Getting Your Dream Job with a Winning Resume & Cover Letter

Your resume is a marketing document that needs to impress even the most disgruntled HR officer assigned to shortlisting from a huge applicant pool. It should be a summary of your experience, education, skills and its main purpose is to convince a potential employer to interview you. Simple as that!  

Contrary to a wide range of confusing articles popping up all over the internet on the importance of just knowing the right kinds of people to land you a good job, it is still imperative that your resume acts as a convincing tool for potential employers. It is however possible that through intense networking, you may get to meet the President of your country or even his adviser who may promise you a good job or you finally get to meet Dangote through that rich uncle or Adenuga at a wedding function and they will assure you a lucrative position in their huge companies. 

However, except your folks are major investors or shareholders in these companies, you will still be required to send your resume to someone they might ask you to contact as a follow-up. You may never get to see nor hear from them again and that person would be the only contact you may have to landing that job you were promised over the bottle of champagne you managed to share with them. You can also be rest assured that there are other 5,348 people with good networking skills like you that have been assured that same position. 

So, how do you stand out? And what will set you apart from the cloned resume holding career change seeking peers?

Understand Your Audience - As an experienced graduate either currently employed or looking to cross over to another industry or company, you need to ask of yourself - "Who is the audience?" You will need to understand what job and industry you are interested in targeting and tailor your resume strictly to that industry and the position you are coveting. As a recruiter, I can recognize a mass “to whom it may concern” type of resume at first sighting. When I receive such resume, I won't give it the time of day it certainly does not deserve. Such mass photocopied resumes show the candidate is not willing to stand out, not dedicated enough nor consider the organization important enough to give  it the attention of the day through the resume specialized building tailored for just that organization.

Conduct Intensive Research- As an applicant, the worst turn off for HR professionals is to conduct an interview with a candidate that may get to ask after the interview session questions like “May  I know what your organization is really into”, “How long have you guys been in existence” or “What’s your main source of revenue in this  company”. Such questions show that the candidate has probably applied to 167 more companies and the present interview was probably just one out of many. When you are applying for a position and preparing your cover letter, the word “stalker” should literally come to the mind of your recruiter/employer upon perusing your cover letter and resume. Conduct an impressively intensive research on the company’s financial statements, its board of directors, its work history, the year the company made its first profit, its work culture and if they have a website, go through it ravenously. If possible, provide an information that's still a sort of challenge that the company is facing which the recruiter may even be briefly aware about then mention the various solutions you can proffer for such challenges when you are recruited. You may however want to leave this for the 2^nd or 3^rd stage of interview when you finally get to meet one of its most important member of the management team. There, you can showcase your stalking skills regarding the company's achievement. For instance, your cover letter could read something along this line- 

Sample Cover Letter- Having spent a large part of my educational years following up on GE’s performance as well as centering my final year project on its financial performance in the public market in 2011 and 2012 with a huge profit margin record of $3.8b, the positive brand perception has majorly influenced my decision to join your impressive technology team that have built a digital spectrum software that has been described in the Forbes as the future. And considering that the GE brand has been recognized as the no. 45 brand among the top 100 brands in the world, I understand my long standing passion which I have nurtured from my sophomore years towards working with GE and needing to be a part of its extremely diverse team and most importantly its Technology team, an area in which I will be willing to focus my career knowing I can contribute my previous professional experience as an IT associate while I grow to become a strong part of this diverse network of professional as seen on your website.

After this, you can then go ahead to list your skills and how you can put it to good use in your preferred department. What such cover letter projects in the eyes of the recruiter/employer is a candidate with superior researching skills, keen eye for good detail, passionate ambition & dedicated interest. These traits can pave way not just for an interview but to actually getting the job.

Profile Summary – You have written your impressive customized cover letter. Now what?  Now, you need to put together a resume that would create a “wow” effect such as your cover letter did. As an experienced graduate, a profile summary is usually much more befitting than an objective as your profile summary should concisely show your experience, your skills you are bringing to the table that can be proven, the areas where you gathered these experiences and what you hope to get from the organization with the experience you are bringing on-board. For instance -

Sample Profile Summary -Accomplished advertising and marketing professional with demonstrated success in the public and private sectors. 8+ experience generating sales leads, training and developing sales teams, and creating marketing campaigns.

The above summary consists of just two sentences and within those sentences, a recruiter is able to know the candidate’s areas of interest, skills, years of experience, and candidate’s objective which is to secure a position within the same advertising and marketing department. A profile summary does not have to be long as many candidates are usually quite excited to list all the skills they have acquired over the years in this section. You can leave the excitement for the next section.

Accomplishment & Experience Section – For experienced level hires, employers are looking for candidates who can come in and start producing superior projects immediately. Therefore, recruiters will seek only candidates that have a track record of accomplishments. Wherever possible on your resume, quantify results, describe changes you have implemented, highlight areas where you were given or took on increased responsibilities. And it is a MUST that you have enough accomplishments as an experienced candidate. How else can you prove you haven't spent the past few years playing solitaire and mahjong at your office desk? A recruiter focuses intently and majorly on three areas of an experienced resume – skills, accomplishment & experiences. And during an interview, most of the questions that will be thrown your way may revolve around these areas so it is important you start practicing and building your confidence for that moment when you need to boldly state what you have achieved and can achieve. Only your accomplishments can convince a recruiter that you may be an advantageous ROI (return on investment). So spend your time listing your accomplishments and most importantly, mentioning figures and percentages.

Sample Accomplishments –

i. Coordinated team events and town hall activities at the best yet economical locations – saved expenses by 40%.
ii. Provided exceptional support to the managers and co-workers which increased overall efficiency by 30%.
iii. Reduced file retrieval time 30% by employing a user friendly electronic filing system.
iii. Attained the title of Best Employee 2010 following excellent customer feedback for providing outstanding tier one services.
iv. Increased program revenue from N1,000,000 to N10,000,000 per year.

However, after tailoring your accomplishments spanning all your work experiences, after each experience section with an organization, you can have a sub heading “key achievements” where you list the achievements you had during your tenure in that position. You can do same for all your previously held positions only if your accomplishment is in one way or the other related to the position you are customizing that resume for. It’d be ridiculous to mention as achievement “successfully greeted customers amicably which led to high rating in customer feedback during the quarterly performance review” when applying for a role in IT or as a Business Analyst. Remember, the key is to tailor to meet the position being applied for and ensure you only include the experiences and skills that match what that employer requires.

Resume Format & Use of Tenses – For an experienced hire's resume, it is advisable to stick to the functional resume format as this ensures the recruiter sees the most important information first – summary, accomplishment, skills & experiences. Also, lacking the ability to use punctuation marks and proper tenses where necessary is a no-no and totally unacceptable for all types of resume. And in cases where your resume is being reviewed by a finicky recruiter like myself with extreme knack for language use and punctuation mark, this could will send your resume straight to the shredder. As an unwritten rule, proofread your resume a million times then share with astute friends and family that have keen eyes for fishing out mistakes to also go through for you. Let your resume be a flawless piece of work and know when to use capital letters as well as the parts of speech that must always begin in capital letters (your name for instance and the name of any company in your resume, well, except it's part of the company's brand logo like Facebook to have it start in small caps!). Italics in resumes isn't professional and except you are a graphic designer submitting a mock-up design or a model showing off a portfolio of all your good pictures, on no account should you consider using different fonts and colors to introduce a new point or information on your resume. Leave the coloring for the toddlers and infants in prep schools.

And finally, except where specifically requested for by a recruiter or organization or at a modelling agency, attaching your picture to your resume is incongruous especially in this part of the world and may be a final conviction to the recruiter that just maybe, the candidate really doesn't belong in the employment sector just yet.

In my next post, I’d be sharing the dos & don’ts of job networking & job referrals.

Disclaimer - The above article reflects solely the opinion of the author and is not in any way the opinion of HR professionals in the HR industry except otherwise stated.