This month my Career Collective colleagues are discussing tactics for giving your job search strategy a mid-year checkup. My tips for a resume checkup are below. Be sure to check out the sage advice of my colleagues as well by following the links at the end of this post. You can also view my video on resume tips for $100K+ professionals here.

In today’s challenging economy, job seekers will need to implement a strong self-marketing campaign in order to get noticed in a crowded job search space. That campaign starts with strong marketing collateral, particularly a quality resume that quickly gets their candidacy to the top of the resume pile. Below are five strategies for crafting a more powerful presentation of your qualifications to get noticed faster and accelerate your job search.

Create a Personal Brand
What comes to mind when you think of companies such as Apple, Google, and Nike? All of these companies have a strong company brand and employer brand and the mere mention of their name brings certain images of their value and market differentiators to people’s minds. It’s really no different for job seekers. They also need a strong brand and a clear and compelling message of value that tells employers why they should hire them. Every resume needs a profile or summary at the top to position them as a leader in their field and showcase their top achievements and brand attributes.

Lace Your Resume With Keywords
Every resume needs clear evidence that you are qualified to do the job you are applying for. Keywords are the words that validate your candidacy and help the hiring authority determine if you have the “must haves” for the job. By creating a special category for your competencies on the resume, you make it easier for your reader to quickly understand your areas of knowledge or expertise. Since both humans and computers may be screening your resume, it is important to list keywords in all the forms that they may be recognized by employers and computers. For example, if you were involved in mergers and acquisitions, use this term and the acronym M&A.

Focus on Accomplishments Over Job Tasks
Anyone can slap information from their job description onto a piece of paper and call it a resume (and many do). But the resume should not be a laundry list of “stuff you did.” Instead, it should be a marketing tool that proves your value to the organizations you supported. Discuss initiatives you led that helped the organization do something smarter, faster, or more efficiently. What impact did you have on the companies you supported? Can you show how you helped these companies make money, save money, save time, grow the business, or keep the business? Do you have metrics (numbers, dollar figures, percentages) to validate your achievements? To create your own accomplishment statements, use the CAR formula. Think of Challenges you faced in your position, the Actions you took to address those challenges, and the corresponding Results. By focusing on your stories of success over job tasks you can demonstrate to your reader not just what you do, but why you are good at what you do.

Just Say No to Cookie Cutter Resume Templates
Ditch the Microsoft template and create your own unique resume design. You never want to look live everyone else when you are applying for a job. The point is to create a one-of-a-kind representation of you as a candidate. Keep the presentation tasteful (no neon green resume paper!), but don’t be afraid to infuse a little bit of style or even color into the document. Use text boxes, bold, and spacing to call special attention to the most important information in the document and use space efficiently. You only have a certain amount of space to communicate your message (1-2 pages) so consider that space precious real estate and use it wisely.

Take Your Resume Past 1-2 Pieces of Paper
Traditional paper resumes will continue to be an important part of the hiring process, but Web 2.0 now plays a leading role as well. More and more recruiters and hiring authorities are “googling” candidates to review their online presence, so it is becoming increasingly more important to have a branded online presence and virtual resume that matches the one you are using to communicate your message of value offline. For right now, LinkedIn still appears to be the “darling” of the recruiter and hiring manager community. Recruiters and hiring managers are leveraging LinkedIn to find candidates because it is an extremely robust database. Take the time to build out your online profile/resume with information about key achievements and consider adding your LinkedIn URL to your paper resume or email signature line for greater exposure.  Additional tools that people are using to build both online identity and their network are Google Profiles, ZoomInfo, Facebook, Branchout, BeKnown, Twitter,  Plaxo, Spoke, Xing, Ecademy, Ziggs, and Naymz.

Your resume is an important part of your search strategy, but it is not the silver bullet. Make sure that you are using multiple methods of search to get in front of employers and not just relying on the job boards. Be sure to enlist the help of recruiters and your network. Research the companies you are interested in and try to build relationships with decision makers at these organizations even if there is not a current opening. Build out your profiles on the various online networking sites and don’t forget the value of professional organizations for education and relationship building. Happy hunting!

4 Summer Strategies to Step Up Your Job Search, @DebraWheatman, #careercollective

Putting Your Job Search Up On The Rack For Inspection, @dawnrasmussen, #careercollective

Mid-Year Job Search Checkup: Are you wasting your time? @GayleHoward, #careercollective

What is your unique value proposition? @keppie_careers, #careercollective

It is Time for Your Check-up Ms/Mr Jobseeker, @careersherpa, #careercollective

Mid-Year Career Checkup: Are You “On Your Game?” @KatCareerGal, #careercollective

How to Perform a Mid-Year Job Search Checkup, @heatherhuhman, #careercollective

Reposition your job search for success, @LaurieBerenson, #careercollective

Mid-Year Job Search Checkup: What’s working and What’s not? @erinkennedycprw, #careercollective

Mid-Year Job Search Check-Up: Getting Un-Stuck, @JobHuntOrg, #careercollective

Mid-Year Check Up: The Full 360, @WalterAkana, #careercollective

5 Tips for Fighting Summer Job Search Blues, @KCCareerCoach, #CareerCollective

Are you positive about your job search? @DawnBugni, #CareerCollective

Where Are The Jobs? @MartinBuckland, @EliteResumes, #CareerCollective

Mid-Year Job-Search Checkup: Get Your Juices Flowing, @ValueIntoWords, #CareerCollective

When Was Your Last Career & Job Search Check Up? @expatcoachmegan, #CareerCollective

I often tell my clients that rewriting a resume is like cleaning out a closet. It’s hard to clean out our closet because we can become emotionally attached to some of the items in it. Perhaps it’s a dress you bought a decade ago that is no longer in style or a pair of pants that no longer flatters your figure. Or maybe it’s that impulse buy that seemed so right at the time but turned out to be so wrong and has been sitting in your closet for years.

We struggle with the same issues when rewriting resumes. It may be hard to let go of  the half page dedicated to that Y2K conversion you worked so diligently on in 1999 or the extended paragraph about the direct mail campaign that was novel in 2001 but old hat in 2011. And what do we do about that dot.com venture in 2000 that only lasted 4 months and turned into a dot.bomb? Sometimes we need someone with a more objective perspective to step in and clean out our resume.

I help people let go of the clutter and the irrelevant and get them to focus on the parts of their background that will be most valuable to employers. And I cultivate a similar strategy when I help clients prepare for interviews.

Recently I started thinking about my wardrobe/resume analogy and  how integral what’s in your closet is to your overall presentation and value proposition to employers. A great resume and a great interview strategy should be complemented by a great outfit for the interview. The clothes need to be just as relevant as the message on the resume or elevator pitch.

So I’m thrilled to introduce Career Solvers’ latest service offering…image consulting through a new partnership with Style of Success image consulting for men and Vada Image Consulting for women. Career Solvers clients can now take advantage of the expertise of image consultants Ann Lindsay and Dianne Boras and purchase image consulting services and packages that include personal color and style consultations, closet clearing and wardrobe analysis and personal shopping services. You can learn more about these new services here.

In case you are wondering, I have gone through this process myself. A few weeks ago Dianne examined the contents of my closet. She helped me let go of a skirt that I’ve dubbed my Y2K skirt because it was that old and that unflattering and she convinced me to give up an impulse buy dress that never really worked and still had the price tag on it. She also helped me gain a better understanding of the best colors and styles for my shape. She removed the emotion from my closet so I could move on and remain relevant to the people seeking my professional services.

I hope you will check out this new service. After all, shouldn’t you look as good as your new resume?

A lot, according to a survey done by Forensic Psychology and information culled by Jobacle. The most common resume lies are about salary, credentials, job performance, job responsibilities, and job skills.

Read more about the statistics related to lying on your resume and fess up (anonymously) if you’ve ever lied on your own resume here.

This month’s Career Collective topic is Spring Cleaning Your Job Search. Please be sure to check out the advice of my esteemed colleagues at the end of this post.

It’s been a rough winter here in New York City. We can’t wait to shed the coats, ditch the boots, and wake up and smell the flowers. (Yes we have flowers in New York City!) Currently there is an installation of flower sculptures along Park Avenue and while it’s lovely, I’m looking forward to the live tulips that are planted there each spring. Those flowers represent renewal and new beginnings. For many, spring is a time of career renewal. Maybe it’s the weather; maybe it’s the fact that many people have just received their payout for last year’s bonus and they are now ready to make a move. Whatever the reason, many people decide to spring clean their resume in March and embark on a job search. Here are five tips for cleaning up your resume.

1. Throw out those cliched personal attributes. Attention all you motivated, team-oriented change agents and dynamic, detail-oriented strong communicators. Pick up these overused expressions and get rid of them. Prove the value you can bring to an organization by describing strong quantifiable accomplishments. Let the garbage man take away the other meaningless fluff.
2. Weed out those endless job tasks. A hiring manager doesn’t want a job description. He wants an explanation of the unique value you brought to the execution of your job tasks and proof of how you do things smarter, faster, and more efficiently. A few sentences about your job tasks is fine…ten bullet points is not.
3. Scrub statements about references. Take the statement “references available upon request” off your resume. It’s dated, it wastes space, it’s unnecessary, and it isn’t even true. References are available in plenty of places without asking directly for them (think Google and LinkedIn). Save the space in your resume for more compelling content.
4. Clean out your resume closet. If you’ve been adding information about your most recent job on top of the old resume content, chances are the resume has lost its focus and become much too long. Take a good hard look at your resume and decide what content it’s time to let go of. It’s doubtful that your next employer will need a lengthy explanation of the marketing coordinator role you held in 1982 if you are now a CMO.
5. Freshen up the look. Consider redesigning the document to improve the formatting, make it easier to find key information, and give the resume a more modern look. Check out Happy About My Resume for some updated resume styles.

• Personal Branding to Fire Up Your Job Search, @DebraWheatman
• Succeeding in a “Final Jeopardy!” World, @WalterAkana
• 5 Steps to Retool & Jumpstart Your Job Search, @erinkennedycprw
• Your Job Search: Let’s Just Start Again Shall We? @GayleHoward
• Checklist for Spring Cleaning Your Job Search, @careersherpa
• 5 Ways to Spring Clean Your Job Search, @heatherhuhman
• Ten Surefire Ways to Organize Your Job Search, @KatCareerGal
• Put Spring Into Your Job Search, @EliteResumes @MartinBuckland
• Toes in the Water, @ValueIntoWords
• How to Revitalize a Stale Job Search, @KCCareerCoach
• How to re-think your job search, @Keppie_Careers
• Wake Up and Smell the Flowers: Spring Cleaning Your Resume, @barbarasafani
• Spring Cleaning and Your Personal Brand, @resumeservice
• Spring clean your mind clutter first, @DawnBugni
• Managing Your Career 2.0: On Giving Something Up To Get It Right, @Chandlee

I was recently interviewed by Adrienne Mitchell of Market Watch Radio Network about resumes. You can hear my tips for making the most of keywords and writing compelling profiles and accomplishment statements here.

I read a lot of resumes that start off with applicants describing themselves as passionate, visionary, out-of-the-box thinkers, dedicated, “roll up their sleeves” professionals, and big picture thinkers. Perhaps they believe these phrases elevate the professionalism of their resume or make them sound more committed to their work. But I think this type of language works against you when you are crafting your resume. Here’s why.

1. You sound like a cliche. When you incorporate these types of terms into your resume to make you sound unique, you actually sound like you don’t have an original thought in your head. Hiring managers read thousands of resumes with these same claims every year. If it wasn’t that interesting the first time around, it certainly won’t be interesting after the 1,000th resume. The same is true for LinkedIn profiles. You can read colleague Louise Fletcher’s post about this here.
2. No one will ever find you. Many hiring managers search for candidates by using applicant tracking software or performing targeted keyword searches on LinkedIn. I guarantee you, no one is keying on the search term passionate or visionary to find their next top executive. They are searching based on key skills and competencies.
3. You won’t look different than your competitors. Anyone can say they are dedicated or the top in their field. Until you can prove it with a strong overview of your accomplishments, no one will believe you are any different than all the other candidates vying for the same opportunity.

Skip the flowery language and stick to the facts. Tell employers how you can solve their problems and what skills you have leveraged in the past to help companies make money, save money, and save time. Your resume will be a better, more engaging, and more credible read for hiring managers.

This month’s Career Collective topic is Job-Hunting Rules to Break: Outdated Job-Search Beliefs.

I come across so many outdated concepts in resume writing that seem to be “passed down from generation to generation” of job seekers, so I thought this was a good time to dispel some common resume writing myths once and for all.

1. Keep the resume to one page. Whether you have a one page resume or a 300 page resume, no one is reading it word for word. They are skimming it. Your job isn’t to squeeze as much information as possible on one page; it’s to prudently edit the content to focus on shining accomplishments and the most relevant content. Sometimes this takes one page; sometimes it takes two pages. Just because something is on one page doesn’t make it easier to read. Aim for a user-friendly design strategy with clean lines and information that is easy to find and stop getting so caught up in the length of the document.
2. Always include an objective. An objective is of no use to a hiring manager. It doesn’t tell them how you will fix their problems or the unique value you can bring to the company. It’s generally all about you and what you want in your next job. And hiring managers don’t really care about what you want. Explain how you can ease their pain, up front at the beginning of the resume, and increase your chances of getting an interview.
3. Never add color to a resume. Years ago, color wasn’t really an option on a resume. Today, color, shading, bold, and other design elements can be incorporated into a resume quickly and easily to make key information stand out. Have you ever read a marketing brochure that used graphic design and other visual elements to improve their messaging? Make no mistake…your resume is a marketing brochure. Why shouldn’t you use similar design techniques to get noticed by hiring managers?
4. Left justify dates of employment. Dates were left justified when people were writing resumes on typewriters and there was really no better way to do it. If your resume looks like it was done on a typewriter, that’s a problem within itself. Beyond that, left justifying dates is a poor use of valuable space on a resume. Right-justify employment dates and save that space for more important information about the value you bring to employers.
5. List references on your resume. This may have made sense if you were conducting a search prior to 1999. But now,  no one is going to solely rely on the references you list on a resume. Most hiring managers Google candidates before ever calling them in for an interview. They don’t need to look at the references you supply; they can dig up all kinds of information about you online.

You can read my colleagues’ post about outdated job search beliefs here:

Juice Up Your Job Search, @debrawheatman

It’s not your age, it’s old thinking, @GayleHoward

Want a Job? Ignore these outdated job search beliefs @erinkennedycprw

Job Search Then and Now, @MartinBuckland @EliteResumes

Break the Rules or Change the Game? @WalterAkana

The New: From The Employer’s-Eye View, @ResumeService

Job Search: Breakable Rules and Outdated Beliefs, @KatCareerGal

Job Hunting Rules to Break (Or Why and How to Crowd Your Shadow), @chandlee @StartWire,

Shades of Gray, @DawnBugni

3 Rules That Are Worth Your Push-Back, @WorkWithIllness

Your Photo on LinkedIn – Breaking a Cardinal Job Search Rule? @KCCareerCoach

How to find a job: stop competing and start excelling, @Keppie_Careers

Be You-Nique: Resume Writing Rules to Break, @ValueIntoWords

Modernizing Your Job Search, @LaurieBerenson

How Breaking the Rules Will Help You in Your Job Search, @expatcoachmegan

Beat the Job-Search-Is-a-Numbers-Game Myth, @JobHuntOrg

25 Habits to Break if You Want a Job, @CareerSherpa

As an older job seeker, writing a resume can bring an additional set of challenges. It can be hard to know what to include and what to leave out of the document when you have had a long work history, and it may have been years since the last time you even needed a resume. Resume etiquette has changed, and it is important to change along with it. Here are ten tips on writing  resumes for older workers.

This month’s Career Collective topic is common job search misperceptions. My post is about resume writing misperceptions. You can read the topics by my esteemed colleagues by following the links at the end of this post.

It’s probably no surprise to you that hiring managers don’t read every resume they receive. And you may also know that they don’t  read any resume in its entirety; instead they scan the resume to find relevant information. If they find key information after an initial scan they may take a closer look at the document. If not, they are on to the next resume as quickly as possible. In some cases they aren’t even reading the resume on a full 8 1/2″ by 11″ piece of paper or a standard computer screen. It’s highly likely that they are doing that initial scan on their smart phone. So how can you grab the attention of the hiring manager and get him to pay attention to your resume? Here are a few suggestions.

1. Group similar content by theme. Instead of making a laundry list of accomplishments, create more digestible sound bites of information by grouping your achievements by themes and using a category heading  for each theme.
2. Highlight top achievements so they can’t be missed. Place big picture accomplishments in bold or a shaded box so they are quickly noticed. Under each big picture accomplishment list the milestones that contributed to the overall accomplishment.
3. Include a section with your top skills. These are the keywords or buzzwords for your industry and job function. Make sure these words are prominent and towards the top of the document.
4. Avoid blocky paragraphs of texts. Most people’s eyes glaze over when they see big blocks of text. Reading long paragraphs takes too much effort. Use bullets and keep your sentences short.
5. Use charts and graphs to convey a point. A chart or graph can illustrate some of your key selling points without using a lot of words. The reader’s eye will be drawn to the chart since it will stand out from the other text in the document.
6. Use text boxes to spotlight important information. A text box can help break up dense text and make your resume more engaging and interesting. A text box can highlight information that sets you apart from your competition such as awards you have received, top performance statistics, or even the number of promotions you received at a specific company.

• 5 Misconceptions Entry-Level Job Seekers Make, @heatherhuhman
• How “Interview Savvy” Are You?, @careersherpa
• Employers Don’t “Care”, @ValueIntoWords
• Misconceptions about Using Recruiters, @DebraWheatman
• 15 Myths and Misconceptions about Job-Hunting, @KatCareerGal
• Are You Boring HR? @resumeservice
• Job Search Misconceptions Put Right, @GayleHoward
• Who Cares About What You Want in a Job? Only YOU!, @KCCareerCoach
• How to get your resume read (sort of), @barbarasafani
• The 4 secrets to an effective recruiter relationship, @LaurieBerenson
• Job Interviews, Chronic Illness and 3 Big Ideas, @WorkWithIllness
• The secret to effective job search, @Keppie_Careers
• Superstars Need Not Apply, @WalterAkana
• The Jobs Under the Mistletoe, @chandlee
• 8 Common Sense Interview Tips @erinkennedycprw
• Still no job interview? @MartinBuckland @EliteResumes
• Misconceptions about the Hiring Process: Your Online Identity is a Critical Part of Getting Hired, @expatcoachmegan