The economy is booming. Unemployment is down. Job hunters have to beat back prospective employers, right?
Not necessarily. Resumes heading for large companies are scanned by computers searching for key words. And just the right job can be hard to get unless you prepare a resume based on what you really want to do, according to Steve Provenzano, a professional resume writer and head of A Advanced Resume Service Inc., with offices in Schaumburg and Roselle.
Provenzano, who says he has written more than 4,000 resumes in 14 years in the resume-writing business, is author of “Top Secret Resumes & Cover Letters” (Dearborn Press, $12.95).
Provenzano offers these tips for preparing a resume:
– The first questions to ask yourself: Where do I want to go, and what kind of work do I like to do?
– The next most important question: What are my five most important skills?
– Biggest mistake job hunters make: Taking their skills for granted.
– How a professional resume writer can help: “We can do a personal interview and help (the job hunter) focus on their skills and abilities,” Provenzano said. “Then we put it in a section that highlights that to the employer. . . . We give them a lot of really decent reasons to interview you.”
– Most unusual fields Provenzano has prepared resumes for: Scuba diving instructor and flower arranger.
– Most difficult job hunter to market: The entry-level graduate “because they don’t have much work history,” he said.
– What works for a new grad: “Develop a resume focusing on what you actually learned in school and on the skills in your jobs,” he said. “If you worked at Domino’s (Pizza), maybe you were in charge of ordering, so you understand working with vendors.”
– Major change in the resume writing business: The Internet. “People see our Web site, and we can interview them by phone and send the resume out by e-mail,” he said.
– How long a resume should be: “We base it on relevance, rather than length,” Provenzano said. “Technical people may have long resumes. We had a guy who had worked for 20 years with IBM, but he didn’t want to do that kind of work anymore. So we did a one-page resume, and it worked for him.”
– Fatal error in developing a resume: Putting together only a work history, making the prospective employer guess what skills were involved in those jobs.
