What Resume Inconsistences Tell A Potential Employer

I have been reviewing a lot of resumes lately. It's that time of year where new graduates are launching their job searches and older job seekers are returning to the hunt after the holiday break. In the last week or so I have reviewed perhaps 150 resumes. The owners of the resumes appear to be intelligent and educated. But the one thing that all the resumes have in common is some kind of formatting inconsistency such as:

• Multiple font types and sizes
• Different bullet sizes and indent widths
• Varying number of spaces between resume sections
• Non-parallel structure of job duty statements
• Irregular order of employment information (job title, employer, location and dates)
• Missing information such as dates of graduation or employment

Granted, I was sent the resume because the owner felt it needed an objective eye. But, some of these inconsistencies and flaws are so basic that a sophomore in high school could catch them. This experience has made me pause and reflect: What do these inconsistencies tell a potential employer about the resume owner?

As the owner of a flawed resume, are you sending the message that you are not proficient in the use of a word processor or basic proofreading? When a college graduate uses bullets of different sizes and indent widths, I don't buy s/he can't use a word processor. After all, in four years of college, they probably wrote many term papers that contained bullets and surely their professor(s) would have pointed out such a basic error!

I think the problem goes much deeper and is at the heart of their employment value. Inconsistencies in formatting don't suggest a lack of proficiency to me. Rather, the inconsistencies I've cited above paint a picture of a person who does not check his work, who doesn't seem bothered by submitting flawed work, who can't tell if his work is flawed, and who may want someone else to do the 'heavy lifting.' This is not an attractive portrait, for sure.

You may feel I am being much too tough. After all, they contacted me for help, so aren't they doing the things that I imply they should being doing? That's a fair argument. But, let me broaden the example. The people who sent me their resume to review are asking for help. But, are there others who do not and think what they send out is just fine? Well, I have the perspective of being 56 years old -- a life time of work experiences behind me -- and 11 years in the job search assistance business. My perspective has told me that most people are not asking for help. Many people send out sloppy resumes and they don't understand why they are not being called for job interviews.

Today's job market can be unforgiving. For many jobs, employers can source 100 resumes or more. And, only a handful of those candidates will be called in for an interview. The rest of the group may get a rejection letter, but many will get nothing at all. How does one correct this problem? It comes back to my lead question in this blog article: What do resume inconsistencies tell a potential employer about you?

A resume is much more than a record of your employment and an inventory of your skills. Resumes tell a story about your career. How you succeeded (and failed). How you "built" the house of your career. But, on a deeper level, a resume tells a potential employer about you as a person and human being. You may be a crackerjack computer whiz but if you don't check your work, do I really want to hire you? You may have rare skills that I need but if you do not go the extra mile, so to speak, and do not do the best  job possible, will hiring you be more trouble than it is worth? If you are the most talented person I have interviewed in years, yet you do not have that "sixth sense" that tells you something isn't right and you need to find some help to correct the problem, aren't you wasting your talent because you don't know how to follow up?

You may say that I am being too picky. After all, resumes are uploaded into databases so formatting doesn't matter. You may even add that many employers want un-formatted resumes. If this is your defense for a error-ridden resume, you are missing my greater point as well as the purpose of a resume: to persuade. I am not persuaded by a resume owner who uses 3 different fonts on his resume and has a mish-mash of irregularities within it. The only thing I am persuaded of is the owner of the resume is disorganized.

How to Handle Virtual, Contract and Self Employment on a Resume

Many years ago, I owned a business and, after selling it, looked for a regular, full time job. I found out very quickly, self-employment was not always an asset; sometimes it was considered a threat to those who never started something new. I never got the job. About five years ago, on  a lark, I interviewed for full-time job that required a technical writing portfolio. While I was not looking for a job per se, I decided to go on the interview. When I interviewed with the boss, I was told that they had hired contract writers before (for this full time position) and it wasn't a good experience because they had a tendency to leave after 6 months because they wanted to "be free." I didn't get the job on that one, either.

I won't say all self-employed or contract workers experience difficulties in obtaining full-time employment, but as non-traditional work is growing, and people form S-corporations to run out of their homes, it becomes more important in how you handle this employment on your resume to prevent being screened out early in the hiring process or pose a threat to an insecure boss.

Early Career
How you handle this employment depends on your career level. If you are a new graduate and have taken a 3-month contract job to get some experience, you should consider the contract job as regular employment. Use the  same format you would for a regular full-time job. Sometimes job seekers will place "via ABC Staffing Agency" beside the name of the company you worked for. This technique clarifies the employment relationship. But, I have found this technique is unnecessary. Potential employers are more concerned about what you did and what you can do for them than what temp agency you worked for. In any event, the actual "employer" in your contract gig will come out in the first job interview. Just so everything can be documented, you will be fine.

Virtual employment is the newest kind of contract work. This type of work is done online via a bidding network such as elance.com, odesk.com, or vworker.com. Since the virtual worker doesn't work for these websites, and sometimes their actual "employer" is an individual or a business outside of the U.S., it becomes a more of a challenge in how this contract employment is treated on a resume. How you treat it would depend on who you work for and how long. If you had worked virtually for a business and provided remote tech support services, I would not mention the websites I cited above; rather, I would use the name of the client and explain on the resume that it is a "remote position." If you work for the company on a regular basis, you will have a supervisor or a project manager, so it is essentially like full-time employment.

However, if your virtual contract work consists of many employers over very short term periods (i.e., 1 day to 1 week), then I would use the website as the "employer" and describe five projects you worked on as bullet points. The challenge here is identifying your supervisor at the website because there is none. The website is simply a job task marketplace and a payment processor. You will then have to select one or more of the employers you worked for as your boss. Nonetheless, this is an imperfect solution, and that's why it is very important that you provide very rich detail about your virtual or non-traditional employment because the detail gives it a higher degree of credibility.

Mid Career
The way you handle contract or virtual employment on a resume changes when you have 5 to 10 years of experience. With this amount of experience, if you simply list your contract jobs as if they are regular, full-time jobs, you may inadvertently be labeled as "a job jumper," which has always had a negative connotation in the hiring process. Some hiring managers think job jumpers have problems holding a job or getting along with people and that makes them unreliable and someone to avoid hiring. But, even this is changing as the job creation of contract work is increasing at a more rapid pace than regular, full-time jobs. So, mid-career people should shorten the time span of their resume while deepening the information for each contract job. For example, instead of listing 10 contract jobs over the past 10 years, just list the last 6 you've had over the past 6 years. With the 6 contract jobs listed on your resume, double the information you use to discuss each job. List the skills you used on the job, the duties, the responsibilities, training completed, and the achievements.

Late Career
Consulting and contract jobs used to be the norm for late career professionals, not early- or mid-career people. After all, by the time you get 15 or more years of experience you have contacts, inside connections and a deep knowledge of products and services such that you run a job search in the hidden job market and your asking price would be above and beyond most pay scales. The problem created with contract work at this time is that with a long career, you have a greater chance of having employment gaps, career changes and other employment inconsistencies. So, a contract work entry on the resume becomes a common way to cover up these "red flags."

The solution is to provide incontrovertible evidence of what you do and who you did it for. This is a modification of the approach I described for the mid-career person. Let me illustrate this with an example:

I was working with a 50-year old job seeker who had a career of helping new ventures market their products. As is the nature of start up companies, the employment is short-term and contract-oriented. As we went over his resume, he first called himself a Business Development Consultant and did not identify an employer. The first red flag. Then he described his duties as: Preparation of business development plans with a view to securing venture capital for start-up businesses. Sounds somewhat vague, doesn't it? The second red flag. His goal was to find a steady, regular job as a Director of Marketing.

At face value, I thought, "good luck." But, there is a way to deal it. It's all about the detail. Even though he had a non-traditional employment, he could leverage it to his advantage by increasing the amount of detail and quantifying the achievements. So, he changed things around on his resume in the following way:

B2B-Contract and Consulting Business Service Provider
SUMMARY: Provided Business Development and Marketing Communication support for Start-up, Venture Capital and Emerging Industry Sectors.

• Consulted with the following companies: incom, inc., 4tobe.com, vanguardone.com, New Materials LLC, Nanotechnology Manufacturing, Inc.
• Interpreted market intelligence data enabling the overview and development of B2B business models, platforms, strategies, and market placement for $50-500K start-up projects
• Managed a $300K marketing budget resulting in $4 million in product sales
• Implemented business process development with a new operating procedures and IT platform resulting in an enrollment increase of 38% and a revenue increase of 22%

When a recruiter reads this entry, she does not see red flags because the detail is rich, objective and quantified. She has the name of the companies and can go research them or contact them for references.

How To Target a Resume to a Career Objective

An essential resume writing skill today is the ability to target a resume to a specific job ad or a career objective. The verb "target" is used in a special way in this context so let me define it. Years ago, job seekers would write a resume based upon their education and experience. It would have a standard format and functioned as an employment history record. Job seekers would take their resume, print out a 100 copies and send them out to employers. So, all the employers would receive the same resume, no matter what the job entailed. This is an example of an untargeted resume. These resumes were good enough to get interviews for their owners because employers had a small talent pool to choose from. But, in subsequent years, as technology has created a very large, documented and data-warehoused talent pool (via resume databases), the nature of how employers select resumes has changed. These changes drove changes in how resumes are written and the "targeted" resume was born.

A targeted resume is really a resume that emphasizes not simply a job seeker's skills and experience, but the relevant skills and experience for a specific job and a specific employer. So, a targeted resume is flexible and variable depending on what the employer says it needs in the job ad. So, the phrase "targeting a resume" describes the process by which a resume is closely adapted to the requirements delineated in a specific job ad.

A targeted resume is more than an employment history record. While it contains all your job experience, it also includes additional information that weights that information to what is relevant for a specific job application. It also contains more summary information that helps to focus the reader's focus on the relevant details. So, in a targeted resume, you will often see information repeated. This usually means that a targeted resume is longer than an untargeted resume. The length is not a problem since most targeted resumes today are transmitted electronically.

Let me work through an example. I had a client who asked me to rewrite his resume. He was a technology consultant and wanted to have his resume targeted to three different positions:

• Digital Media and Analytics
• Business Development/Client Service
• Start Up Operations/ New Ventures

His original resume was in the following format:

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, San Francisco, CA (2007 – Present)
Technology Consultant - Enterprise Intelligence (Analytics)

• Created SOWs and managed relationships that led to over $2M of work
• Managed 15 person team to integrate Salesforce.com with client’s core business system, which helped the sales/marketing process
• Tracked a global remediation for one of the largest banks in the world by working with teams of over 200 people in Poland and India

JP Morgan Chase Bank, Chicago, IL (2003 - 2007)                                    
Portfolio Analyst

• Optimized portfolios exceeding $2B in assets using internal platforms, Excel models and monthly reporting
• Won new business through developing high-profile relationships with portfolio managers
• Led a three person deal team over six months to resolve discrepancies in the group’s largest portfolio resulting in the recovery of $1.5M+ in funds

EDUCATION   

• University of Minnesota, B.S. Economics, May 2003

SKILLS

• Stradegy, AdBuyer, Microsoft Power Point and Excel, MySQL, Bloomberg, Adobe Photoshop, HTML, Certified Information Systems Security Professional/CISSP, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce.com     

(end of original resume)

The resume looks pretty good, doesn't it? He seems to be a highly skilled and experienced professional. But he wants this resume to be used for the three different objectives  I cited above. The reason this version of the resume would not achieve his goals is that it is an untargeted resume. Had a recruiter seen his resume in a database, she would call him for a technology consultant or a portfolio analyst position. That's all she has to go on -- his previous job titles or job skills. Nothing in this resume hints towards his interest in working for a new venture or his qualifications for a digital media job (What kind?) The resume reader (recruiter) doesn't have a reference to understand his interests or objective. When I asked him why he started with his experience and didn't even include an objective, he said,

"I have never had text at the top of my resume. However, having reviewed resumes in the past, I think that the less text, the better."

Clearly, he has a preference for an untargeted resume. But after a few email exchanges with him, I convinced him that to make his resume more appealing to a recruiter, he needed to target the resume. This process began with a little research. We reviewed a number of job ads and the stated requirements. I wanted him to learn what the employer wanted. In other words, I wanted him to think about his resume from the point of view of the employer. Then, for each position we expanded upon the skills and achievements he did that would be of interest or have relevance to the employer. But the actual targeting of the resume occurs in what I call the "header section." This section contains an objective, summary and key skills. The header section is drawn from the job ad, employer research, and the key attributes the job seeker wants to "market" to the employer.

The rewritten resume turned into the following:

Managing Consultant and Technology Entrepreneur 

Performance Improvement | Start Up Ventures | Digital Media

Entrepreneurial, collaborative, and versatile consulting professional with 7 years of progressive experience spanning project management, and process improvement across Business Development, Media, and Technology. Proficient at managing large, global client teams, creating strong relationships with client executives, and organizing activities across multiple business units to achieve aggressive project timelines. Able to leverage entrepreneurial skills as well as technical experience to foster an environment of mutual trust, high productivity, and accountability.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, San Francisco, CA (2007 – Present)
Sr. Technology Consultant  (2008 -- Present).

• Created SOWs and managed relationships that led to over $2M of work
• Managed 15 person team to integrate Salesforce.com with client’s core business system, which helped the sales/marketing process
• Interfaced with top executives and planned client and team outings, which led to stronger client relationships and more sales opportunities  

Consultant (2007 -- 2008)

• Tracked a high-profile global remediation for one of the largest banks in the world by working with teams of over 200 people in Poland and India under very short deadlines
• Gained hundreds of man hours by acting as project manager and taking the initiative to move 300+ resources to a faster share drive
• Used MySQL and visual analytics to display the data quality of every data element at one of the largest banks in the country

(end of rewritten resume)


While there are no hard-and-fast rules of creating both the header section and the targeted resume, you will know that you have properly targeted your resume when someone can quickly skim the resume and determine what you are seeking in a few seconds. The targeted resume has the additional benefit of a higher keyword density. This attribute usually will improve the resume's visibility and ranking in a resume database.