Your door to your career entry will largely depend on your resume. An impressive resume will definitely be of great assistance to you during your job seek journey.
Before you embark on this task, you must first understand that job search requires as much effort and planning as any other campaign or business building efforts requires. Proper thinking must take place to understand to point you to the right direction on where and how to start. If not you are going to be LOST throughout the journey.
Usually, I would refer to Sun Tze art of war as a key source of guide when planning for my job search process. Before any campaign or battle kicks off, it pays to under the terrain and knows your enemies well to develop an edge for your battle. Which is one of the reasons why you will find that all marketing campaigns or business plans begins with situational analysis (scanning the external environment for opportunities and threats).
To all the fresh grads out there, I believe the economic conditions and the number of potential job seekers will definitely be something you need to take into consideration during your job seek process. Given that the number of fresh graduates will be high every year. Couple with the other strong competitors from foreign talents and employees with relevant experiences who are seeking for new pasture, you definitely would be facing a great challenge in your battle. In another words, you will be experiencing an enormous amount of clutter you need to break through in order to capture the attention of your potential employers, and have your resume shortlisted.
To do that, you have got to be DIFFERENT. Get CREATIVE. Do the things that others will not likely be doing when preparing their resume. There are THREE things you could consider when writing your resume that can make a different.
(1) The STRUCTURE of your resume
The structure of your resume helps organize a flow that tells a story about you. There’s no right or wrong structure. So long it tells a story about you in a clear and easy to follow manner.
What you should do:
Google for resume samples to get a feel of what everyone else will be following as the skeleton structure for their resume. And make sure you avoid using the same structure but be sure your newly design structure flows in a logical and easy to follow fashion.
HINTS:
– Get graphical to illustrate your strengths, skill set, characteristics, etc
– Make it into a book instead of the standard resume structure
(2) The FORMAT of your resume
Will your finished resume be in the form of pdf, word document, PPT, printed format, CD Rm, flash, html format?
What you should do:
Pick a format that compliments your delivery method.
HINTS:
Ensure that the format you will be using is friendly enough for your potential employers to access and review your resume.
(3) The DELIVERY METHOD of your resume
No matter how well you have crated your resume, it’ll all be gone to waste if it failed to reach the hands of your potential employers. Not only must it reach the hands of your potential employers, it must also be read.
Thus, you will have to consider the most effective ways to deliver your resume to your potential employers. Is it going to be email?
What you should do:
Imagine yourself as the potential employers, how many applicants will be flooding your mail box? Do you think you will have enough time to go through all the applications?
HINTS:
– Have a hardworking email title
– Ensure you have a very hardworking cover letter as your body content for your email. This will help entice the readers to open your resume attached with the email
– Ditch email altogether. Use printed format, and send via mail to the HR / GM / MD / CEO. This way, you can save the hassle of coming up with a hard working email title, designing a good email structure, drafting hardworking content, and developing the email format. Yet, you are almost sure that your resume reach the hands of your potential employers, and very likely they will open it to see what is inside the envelop that is attention to their names.
Take note: Don’t just be creative and different for the sake of being creative and different. You’ll lose the plot. At the end of the day, it must be convincing enough to get you shortlisted for the job interview.
Before you start preparing for your resume, and looking for a suitable job to kick starts your career, I would strongly suggest for you to also read my earlier postings on “Fresh Graduate”, and “How to get into Advertising”, which also helps you in your planning for your career development.
All the best.
Feel free to drop me your views or queries via the comments box or email at ask@strongerhead.com
