How Mid-Career Changers Must Use Their Resumes to Sell Themselves

Every marketing campaign needs a sales brochure, and yours is no different. Your sales brochure is your resume. Its job is to sell you, to go where you cannot go and say what you don't have the opportunity to say. You want your resume to cause action! The purpose of your resume is to get interviews, the action you need to make your mid-career change.

A mid-career changer has three challenges in making a change:

1. To find that new job or career
   
   
   
   
2. To show skill transferability between different careers and industries
   
   
3. To deal with being perceived as overqualified

In this article we will discuss how to look for your new career with a selling resume and cover letter. Anyone with work experience who makes a job change can run into the "overqualified" objection. We will learn here how to minimize the objection and maximize your strengths.

Writing a Resume That Opens New Doors

The key that opens doors is the selling resume. You must understand that there is only one thing people buy, and that is the benefit that they can derive from owning or using some-thing. Once you understand this, you will be on your way to successfully selling yourself. To make your mid-career change, the employer must be able to clearly see the benefit of hiring you.

How to Write a Selling Resume

If you pick up the typical book about resumes, you see a number of different styles, such as the functional resume, the chronological resume, the analytical resume, and the creative resume. This article recommends one kind of resume: the selling resume.

The selling resume has three main parts:

1. Your career or job objective
   
   
2. Your special skills and how the hiring manager can benefit from those skills
   
   
3. Your work experience and how it relates to your special skills and qualities

In addition, your name, address, and telephone numbers should be at the top. A list describing your education should be at the end.

Writing your resume will be easier and the results better if you relax and take your time. Be sure to have a thesaurus and a good dictionary by your side. Gather together any information regarding your past employment history, and previous resumes you have written. Now you are ready to begin.

1. Your Career or Job Objective

Your resume should have a career or job objective. Hiring managers are looking for people who want to work for their organization. They want to believe you have a goal in mind that is a good match for the job requirements. If it is not a match, their concern, legitimately, is that you will not be happy in the job and will leave the company prematurely. Replacing you is expensive. A hiring manager would rather not make that kind of mistake. Consequently, they look for resumes that have career or job objectives that are consistent with the job at hand.

Career changers often ask how important it is to customize a resume for a particular job. It is very important if you want to be a top contender. Generally, the only part of the resume you must worry about customizing is the objective. (It can be helpful also to customize the skills section.)

When you send letters to placement agencies or recruiters, be sure to have an objective statement general enough to cover the range of jobs that interest you. In your cover letter say that you will be happy to update a resume for a specific job when you become a candidate for that position.

The following are examples of objectives you might use when you tailor your resume for a specific job.

• Director of Marketing: Want to join the team of a fast-paced, progressive organization by having a responsible leadership role in the marketing department.
  
  
• Data Processing Manager: Looking for a challenging department that needs to build communication, foster exceptional customer relations, and create a dynamic team.
  
  
• Office Manager: Seeking an opportunity to manage an office that will challenge my organizational skills, stimulate my creativity, and test my communication proficiency.
  
  
• Personnel Manager: Want to join a progressive organization that is concerned with its employees' welfare and looking for exceptional human resources professional.
  
  
• Sales Professional: Seeking to join a growing, fast-paced company that rewards its sales professionals for hard work, professional skill, and dedication to the job.

These next job objectives are more general, and could be used when sending your resume to a recruiter.

• Senior Manager: Seeking a senior management position that will capitalize on my financial, manufacturing, and marketing skills and experience.
  
  
• Middle Manager: Looking for a management position that will draw on my past management experience, yet challenge my desire to learn new facets of business in general.
  
  
• Supervisor: Wish to join a progressive organization as a team leader. Looking for an opportunity to use my ac-counting skills while gaining broader exposure to the complexities of business.

2. Your Special Skills and How the Hiring Manager Can Benefit from Those Skills

This section is the heart of the Selling Resume. This is where you, as a mid-career changer, have the opportunity to polish those hard-won skills until they shine and stand out.

There are three important stylistic factors to master before you begin writing your resume. First, use action words. Second, use positive descriptive words. Third, illustrate benefits. Employers are looking for motivated, optimistic people who will be a benefit to the company.

Use positive descriptive words, or adjectives, to indicate the level of competency you have in a particular skill. "Excellent" is an example. For instance you may describe a skill as follows:

• Excellent ability to train others in effective customer service
  
  
• Excellent communication skills for building strong relationships with my coworkers
  
  
• Excellent listening skills for understanding the needs of my customers

If you are unsure what skills are appropriate for your new job objective, take the time to talk to someone who is in that line of work. Ask, "What skills are important to make me a success at this job?" Compare your list of skills to what they say. Then select five skills that are most relevant to the job objective and begin writing a skill description for each one. Be sure to use different adjectives to describe your level of competency, and make sure the benefit or advantage of each skill is clearly described. Finally, separate this section on your resume by a border of some kind to make it stand out.

3. Your Work Experience and How It Relates to Your Special Skills and Qualities

Now list your work experience. Most employers are looking for your experience to be listed in reverse chronological order beginning with your present position. Start by listing each job you have had and the dates of each position. If you have worked for only one company, but held a number of jobs within that company, list those jobs with their corresponding dates.

Once you have created this list, begin to evaluate each job by the skill you learned or mastered during that period of time. An example would be: "Improved my persuasive skills." Write that skill next to the job.

Next ask yourself what quantifiable accomplishments were achieved during each job. An example would be: "Saved the company $100,000 by developing an easier way of packing the product." Write these accomplishments next to each job.

After you have developed this list, evaluate the skills and quantified accomplishments in terms of relevancy to the job objective stated on your resume. This concentration on skills rather than job accomplishments alone will prove you can transfer your talents from one field to another.

A rule of thumb we have developed from talking to hundreds of hiring managers through the years is this: If at all possible, keep your resume to one page. If it must go to two pages, do not fill both pages with margin-to-margin type.