by Martin Yate
21. July 2009 09:23
| The most productive résumés start with a clear focus on the target job, and look at its responsibilities from the point of view of the selection committee. Let's start Target Job Deconstruction to determine the proper focus for your job-targeted resume:
Step One. Collect 6-10 job postings of the job you are best qualified to do. Save them in a folder and also print them out. Not sure where to start? Try www.indeed.com, it's a job aggregator (or spider) that runs around thousands of job sites looking for jobs with your chosen keywords.
Step Two. Create a new MSWord doc and title it TJD for Target Job Deconstruction.
Start with a first subhead reading JOB TITLE, then copy and paste in all the variations from your samples. Looking at the result you can say, "when employers are hiring people like me they tend to describe the job title with these words."
This will help you to come up with a suitable Target Job Title for your resume, coming right after your name and contact information. This helps your resume perform well in resume database searches and acts as a headline giving human eyes an immediate focus.
Step Three. Add a second subhead titled
SKILLS/RESPONSIBILITIES/REQUIREMENTS/DELIVERABLES ETC
Look through all the print job postings across your desk for a single requirement that is common to all six of your job postings. Take the most complete description of that single requirement and copy and paste it (with a bullet) into your TJD doc; put a #6 by your entry to signify it is common to all.
Underneath this pasted entry add any other words and phrases from the other job postings used to describe this same area. Repeat this exercise for any other requirements common to all six of your job postings.
Step Four. Then repeat the exercise for requirements common to five of the jobs and then four and so on all the way down to those requirements mentioned in only one job posting.
When this is done you can look at your work and say, "when employers are hiring people like me they tend to refer to them by these job titles and they prioritize their needs in this way and use these words to describe them."
Step Five. This step will get you focused on the very practical competency issues of interest to employers, it is information you might well use in an interview as well as in your resume........Read More
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Martin Yate CPC
NY Times Business Bestseller
10 books in 25 languages
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