Keppie Careers

Social media speaker, social media consultant, job search coach

Using your "motivated skills" on your resume

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motivated221946800_60549aa0bf_mYour resume is highly optimized. It is skills focused and accomplishment driven. Take another look. How many of those skills are the ones you actually enjoy doing? Are you emphasizing what you might be GOOD at doing, but don’t care to do at work?

Richard L. Knowdell spoke at the Career Management Alliance conference, and I was intrigued by his suggestion that coaches advise clients to OMIT skills from their resumes if they are skills the job seekers do not enjoy.

In a tight job market, this advice seems extreme, or even foolish, on first glance. Shouldn’t we all be marketing everything we have to offer? It’s a recession, after all! So, I posed the question on Twitter: Should job seekers leave off (or de-emphasize) skills on their resume that they do well but don’t enjoy?

Veronica replied, “As job seeker, I don’t think should leave off any skills that could help get a job. Each circumstance individual.” @vmodarelli

Sam Blum, Co-Founder and CEO at Razume said, “Resumes are marketing documents, not statements of personal interest. I say list any skill that can give you an advantage.” @samblum

Reasonable replies, certainly.

However, my goal (and that of my colleagues in the career coaching world) isn’t only to help people find and land jobs, but to secure positions doing what they enjoy. My friends who are experts in personal branding have a different take!

Deb Dib, a CEO coach and personal brand expert explained: “I leave them off/give subsidiary placement. Don’t want burnout skills attracting interest; fit won’t be right.” @ceocoach

Walter Akana, a life strategist and personal branding expert said, “Yes, deemphasize skills that you don’t enjoy. Emphasize ones you do – provided, of course, what you offer creates value!” @walterakana

This makes a lot of sense to me. Why attract opportunities that may be a bad fit?

Two social media/marketing professionals had some practical advice:

Avi Kaplan suggested: “Leave everything on applicable to each job & don’t apply for roles needing skills you don’t want to use,” which Neal Wiser echoed, “If a job seeker doesn’t like doing something, they shouldn’t apply for that job.”

Think about it…Are you over-emphasizing skills you are not motivated to use on your resume? How much time do you spend thinking about applying for and targeting positions that you would enjoy doing? Are you applying for just “any old job?”

I hope this is food for thought…I’m open to your “take” on the subject, but I hope you’ll seriously consider focusing your job search in areas that appeal to your motivated skills. I’m happy to help. Follow THIS LINK to learn more about me and how we can work together to optimize your resume to help you land the job you love!

photo by BPM

Razume Relaunches with New Tools for Job Seekers

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I’m excited to share some news from a cyber friend, Sam Blum, one of the founders of Razume. Razume aims to provide job seekers “with all the tools, resources and guidance…to find and land your perfect job.”

This week, TechCrunch announced Razume’s relaunch after completing a 12-week program with incubator LaunchBoxDigital…

While there are lots of businesses out there to help the employer (Job boards, etc.), there is a huge under-served opportunity to focus on the needs of the job seeker, especially ones without the power of a robust LinkedIn network to help them in their job seeking journey.

The opportunity: There are over 20 million job change events happening this year, and the average 18-year old today is expected to make over 10 job changes before they hit 38 years of age.

Razume helps the job seeker along three dimensions. First, it helps a person develop a professional resume, starting with powerful authoring tools and online tips, and then making it simple for a person to reach out and get tips on fine-tuning their resume from friends, associates and, just as importantly, the Razume community itself. Simple annotation and commenting tools allow people to give very specific feedback to turn someone’s resume into a better, more effective marketing tool.

After that, Razume helps get the resume into the market. That’s done through two means: a free one-click posting of the resume to the major job boards (a service that costs $59+ at other sites), and use of the Razume Job Finder to browse and bookmark jobs of interest from over 7 million job listings on the web.

Once a user has a call-back, Razume helps them prepare for that interview with useful tips and techniques, plus tools to help research prospective employers that, ultimately, helps a person get the job and make the right decision.

Want to learn more? Take a look at this video explaining Razume.

As a featured Razume Expert Reviewer, I’m particularly excited to see the new features launched this week. When I spoke to Sam, I was thrilled to learn that his passion for helping job seekers fueled his interest in focusing full-time on creating and growing Razume into an indispensable tool for job seekers.

Are you interested in getting feedback on your resume? Are you an expert in your field who would enjoy sharing your skills with others seeking work in your industry? Want to check out an up-and-coming platform that focuses on helping job seekers – for free? I hope you’ll take a look at Razume and join the community.

I’m happy to offer your my expert resume advice! Need a great resume? Some help to write the perfect cover letter? I’m here to help! Write to me.

If you want to receive free up-to-date tips to help with your job hunt, Click here to subscribe to receive future blogs sent directly to you!

Read Any Good Books Lately?

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One of of the best parts of writing a blog is joining a community of bloggers and sharing ideas, opinions and sometimes games!  Today, Anita Bruzzese, blogger, columnist and author of 45 Things You Do that Drive Your Boss Crazy tagged me in what she calls a “new meme being passed around the blogosphere.”  

Anita describes the rules:

Find the book nearest to you, go to page 123, go down to the fifth sentence and then type the following three sentences. After that, you pass the message along to other people you want to bug… uh, get to contribute.

Anita’s contribution:
Of course, the book nearest me is my own, “45 Things You Do That Drive Your Boss Crazy…and How to Avoid Them”:

Anything that has a “those people kind of edge to it should be ommitted from your language in the workplace.  Speak up if there a problem. If you find something a coworker says is insenstive, take the person aside and calmly say, “You know, you’re giving all women a bad name when you make sweeping, derogatory comments about men.” Focus on the behavior, not the person. Calling someone a racist or a bigot won’t get you anywhere — it will just erect more barriers.”

My contribution:
I have been reading a soon-to be-released book by Tamara Erickson, published by Harvard Business Press – Retire Retirement:  Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation.  This optimistic book takes a look at opportunities and changes that may be coming to the workplace as boomers reach retirement age:

Request a lateral move.  Lateral moves are a particular subset of fresh assignments that allow you to develop new skill sets, thus providing even greater scope of experience, and enhance learning more, than a new assignment based on your existing skill set.  Ideally a transfer sideways would be based on some mix of new knowledge and existing strong capabilities. Expect options to move laterally to become more common; with the changing shape of the workforce, vertical promotions – advancement up the hierarchy – will occur less frequently.

Stay tuned for a full review of Erickson’s book on this blog!

I’m going to pass this game on to some friends at Secrets of the Job Hunt:

Chris Russel of Jobs In Pods, Phil Rosenberg of Recareered  and Sam Blum of Razume.

Please, join in!

Keppie Careers will help make your job search possible!  www.keppiecareers.com