Revise Your Resume and Job Cover Letter to Improve Your Job Search Results

You’ve got the work experience to land the jobs you most want to get paid for. Even more, your communication, leadership, supervising and time and project management skills are top notch. Your previous employers gave you excellent marks on key areas during your semi-annual and annual performance reviews. But you still haven’t landed a new job. What’s going on?

Revise Your Resume and Job Cover Letter

No. You may not need to go back to college. Besides that will only cause you to spend more money needlessly. Believe it or not, all you may need is to revise your resume and job cover letter to improve your job search results. After all, gone are the days when you could walk into a human resource or personnel office, sit down and fill out a job application, smile at the receptionist when you were finished, walk back out the office door, returning home to await a telephone call from the office manager.  

Today you’d be hard pressed to find a company that didn’t ask you to fill out job applications online, typing your personal data in blocks of open spaces. Let your computer crash or the online job application system shut down or freeze and (unless you wisely copied and saved information you typed into the form on a Word document) you’ll have to start the time consuming process all over again. (Forgive me; it’s hard not to snicker. I’ve been there.) 

Tips and Advice to Sharpen Your Job Resume and Job Cover Letters

Tips and advice regarding how you can sharpen your resume and job cover letters are diverse; they’ve certainly changed over the last two to three years. If you’re applying for similar types of jobs, to save time consider copying and pasting job cover letter information into new job opening templates or emails. Also take the following steps: 

• Address cover letters to a specific individual by name (e.g. hiring manager, recruiter, human resource manager)
• Keep employment cover letters to one page
• Spotlight three to four job strengths in your cover letter (mention them; elaborate on the strengths on your resume)
• Revise parts of your cover letter to align them with the particular job you’re applying for (believe it or not, hiring managers can tell if a cover letter is a template that’s being sent out to several employers). By aligning your job cover letter with the particular jobs you’re seeking you can let hiring managers know that you’re only applying for jobs that interest you most. 

Keep Your Job Cover Letter and Job Resume Current

Measure the results of your cover letter. If you don’t hear from employers or hiring managers after sending out 20 or more job cover letters and resumes, consider editing one or both of the documents. Doing so can keep your job cover letter and job resume fresh and up-to-date. 

In regards to your resume: 

• Start bullet points or sentences with “action verbs”
• Identify ways you helped a project or initiative to grow (e.g. reduced employee turnover by 20% within six months)
• Space your job resume out so it doesn’t look jammed or crammed
• Read your resume out loud to see what on the resume jumps out at you (these same facts might be the ones to jump out at hiring managers)
• Move data that most strongly corresponds with the requirements of the job you’re applying for to the top of your resume  

Of course, it’s good to spell check your job resume and job cover letters before sending them out. Additionally, if you’re applying for two to three different types of jobs during your employment search, consider creating two to three different resumes.  

Follow-Up with Hiring Managers and Employers

Follow-up with hiring managers or employers two to three weeks after you apply for jobs. If hiring managers contact you to thank you for applying for the job then tell you that the position was filled by another candidate, thank the hiring managers and ask them to keep you in mind for future jobs.  

Until you land the job you’re looking for, a job that inspires and motivates you, a job you love working, consider creating email alerts with major job search boards like Career Builder, Monster and Indeed. This way you can receive automatic updates in your email in-box and can save yourself the time of searching job boards every day. You can also store your resume at job boards, even making them visible to employers. Furthermore, as a tip, if you create online logins and passwords at company human resource websites you can store your data for future reference should you see other jobs at the company you want to apply for later.  

Check out Spiral, Portia and Love Pour Over Me at www.chistell.com