Your Job Interview – Your Biggest Fans are in the Room

Every time I’ve ever interviewed a candidate for our company, the minutes before I step into the interview room have always been preceded by emotions of anxious anticipation, excitement and hope. By the time I’ve gotten to the interview stage with a candidate, I’ve done sufficient due diligence to give me reasonable cause for hope. […]

The benefit of “Cold” Job Applications

As I mentioned in a previous piece, employers who place job ads typically receive hundreds of resumes. Thus, if you only apply to posted jobs, you’ll be one of 200 to 300 (or more) resumes in a pile on someone’s desk. In this case, you’ll need a great resume and a bit of luck to […]

Your Resume Part 5 – A Counter-Example

The major struggle of the Fintelligence project is getting in front of educators and asking them to allow me to volunteer my time to speak about Career and Financial Literacy in front of students. More often then not, teachers I speak with are interested but there is very little follow up. It’s likely that having […]

Your Resume Part 4 – Things that waste space

I don’t know how “one-page rule” for resumes ever became a thing. The (conventional?) thinking seems to be that if your resume is too long, hiring managers will get bored or annoyed. In my years of hiring at our company, there has never been a correlation between the length of a resume we received and […]

Your Resume Part 3 – Outcomes Matter

If I only have 15 to 30 seconds to scan your resume to see if I want to read further, the first thing I’m going to look for is what you’ve achieved for your previous employers. In the business world, outcomes matter. Writing about your own employment history in the context of business outcomes you’ve […]

Your Resume Part 2 – SEO Your Resume

I own a small online marketing company. Our mission is to help our customers WIN in online local search. That is, we use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques to help small businesses appear higher in Google search in their local area. The first step in our process is to identify the keywords their potential customers […]

Your Resume Part 1 – Assume the Reader is Lazy

People (like me) are lazy. When we were busy running (sprinting?) our company, there were so many times when we thought “it would be great to hire someone who could take some of these functions off our plates”. Money was rarely the issue when we contemplated hiring (especially entry-level, part-time or summer help). Rather, it […]