RWB - Follow-up Week 1 |
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Thank you for purchasing the Resume Workbook |
Thank you for purchasing the Career Tools Resume Workbook.
We designed the Resume Workbook to give you everything you need to create a great resume which will get you interviews. There's even more though, that we know about getting the new job of your dreams.
Over the next 12 weeks, we're going to send you more information that will help you move from where you are now to where you want to be.
Before you start working on your resume, you'll want to create a Career Management Document (CMD). It makes creating your resume and tailoring it for each job you apply for really easy.
It's a document with a title for each role you've held, the dates and the company name. Underneath is a paragraph of all your responsibilities and underneath that a bulleted list of your accomplishments. It looks a lot like the sample resume you'll find in the Resume Workbook. The difference is that the CMD can be as long as it needs to be.
It contains the whole of your career history - so when you need to create your resume, you can cherry pick the most relevant parts.
To hear more about creating a Career Management Document and using it as part of your career documentation system, click here.
We'll be back next week with more practical guidance. If you can't wait, you can find all the follow-up emails here.
If you need a copy of your order for expense or tax purposes, go to your account, and click orders. Select your order and a printable receipt will be available immediately.
The Career Tools Team
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RWB - Follow-up Week 10 |
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Your Resume Workbook - Go For Interest? |
Still wondering about whether a more 'modern' resume will help you more than a boring one page black and white resume? Maybe you've seen the guidance about video resumes and graphic resumes and you're thinking 'they look good'.
To be fair, yes, they look good. The problem with that guidance is that it's based on wrong thinking. Having a resume which looks good isn't the object. The object is to answer the hiring manager's question. Those questions are always the same:
What have you done? How well have you done it?
That's why we emphasize responsibilities and accomplishments on your resume - they specifically answer the hiring manager's questions.
We update our resume guidance every year, but our guidance about responsibilities and accomplishments never changes. That's because hiring managers' questions never change. You can find our yearly updates here.
We'll be back next week with more practical guidance. If you can't wait, you can find all the follow-up emails here.
The Career Tools Team
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RWB - Follow-up Week 11 |
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Your Resume Workbook - Using Linkedin? |
Curious about how your resume fits in with LinkedIn? We recommend you use LinkedIn as a method of building and maintaining your network. But your resume is not LinkedIn and LinkedIn is not your resume.
Your resume is geared to a specific hiring manager and vacancy. Your LinkedIn profile gives a more general overview of your skills.
To create a LinkedIn profile, take the accomplishments from your Career Management Document and select the ones which show the range of your skills and achievements. Your profile needs to have the broadest view of what you have to offer to hiring managers, since it could be viewed by anyone.
We have more guidance on creating a LinkedIn profile.
We'll be back next week with more practical guidance. If you want to move more quickly, you can find all the follow-up emails here.
The Career Tools Team
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RWB - Follow-up Week 12 |
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Your Resume Workbook - From Resumes To Interviews |
Hopefully by now you have a resume you can be proud of and which, more importantly, gets you interviews.
What's the most important thing to remember about interviews? That the interview is about answering the hiring manager's needs, not telling him what you want to tell him.
Our favorite example of this is questions about GPA. The hiring manager asks: 'What was your GPA?' and the candidate says 'well...'. That's not the answer to the question. The answer is a number. It has to be!
Answering the question you're asked is the hardest thing to do in an interview, but the most important.
To be really successful in interviews, you have to be prepared - know your background cold, know what curveballs to expect and how to hit them, and how to ask for an offer.
The Interview Series is our flagship product for job-changers. You get exclusive podcasts about the whole process of interviewing from preparation to follow-up. 60+ podcasts, 20+ videos and a written library - everything you need in incredible detail and our signature, practical, actionable style. We hear every day from people who used the Interview Series, and saw outsized success, like David:
I just wanted to thank you for an excellent interview series product. I interviewed several times a while back without much success. Now that I used the interview series, I aced my recent interview. It was "fabulous" apparently and I just received a wow offer for +35% compensation.
And Josh Willett:
So I bought the Interviewing Series and I have to say it is fantastic. I followed closely your resume (I also submitted it to you when you were reviewing resumes online) and interview recommendations and here are my results: - I get an offer to interview 100% I have submitted my resume - I have received an offer 4 of 5 times using your interview series. My brother, sister, 2 brothers-in-law, sister-in-law have all had similar results.
You can get all the details and buy the series here.
The Career Tools Team
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RWB - Follow-up Week 13 |
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Your Resume Workbook - Feedback |
Would you help us? We'd love to know what you thought of the Resume Workbook product so that we can make it better in the future. (And, don't worry, because you have a lifetime license for it, you'll benefit from any changes we make too.)
- Did you have any technical difficulties with the product?
- Was there too little, too much or just enough information in the product?
- Did you like the follow up emails?
- Did the emails go too fast or too slow?
- Is there anything you wish we'd included?
We'd appreciate answers to any of these questions or anything else you'd like to tell us. You can email us right now.
We wish you the best of luck in your career, and we look forward to serving you in the years to come.
The Career Tools Team
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RWB - Follow-up Week 2 |
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Your Resume Workbook - Overwhelmed? |
Revamping your resume from scratch can be a big job. If you're already overwhelmed, take it slow. This week, open a computer document and list all the jobs you've ever had.
You'll need the company name and your title, and most importantly the dates. If you need to go find your paystubs or tax returns, do that now. Your resume needs to be accurate.
Once you;ve got your list, save that document as "Resume V1" and then save it again as "Companies list". On the second version, add the company address, current phone number and website. None of this data goes on your resume, but it's very useful to have around when you are jobhunting.
Add the name of the person you worked for. You can look them up and see if they're on LinkedIn - this would be a great time to get back in touch.
This is all you have to do this week.
We'll be back next week with more practical guidance. If you want to move more quickly, you can find all the follow-up emails here.
The Career Tools Team
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RWB - Follow-up Week 3 |
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Your Resume Workbook - Responsibilities |
Remember the document we created last week,"Resume V1"? Let's get that out again, and this week, add all the responsibilities for your previous jobs. Don't worry about grammar, or what you should or shouldn't include, just write.
Once you begin to see the trajectory of your career as it looks on paper, you can start refining. First, you need all the information.
If you think of accomplishments as you go, add them, but don't stress. You can leave that to next week if it's too much.
We'll be back next week with more practical guidance. If you want to move more quickly, you can find all the follow-up emails here.
The Career Tools Team.
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RWB - Follow-up Week 4 |
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Your Resume Workbook - Accomplishments |
Now we're going to add your accomplishments to your resume. For every job you've had, what did you achieve? What things did you do which you were proud of? Did you complete any projects? Did you save any money? Did you save any time? Did you increase revenue? Did you meet targets your employer set?
If you're still stuck, here's another way to think of accomplishments: what was the minimum standard that if you didn't do it, you'd have got fired.
For example, if you're a call center representative, you have to take a certain number of calls per hour. Let's say 15. If you don't get that number, you could get fired. When you start to write your accomplishment (assuming you didn't get fired for not reaching the target) you'd say:
Achieved 100% of calls/hour target by monitoring call length.
Easy. We have more accomplishment examples here. Another important topic - how to link your accomplishments and your interview answers - is here.
We'll be back next week with more practical guidance. If you want to move more quickly, you can find all the follow-up emails here.
The Career Tools Team
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RWB - Follow-up Week 5 |
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Your Resume Workbook - Congratulations! |
You've created your Career Management Document!
Once a quarter work to keep this document up to date. It's much easier than having to keep starting over. Now what? We need to turn that Career Management document into a resume. That's what the Resume Workbook is for. Hopefully, you've found out that it contains lots of specifics about how to deal with the different elements of your resume.
If your document is still very long or overwhelming, either go job by job and have a break in between, or go section by section (admin data, responsibilities, accomplishments).
We won't tell you that creating a great resume is easy. It's hard and quite boring. But the rewards are worth it!
If you're having trouble fitting your resume onto one page, there's some hints at the end of the Workbook to help you do that, and also a video on your product page: https://www.manager-tools.com/start-using-resume-workbook.
We'll be back next week with more practical guidance. If you want to move more quickly, you can find all the follow-up emails here.
The Career Tools Team
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RWB - Follow-up Week 6 |
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Your Resume Workbook - Put Your Resume Aside |
The problem we have when we've been working hard on something is that we start to see not what's actually there, but what we intended to write.
There's a couple of ways to ferret out those mistakes you can't see. First, read your resume out loud. You'll be amazed what your tongue finds that your eyes didn't.
Second, put the resume aside for a few days. Even a couple of hours will work if you're tight for time. Looking at it again after doing something different will help you remember other accomplishments and finding other wording. If you're really tight for time, try a couple of minutes under the shower. We don't know why it works, but it does.
We'll be back next week with more practical guidance. If you want to move more quickly, you can find all the follow-up emails here.
The Career Tools Team
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RWB - Follow-up Week 7 |
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Your Resume Workbook - Asking Someone To Review Your Resume |
It is helpful to have someone else look at your resume. If you don't want to end up confused you need to give them specific parameters. Because there's no single way to create a resume, everyone has an opinion, including people who have no business having opinions.
That doesn't mean they can't be useful though. You just don't want them to comment on the format of the resume.
What you say is this: "Bob, please would you review my resume? I'm very happy with the format, so I don't need any guidance on that. What I would like to hear about is any spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, missing punctuation or things that just don't make sense to you."
If you don't set the parameters, and you ask five people to review your resume, you'll end up with five different opinions and be more confused than ever.
We'll be back next week with more practical guidance. If you want to move more quickly, you can find all the follow-up emails here.
The Career Tools Team
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RWB - Follow-up Week 8 |
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Your Resume Workbook - You Need More Than One Resume |
Just as you've finished a resume, you find out you need more than one! For every job you apply for and for every person in your network that you send your resume to, you need a different resume.
It doesn't need to be wildly different. It does need to appeal to the person you're sending it to based on their needs. For example, let's say you're a marketing analyst. You've got to the point in your career where you'd really like to concentrate on the marketing aspects of your job, so you're applying for marketing focused roles.
You'd go through your career management document and pick out the responsibilities and accomplishments which best matched the marketing job description to create a targeted resume. You probably won't end up with a pure marketing resume, but it'll be more persuasive than if you hadn't made those changes.
Or, perhaps something dramatic changes and you need a new job fast, and you know that analyst roles are easier to get than marketing ones? You'd go find all those analyst duties and accomplishments and make the most of those on your resume.
We'll be back next week with more practical guidance. If you want to move more quickly, you can find all the follow-up emails here.
The Career Tools Team
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RWB - Follow-up Week 9 |
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Your Resume Workbook - Less Than Perfect Career History? |
We always say that it's better not to have gaps on your resume. It's better to show continual career progression and it's better to show a constant path rather than jumping around between careers.
What if that's not the case for you? First, don't worry. You can't change history, and you can't change your resume. What's done is done.
Second, find good explanations for the career hiccups. For example:
"I took a lower level job because I'd been laid off and my family needed me to work. I went into real estate just as the market crashed. I thought I could make it, but the economy was against me."
"I have a 6 month gap between roles; I was looking after my mother during a terminal illness."
Third, if you can, find the positive out of those circumstances. For example:
"I took the lower level job and remembered what it's really like to be managed. I think that experience will make me a better manager."
"Working for myself was eye-opening - I learnt how complex a business really is. It's given me real insight into how a business runs."
"Looking after my mother was a privilege and one I don't regret. I learnt a great deal about patience and forgiveness during that time too."
We'll be back next week with more practical guidance. If you want to move more quickly, you can find all the follow-up emails here.
The Career Tools Team
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