third party recruiter who receives over 100 resumes per week.  Most of those resumes are responding to postings I have place on several thousand job boards, or on my own web site.  When I post a job opening, I carefully spell out the job requirements.  Job seekers responding to my posting often have very few, or none, of the job skill and experience requirements in their resumes.  When I respond to the candidate via e-mail, or call them, and inform them that they don’t fit the job requirements, the job seeker often responds by telling me that they have the requisite skills but they failed to include the information in the resume.  

A Resume is not just a formality, it is the key to unlocking the company’s hiring door.  If the information on the resume does not include the  information the hiring company wants, no amount of cajoling by the recruiter will get the hiring company to interview the candidate.  With the easy access to word processing software these days, there is no excuse for not tailoring a resume to fit the job description unless the job seeker does not have the requisite job skills and experience.  If a job seeker does not have the experience and job skills the company wants, they should not be responding to the positing by a third party recruiter for that particular position anyway.  If the job seeker is responding to the posting in order to get help from the third party recruiter with their job search, that should be clearly stated somewhere in the response.

I know many candidates believe that third party recruiters should “think outside the box” and present them to the hiring company anyway but that is not what companies are paying us to do.  Companies provide lists of qualifications they want met and that is that.  Companies are not looking for creativity when they hire a third party recruiter, they are looking to have their hiring needs met period. 

The perfect resume probably has not been written but a resume does not have to be perfect, it merely has to be good enough to get you a job interview.  The following 12 items should help in your efforts to write an effective, if not perfect, resume. 

1. Never, never lie on your resume.  Even stating that you are still working for a company when you are merely collecting some type of unemployment compensation from the company is a lie.  Intentionally misleading people into believing you have a degree when you do not is a lie.  Leaving a job off the resume that you worked at for six months is a lie.  I was ready to hire an engineer several years ago and I was very happy to have found someone after a long search.  I told the headhunter I was working with that I was ready to make the candidate an offer but when I found out he was not employed, I decided not to make the offer.   I withdrew the offer because during the interview I asked him if he was still working and he said yes.  I figured if he would lie to me about that he would lie to me when he came to work for me and that was a risk I was unwilling to take.
2. Make sure all contact information is correct.  I once had an executive making over $250,000 get very angry with me because my client company would not send him his interview expense check.  When I checked into it, I found out the check had been returned to the company several times.  The candidate had an incorrect address on the resume.  I have seen many resumes with incorrect telephone numbers.  This is not as important in the email era, unless your email address is wrong also, but it is not a good thing.
3. Make sure you have NO spelling errors on the resume.  Virtually everyone has access to word processing program with a spell checker.  If you do not, invest in a word processing program and use the spell checker.  Spelling errors send everyone who reads the resume a message that you don’t really care.  I once had a candidate who after interviewing with a company felt compelled to write a thank you letter, which is normally a good thing.  Unfortunately, the thank you note was hand written and full of spelling errors.  The company’s offer letter and the candidate’s thank you note passed each other in the mail.  After receiving the thank you note, the company withdrew the offer.
4. Talk about your accomplishment’s not the team’s accomplishments.  The team (in most cases) is not trying to get the job, you are.
5. List accomplishments, not your job description.  The hiring company wants to know what you did to make your company more successful, not that you watered the plants every morning.  This can be very important.  I rewrote an executive candidate’s resume (for a fee) that had been out of work for six months.  The main thing I changed was his to list his accomplishments and eliminated his duties.  A few weeks later I received a letter from him stating he had 6 interviews and was deciding between 3 offers.   He also sent me an additional check.
6. Minimize or eliminate the use of bullet  points (like this one) and fancy graphics.  My computer reads most of the resumes sent to me before I do and it gets very upset if it has to sift through bullet points or cute winking happy faces.  Also, more and more hiring companies are reading resumes directly into data bases and bullet points and graphics make this a slow process. 
7. Do not use tables.   Tables present a whole host of problems if the recruiter has to make a change on the resume or if the company is trying to feed the resume directly into their data base.
8. Try to keep the resume to two pages.  One page is usually too short but more that 2 page resumes often get ignored because no one has time to read more than two pages.
9. Do not call your resume a Curriculum Vitae.  They are all the rage in Europe but a true Curriculum Vitae is almost an autobiography and no one in Human Resources wants to see that.
10. Do not list references on your resume.  There are so many reasons not to do this that I do not want to list them here.  One of the biggest reasons not to list references is that the person you have listed as a reference may quickly become your strongest competitor for the job after the recruiter talks to him or her. 
11. Do not put your Social Security Number on your resume.   This seems obvious in this era of identity theft but I still see resumes with Social Security numbers.
12. Do not list personal items such as hobbies, number of children, church affiliations, etc.  These can only hurt you because most Human Resource Managers think they are Psychiatrists and if they see you like to read, they automatically assume your are an introvert and this could be a bad thing if you are interviewing for the Plant Manager position.  Also, deep down most companies believe you should not have a life outside the company.  If you have time for hobbies that means you could be working longer hours developing that perfect report no one is going to read.  I interviewed with a well known maker of orange juice in Florida several years ago for a management position.  The Vice President of Operations explained that he expected everyone to work on Saturday and after taking your family to church on Sunday morning, you should probably come into the office in the afternoon (if you had to go to church or synagog on Saturday, I guess you were in big trouble).  I think a lot of executives still believe all your waking moments should revolve around work, even though they know better than to say it.  I got the job offer but turned it down. 

I just read another Internet article about how job seekers should get out of the box.  After reading the article I still could not figure out why the author seems to thing job seekers should “get out of the box”.  Of course the writer is just a writer, trying to tell corporate recruiters and job seekers, trying to work directly with corporate recruiters, how to dance together.  The only problem with his advice is that it is wrong for the most part. 

In this era of job hunting, companies are looking for people with skills that match the job description exactly.  Why?

• Most companies do not have the personnel needed to train someone for six months (almost everyone in Corporate America is overworked or perceive themselves to be overworked.
• Companies are operating on tighter and tighter profit margins, especially in the plastics industry.  They cannot afford to pay someone for several months who is not adding anything to the bottom line.
• Overworked Human Resource Departments do not have the time to read a resume and try to figure out if the individual has the qualifications the functional manager wants.

As a third party recruiter, I try my best to define my candidate’s qualifications for the position so no one in the company has to deal with ambiguity.  Some candidates want to think of themselves as “out of the box” kind of people (an enigma wrapped in a …………….) which very often works against them when they are hunting for a new job.  I usually ask these individuals, “what do you want to do when you grow up,” in order to get them to focus on what they are really looking for in a job or a career.

The ”thinking outside of the box” concept is so old that I keep hoping it will die of old age but it seems that when writers or motivational speakers cannot think of anything better to say, they reach for the old “out of the box” cliche.  Thinking outside of the box is fine when solving a problem but if you want to increase you chances of getting a job, get in the box and wrap a yellow ribbon around it.

Frequently, in my role as a Technical Recruiter for the Plastics Industry, I respond to resumes sent to me for specific positions via e-mail with “your experience does not fit the job requirements” and almost as frequently I receive the following in response “I just have too much experience to put it all in my resume”. Resume writers are told to keep their resumes to one or two pages, so why do I expect job seekers to put so much information on their resume? The answer is, I do not expect job seekers to put all of their experience in their resume, what I expect them to do is to put the experience on the resume that is pertinent to the job they are seeking. If the candidate is responding to a posting for a position on a job board for a Maintenance Manager, two words that should appear somewhere in the resume are Maintenance and Manager.

Ten years ago or more writing only one resume and having it printed on fine or colored paper made a lot sense because it was so difficult to change a resume but in this era of cheap (free on Google) word processors, writing only one resume makes no sense. Each resume should be tailored for the position the job seeker wants. Trying to respond to every position with the same resume is a mistake, especially if the position calls for experience the job seeker has, but does not have in the resume. If the job seeker does not have the required experience, then he or she should probably not be applying for the position in the first place. Just responding to a job posting because one lives in the same town and wants to stay there wastes everyone’s time, and may prevent a good candidate from getting the position.

Some experts say that a cover sheet can be used to fill in experience that has been left out of the resume. I agree with using a cover sheet to tell the recruiter the position being applied for and to highlight some pertinent experience, training, and/or education, but the resume should still relate to position the job seeker wants. If the resume gets too long (sometimes a well written 3 or 4 page resume is not that bad), try leaving things out of the resume such as; I worked my way through college as a sack boy at A&P. Paying your own way through college twenty years ago may have been important when applying for the first, or second, position after graduation but twenty years later it is irrelevant.

The bottom line is that when applying for a job, read the job description thoroughly and respond only if the experience and educational requirements are shown somewhere in the resume. No recruiter, be it a headhunter or a company Human Resources Recruiter, has the time to sift through a resume and try to read between the lines to determine if the job seeker is worth interviewing. Also, there is almost never a second chance to change the recruiter’s mind once they have decided to reject the job seeker’s resume. An indignant response to the recruiter’s rejection e-mail or letter rarely gets them to change their mind, they have moved on to the next candidate.