We all know that a resume is the primary tool for marketing your skills, knowledge, and experience to prospective employers. Most people make the mistake of treating their resume simply as a 1-2 page career history.

A more accurate perspective is to see the resume for what it is: an advertisement for a wonderful, complex, intelligent, educated, hard-working individual who can contribute significantly to a company’s success. However, as an advertisement, it cannot possibly communicate everything about who you are.

The resume is just a sample—a taste of the challenges and successes met, particularly throughout your work life. Each piece of the resume needs to be significant, positive, and effective. Each achievement, phrase, and word carefully selected to meet the goal: generating an interview.

Write to a Target Job Description

A resume will be more effective if written for a specific job in a specific industry—a Target Job. “Fine,” you might be saying. “If I knew what that is, I wouldn’t be reading this blog. I’d be working already, with my mortgage paid and my credit card payments up to date!”

Take it easy. Finding your perfect, Target Job is easier than you might think. You may even enjoy the process. But first, let’s look at the world of hiring managers—your resume’s audience. The task of a hiring manager is to find a near-perfect match between the job applicant and the job.

At the point of screening, the match of your capabilities to the requirements of the job isn’t just the big thing: it’s the only thing. Your resume must answer one question, “Can this candidate do the job?” This is why it is imperative to have a Target Job description in front of you when writing your resume.

Shopping for Your Target Job

So how do you find a Target Job description? Go shopping on the internet; the job boards are at you disposal. My favorites are  Monster.com,  CareerBuilder.com and  Indeed.com. To begin searching, type in key words that are job titles you have held in your career. Be sure to search nationally so that you get as many options as possible. As you type in job titles, you will see how many jobs with that title pop up by industry.

If you are considering an industry change, find out how your old job might play out in another industry. For example, “Sales” in manufacturing might be “Business Development” in healthcare. You are playing a jargon game, trying to determine what job titles exist for your skill set. This process will also allow you to move into industries that are growing, using the skills you already have.

Sometimes typing a job title will yield a group of jobs in a particular industry. This is how to find careers that are close to what you used to do, yet different enough to provide new challenges. For example, typing in the words “grant writer” generates a list of jobs that are open in many nonprofit organizations, such as “volunteer coordinator,” “business development director,” “CEO,” and “director.” These are all functional jobs within the industry of nonprofits.

When you find a job of interest, copy and paste it into a word document. Do this four or five times, until you have a good mix of job descriptions. Voila! The key words are those that come up repeatedly. Use these common words and phrases to help you select what information to put on your resume. In my book, New Resume New Career, there are 50 resume makeovers, showing how to reframe experience to the new Target Job requirements.

Online Sources for Job Titles

Sites such as the U.S. Department of Labor website, dol.gov, will show industries that are expanding in each state, and which job titles are in demand. You can even get a customized report for a specific metropolitan area at jobbait.com.

Another government site,  online.onetcenter.org, can help expand your career options in four distinct ways. You can search by occupation titles, skills, related occupations, or by tools and technology. You can even find a new occupation. When you type in key words from your former job, you will see a list of related occupations, either by function or by industry. The site also includes a quick skills assessment to help identify dozens of new job titles that fit your skills.

A New Way to Network

When seeking work, think about networking as extended conversations to gather insights and information for your job search. Become a career detective. Ask contacts about their own careers, about their companies, and the job titles inside that organization. Share your Target Job Title and ask if there are positions open for that title. Your contact will quickly correct you if you have the terminology wrong. If you decide to apply there, first ask to see a job description. Then, make the appropriate changes to your resume before sending it along in an email.

You will start to notice that the more specific you are, the more people are able to help. Ask about one job, and people will tell you about other, closely related jobs. The clearer you become, the more possibilities open up.

Finding a new career is one of the most daunting tasks you will ever take on as an adult. It requires hard work, some digging, and the willingness to learn. My career-changing clients have told me it’s the most rewarding work they have ever done. So check out the depth of that job market water, revise your resume, and then dive right in.

Catherine Jewell is the Career Passion® Coach and author of New Resume, New Career, a resume makeover book featuring 50 real-life career changers. She has coached more than 600 adults through mid-life career changes. For more information, check out CareerPassionCoach.com or contact her at cj@careerpassioncoach.com.

Okay, not always, but often enough to be a problem. In a fit of Christmastime career-ennui a few years ago I submitted my résumé to a market research company known for mapping the vendor universe and never heard from them again.

My theory about this process, never verified, was that my résumé lacked the requisite keywords such as graduate degrees. Several weeks later my follow-up phone call was never returned, nor was a follow-up e-mail. Come to think of it, though, the company’s voice-mail system couldn’t have been looking for keywords. The downstream impact on me: I journeyed from feeling admiration to humiliation in about one week.

A recruiter will tell you that I should have given my résumé to a contact inside the company and asked him to walk it over to a hiring manager. I thought of that and opted not to because I didn’t want my contact to know that I wasn’t committed to my current job. (Granted, that’s beginning to sound like a Catch-22.)

In retrospect, these were my choices:

• I should have added better keywords into my resume like “briefly considered M.B.A.”
• I could have gone back to college for a more impressive, presumably higher degree
• I could have tried to meet someone at the firm who didn’t know me
• Or, I could have tried to figure out whether the company used a third-party recruiting firm and sought them out

The truth is none of these ideas would have worked very well. Although I knew people ‘inside’ I didn’t want to play that card. Lesson learned.

But as I look back upon this experience, I am kind of convinced that the corporate site should have come with a 36-point bold type warning in red that says: If You Insist.

Perhaps I can sue them for some form of delayed stress syndrome related to the lost résumé? “Well, you lose control,” explains Mark Mehler, co-founder of CareerXroads, a staffing strategy consulting firm Kendall Park, N.J.

Mehler says the important thing to do is just ask someone with whom you may have an affinity, like someone who went to your college or high school (not necessarily when you did). “People are generally friendly about helping each other,” he says. “So you ask there’s nothing wrong with that. The magic clue is to ask. Most people won’t ask.”

Tell me about it. This is how I parse the whole episode now: The corporate site seduced me into sending my résumé and I fed it to them. And frankly I don’t want it back.

Sounds dire, but getting the right words into your résumé is pretty simple according to Wendy Enelow, executive coach, résumé expert and author of more than 30 careers books including some on keywords and search engine optimization (SEO). “You can be the single most talented integrated-logistics manager but if you don’t have those words in your résumé you will get skipped over,” says the Virginia-based author.

To be clear, no one equates keywords with actual job experience or accomplishments. But in this highly competitive, technological age, the résumés that stand out are the ones that satisfy filtering software.  As for keywords, says Enelow, they are no more or less complex than “nouns and noun-phrases that describe what you do every day in your position.”

According to Enelow, typical keywords for the $100,000+ executive include:

• Strategic Planning
• Organizational Leadership
• Profitability Improvement
• Performance Optimization
• New Business Development
• Joint Ventures & Alliances
• Consensus Building & Teaming
• Corporate Administration
• World Class Organization
• Best Practices & Benchmarking
• P&L Responsibility
• Multi-Site Operations
• Budgeting & Finance
• Decision-Making

But what if, like much of the job world, you’re not yet a $100,000+ executive? And what if you haven’t yet worked for, much less created a world-class organization? And what if you’re a school teacher or a nurse and you’re completely disinterested in P&L responsibility?

No worries, Enelow has an idea for you anyway. “Use the Objective to integrate the appropriate keywords into your résumé,” Enelow advises. “If you’re looking for a job in accounting, you write, ‘I’m seeking a position in a corporate accounting where I can develop skills in accounts receivable, accounts payable, cash management and financial reporting’. So the Objective can become an extremely valuable tool for people trying to transition from one career to another.”

Enelow, who’s latest book is The $100,000+ Entrepreneur, says that while keyword compliance is critical – it’s not the solution to your job search. Don’t count on corporate job boards to properly scan your keywords. Be sure to send – via e-mail or snail-mail – a copy of your résumé to the powers that be at the company where you’re applying to work.

Until video presented itself, the pre-interview screening process of comparing one résumé versus another was comfortably black & white and decidedly lacking in color. Consider the fairness of an automated résumé screening process where candidates with the right keywords rise to the top.

Still, it’s tempting to call video résumés a classic example of a disruptive technology that rubs old school managers the wrong way. But it’s really not a technology issue – it’s more a matter of process. The video résumé potentially biases an otherwise black & white talent judgment by recruiters and hiring managers.

Aside from ethical considerations, video résumés lack standards for production, quality or content. Hiring managers complain that they tend to be funky, funny or offensive. The bottom line is that they often don’t reflect well upon the job candidate.

These variables means that managers who review a video résumé don’t know whether they are about to view something promising or a waste of time. Best case, it takes substantially longer to view a video résumé than it does to read one or two pages of job history, education and accomplishments.

On the other hand, video isn’t the only possible visual bias that comes into play. Many job seekers have video links or photos up on their social media sites. “With a video résumé, a candidate’s face is there for everyone to see,” says Steve Guine, NY-based HR consultant and recruiter in the financial services field. “This makes it easy to reject a candidate out of hand.”

Boston Globe columnist Penelope Trunk, author of the book, Brazen Careerist, makes the case against video résumés:

• “Don’t do it unless your biggest selling point is your charisma because it can only hurt you.”
• “Hiring managers spend ten seconds on each résumé. It takes ten seconds just to start up a video résumé. So the hiring manager has to invest more time in checking you out if you submit a résumé via video.”
• Don’t be too authentic! “Corporate hiring managers are used to [viewing] coached video, so authentic video will strike them as sloppy and unprofessional.”
• “But let’s say everyone hands in a video résumé. There are so many nonverbal issues that will matter way more than what is said, that the person who will look best on the video is the one who had the most coaching.”

Guine, the recruiter, recognizes that it’s too late to put the video genie back in the bottle. “There will have to be more oversight in dealing with this as there is potential for abuse,” says Guine. “Metrics should be rigorous and reporting timely in order to spot trends or biases. On the other hand, this may also be the tool we need to ferret out the recruiters that are biased.”

The prospect of viewing video résumés doesn’t thrill all hiring managers either. “I think it’s risky, risky, risky for people to send a résumé talking about themselves,” says Devin Thorpe, CEO, Thorpe Capital, a middle market investment banking firm in Salt Lake City. “Very few of us look like the people in Hollywood and there’s some risk that you will come off wrong – that you can hurt yourself more than help yourself.”

HireVue’s CEO Mark Newman suggests that there are approximately five thousand video résumés in circulation at the moment. These are clearly early days for this technology and even talented videographers should be patient about pursuing them too aggressively. Given the chilly reception that video résumés receive in the job world, the wisest move for now is to carry on without them.

Video résumés can be more revealing than a job seeker intends. That hasn’t stopped a few thousand mostly young job candidates from posting them on You Tube or e-mailing them to recruiters and employers. Most of the early video résumés have been criticized by corporations and recruiters who not only dislike the uneven content and quality but concede that they are ill-prepared to work with them.

You can’t screen a video résumé using today’s candidate tracking software.

Worse, hiring managers are concerned that seeing a candidate’s photo or video may bias their judgment and possibly result in more discrimination. 

Still, Alexsey Vayner exceeded his wildest expectations: his infamous “Impossible is Nothing” video résumé has received nearly a half million streams on You Tube. Much more typical is this sub-minute effort by Chrissy Harvey. One impatient wag commented back to her: “Great, tell me how many offers you got so far?”

Where do you stand on video résumés? Is it yet another disruptive technology or a set back for diversity and fair employment practices? If you know of a good video résumé, send us a link.