Your Resume is Your Curb-Appeal
Just like selling a house,
your job search process needs to have “Curb-Appeal”.
Article by Brian Sigler, Career Coach
When you decided to list your home on the market, what was the first thing you did or started thinking about…sprucing up here and there, disguising some of the blemishes, and in general giving it a bit of a face-lift?
Now think about a time when you were shopping for a new home. What attracted you (or not) about the various homes you considered? Did you ever get to the front of a new home and decide to keep on driving solely because of the outward appearance and general condition of the yard and front of the home?
Real estate agents will tell you of the hundreds of cute little places on the market that just haven’t moved due to lack of interest in prospective buyers caused by some form of disappointment in the first impression.
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| If these homes were RESUMES, which would invite you to go to the next step? |
Can you afford to have disappointment caused by your first impression when you’re seeking new employment?
Can you afford to have disappointment caused by your first impression when you’re seeking new employment?
The potential new employer knows nothing about you other than what your resume states about you. Have you taken a good look at your resume? What does it say about you? More importantly, what does it say about you to someone who doesn’t know you, or who knows only a little about you?
Test your Resume!
Many real estate agents will do a courtesy walk-through and point out some areas of concern that will help the “curb-appeal” of your home be all that it can. They are the professionals that know what to look for in “curb-appeal”. The job seeker can have the same professional walk-through on their resume too. Every state in the country has One-Stop Career Centers and job search professionals who do this work at no cost to the job seeker. For a list of One-Stop Centers, visit the Career One Stop page of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) at: http://www.careeronestop.com/ .
Sprucing up the outward appearance of your home does not always increase it’s value. It’s not really designed to do that. Giving your home an enticing appeal from the initial contact helps toward the ultimate goal of getting an acceptable offer from the prospective buyer.
Acceptable offers of employment from prospective employers never come if the “Curb-Appeal” is less than what they may be expecting. As a mater of fact little or nothing may come after that first impression which is why employment specialists hear an awful lot of comments similar to: “I keep applying for every job I can, but I never get called to an interview”.
Sometimes homeowners never really know just how many prospective buyers have passed them by due to a negative “curb-appeal”. Vehicles pass their property and their “For-Sale” sign all day long, but how many may have been interested or how many were just traveling is never known.
Job seekers on the other hand should know how many applications or resumes were submitted and therefore could calculate how many “prospective buyers” have passed them by. Or do they?
New technology allows job seekers to electronically “post” their resume on various career and job boards. Hundreds or even thousands of employers and recruiters may be looking at or bypassing your resume. If you were counting cars that passed your home you could actually come up with a number of “missed opportunities”. However you may never know just how close you may have come to getting an offer or being passed by for a job opportunity. All you know is that your resume is there for employers to review.
Real estate professionals can tell you that a really sharp “curb-appeal” can actually sell the home for you. Make your resume sells your skills! Salesmanship 101 teaches that the buyer will “buy” for their own reason, whatever it may be, in spite of the actual benefits of the purchase or how many they may number.
It is the same with the employer. They have certain key skills that are important to them and the job they need done. If your resume skirts around those important skills or has them buried under lesser skills or mundane “job description type language” then you’ve allowed them to “drive right on by”.
Resumes today can be and should be targeted toward the specific job and employer you are aiming for. Generic resumes or the one-size-fits-all resume are as passé as 78rpm phonograph records.
In order to target your resume you may need to learn to speak the employer’s language. That doesn’t mean that you actually learn a new foreign language, but something that may be even just as difficult.
All industries have their own vernacular. In the real estate profession they use terms like “turn-over” (which has nothing to do with a French pastry) or fixed vs. balloon (which has nothing to do with neutering your dog or a birthday gift for a child)
What the job seeker needs to understand is how to translate the terms and descriptions of skills from one job into the language of the prospective employer who will be reading their resume.
Imagine that you knew the employer only spoke French, but you typed your resume in Russian. Is it even possible that the employer would understand one single word? Likely not.
Would you wonder why the employer never contacted the job seeker? Of course not, you’d know exactly why. So it is with most resumes reviewed by most employers. It’s no wonder the national average of the length of time an employer actually looks at a resume is less than 20 seconds* and some will say less than 10 seconds** before that applicant has been screened out.
Maintaining Your Curb Appeal
If you’ve been unemployed for a length of time, it can be much like having your home first listed a while ago. Back at that time the curb appeal was really something…but look at it now. How’s your shinny new updated resume doing by the way? Remember when you gave it the overhaul back when you first started looking for new employment? Imagine if you hadn’t mowed the lawn for 6 months. What happened to the sparkle of your curb appeal? Sure it’s easy to see with something so tangible as our home, our lawn our possessions but have you really done anything new with your resume?
Perhaps you’ve completed a training course during your time off, or began volunteering at a community or charitable organization. Not putting that stuff on your resume is like doing the facelift on the back side of your home when it’s the front side everyone will see first.
Just as you’ve been busy keeping the lawn mowed, weeded and watered; your resume needs that same careful cultivation to maintain the best curb appeal.
Look for things to add to your resume that show you are still involved, still out there using your skills and gaining new ones.
Mass Appeal
Your curb appeal is infinitely more important and demanding of your immediate attention if you have your resume posted on-line. (Even your LinkedIn Profile is a resume.) In this case millions of potential “buyers” are passing by every day.
When you used to pass out hard-copy resumes one at a time, it was easier to gauge the need for an overhaul. Now with the volume of traffic the internet is driving to your door, you’re curb appeal is the make-or-break document that will give you the thumbs up or thumbs down.
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