Sample Sales Representative ResumeJohn Doe
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE Present Company 2001 to PresentSenior Territory Manager (May, 2002–Present)
Territory Manager (September, 2001–May, 2002)
Account Representative (April, 2001–September, 2001)
Past Company 1998 to 2001Account Representative (July, 1998–April, 2001)
Past Company 1997 to 1998Sales Representative (July 1997–July, 1998)
1996 to 1997Sales Management Trainee (July 1996–July 1997) EDUCATION State University, Anytown: Graduated 1996, BS in Economics - 3.2 GPA REFERENCES Available upon request |
Sample Sales Manager ResumeJohn Doe
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE ABC Medical Products 1989 to Present
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Sample Entry-Level ResumeJohn Doe
Objective: To obtain a position in sales or marketing. I would like to utilize my skills and knowledge acquired throughout the course of my educational and professional experiences as a Sales Representative. Education: State University, The State May 2003 Additional Coursework: Business Management and Financial Planning Experience: Any Company, Town May 2001 to Present College Marketing Representative Part-time Employment Company January 2001– Present Customer Service Representative Skills: - Working knowledge of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) Activities: Member of the Student Senate |
Six Critical Rules of Resume WritingMake a memorable impression with an attractive, results-oriented marketing document by Wendy S. Enelow (reprinted from the National Business Employment Weekly, Fred Runyan didn’t want to be left holding the bag when the Northern California-based management consulting firm he worked for completed a pending merger. After 10 years with the firm, the senior consultant knew there would be big staffing changes ahead, and decided to explore opportunities elsewhere. He needed a resume, though, so he shuffled through his desk to find the one he’d used to land his current job. He thought a few paragraphs about his decade-worth of consulting assignments would update it sufficiently, so he jotted them down. Next, he dug up a resume he’d received six years ago that had an attractive format. He handed the revisions and original copy to his secretary and asked her to make the finished version look like the sample. In an hour, his new resume was done and he felt ready to interview. Six months later, Mr. Runyan was still waiting for an invitation to interview. He’d received a few phone calls from employers, but nothing more. Discouraged and confused, he didn’t know why the response to his mailings was so poor. He had worked for good companies, held responsible management positions and delivered strong results. Couldn’t prospective employers see that when they reviewed his resume? Apparently not. By not thoughtfully redrafting his document, Mr. Runyan failed to address key issues of resume-writing, according to members of the Professional Association of Resume Writers, a St. Petersburg, Fla.-based professional group. To ensure your resume makes the best possible impression, it’s essential to meet six challenges regarding its presentation, format and content, say recently surveyed association members. These challenges and professionals’ advice on writing a winning resume follow. 1. PresentationSince your resume is actually a marketing document, its visual appearance is critical. To survive next to those of hundreds of equally qualified candidates, it must look sharp and dynamic. Don’t have it typed on an outdated word processor and printed onto plain bond paper, as Mr. Runyax did, and don’t model it after resumes from years back, says Jerry Bills, a Colorado Springs, Colo., resume writer. “Picking up an old resume book from the library and following suggestions or styles that have been outdated for years won’t give you a competitive advantage,” he says. Instead, give your document an up-to-date style that attracts attention. This doesn’t mean using an italic typeface, cute logos or an outrageous paper color. Instead, be conservatively distinctive. Choose a sharp-looking typeface such as Bookman, Soutane, Krone, or Fritz, or if your font selection is limited, the more prevalent Times Roman, Helvetica or Arial typefaces. Unless you’re seeking a position as a graphic artist, don’t put logos or artwork on your resume. However, using horizontal rules to separate sections can give it an upscale look. Your choice of paper color isn’t important, as long as it’s conservative—white, ivory or light gray. 2. FormatFormat shouldn’t be your primary consideration when preparing a resume. When Mr. Runyan saw a format he liked, he tried to manipulate his information to fit it. Other job hunters make the same mistake, says Susan Higgins, a resume write with Q Resume Service in Grove City, Ohio. Many of her clients “insist on [using] a friend’s format because it worked for the friend, but [it’s a] critical mistake,” she says. Decide on a resume format after your text is prepared. And even then, don’t try to make your information fit into someone else’s structure. Since each person’s career history, achievements and academic credentials are unique, their resume format should be as well. Review other resumes for ideas, but craft your document to “sell” only you. Start writing without worrying about the format and concentrate on marketing yourself. It’s likely that when you’re finished, the format you should use will become obvious. You’ll just need to change headings or margins, insert rules, bold or italic type or edit sections to fit your information more comfortable onto a page. If possible, adhere to these formatting guidelines:
3. Spelling, grammar and syntaxTypographical errors signal job-search death, which may be why Mr. Runyan’s did so poorly. It contained three typographical and two syntax errors, as well as unpolished wording. He didn’t recognize that resumes serve as your introduction to employers, and indicate the quality and caliber of work you’ll produce. An imperfect document isn’t acceptable. Write your document in the active first-person tense, never the third person, and choose language that’s appropriate to the type of position you’re seeking. If you’re a mid-level manager, don’t use “Ph.D.” language. If you’re in line for CEO, COO or other top operating slots, use words appropriate to that level. Proofread your resume not just once or twice, but repeatedly for typographical and wording errors. Then ask three to five others to review it, paying attention to your terminology and tone. As Walt Schuette, a resume writer with The Village Wordsmith in Fallbrook, Calif., says, “The greatest mistake job seekers make is not reading for erors (whoops, errors).” 4. ContentResumes aren’t job descriptions. Still, you may have seen some that included such descriptions as, “This position was responsible for purchasing, logistics, materials management and distribution.” Were you impressed with those? Mr. Runyan made this mistake. For instance, under “Experience,” he included descriptions of positions without mentioning the size of his past employers or his achievements. It could have been anyone’s resume. He also cited every job he’d held, going back to 1968. Listing all your past employment isn’t necessary or helpful. And, if you list responsibilities, include their scope and your contributions. “Generalizations aren’t impressive,” says Estelle Wiesmann, a Fort Atkinson, Wis., resume writer. “You must cite specific figures, percentages and results when describing previous accomplishments in the workplace.” To highlight your strengths, develop strong, results-driven position summaries. For instance, a logistics manager might write:
Prospective employers who read this description can sense the scope and results of the manager’s experience. Remember, recruiters won’t read between the lines for relevant information if you don’t spell it out. And if positions you held 15, 20, or 30 years ago aren’t relevant to your current career path, delete or briefly summarize them at the end. For example, “Previous professional employment includes several increasingly responsible management positions with the ABC Co. and XYZ Corp.” Whether you include your dates of employment depends on your circumstances. 5. FocusA resume doesn’t work if readers can’t quickly grasp who a candidate is and what he or she seeks to do, say survey respondents. For instance, it’s likely that Mr. Runyan baffled readers with his objective: “Seeking a position where I can contribute to the growth of a corporation.” “With a resume full of unnecessary details, repetitive information and no summary of skills or achievements, how is an employer to know who you are?” asks Jackie Murphy, a resume writer with Accurate Professional Typists in Melbourne, Fla. Clearly and directly state who you are, with this strategy: Omit an objective and start with a “summary” or “career or technical profile” instead. Unlike an objective, which states what you want, a summary describes what you know and quickly grabs readers’ attention. For example: SENIOR SALES & MARKETING EXECUTIVE Building Revenues & Market Share Throughout Global Business Markets Dynamic 15-year career leading sales, marketing and service organizations throughout the U.S., Europe and Pacific Rim. Delivered strong and sustainable revenue gains in both emerging and mature business markets. Strong sales training and team leadership skills. A summary eliminates the need for an objective because it usually indicates the type of position a candidate seeks. And don’t assume that stating your objective in a cover letter is sufficient. Cover letters and resumes must be able to stand alone. 6. SellingA resume should be more than a list of past jobs. It should serve as a personal sales and marketing tool that attracts and impresses employers. Your qualifications, words, format and presentation must all be packaged to sell yourself. “Take credit for your accomplishments. Know what makes you marketable and sell it,” advised Mark Berkowitz with Career Development Resources in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Ironically, sales and marketing professionals often write the worst resumes, say career counselors. That’s because when they become the “product,” they seem to forget everything they know about selling. Your resume is your only opportunity to distinguish yourself among the crowd of other candidates. You must market your qualifications aggressively by highlighting your achievements and defining the scope of your responsibilities. That means not just saying what you did but also how well you did it. Poor example:
Good example:
Poor example:
Good example:
To create impressive descriptions, ask yourself not only what you did but how well you did it. Then sell your achievements, not your responsibilities. When Mr. Runyan went back to the drawing board, preparing his resume took three weeks instead of an hour. The process involved his secretary, two friends and three professional colleagues. His new document includes a strong, accomplishments-oriented text and makes a sharp visual presentation. Two weeks and 100 resumes later, his phone started to ring. In one day, he had spoken with five employers and scheduled more than 10 interviews. By remembering these six rules, your resume can help you to do the same.
Source: By Lindsey Novak and Jeff Skrentny, CPC/CTS, ATM-B. |
Think Twice Before Posting That ResumeQ: A headhunter has asked me to sign an exclusive presentation contract with him. Resumes live forever. Once your resume leaves Earth to live in the stratospheric reaches of the Web, you can’t control it, and it may turn up anywhere, anytime, including on your boss’s desk. But what if you’ve been cagey—wink, nudge—and only listed events prior to your current job? Can’t you just tell your boss that the resume is old, posted before you took your present position and you have no idea how or why it’s still alive? Sure you can, but the missing information describing your present employment is probably your best selling strength if you’re on the market. Moreover, employers are realizing that once your resume is up in Web lights, you’ll continuously be contacted if you seem to have what’s wanted somewhere. And if you’re having a bad day, you might just be tempted to say, “I’m gone.” When you’re targeting the fast track to the best jobs, nothing beats being brought to an employer’s notice by an important third person—and a recruiter qualifies. So it well might be to your advantage to sign one or more “exclusive presentation” agreements, each defined by specific clients and time parameters. A typical “exclusive right to present” agreement usually is pretty simple and direct: “I (your name) grant (name of recruiter) the exclusive right to present my resume along with any information pertaining to my background and experience to (list of clients by name) for the time period of (six months).” What’s in it for you? The Fordyce Letter (www.Fordyceletter.com), a recruiting industry favorite, reports in its August issue that “people who two years ago put their resumes on the big national job boards are still hearing from recruiters and companies even though they have accepted other employment.” Not only do the resumes live on eternally, they may migrate to unintended databases. Several candidates told The Fordyce Letter that they posted their resume in one place and it ended up on dozens of others, even though they deactivated their resume on the boards where they originally posted it. “Marked for life” is the way one candidate put it. The chances that your resume will escape from its designated cyber box are multiplying. Recruiters now accuse one of the national job boards of making copies of the national job boards of making copies of resumes sent in response to advertisers’ job postings, then adding those copies to the job board’s own resume database. The job board denies the practice, but recruiters are disbelieving. I don’t know what to think until more facts are in. But my previous advice that you have pretty good privacy when you send your resume into cyberspace in response to specific job ads may no longer be valid. Some job seekers will be happy to find out their resumes are getting additional eyes, but others wince at the loss of privacy and the right to control where their information goes. Job ads have long been openly “scraped” – a term for what happens when robots/spiders scour the Web looking for job ads and aggregate them on a second and unrelated site. Now resumes, too, are being scraped. Ethical scrapers send you an e-mail and ask if you’d like to be included in the second database and are guided by your response. But most scrapers don’t get your permission and take your resume to places unknown. When you don’t know where your resume is, how can you call it back to make changes? Employers are becoming more resistant to paying recruiters big fees to search the Web when they can do it themselves cheaper. That’s why recruiters need fresh inventory that employers can’t find elsewhere. If you want a recruiter to present you, think carefully before pinning cyber wings on your resume. Plus, there’s that risk of discovery. As outplacement consultants Kay Stout of Right Associates in Oklahoma City says: “I’ve had friends who learned the hard way to not post their resume if they were still employed and their paycheck provider found their resume on one of the Web sites.” Remember, online resumes may never die. They just fade away into the timeless Deep Web. Do you have an employment question for Joyce Lain Kennedy? Write to Careers, Joyce Lane Kennedy, Box 368, Cardiff, CA 92007 or e-mail jlk@sunfeatures.com |
Cyberspace is a Job Jungleby Jerry Useem (reprinted from the Fortune magazine) The headhunter probably should have contacted Unmesh Laddha before plucking his resume off an Internet job board and sending it, without his knowledge, to an employer. Especially because that employer, Argus Technical Services, was where Laddha already worked. Last November, Laddha’s boss telephoned him in a huff, none too happy to have received the resume of his own employee. Initially dumbstruck, Laddha was at pains to explain that he’d posted it online seven months earlier, before taking the job at Argus, and had never even met the headhunter in question. His job was spared, but his resume, still lingering in cyberspace, has twice more landed on his boss’ desk. "It’s been very embarrassing," says the 28-year-old technical consultant. "Once I put my resume on the Internet, I couldn’t do anything to control it." Such is the mixed blessing of online job hunting. Sites like Monster.com, Headhunter.net, and HotJobs.com allow candidates to shop their resumes to hundreds of employers at once. But many resumes—purloined by unscrupulous headhunters, duplicated and re posted by roving "spiders," and even spotted online by Web-wise bosses—are getting more visibility than their authors intended. "I get a minimum of two messages a week from readers saying they’ve lost their job from posting on the Net," warns Pam Dixon, author of two books on Internet job searching. "It really is a very dangerous situation for the job seeker." Hyperbole? It seems not. More than a dozen human resources managers contacted by Fortune reported stumbling across their employees’ resumes on the Net. Mike Prelewicz, recruiting manager at the Milwaukee office of Consultis Inc., says it has happened to him six times, usually while he’s sifting through candidates on Monster.com. "We call them on the carpet," says Prelewicz, describing his handling of the first offender: "I got him on the telephone and said, ’What’s going on? Is there something you don’t like about us?’ " That was a more tempered response, he admits, than his initial instinct: firing the guy. "The Net is so vast, people think you’ll never bump into each other," says Prelewicz. "But it’s more common than people realize." Not all such encounters are accidental. Some corporations have begun to patrol cyberspace in search of wayward workers, giving rise to a shadowy new subspecies of HR professional: the "salvager." As a senior human resources consultant at Seer Technologies, a computer-services firm in Cary, N.C., that has since been acquired, part of Lori Laubach’s job was to log on to resume boards each day, type in the company name, and see if any of Seer’s 700 employees popped up. If one did, Laubach would notify the employee’s supervisor. They would discuss whether the employee should be persuaded to stay or encouraged to leave, then arrange a sit-down with the invariably stunned individual. "At least 20 or 30" people were caught in such a fashion, says Laubach, who left the company last fall. "Probably more... We relied very heavily on it." It’s called employee "salvaging," and to some, the practice smacks of guard towers and searchlights. "I would be repulsed if someone did it here," says Allen Wolf, manager of recruiting programs and services at Ford Motor. "We don’t believe that’s fair to the employee." Donald Harris, chairman of the Privacy Committee of the International Association for Human Resource Information Management, calls such monitoring Orwellian and speculates that "it could create an employee-relations disaster." But at stake, Laubach insists, was a legitimate employer concern: protection of company secrets. Employees discovered with one foot out the electronic door, she says, needed to be reassigned off sensitive projects. Other companies seem to share her philosophy. A former HR manager at software behemoth Computer Associates, Bruce Sasson, says two of his colleagues spent "a good part of their day" scanning the Web for current employees. (Computer Associates says it has no such policy.) And Pam Dixon, the author, says she’s confirmed at least seven instances of Fortune 1,000 companies assigning someone to the task full-time.
Read This Before You Put A Resume OnlineAttuned to such dangers or not, an estimated one million people will transmit their resumes over the Net this year. And it can be a matchless generator of job leads. When Scott Savant, a PeopleSoft consultant, posted his credentials on three sites, he was deluged with as many as 75 recruiting calls per day. "There’s a serious positive side to having it out there," says Craig Brown, who routinely uses the Net to land short-term gigs as an Oracle database administrator. "You can get that job of a lifetime." But a number of factors conspire to wrest control from the job seeker. Among them: so-called spidering technologies. Dispatched at night by job boards looking to populate themselves with candidates, these programs creep robotically through other sites and return laden with resumes. Even private, password-secured services aren’t immune to such pilfering: A couple of years ago ComputerJobs. com, a popular site for tech professionals, had several rivals sign up as "clients" and then illicitly download resumes for re posting. The result? A CV posted on a handful of sites can quickly end up plastered across a dozen. And a runaway resume can be hard to stop. Many job boards don’t even allow candidates the option of removing outdated versions. In Craig Brown’s case, a company he’d never heard of began using his resume to solicit business from a client. Shri Kakarla, a Brooklyn-based consultant, had an even worse problem: not only did he lose track of his resume’s whereabouts, but someone improved it, adding work experience he didn’t have. "I got a call saying, ’I heard you’ve worked at nuclear power plants,’ " he recalls. "I was like, ’Where did you get that idea?’" Then there are the thousands of small-time headhunters who, looking for a quick commission, harvest resumes from the Internet and shovel them to employers in bulk—without consulting the candidates. One former manager at Price Waterhouse Coopers says his resume was picked up in such a sweep and sent to—you guessed it—Price Waterhouse. It was not, shall we say, a boon to his career. "[The headhunter] didn’t even bother reading my resume," fumes the manager, who hired an attorney and considered legal action. But what legal recourse is there against resume snatching? Not much, attorneys agree. "Once you’ve posted something publicly," summarizes Jamie L. Johnson, a partner at the law firm Brobeck Phleger & Harrison in Los Angeles, "forget it." Sensitive to the mounting concerns, some job boards are turning privacy into a selling point. HotJobs.com, for instance, offers candidates the option of "blocking" their resume from the gaze of certain employers. And JobOptions.com has introduced a so-called "blind" approach whereby candidates post a truncated, nameless version of their resume and receive an e-mail if an employer’s interest is piqued. "We’re trying to provide an environment where professionals can have their credentials out there while keeping their careers intact," says JobOptions president Michael Forrest. Pam Dixon is skeptical that such precautions can thwart a salvager. "It doesn’t work," she says, noting that employers can skirt some blocking mechanisms simply by registering under a non corporate e-mail address. So what’s a responsible job seeker to do? For out-of-work or just-out-of-school candidates with little to lose, the air-drop method might still make sense. By all means, proceed directly to ResumeBlaster.com, which distributes resumes with all the discrimination of a fire hose, and blast away. But for those who’d prefer not to be fired for testing the waters, some protective steps seem essential. As for Unmesh Laddha, he won’t repost his resume online anytime soon. But then again, he doesn’t need to. It’s still out there—and will be for years to come.
Resume Privacy 101Going online to job-hunt? We can’t guarantee your privacy, but here are six steps that may safeguard your resume. At a minimum, date your resume—just in case it lands on your boss’ desk two years from now. Include a legend that forbids unauthorized transmission by headhunters. It may not work, but no harm in trying. Call a job site’s administrators before posting to it. Key questions: Are resumes ever traded or sold to other databases? Is a firewall up to protect them from being cherry-picked by "spidering" programs? And who has access to the database? Just corporate recruiters? Headhunters too? Anybody at all? Keep your resume off Usenet news groups, the most exposed posting spots. If possible, cloak your identity with a "power resume"—one that lists your capabilities but not your name or employer—and with an anonymous e-mail account to receive inquiries. Better yet, don’t post a resume at all. Register with a "job agent" service (available on sites like NationJob.com and CareerBuilder.com) that brings notification of job openings to your desktop. Her boss’ spy, Laubach scanned the Net for employee resumes. |