Susan Ireland - Top Resume Tips

August 1, 2006 —

Susan Joyce recently spoke with Susan Ireland, author of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Perfect Resume". Following is an edited transcript of that conversation. You may also listen to the original interview here, or visit our Career Strategy Center to get additional career-related information.

Hi. I'm Susan Joyce, Editor and Publisher of Job-Hunt.org, a website recently selected by US News and World Report Magazine as one of the top sites for finding work. Today we're talking with another Susan, Susan Ireland. Among Susan Ireland's many accomplishments, she's the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Perfect Resume, and she's also the person behind the excellent resume website www.susanireland.com. Susan has been a professional resume writer since 1989 with literally thousands of happily employed clients.

Susan, in the introduction to your latest edition of Perfect Resumes, you tell your readers, welcome to the world of marketing. What did you mean by that?

Susan Ireland: First of all, thank you for asking me to be interviewed by you. And I want to talk about marketing because that is exactly what resume writing is. A lot of people think of their resume as a document, kind of a historical document about their past. But I think if we take a different approach to it and think of it as a marketing piece that's going to launch you into the future, the resume writing process itself can be much more interesting and the results of that resume will be much more productive. So if we think of this as a marketing project where we're going to present you, the job seeker, to the employer, it is very likely that the resume is going to be the first piece of marketing that will come before the reader's eyes. And so therefore, the resume is a marketing piece that will represent you and it's something that we want to create with the idea of creating your future. So when we think of the resume as a document, we want to think of it as a document about your future, not about your past. Even though you'll be writing about your past, you're going to be very careful to write about your past in such a way that it creates the future that you want. In that way it becomes a marketing piece for you.

Susan Joyce: I can see how people get caught up very much in the historical aspect of it, and they write down every job they've ever had. And that's really not appropriate for a marketing document.

Ireland: That's right. In fact, as a marketing document, I do want to be careful that you write about only the things that you want to do next. So there may be some jobs that you never want to repeat again or some aspects of a job that you would rather not do again, in which case you want to try to avoid writing about those aspects if at all possible.

Joyce: Because you don't really want to market your skills in those areas, because you don't want to do them again.

Ireland: Right. So never write about something that you don't want to repeat.

Joyce: I think that's a great tip. Susan, you and other resume professionals advise job seekers to write achievement statements on their resumes. Now, fitting in with our marketing theme, achievement statements are something that people have been putting in resumes for 20 years, if not longer. How do you convert an achievement statement into a good marketing statement?

Ireland: Actually, an achievement statement is a good marketing statement, especially compared to the boring job description statements that appear in so many job seekers' resumes. The boring job description essentially says one thing and that is, I have done such-and-such; whereas the achievement statement demonstrates success and therefore says, I've done such-and-such, I'm good at doing such-and-such, and I enjoy doing such-and-such. And those are three good reasons for an employer to want to talk to you about the job that you're after. So I strongly encourage people to write achievement statements in their resumes because what we want is we want to see a thread of success running through someone's career history, the idea being that if you've been successful in the past, you'll be successful in the future. And that future is hopefully with the employer who is reading your resume. So go ahead and write those strong achievement statements on your resume.

Joyce: Is there a difference in achievement statements for IT management versus the IT technical people who actually do the coding?

Ireland: Actually, there is, and that difference is a matter of appropriateness or we could say modesty. For the IT management person, they want to demonstrate their success using the bottom line. So theirs can be a little bit more dramatic in saying that they saved the company so much money or they launched such-and-such a product or they generated so much revenue by doing such-and-such. They can be a little bit flashier or one could say juicier achievement statements; whereas the technical person wants not to have things that look sensational but rather have a more technical feel. So for the technical person's resume, they want to demonstrate their technical abilities by referring to specific programs or codes or systems or methodologies that they use, that demonstrate the level of their expertise within their field.

Joyce: And at the same time if somebody is looking to move from being sort of a technical grunt to being manager, then you would start to sort of introduce that kind of statement?

Ireland: That's it exactly. And the reason is that this is a resume about the future, not about the past. So what we want to do is we want to use language and a kind of sensibility about business demonstrated in the language of the resume to show that they are management material, if that's what they wish to go into.

Joyce: Now, most technical professionals search for jobs online. What resume advice do you have for them for their online job search?

Ireland: If we're posting a resume online, we definitely want to take the resume and create it in plain text. And this means that, of course, we're going to lose all the bold and all the fancy formatting that we might have had in a hard copy resume, so that we're making it very easy for the database to manage the information. And then once we create the plain text version, then we want to use the limited formatting abilities of plain text to direct the eye because eventually it will be read by a human eye, hopefully. So we want to use perhaps all caps where we used bold or we want to use spacing to direct attention or we want to use some of the common keystrokes such as the plus sign or the dash or something instead of bullet point statements or where the bullet point statements once were. So we want to try to take advantage of whatever formatting capabilities we have in plain text.

And then, at that point, we're ready to post the resume onto the online service for resume posting. And if we're emailing a resume, we want to be careful not to send the resume as an attachment unless the job posting specifically asks for the job seeker to do that. The reason is that many job seekers simply won't open the attachment because of the fear of a virus. That's probably the strongest reason not to. The other is the issue of compatibility and whether or not the document can actually be opened and read accurately. So what I suggest instead of sending it as an attachment is that you, again, create the resume as a plain text version and that you drop it into the body of the email itself and send it as an email so your resume email would have just a very small introduction of like a cover letter but very quickly move into the actual resume right there in the body of the email. And doing this will actually make it very easy for someone to read immediately rather than having to open a file. And it will also make it easy for them to drop it into the database should that be their form of storage for the resume.

So now, there's one little trick in sending the email resume and that is that you want to be very careful to limit the line length. Each line length should be no more than 65 characters and spaces. And for details on how to do that, you can, again, refer to my e-resume guide on my website. And that's important because otherwise you get these kind of irregular line lengths that don't look logical and?

Joyce: Yeah, they wrap strangely and they look ugly.

Ireland: Yeah, right. So you can avoid that by doing a little extra work before you drop it into the email body.

Joyce: Well, we've talked about electronic resumes, which everybody seems to be focused on doing and hopefully doing well. But another question is do online job seekers need hard copy versions of their resumes?

Ireland: Absolutely. They do. And they need it for a few reasons. One is that even though online job searching is prevalent and easy to do and you can do it any time of day or night in your fuzzy slippers if you want to, probably the most valuable form of job searching is using your network, your personal contacts, people that you've worked with in the past or friends that you have or other members of your trade organization, people that you actually see in person and can hand a resume to or send it in the mail. It's extremely valuable and so that hard copy resume is still useful to you. It's also something that you want to take to the interview. So even if the resume has already been sent by mail or email or been processed through the job posting, you still want to carry a hard copy resume with you to the interview that you can leave with the interviewer. And, of course, the other thing is that if you do attend in-person job fairs, then you would want to carry some resumes with you there. So yes, we still need the hard copy.

Joyce: I think we've answered some good questions here. But finally, as a wrap-up, is there any one best thing that you would recommend someone do to prepare for their next job search?

Ireland: Very definitely. I would say that making lists -- we want to make two lists. And as we're in a job, always be keeping a list or a database or some kind of list whereby you can see easily what projects have you worked on, what are your achievements. So that when it comes time to write your resume, you can refer to that and easily pull out those projects that you want to highlight for your next employer. The other list that you want to make is what were the things about the job that you did not like. And, by the way, you want to keep that at your computer at home, not on your computer at work.

Just keep a list of what are the things that you -- that happened or that you -- tasks that you were assigned that you really don't want to do next time. And then be sure that you use that checklist so that you don't put those things on your next resume.

Joyce: And don't end up being stuck with the same things to do.

Ireland: Right. We don't have to keep repeating work that we don't like and we get to create work that we do like next time around.

Joyce: That sounds like a wonderful idea. Well, Susan, thank you very much for sharing your time and your expertise with us. We really appreciate it. And I'd like to direct listeners to www.susanireland.com for more information about what we discussed today. Thank you all for listening.

ITworld.com