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| Advice on how to land your dream job:
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| #1 Your resume
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This article is sponsored by ChildcareJobs.com.au the best place to find your next early childhood job.
Is 2015 the year you find your dream job? If you are thinking about looking for a new job the first thing you need to do is visit our sister site ChildcareJobs.com.au and register to receive our weekly job alerts, the second thing you need to do is dig out your resume and give it a spit and polish.
Your resume is your first point of contact with a future employer and as such it is extremely important to make sure you get it right.
Most people dread the thought of putting together their resume, or refreshing it after new training or experience. However, if you view your resume as your one and only ticket to an interview then it should motivate you to spend some time making it look great and read even better.
Many employers recruiting new staff perform an initial cull of all the resumes they receive, which means your resume must catch a recruiter's eye very quickly.
Use our tips to make sure your resume has the best possible chance of winning you an interview and the opportunity to impress a prospective employer in person:
General resume rules:
- Aim to be clear and concise, you need to prove to your employer that you have the skills, experience and abilities to do the job and make it easy for him/her to contact you.
- Use bullet points and lots of white space, remember the person reading your resume has probably read many others that day and making the job easier for them may improve your chances of winning an interview.
- Use action words and positive language. Using words which describe the actions you took and the outcomes you achieved in your last job will catch the recruiter's eye. For example:
- Provided high quality care for three children under five for two working parents
- Used my child care training to provide stimulating and educational activities for the children on a daily basis
- Highlight your strengths; your employer wants to find out what unique skills, experience and talents you can bring to the workplace. This is your opportunity to sell yourself, list your strengths then explain how you achieved them, for example:
- Excellent communication skills gained through five years of working in homes with children and their parents
- Highly developed time management and organisational skills achieved through working in constantly changing child care environments which need to adapt to the needs of the children
- Match words used in your resume to words used in the job description. Have a close look at the job description and borrow some of the words for use in your resume. These words will catch the recruiter's eye and will make your resume stand out.
- Leave out personal details such as your age, health, marital status, ethnicity, hobbies etc. These are irrelevant and may be used against you.
Layout:
As mentioned above it is extremely important to make your resume clear, concise and easy to read.
There are many different ways to layout the all-important information and the way you choose should depend on the information you are trying to highlight and your professional experience to date.
- Regardless of which format you choose, your name and contact information should be the first things the recruiter reads. Your details should be centred on the page and should include your full name, mobile and home numbers, address and your email address. It is preferable to use a personal email address rather than a work address but avoid using an email address with a strange nickname.
- Some people like to put a career objective after their contact details. This isn't necessary but if it is something you would like to include write your objective in a way that describes what you can do for your employer in return for achieving your goals.
For example:
- To work in a dynamic child care environment where I can use my skills and experience to further shared goals and gain on-the-job training.
The next section should describe in detail your professional experience. As a general rule you should try and put more information about your responsibilities and achievements in your current/most recent job than previous jobs.
The exception to this rule is when your most recent job was away from the field you usually work in. In this case you should pad out the information provided on previous jobs which provided skills and experience directly relevant to the position you are currently applying for.
Have a think about whether the title of the job you held or the place where you worked is more important for the position you are currently applying. This should help you decide the order of information in your professional experience section for example:
| Live-in Nanny |
Smith family |
2000-2012 |
| 5 Star Child Care Centre |
Child care assistant |
2012-current |
Describe your key tasks and responsibilities, make sure you highlight your accomplishments and describe how your contributions improved your workplace and helped achieve the objectives of your employer. Use positive language and action words and if possible quantify your key achievements so the recruiter can see exactly what changes and improvements you helped to bring about.
Information on qualifications and additional training courses should come next. If you completed your training a long time ago it is not necessary to provide a lot of detail in this section, however, if you are hoping your qualification will help you secure the job and you don't have much work experience then it would be worth describing the course and the subjects you completed.
It is becoming less common to provide written references in resumes these days and most recruiters seem to prefer to speak to former employers directly. If you are not comfortable listing the contact details for your referees it is perfectly acceptable to include a statement along the lines of:
Contact details for references available on request
Make sure you contact your referees prior to handing out their details and make sure you give them an overview of the position you are applying for so they can provide information relevant to that job.
Remember:
One size does not fit all when it comes to resumes. Expect to tweak, rewrite and refresh your resume for each job you apply for.
A resume written on zany paper with a crazy font is likely to stand out: You're right it is but for all the wrong reasons. Employers prefer plain white paper with a clear font which can be easily read, copied and scanned.
Less is more. Your resume is your personal marketing document not your life story. Stick to the facts, make it relevant and keep it up-to-date.
Common Mistakes:
Now you know what to do, you also need to know what NOT to do. Laszlo Bock the SVP of People Operations at Google, a man who has seen a lot of resumes, has identified five main errors he sees time and time again.
Mistake 1: Typos.
This one seems obvious, but it happens again and again. A 2013 CareerBuilder survey found that 58% of resumes have typos. In fact, people who tweak their resumes the most carefully can be especially vulnerable to this kind of error, because they often result from going back again and again to fine tune their resumes just one last time. And in doing so, a subject and verb suddenly don't match up, or a period is left in the wrong place, or a set of dates gets knocked out of alignment. I see this in MBA resumes all the time. Typos are deadly because employers interpret them as a lack of detail-orientation, as a failure to care about quality.
The fix? Read your resume from bottom to top: reversing the normal order helps you focus on each line in isolation. Or have someone else proofread closely for you.
Mistake 2: Length.
A good rule of thumb is one page of resume for every ten years of work experience. Hard to fit it all in, right? But a three or four or ten page resume simply won't get read closely.
A crisp, focused resume demonstrates an ability to synthesize, prioritize, and convey the most important information about you. Think about it this way: the *sole* purpose of a resume is to get you an interview. That's it. It's not to convince a hiring manager to say "yes" to you (that's what the interview is for) or to tell your life's story (that's what a patient spouse is for). Your resume is a tool that gets you to that first interview. Once you're in the room, the resume doesn't matter much. So cut back your resume. It's too long.
Mistake 3: Formatting.
Unless you're applying for a job such as a designer or artist, your focus should be on making your resume clean and legible. At least ten point font. At least half-inch margins. White paper, black ink. Consistent spacing between lines, columns aligned, your name and contact information on every page. If you can, look at it in both Google Docs and Word, and then attach it to an email and open it as a preview. Formatting can get garbled when moving across platforms. Saving it as a PDF is a good way to go.
Mistake 4: Confidential information.
In a very rough audit, we found that at least 5-10% of resumes reveal confidential information. Which tells me, as an employer, that I should never hire those candidates ... unless I want my own trade secrets emailed to my competitors.
Mistake 5: Lies.
This breaks my heart. Putting a lie on your resume is never, ever, ever, worth it. Everyone, up to and including CEOs, gets fired for this. People lie about their degrees and where they went to school. People lie about how long they were at companies, how big their teams were, and their sales results, always goofing in their favour.
There are three big problems with lying: (1) You can easily get busted. The Internet, reference checks, and people who worked at your company in the past can all reveal your fraud. (2) Lies follow you forever. Fib on your resume and 15 years later get a big promotion and are discovered? Fired. And try explaining that in your next interview. (3) Our Moms taught us better. Seriously.
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