What to Look for in a Résumé

Most professional résumés should not be on crazy colored paper. It shouldn’t include a picture or graphic. Unless you’re going for a super creative job as a graphic designer or an art teacher, these are just two mistakes that beginning résumé writers make.

Here are some easy ways to tell if you’re dealing with a seasoned pro or a rank amateur in the art of résumé creation.


Did the applicant:

Use more than one page?

Keep it brief with short, concise job descriptions in the work history portion?

Use things like bold and italics sparingly (only for accenting purposes)?

Keep it consistent and not change fonts a lot?

Choose a format that is pleasing to the eye and not cramped?

Proofread thoroughly so that there are no notable errors in punctuation or spelling?

Keep a consistent verb tense (current job duties in present tense, all others in past)?

Talk about professional work history only? (Including office skills like computer and typing proficiency are fine, but going off on tangents about macramé and basket weaving talent isn’t (unless, of course, you're trying to fill that type of position).

Lie? (More important than whether or not a prospective employee has been fired before is whether or not he came clean and put it on his résumé.)


Keep these helpful tips in mind, but you are, of course, the final judge here. For new bosses, that may seem a little daunting. Remember that some things are intuitive. Yes, the Johnny Jobseeker may have included a line about his “mad” Karaoke skills, but in the end, your gut feeling about someone during an interview can carry a lot of weight. If someone seems interesting on paper, meeting him can help you determine whether the inclusion of details about his singing prowess is just a quirk or the sign of someone completely wrong for your team.

10 Steps to Increase Interviewing Accuracy into the 90% Range

A simple, accurate, and effective process for hiring the best

There are two huge problems when hiring is viewed as an end-to-end process. The first one involves sourcing. Most companies are terrible when it comes to advertising, recruiting, and attracting the best. Of course, as a recruiter, how I make my money is by finding top people that others can't. However, this is a big waste of time if you or your hiring managers don't know how to accurately assess candidate competency.

I've seen many good people get overlooked and underperformers get hired because the recruiter or someone on the hiring team didn't properly assess competency. With this in mind, I would like to offer a 10-step process that will increase your company's ability to accurately determine a person's ability to perform on the job with 80 – 90 percent accuracy.

1. Know the job. As odd as this seems, the primary reason most people aren't very good at assessing competency is that they don't know what the person really needs to do on the job to be successful. Recruiters are equally at fault here. When you don't know the job, you over-rely on experience, skills, and qualifications with some combination of intuition, gut-feel, personality, and technical depth. I use performance profiles to determine real job needs, but the key is to focus more on results and deliverables to define the work rather than qualifications.

2. Emphasize comparable results, not skills and competencies. Dig deep into a candidate's major accomplishments to find out how their skills, behaviors, and competencies collectively were used to achieve success. Then, compare these results to what's required on the job. By trending these accomplishments over time, you'll also be able to observe consistency and growth. This "combo-behavioral" interview is far more effective than looking at individual traits separately.

3. Give a very restricted "no" vote that must be proven with facts, not feelings. It's too easy to say "no" about someone for a minor issue (late, unprepared) or incorrectly assess someone on an important trait that requires skill and training to measure, like meeting performance objectives on time. To minimize these false conclusions, require written documentation with substantive proof for all "no" votes.

4. Don't give anyone a full "yes" vote. There is no way someone can assess complete candidate competency across all job needs in a 45 – 60 minute interview. You might be able to determine if someone is an abject failure in this time, but that's about it. Instead of allowing a full "yes" vote, assign interviewers a sub-set of factors to assess during the interview (here's a generic competency model you can use for this.) When interviewers "own" a specific trait (e.g., job-specific problem solving), they tend to be more focused and more accurate.

5. Require candidates to give a PowerPoint presentation of their background. Errors due to lack of good interviewing skills on the part of the candidate or the manager can be reduced by having candidates present their background in a more structured way using PowerPoint. During the interview, allow candidates to talk through their 6 – 8 page printed summary with the interviewer getting details and asking for clarification. The presentation consists of a work-history overview, major accomplishments and recognition received at each job, and a summary of strengths and developmental needs. This structured interview approach forces both the candidate and interviewer to stay on point and prevents misunderstandings. The written component is especially valuable in overcoming language gaps.

6. Conduct more panel interviews. Positive and negative emotional reaction to a candidate is one of the root causes of interviewing errors (lack of job knowledge is the other). Structured panel interviews with 3 – 4 interviewers are extremely useful in minimizing errors due to first impressions, personality style, and preconceptions. During the session, one interviewer must lead, with the others only allowed to ask for clarifying information. The worst type of panel interview occurs when panel interviewers compete with each other asking their "favorite questions." Here's an article on organizing panel interviews you might find useful.

7. Use job-simulation or problem-solving questions. For years I've been asking candidates to present their analysis of a business-related issue in a panel interview as part of a take-home project. As long as the problems are job-related, important traits are uncovered, such as thinking, creativity, communications, confidence, interest, decision-making, and analytical skills. You can also ask a similar question during an interview by asking the person how she would handle a realistic job-problem. Then, get in to a give-and-take conversation. This will provide a rough sense of these same traits. Job-simulations like these, or anything else that demonstrate a person's ability to handle real job needs, improves the overall predictability of the assessment.

8. Conduct multiple interviews. If the hiring manager is serious about hiring the best, more than one session should be spent with the candidate. For staff positions I'd recommend at least two meetings, and for mid-management at least three. For executive-level spots a minimum of 5 – 6 hours spread over multiple sessions is essential. You can't learn much about a person in the first meeting since everything is scripted and the candidate is prepped. The real truth comes out in the second and third sessions.

9. Use a formal group debriefing process to reach consensus across all job factors. First, assign interviewers a sub-set of the traits in your competency model and require them to provide detailed evidence to support their assessment. Then review these in a formal group debriefing session. The hiring manager and more senior people should make their comments last. Also, start off with the positives, before getting into the negatives, to increase group objectivity. Then, foster argument about each trait. At the end, you'll know your assessment is reasonably accurate if there is little variation in opinion on each factor. Wide variation on each factor is indicative of a superficial or biased assessment.

10. Implement a multi-step validation process. A multi-step interview process as described is not enough. You'll need to include some type of cognitive skills testing to assess verbal and numeric reasoning. This will increase assessment accuracy by about five percentage points. A personality DISC-like test is helpful as a confirming indicator when used to guide the second set of interview questions. Of course, you must have drug testing (this weeds out a lot of under-performers) and conduct a formal background check. In-depth reference checks must also be conducted, with the hiring manager personally involved. Checkster.com is a new tool that we're just checking out which provides a 360-degree, anonymous means to conduct more effective reference checks.

Interviewing candidates is an important business process that few companies implement properly, even for those that have competency models and use behavioral interviewing. The problem is weak integration among all of the tools, inappropriate training, and lack of enforcement, including weak metrics. For example, if you're not measuring predicted candidate performance versus actual performance, you can't get better through process improvement. (The multi-factor competency model mentioned earlier provides an easy way to do this.)

While some of the steps above are paradigm shifting (e.g., focus on comparable results, group voting, PowerPoint structured interviewing), none are complex. The hard part is in the implementation and monitoring. But if hiring the best is an important strategic initiative for your company, there is no simpler, more accurate, or more effective way to pull it off than what's described here.

By: Lou Adler

http://www.ere.net/articles/db/02497F5B081C43DF8B41EB7267A8F744.asp

Three Questions to Ask Yourself About Millennials

Is your organization ready to identify and attract this unique generation of workers?

I still remember the first time I heard about the Millennial generation. I was at a recruiting conference in New Orleans about 10 years ago, and one of the presenters was commenting about how the boomers were about to turn 50. He said the bulk of workers who would be replacing them would be coming from a generation we now know as Millennials.

I can still see the crowd's reaction as the speaker talked about how this generation would be particularly coddled (raised by overly indulgent parents), have off-the-charts self esteem, and focus on a "what's in it for me?" attitude.

I have to confess that I overheard more than a few staffing professionals remind themselves to check on the status of their IRAs when they got back to the office, as they were seriously considering retiring early rather than be forced to conduct campus job interviews with students who brought their parents along with them.

That was 1997, and here we are 10 years later. Amazingly, just about everything that speaker said has come true (I think he worked for an insurance company). The Millennials are here, they want it all, and they want it now.

Just like you, I've experienced the drama of the college kids who have their mothers negotiate their offers for them, the new MBA who tells the vice president that she won't travel unless she has "at least two weeks' notice," and the interns who refuse to stuff binders. The chilling fact, though, is that we ain't seen nothin' yet!

The first boomers only just turned 60 last year and have not yet started leaving the workforce in significant numbers. As staffing professionals, our job during the next few years will be to replace a generation of almost 80 million people with these Millennials.

Before I go any further, I need to do some disclosure and point out that I am in no way an expert on this subject. If you're interested in the characteristics of the four generations currently working side-by-side in today's workplace, I highly recommend a book called Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 by William Strauss and Neil Howe. If you want to learn more specifically about Millennials, I recommend Cam Marston's book Motivating the "What's in it for me?" Workforce.

While the arithmetic challenge of replacing these hires is daunting, there are other considerations that will make this shift especially complex. These considerations include your ability as a staffing professional to find and attract job seekers you've never targeted before, your ability to truly understand what motivates this generation, and your ability to prepare your organization for this inevitable change.

This is a huge responsibility. I know some days I feel like celebrating just for getting our applicant tracking system to work. How will I ever be able to lead what amounts to a total revolution in how my organization views talent?

Fortunately, unlike many other changes we encounter in life, we already have a great deal of information available to us. The Millennials are the most studied and analyzed generation in history; we know what motivates them, we know what's important to them, and we know how they view themselves. A few well-spent hours researching this topic can really help prepare you to guide your organization through the next few years.

Once you're done, see how you answer these three questions:

1. Do you know how to find these job-seekers? The building in which I work has been renovated several times throughout its history. In the conference room near the staffing department there is a door that opens up into the front yard along the street. While it's currently used as an emergency exit, it has a nice awning over the door, which is different from the strictly utilitarian design of the other emergency exits in the building. Someone finally explained to me that the door was once used by the "Personnel Department" to receive walk-ins who literally walked up to the building and filled out an application for employment! What a long way we've come since then. Nearly all of us now post jobs on specialty websites and do the odd bit of branding to attract passive job-seekers. Some of the braver among us use social networking sites and virtual worlds to recruit new hires. Do you know where inexperienced hires are looking for their first jobs? Do you know how they want to learn about your company, or even what questions they're likely to ask you when you meet them? If you don't know any Millennials personally, find some and talk to them. This generation has great clarity around what they want from their careers and will be glad to share their insights with you.

2. Is your organization appealing to these job-seekers? In nearly every meeting I've attended where the topic of recruiting Millennials was discussed, someone has vowed out loud that they'll never hire someone who isn't willing to "pay their dues" like they did. Boomers value hard work and don't take kindly to people who don't see the value in "putting in their time" before they begin to realize the rewards such hard work inevitably brings (i.e., a bigger office, a loftier title, more money). Interestingly, the Millennials aren't motivated by the same things their boomer bosses are.

3. Do your hiring managers and leadership know how important this is? If your organization is like many others, you've probably never sat down and taken a "generational" look at who currently comprises your workforce, who runs things, and how your reward structure is configured. Many organizations today are run by boomers for the exclusive benefit of other boomers. Getting in early, staying late, and appearing to work hard is rewarded. People probably brag about how they came in on the weekend, or that they answered a Blackberry message in the middle of the night. People who navigate these organizations successfully are rewarded with corner offices, drive expensive cars, and enjoy the ability of having people obey their directives without a lot of discussion.

In a few years, the workplace will be significantly different. People will come and go to suit their schedules (some companies already offer employees unlimited vacation as long as their work is getting done); employees will change jobs much more frequently, so rewards will take the form of training and development; and titles and corner offices will take on less significance as good employees challenge ideas no matter who comes up with them.

Question: Does this workplace vision sound better or worse to you than your current work environment?

Answer: It doesn't matter what you think because the changes will take place regardless of your buy in.

During the Great Depression, my grandfather walked into the headquarters of one of the Big Three automakers, was hired on the spot, and worked there for 40 years. Today's Millennial job-seekers will have a very different experience: they'll work for perhaps a dozen employers, participate on virtual project teams with team-members located around the globe, and probably integrate their work life and personal life more effectively than any previous generation.

I'm quite excited about seeing what life will be like when the world is run by a generation that has never known a time without computers and cellular phones. Getting your leaders to acknowledge the impending changes will allow your organization to get the edge on your competitors and make you a hero.

By: Dr. Michael Kannisto

http://www.ere.net/tb/8CBDB915BB2442EA982080AD2A44BA4A/0F50585412

Welcome to the Career Network.

Who We Are

Career Network provides back-end solutions to help individuals start and operate their own recruiting company.

The Industry

The recruitment industry is now a multi-billion dollar industry; one that has made astounding changes and developments over the last couple of decades. The industry has felt the impact of the Internet, and its contribution has created phenomenal advancement. Internet recruiting has grown 150 percent each year since 1999, whereas traditional staffing agencies only grew 7 percent.

To illustrate this point more poignantly, here are some interesting numbers to keep in mind. A survey revealed that the cost per new hire using job fairs, print advertisement, etc. is $3295. Compare that to recruitment done exclusively through the Internet at $377 per capita. Using the Internet as part of the recruiting process attracts top-flight candidates with higher levels of education, experience and technological expertise over those relying strictly on the older job search methods.

What We Do

Gone is the era of coveting the solicitation and distribution of résumés, which were once viewed as proprietary information by staffing agencies, candidates and employers. Previously, a firm may have worked collaboratively with a few other agencies. Now hundreds of thousands of resumes are captured daily and placed on job boards, cross-posted through multiple channels, portals, search engines, and Usenet groups. Alliances forged between HR teams and the traditional and third party recruiters will become more and more vital to surmount the obstacles of recruiting.

With Career Network's help, you'll have access to everything necessary to get your employment business up and running. We offer industry resources including market analyses, technical support, consulting, legal assistance, assistance with acquiring the proper licenses, underwriting contracts, training and access to experts in the field with over 30 years of experience developing innovative objectives and running successful employment agencies.

Our Goals

Our focus is to encourage growth within the employment industry, developing networks and partnerships so that the entire human capital machine can be adept at retooling for maximum effectiveness, allowing recruiters, employers and employees to stay competitive and successful in the cyber-world order.

Stay Tuned

We'll be updating frequently with advice and news about our rapidly growing industry.