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Your resume is not about you.

Job-seekers often make the mistake of stuffing every job experience they've ever had into a one size fits all resume. They then mail out these three or four page monsters to as many possible employers as they can, and wait for the offers to roll in.

These folks are likely to remain "job seekers." No human resources manager is going to waste time digging through that volume of data about someone who has already demonstrated a lack of communications skill by submitting such a resume in the first place.

Your resume is about the potential employer's needs, and how you are the best person on earth to fill them.

A resume is an advertisement, and effective ads target the customer. As you've probably been told before, you should prepare a different resume for every job you apply for, and you should target it to the company in question.

To target a resume, you need all the information you can get about your prospective employer, so start with research. First look at any printed material about the job. If the specific job description isn't on the employer's website, call their human resources department and ask to review it "to see if it's something I might be interested in." Then look at anything else you can find about this company. Find out about their products, their market position, and how they advertise themselves to their customers. Look in particular at the "history"and "about us" sections of their website, if they exist. This is where you find out how the company sees itself.

Then start writing. Begin with a "skills" section: take each skill in the employer's job description, and provide evidence that you have it in spades in a single paragraph. If the job needs someone with supervisory experience, you were responsible for hiring, training, scheduling and managing X people. If you will be responsible for loss control, detail how you did it for a previous employer, a volunteer activity, a school group, or something.

After the skills section, include your recent work history. You will provideth employer with a more complete history at the time of the interview. Do the same for your education, sticking to that applicable to the job: it's not necessary to tell the school where you're applying to teach French that you're a certified plumber. Leave your references off, but be prepared to provide them when you're asked, as you will be.

Finally, go back over your resume. Make sure it reads smoothly,and that it includes a few of the words and phrases from the employer's history and "about us" material to show that you'll fit in. Make sure it's factually accurate, and, if possible without sacrificing readability, make sure it fits on a single page.

Then print the resume on decent paper,fold it neatly and mail it in a matching envelope,also printed rather than handwritten, to the appropriate person in your targeted organization. After a week or so, call their human resources department to check upon it. You'll find yourself with more interviews for the time expended in this process than by sending out a cookie-cutter resume to untargeted recipients, and you'll be far more likely to find yourself employed.

Learn more about this author, Elizabeth Rowe.
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