Effective Job Applications - the perfect resume

Many "experts" will tell you to tailor your resume for every job. Wrong! Take a fresh approach and you can catch an employer's attention much more effectively.

The first thing an employer sees when he opens your application is your cover letter. Make it clear, concise and informative, and you'll catch the employer's attention and almost guarantee yourself an interview.

When an employer reads most job applications, he has to search through the resumes for the qualifications, experience and qualities he needs. If you give him the answers he's seeking, neatly summarised in your cover letter, he'll love you for saving him so much time!

I have followed this formula for twenty years across three continents, with great success. I've had numerous compliments on my job applications and my resume. I've helped others use this method to apply for jobs and they've had success, too. And as a manager who has hired many staff, I know this kind of application makes my life a lot easier.

It can make your life easier to, because instead of having to tailor your whole CV every time you apply for a job, you just need to write a tailored cover letter - and clip your standard resume to the back.

Because it is going to be a long-lived, unchanging document, it's worth spending time to format your resume perfectly. It goes without saying that it should be well laid out with no typos.

You want your resume to fit on the minimum number of pages, so don’t leave acres of white space on the page. Use one inch margins all round.

Start with your name, in large, bold type, centred at the top of the page. Follow this up with your address and contact details in normal type. Don't include email or phone numbers that you don't want an employer to use - e.g. your current work number.

You're not obliged to include personal details like age, marital status or number of children, and in many countries it’s against the law for employers to request those details. Whether you mention them is up to you. For instance, you might be going for the kind of job where the stability of a wife and family is seen as an advantage. Or if you’re baby-faced, it may pay to mention your age, to ward off any misconceptions about your maturity at the interview. Consider how these facts are likely to influence your interviewer and make your own decision.

When describing your experience, it's important to be honest, but you can be selective about what you include!

• A good tip is to use years instead of exact dates (e.g. "2003 to 2005" instead of "December 2003 to January 2005"). That way, gaps in your employment history become less obvious - you can leave out those disastrous few months at Company X, and no one will know.
• If you changed career direction at some point and would rather forget your earlier jobs, you can. Just head your list of roles with "Relevant Work Experience" instead of just "Work Experience". For instance, I'm a manager now and don't want to highlight that I was a humble secretary for many years, so my resume starts with my first supervisory role. That also conveniently disguises my age!
• For each job, give the job title, summarise the responsibilities in two or three lines, then mention some key achievements in bullet points. Needless to say, there's no need to mention any failures!

If your qualifications are a selling point, put a "Qualifications" section straight after your name and address at the beginning of your resume. If they’re not quite up to scratch – or if they’re not relevant to the jobs you’re applying for – relegate them to the end.

For some years, including hobbies or interests was seen as unnecessary and even detrimental. Now, the tables have turned, and you should mention them – usually as the very last item in your resume. Employers want to see that you have a life outside work!

Now, let's look at how to write that cover letter. This is the most important part of your application.

Go through the job ad and note down, in bullet points, everything the employer is looking for. That may include things like:

• x number of years experience in a particular field
• skill or knowledge in a specific field
• a relevant qualification
• a quality, e.g. "team player", "leadership qualities", "able to use initiative"

For each bullet point, write a couple of sentences to explain how you can satisfy that requirement.

Experience and qualifications are usually easy to cover, (e.g. "I have worked as an Accountant for 12 years in 4 different companies. This has given me broad exposure to a variety of accounting approaches" or "I hold a CPA qualification and attend professional development courses on a regular basis").

Qualities can be more difficult. For these, you need to think of a concrete example to illustrate your expertise. For instance, for leadership qualities, you would choose a time when you stepped in and provided leadership to your team in a difficult situation and summarise it in a short paragraph.

Write your cover letter in this format:

"Dear....,

I wish to apply for ....... As you can see from my attached resume, my qualifications and experience are ideally suited to this role as follows:"

Now list each bullet point with its accompanying explanation. Try to keep each bullet point no more than two or three lines long.

Your cover letter should ideally be one page, and certainly never more than a page and a half.

Your finished cover letter should now be a summary of all the good things in your resume THAT ARE RELEVANT TO THE CURRENT JOB. Don't waste the employer's time by boasting about stuff that isn’t related to the job ad.

My final piece of advice is - apply for everything you feel you're remotely qualified for. Too often, I see people talking themselves out of jobs before they’ve even applied for it. They cut the ad out of the paper, or print off the internet ad, then they start saying, “No, they won’t hire me because….”

Well no, they won’t hire you – if you don’t apply. Some of my very best jobs have been ones I thought I had no chance of getting! So don’t rule yourself out of the race because you’re afraid of rejection.

Write the best letter you can, attach your resume, send it off and forget about it. That way if you never hear from them, you won’t care. If you do hear from them, you can fish the ad out of your file and refresh your memory.

Go for it, and good luck!

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All text copyright Marisa Wright. Photo courtesy of Daoist56 on Flickr.