Ensure your CV impresses in the first six seconds

You spend a long time keeping your resume up to date, and then more time tailoring it for a specific job application. But did you know that whether your resume gets past an initial selection depends on it delivering key information to the reader within six seconds? 


This new evidence of the importance of a resume's first impressions comes from a recent American report that used eye tracking technology to examine how recruiters make decisions. The recruiters in this research are professionals, and hiring managers probably spend less time, and give up more easily, if the CV they are reading does not deliver evidence of a match to the job requirements in an even shorter time than six seconds.


What is the reader looking for in your resume in the critical first six seconds? The main information the recruiter wants to read is:
  1. Name
  2. Current position title, organisation and dates of appointment
  3. Previous positions, organisations and dates of appointment
  4. Education or qualifications
If the reader proceeds to explore your resume further, they are mainly skimming for keywords that suggest fit with the position you are being considered for.


During the vital six seconds, readers are distracted by:
  1. photos
  2. clutter
  3. lack of clear layout or hierarchy


The lessons here are:
  1. reduce the cognitive load on your reader, 
  2. deliver the key facts in a clear and easily assimilable way, and
  3. speak the language of your target audience - use the same keywords in your resume, plus
  4. take out unnecessary information that could waylay your reader


The report I cite here is promoting a professional resume re-writing service but that is not only unnecessary but can prove counter productive anyway. I will explain why not to use a resume re-writing service in my next post.

Tips for new year career planning

As you settle back into work for the new year, it is a good time to take stock on your career direction. By mentally preparing yourself for the right opportunities you will be better able to identify those opportunities, and to take them. Here are some simple steps in career planning.

1. Consider good moments in your career

Who was there to share those moments to to help make them happen? Send them new year greetings. Invite them to have a coffee to catch up. Talk to them about the career highlight you share, ask them to relive it from their perspective.

2. How can you plan to have more good career moments?

Think about what was enjoyable about these times. Find adjectives to describe the key feelings and cognitive processes involved. Recall what happened, the steps involved. What did you do to make it happen? What skills or experiences did you use? Did these career moments rely on a particular environment? How could you make similar situations happen again? What skills or experiences may you need to acquire? 

3. What are your obstacles to achieving more of these great moments in your career?

Are they truly insurmountable, or are you holding yourself back? Discuss this with a trusted friend or your partner, and get their view.

4. Now you have remembered your career highlights, do not forget them!

In situations when you need confidence or a boost, spend five seconds remembering those times in your career when you excelled. Recreate in your mind and body how good it felt! This will inspire you to have confidence in yourself and to pursue greater career potential.

5. Set three objectives to help realise more career highs

Just three, and check in on them at Easter, in the new financial year and again in September. Maybe set one objective per trimester. Your objectives should seek to rebuild, or capture, outstanding career moments.

How to gear up your career in the new year

A new year gives the opportunity to reflect on where we want to be and set strategies for achieving our potential.    The following tips don't take much time and will give high returns in putting you in control of your career and opening greater opportunities. 


Check your public profile
Google yourself. What comes up? Do the search results capture your achievements so that a search specialist, like me, will be able to find you for a position that matches your capabilities? If they do, well done and go to my next tip.


If your public profile does not showcase your potential, here's what to do. 


1. Create a profile. 
This should be on your staff page if you are at a university or college, or in an online community relevant to your specialisation, such as the following networks: 
http://academia.edu/
http://www.researchgate.net/

Also create a profile on LinkedIn 


Already have these profiles? Update them. 


My next post will cover more items for your career management new year's check up.

How universities can beat Chinese institutions at preparing graduates for the modern economy

Thousands of students come to Australia from China to complete university studies, but do we really know why? Many assume Chinese students go abroad to study with the aim of emigrating, and some of them probably do. But the real driver behind that aim, and also the reason why our education system is more effective than Chinese higher education at preparing graduates to succeed in the modern economy, demands greater scrutiny.

In his upcoming book, The End of Cheap China, Shaun Rein looks at how Chinese higher education is out of line with the needs of its own economy. As the Chinese population ages, and shifts from wanting to make iPhones to buying them, the country can no longer rely on manufacturing. However the education system is not preparing young people for a more service oriented economy. The Chinese curriculum still focuses on rote memorisation and test scores, which do not adequately train Chinese on the creative and analytic ability needed to survive and innovate in a global economy.

By contrast, Australian universities do prepare graduates to be agile in a modern, changing, service-based economy – and should be actively marketing themselves to Chinese markets on these strengths.

Beware of including distracting achievements in your resume

A candidate recently asked me for advice on his resume for a General Manager role. It contained a section listing general interests and achievements, including a year spent researching in Antarctica. I advised him to drop it as being not only irrelevant to his application, but potentially a way to get him ruled out of contention.

A resume has one purpose for the job applicant: to help secure an interview. On the hiring side, they are used to exclude candidates from progressing further. The hiring manager, or selection committee, are extremely risk-averse when reading your resume, and if anything in it looks risky, your resume could easily work against your application.

Including irrelevant achievements distracts from the evidence of meeting a role’s selection criteria. 

The Antarctica experience could make this applicant seem a bit odd (a loner? Show off?) and not a fit for General Manager. 

The candidate is proud of his work in Antarctica and it could make him memorable to the interview panel. I suggested he refers to it in interview but stay focused on providing evidence of his skills, experience and aptitude for this role. For example, if asked how he deals with conflict, he could respond, “Spending a year with a research team in Antarctica means that I had to work out how to settle differences with and between colleagues. But I’ll give you a more recent example….”

While we are all proud of our extracurricular achievements, think hard about what they could signal about you when your resume is being evaluated for a job. You could end up reminding people of the hyperbolic video resume “Impossible is Nothing” that turned into an Internet meme. 

How to perform better in job interviews: good posture builds your confidence – and helps you breathe!

With good posture you will not only look and feel more assured – without looking overbearing – good posture will generally build your strength and flexibility, and help avoid back problems.

Imagine there is a string pulling up the top of your head. Put your shoulders back without puffing out your chest. Align a neutral spine. This helps you breathe more easily, so you can remain calm and focused in your interview, and good posture enhances your speaking voice. Pilates teaches you how to realign your body. 

How to perform better in job interviews: Other resources

If you are a few days before your interview, concentrate on these above preparation tips so you don’t bewilder yourself. 

If you have some more time, check out my interview tips bookmark stack on Delicious: http://www.delicious.com/stacks/view/LWrehD 

And my company website: http://www.desailly.com.au 

And please drop me a line to let me know what works well for you!

How to perform better in job interviews: practice answering questions

I send my short listed candidates some questions they might be asked in their interview. This to start them thinking about how to describe their key achievements and qualities in a succinct way. Expect questions about how your skills and experience meet the selection criteria. Review the selection criteria several times, jot down some points next to each about what you’ve done that shows you meet each of them. Are there any parts of the job description, or areas in your CV that may be of concern to the panel? Think of what you can say that you will do to assuage any concerns. Remember to remain realistic and honest!

Don’t assume the panel are as familiar with your CV as you are! In the interview draw out the highlights from your CV that support your claims for this role.

Practice behavioural questions

Behavioural questions are extremely popular in interview and most of us aren’t good at answering them. 

The key to both types of questions is to have already thought of examples of what you have done, how you have handled conflict that provide evidence of how you would act in the role you are interviewing for. For my candidates I offer to conduct a mock interview and this further gets people thinking about how to better phrase their accomplishments in interview. It quells the nerves, too, as it makes behaving in an interview a more recent experience. It’s a bit like jumping into cold water before a race, so that the initial shock is already dealt with. Or, another analogy: remember a time when you got back onto a bike, or horse, when you had not ridden for a while? It can take some readjustment to find your comfort zone.

Even if you aren’t dealing with a supportive recruiter like me, practice into a mirror, with a friend or record your answers and play them back to see how you might improve. 

Remember you can pause and take notes

You may get asked a confusing or convoluted question. Or in your excitement, you get off track and you answer the wrong question. Jot down the key words of any slightly complicated question, and glance at them during your answer to make sure you cover all the points. Make sure when you finish to ask the questioner if you have answered their question, it’s possible they are nervous too and asked garbled question that didn’t serve their intentions.

How to perform better in job interviews: Other resources

If you are a few days before your interview, concentrate on these preparation tips so you don’t bewilder yourself. 

If you have some more time, check out my interview tips bookmark stack on Delicious: http://www.delicious.com/stacks/view/LWrehD 

And my company website: http://www.desailly.com.au 

And please drop me a line to let me know what works well for you!