18 Reasons Why Your Resume Isnt Working

18 Reasons Why Yur Resume Isnt Working18 Reasons Why Your Resume Isnt Working18 Reasons Why Your Resume Isnt WorkingApplying to federal jobs can be frustrating. If youre racking your brain about why youre leid getting referred, Best Qualified, or interviewed for federal jobs, its time to rethink your resume.In fact, there are 18 reasons why your federal resume could be to blame for your frustrating job search. Weve found that resume problems fall under three following categories Format, Style, and Content.Format IssuesYour resume is in a bullet format. Is your resume a laundry list of bullets that are unrelated and not targeted to a job announcement or job series? This format will not help the human resources specialists to determine your qualifications for the vacancy announcement.Your resume is in the old-school big block format. This welches popular for the Resumix keyword scanning system, which was eliminated in 2010. Now, actual humans look at your resumes, and they dont want to see large blocks of text.Wrong length. A federal resume should be 3 to 5 pages in length. Many people try to apply for a federal job with a 1 to 2-page resume that would not have enough details about your experience to determine your qualifications. Some people apply with a much longer resume that gives too much information for the human resources specialist to weed through to find your skills and abilities.Missing compliance information required by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Month and year and/or hours per week employers street address, city, state, zip code supervisor phone number yes/no on whether supervisor may be contacted. All of this information MUST be included in each job block on your federal resume.The profile/summary section at the top of your resume is too long and/or generic. A profile or summary of skills does elend increase your application score. Your work experience, skills, and accomplishments must be anchored to dates in your Work Experience sectio n, and all verbiage should be tailored to your target job. Do not include a list of generic skills that could apply to anyone.Style IssuesUse of passive voice. Are you using passive phrases in your resume, such as responsible for, duties include, assisted with, performed, provide, helped with, tasked with, recruited for, participated in, in addition to? These passive verbs create wordiness in your resume and show hiring officials that you are a merely a helper at work.Overuse of acronyms and technical jargon. No one but you, your supervisor, and your coworkers will understand your resume, even if the hiring officials are in your field. Too much discipline-specific acronyms and language creates an unreadable resume that gets disqualified.Overuse of I. This creates wordiness in your resume and distracts hiring officials from your duties, responsibilities, and accomplishments.Content IssuesYour work experience section simply does not match the target position. Read your target job anno uncement from beginning to end. Make sure that youre actually qualified for the job. Contact the hiring manager (listed towards the bottom of the announcement) if youre not sure.The resume has NO keywords that match your target job announcement. Your must use the language from the target job announcement to write your duties, responsibilities, and accomplishments.The resume has no accomplishments in the work experience section. Hiring officials want to read about your unique contributions to your job. Including a list of accomplishments can demonstrate to hiring officials that you are a star performer and not just an average one.The resume goes back too far. Federal HR only wants to see recent and relevant experience. Remove job blocks older than 20 years. The federal resume is not a life history form or the old SF-171, which did have to include every job.Your Guard or reserves experience or deployment details are missing from your resume.You are changing your career, but your dutie s, responsibilities and keywords are targeted to your prior career. Your resume must feature only the skills that are transferrable and relevant to your target job.You are attempting to get promoted, yet the resume is written at the same professional level. The resume you write for a promotion must increase in complexity to target an advanced level of performance. The resume must feature the highest, most complex level of duties, as well as your best accomplishments to demonstrate that you are ready to move up and get promoted.Education history is not in reverse chronological order. Your current or most recent education should be at the beginning of your job block.Education includes nothing but the degree and the college name. Add a list of courses and/or descriptions of 3 significant projects.Training lists do not include classroom hours, the certification, and go back too far. Remove trainings that you took more than 10 years ago.Its pretty easy for a federal resume to go awry. Bu t our tips can help guide you in creating a resume that gets you good results. Need Help?If you want customized support on your federal resume and want to avoid ALL of these problems, let us help you. Submit a Free Project Review. Well review your resume and write back with recommendations and a quote for our services. Kathryn Troutman is known as the Federal Resume Guru and is the developer of the Ten Steps to a Federal Job. She teaches hundreds of career counselors each year about her highly acclaimed methods of federal job search and has published dozens of titles, including the recent award-winning Students Federal Career Guide 3rd Edition.

Top 5 Interviewing Tips for Experienced Employees

Top 5 Interviewing Tips for Experienced EmployeesTop 5 Interviewing Tips for Experienced EmployeesInterviewing can be nerve-wrackingeven for veteran employees. Whats more, if youve been in your job, company, industry or career for a long time and havent needed to do a job search in a while, you may feel pretty rusty when it comes to preparing for and navigating the interview process. As an experienced employee, your track record (if its strong) can certainly help pave the way to your next position. Yet even as a seasoned professional, wowing the hiring committee is still a key step to getting the job you want. Even the most qualified candidate must nail a series of interviews to be considered the best person for the job. If youre not up to date with interview protocol, dont leave your interview performance to chance. Brush up with ansicht five advanced tips for seasoned careerists Open the door. The first step to a successful interview is landing one in the first place. With plent y of experience under your belt, you can outshine your competitors before the interview even starts by crafting an effectiversum. This is not a nice-to-doits a must-do. If yourrsumdoes not reflect your professionalism and your level in the industry, then past successful initiatives cant help you get the job. As an industry veteran, you no doubt have data to draw on that can help support the results you achieved. Cristin Sturchio, global head of talent at Cognolink Limited, suggests getting as specific as possible to showcase your achievements with numbers, percentages or dollar amounts. Made outbound calls to generate donations from alumni tells what you did, she says. Made 150 outbound calls to alumni that resulted in $12,500 in donations tells what you achieved.Once you have these data points nailed down in yourrsum, youll be able to speak to them in your interview as well. Make the link. Another essential component of todays pre-interview process is to utilize LinkedIn to full advantage. If youve been off of the job market for a while, its vital to catch up on the current expectation of most recruiters and hiring managers, which is to have a professional, updated LinkedIn profile. Marketing and branding strategist Karen Leland says that while its estimated that up to 60 percent of the Fortune 100 companies use LinkedIn to check out candidates, the vast majority of job seekers have poor or insufficient LinkedIn profiles. To rectify this problem, Leland suggests drawing on information from the first point during your actual interview andhaving the following items in place beforehandA fully fleshed out summary section that shows rather than tells your valueAn up-to-date and professional photo At least 10 recommendationsKeyword-optimized headlines Demonstrate executive presence.A 2012Forbes article describes executive presence as the ability to project gravitasconfidence, poise under pressure and decisiveness. Communication skills comprise another area of executive presencehow you speak, how assertive you are and how well you understand others. Job seekers with ample on-the-job experience may trip themselves up in the communication departement by trying to convey too much about their background. Executive coach Beth VanStory believes that to demonstrate executive presence, its important to answer questions concisely by creating an outline of your key messages. Experienced executives usually have a lot to say, she says. However, sometimes less is more. Its tempting to want to show everything you know and tell about all of your successes. But that approach can be a recipe for interviewer fatigue. Think ahead. If youve been committed to one role or organization for a while, your self-concept as a professional may be based solely on this role. But to move up and ahead in your career, its important to mentally prepare yourself for your next position. Michele Gorman, managing principal of Leveraged Potential, suggests that many interview ees dont think about where they are headed and thus make the mistake of marketing themselves with their current title and role versus branding themselves for the next move. It is important to define the next career move that you want and brand yourself appropriately, she says. Your answer to Tell me about yourself should reflect this new role versus your current role. To make this work, Gorman recommends thinking through the following questions prior to the interview and crafting your answers into a quick pitch that will resonate with hiring managers for the new roleWhat kind of professional are you? What level are you aiming for?What are your three or four keys areas of expertise that you bring to the new roles? What is something personally unique about you that you bring to the workplace? Understand your past. While your future is about the position to come, its still important to properly analyze and put into context key points from past positions. The longer youve been in the industry, the more possibilities you have about which type of information to showcase during an interview. A good way to narrow your focus is to understand your own strengths and weaknesses so that you can match those against a new jobs particular requirements. Halogen Softwares senior talent attraction manager John Fleischauer advises reflecting on past successes and past performance reviews as part of your interview prep. What kind of feedback have you received from your managers and peers? he asks. Look for trendsfor example, repeat feedback that youre a great team player or very proactive. Take note of feedback youve received around both job-specific skills and soft skills. Interviews can cause stress and nervousness for even the most experienced candidates. Yet taking the time to get up to speed with advanced interview skills can help ensure that you shine like the industry expert you are.Robin Madellhas spent over two decades as a corporate writer, journalist, and communica tions consultant on business, leadership and career issues. She serves as a copywriter, speechwriter and ghostwriter for executives and entrepreneurs across diverse industries, including finance, technology, healthcare, law, real estate, advertising and marketing. Robin has interviewed over 1,000 thought leaders around the globe and has won 20 awards for editorial excellence. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Healthcare Businesswomens Association in both New York and San Francisco, and contributed to the book Be Your Own Mentor Strategies from Top Women on the Secrets of Success, published by Random House. Robin is also the author of Surviving Your Thirties Americans Talk About Life After 30 and co-author of The Strong Principles Career Success. Connect with her onLinkedInor follow her on Twitterrobinmadell.

3 Ways to Generate Silver Linings From Regulatory Compliance Work

3 Ways to Generate Silver Linings From Regulatory Compliance Work3 Ways to Generate Silver Linings From Regulatory Compliance WorkWhen finance leaders and their gruppes are in the thick of routine and complex regulatory befolgung work, they can easily lose sight of the benefits their efforts can yield - beyond keeping the business compliant, of curse. The most obvious silver lining is good governance - which, in turn, is good for the business.But what about the accounting and finance function itself? Can it derive value from regulatory befolgung work? Certainly. In fact, several financial executives interviewed for the latest Benchmarking the Accounting and Finance Function survey report from Robert Half and Financial Executives International (FEI) were quick to highlight how befolgung initiatives have had a positive impact on their organizations.For example, a senior director of finance and administration for a public manufacturing and distribution company said that having a stron g internal control framework in place has helped his staff to increase efficiency. And a controller at an automotive dealership group said that well-established einhaltung processes help her finance team to play offense instead of defense because they can audit and review red flag issues before they become significant problems.Meanwhile, in a separate survey from Protiviti* that examined Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) compliance trends, internal audit and finance leaders cited the following as the top two benefits their organization has achieved through its SOX compliance process an improved internal control over financial reporting (ICFR) structure (70 percent) and enhanced understanding of control design and control operating effectiveness (65 percent). Fifty percent of respondents identified continuous improvement of business processes as a key benefit.Best practices can lead to better outcomesWhile compliance costs are holding steady at most U.S. businesses this year, according to the 2017 Benchmarking report, the compliance burden for many organizations is still rising. Sixty-one percent of U.S. financial leaders surveyed said they expect their firms compliance burden to increase over the next three years.That outlook may change under the current U.S. administration, which has been taking steps to reduce regulatory compliance requirements for many companies. However, the nature of regulatory compliance work will still require businesses to commit significant time, budget and highly skilled resources to complete many critical tasks.To effectively manage the costs and burden of compliance initiatives in any regulatory environment, finance leaders should consider applying strategies that are outlined in the Benchmarking report and employed by their peers. Here are ways that leading finance functions are ensuring they can realize silver linings from regulatory compliance workEmbracing automationWhile finance functions, in general, have not been early adopters of te chnologies like cloud computing, many of the executives surveyed for the Benchmarking report said their organizations are now looking to technology solutions to help reduce compliance costs.Automated systems can be configured to produce essential reports that are ready to submit to regulatory bodies. That, in turn, reduces the workload for compliance teams. Automation also helps to streamline workflows, and reduce errors that manual processes can often introduce.Another silver lining from automation is that it frees accounting and finance staff to focus on other priorities, like strategy, or to develop valuable new skill sets, like business analytics.Making compliance work a true team effortWhen there is too much incoming work for the firms core compliance team to handle, the risk of missing key deadlines and making costly mistakes runs high.Training team members from other areas to help with regulatory compliance work is one way to alleviate the strain. For example, teaching employ ees how to produce reports in the format used by the compliance team can make things much easier for the compliance staff.An additional silver lining When staff have strong knowledge of the basics of a key compliance mandate that the business must adhere to, like SOX, they can help the organization to drive continuous improvement of business processes related to financial reporting.Engaging outside resourcesBringing in compliance consultants is another strategy that many leading businesses use to take the pressure off their compliance teams, especially during busy reporting periods.As an example, our company recently helped a financial services firm that was short-staffed across several of its locations and facing the possibility of not being able to execute its audit plan. It needed auditors with compliance and risk expertise, and we quickly assembled a team of consultants at the manager and senior levels with that knowledge. The silver lining for this firm? With the extra support, it kept its audit plan on track.Without question, regulatory compliance work can be a tremendous burden for accounting and finance staff. However, by harnessing technology and streamlining processes, providing training, and securing expert resources when needed, finance leaders can help their teams to manage this work more effectively, and deliver even more value to the function - as well as the business.*Protiviti is a Robert Half subsidiary.Do you need to expand your team?Whether you need to tap specialized expertise for a critical compliance initiative or staff an interim leadership role at your firm, Robert Half Management Resources can help. Our experienced team of financial and business systems consultants are available individually, or on a team basis.Click the button below to learn more about our services.LEARN MORE