Getting a good job is easy Part 1: Get Noticed

I made post wholly unrelated to employment / job hunting a while back and it blew up to the front page. In the post I mentioned that I was having a hard time filling some open positions at my consulting firm. This resulted in over 1000 messages in my inbox asking for a job or resume help or advice on how to get a good job etc... After giving a bunch of folks individual advice on their specific job searches I was asked repeatedly to make a post on the topic. There's way too much to put into one post without causing peoples eyes to glaze over so I'll break it up into a few parts. TL:DR I Posted http://imgur.com/gallery/v5hWg and as an indirect result tons of people asked me to make a post about how to get a good job.

  

It starts with the job, not your resume

Everybody does this backwards and it just doesn't work well. If you create a product without understanding what your customers want first then, unless you're just lucky you're not going to create a great product. The same applies with your resume. Step 1. Figure out what sort of job you want. Step 2. Go to Dice.com, Monster.com etc... and search for related jobs Step 3. Find all the job postings that you like and copy / paste their contents into a word document. I recommend at least 30 posts but more is better

The way companies decide who's worth interviewing has changed

Unless you're applying to fast food places or retail nobody operates with paper resumes anymore. If you're sending out paper resumes they're probably getting thrown away instantly. Companies / recruiters own software or pay for services that use key words to match a job opening with a resume or database full of resumes to see who's worth looking at. Even if you're an AMAZING candidate if your resume doesn't have a high percentage match to key words in a job post it's not going to be picked up for review. Step 4. Take your massive word document full of job postings and copy/paste it into a key word analyzer (the one I show here is free and available online) Step 5. Run it

Find the key words and tricky phrases

The output report will have a ton of entries returned. Step 6. Walk through the results and find the key words and tricky phrases that seem to be commonly used. Step 7. Copy out the key words and tricky phrases that seem to pop up more than once or twice and put them in a seperate list

Now it's time to write your resume

Step 8. Find a good resume template that works well for you and build your entire resume around the results in step 7. Regardless of the resume template you should have a section like the above picture that you can use to list all of your relevant skills. I usually suggest putting this right before your "Employment History" section. I built the resume above from using key word results for various "Data Analyst" jobs. I used my youngest employee's resume as inspiration, he's in his early 20s and 2 years out of college. Key words were half the battle, incorporating them in an attractive way is the second half. Match the number in the picture with my comments below to understand the logic. (1) Using vague terms like "Exposure to" or "Experience with" gives you the ability to appear qualified even though you may have just only taken one class on the topic or done some independent research online. If you can speak comfortably on a skill in an interview then feel free to list it in this manner. (2) Here's a good example of a vague and essentially un-provable boast. Pepper your resume with these. I don't advocate outright lying however you certainly need to have a measure of "used car salesmen" in you when you write your resume. (3) The specific person I built this around has 3 years of relevant college work and 2 years work experience. He sent specs to an offshore team in India and managed their development work and he was in charge of a team of interns on his last project. Doesn't sound anywhere near as impressive as what I wrote in the resume however it's still factually true and completely defensible in an interview. (4) You don't have to have done it in the work place for it to count as a skill you're capable of performing. If you've written something up or worked on something as practice on your own time it's still something you've done and a skill you've developed or are developing. Again don't outright lie but don't sell yourself short either. (5) missing a skill? Go to Kahn Academy, Udemy.com, Youtube, local library and take a class or read a book. Every single item listed on the above with a (5) behind it are marketable skills you can learn in either a couple hours online or over a weekend of fiddling around. Step 9. Write a novel. The old "your resume should only be 1-2 pages long" advice doesn't apply to the modern digital world, not one bit, anyone who tells you otherwise is out of touch with how the HR world has changed over the past 10 years. Human Beings don't read stacks of resumes anymore to find good candidates, computers do it. The more words you have the higher chance of hitting the key word match for a given opening. My online resume is 16 pages long (due to the type of work I perform I recognize that this is a pretty big outlier) and I have an "Executive summary" version that's 5 pages long that I'll send to clients that are already interested hiring me or my firm. The average person's Online resume should probably be 4-5 pages and their executive summary should be 1-2.

The results

Step 10. Post the resume to all the job boards. I posted the resume I wrote for this post and within a couple of days the inbox was flooded with companies and recruiters reaching out with their various openings asking if I was interested. Your results may vary depending on how common / rare your preferred job may be however I'm confident that following the above can help pretty much anybody get much more noticed by employers. Your resume shouldn't be primarily a catalog of what you've done. It should tell the story of what you're capable of doing. NOTE: Sorry if the wording is clunky and the pictures aren't pretty. I'm pretty slammed this week and didn't have a lot of time to polish post had to knock it out during a staff meeting. Here's a practical example: http://imgur.com/gallery/PDUMp Part 2: