resume | JobTabs Job Search & Resume

September 1, 2012

JobTabs Job Search & Resume 2012 – Released!

Filed under: Job Searching,JobTabs,JobTabs Story — Tags: Career, jobhunt, jobsearch, jobseeker, resume — admin @ 1:24 am

JobTabs Job Search & Resume 2012 has been released. While there have been improvements across the board, we really wanted to focus on application speed and handling objects/graphics in the word processor.

Previewing Saved Jobs from the Internet is 10x faster

We reviewed the process and simply decided that we were saving too much. We eliminated much of the superfluous elements of the web pages and focused on what mattered. We also moved the process to a separate window so that it can be cancelled at will. The update messages provided by the window are much more detailed to give you the assurance that things are happening.

The crux of the word processing upgrades were necessary in order for us to implement a new product designed to complement JobTabs. More on that later. Suffice it to say that the JobTabs word processor has always worked beautifully, however we added some more functionality that we are going to need as we make JobTabs even more powerful.

Transparent Text Frames

While you could always add text frames to a cover letter or a resume in JobTabs, they had to be inline with the text. Now then can float above or behind and let the background image text show through entirely or partially.

Background Images

New support for background images allows you to insert a watermark, a CONFIDENTIAL/DRAFT disclaimer or a picture.

Object/Image Support

The JobTabs word processor supports OLE handling, images and many other objects. We made it easier to size and move them on the fly as well as maintain the aspect ratio as needed. This was especially important for job seekers who would include a signature graphic with their cover letter. The signature didn’t look like the real thing.

Prior to the upgrades, a signature couldn’t be placed directly above the typed text without covering it up.		After the upgrades, a signature can be placed above the typed text as it would normally be if it has been actually signed by the person.

In closing, a word on updating JobTabs is in order. Before ‘online updates’ went mainstream, software companies would distribute software improvements in bulk via CD or disk. One could expect lots of bells and whistles with the arrival of each annual upgrade. That was then, this is now. JobTabs is distributed over the internet and by CD upon request. Every time we improve upon JobTabs, we roll it out to our user base immediately. Why make earnest job seekers wait for a deluge of application upgrades all at once when those upgrades have already been developed? It makes no sense to us so we roll out new bells and whistles as they are developed. All registered users of JobTabs get free upgrades for an entire year after their purchase! This includes all major and minor upgrades. We look forward to serving you a steady stream of updates for as long as you will permit us to do so. : -)

John Coffey is the President of JobTabs, LLC. Through JobTabs Job Search & Resume, thousands of job seekers have taken control of their destiny in finding new and fulfilling careers. JobTabs Job Search & Resume motivates job seekers by making the job search easier by a huge order of magnitude. John Coffey can be reached via his website at JobTabs Job Search & Resume, by email via jpcoffey at jobtabs.com, and by phone at 404-255-0248.

Comments (0)

June 17, 2011

Inventory Your Career With A Master Resume

Filed under: Resume Writing,Sell Yourself — Tags: accomplishment, Career, employer, experience, job, JobTabs, master, resume, skills — admin @ 12:22 am

Inventory your career when job searching.

Is this straight, baby?

When my wife and I got married, we moved out of our respective domiciles and into our new home. It was a bear of a move. I remember saying to myself, “I never knew I owned this much stuff!”

And so it is with your career. It is absolutely amazing how much experience you can accumulate in a short amount of time. If you were to look back on the last twelve months of your employment,

· How many different projects did you work on?
· How many audits/reviews did you prepare for?
· How many working relationships did you have to coddle?
· How many glitches did you have to delve into just to get things moving again?
· How many new people were you introduced to?
· What were your victories? What were your defeats?

In the course of a year, it is amazing how much we have done. Now do it for the last X years of your career. You have done a lot more than you think you have.

All of this experience can be extremely valuable when you are job searching. As I have told so many job seekers, the likelihood of any job seeker getting a job that exactly mirrors their experience to date is near zero. It is highly likely that you will have to draw on the peripheral work you have done to get under the wire. In this economy, this is doubly important yet, all too often, job seekers under sell themselves. They have a few resumes and share the resume which most closely matches the position they are pursuing. Here at JobTabs we call this, The Highway to Hell.

Taking a written inventory of your accomplishments is extremely important. The best way to do this is to develop a master resume. A master resume isn’t a resume that you would actually send to anybody. It is used only to list everything you have ever done at any company. It is your personal checklist to jog your memory to see what you can come up with to be as close of a fit as possible for any job listing in which you have an interest. A master resume has no facilities you would use in a Functional Resume. It is purely chronological and used purely for your reference. There is no page limit; the longer the better. Ultimately, you want to use your master resume to copy specific accomplishments for pasting into resumes you are tailoring for a specific job. Remember, there is rarely – if ever – any job you are going to be applying to that mirrors exactly what you have been doing, so you have to be able to draw on all of your experience.

Describe each accomplishment in your master resume much as you would a regular resume. You want to be able to copy and paste from your master resume into a resume that you would send to the employer. If you do not put everything on your master resume, it is likely that you will forget what you accomplished and that hard earned work experience will be lost forever.

In addition to listing all all of your accomplishments, you may want to do the following.

Add tags.

If you have enough bullet points, it will be easier to add a tag to them to make them easier to find. Consider adding tags for leadership skills, financial skills, team building skills, managerial, helping skills, technical skills, etc. These could help you find specific experience more easily.

Add notes to yourself.

Add extra details about the specific accomplishment to include anything an interviewer might ask you. If an interviewer asks you how you quantified a certain accomplishment you want to be confident as to how you came up with those figures. Again, you are not going to include the calculations on the resume you send to the employer, but if asked in the interview you don’t want to appear unsure as to how you arrived at those figures. Add notes about people involved in the project. If there is someone who would be happy to attest to what you did, you could add their name and contact info if you need to use them as a reference. Put these notes in a different font or color so that they stand out from the body of your resume. You don’t want to risk pasting them into your real resume accidentally.

The experience that you have garnered over the course of your career is important. To let your accomplishments slip into the ether because you didn’t remember doing it is foolhardy. It can make the difference between getting the interview or getting passed over. Take inventory of your career and you will be prepared for life.

Comments (1)

December 21, 2010

Age Discrimination is Over!

Filed under: Job Searching,JobTabs,Motivation,Resume Writing,Sell Yourself — Tags: Career, jobhunt, jobsearch, jobseeker, resume, Resume Writing — admin @ 12:23 am

Who's the boss?

There is a steady undercurrent in the job search space about age discrimination. I believe it. However, what I don’t believe is that it cannot be overcome. People, it is all about packaging.

Think about it for a moment. Let’s say someone is 50 years old and has been in the workforce in varying capacities for roughly 30 years. This person has 30 years from which to draw accomplishments which are relevant to any job posting he applies to. Take someone who has only been in the workforce for 5 years. That person only has 5 years from which they can reference relevant accomplishments when applying for a job. This gives experienced job seekers a huge advantage over less experienced hires.

The key word here is relevant. What many job seekers fail to grasp is that the likelihood of their next job being an exact match of what they have been doing up to this point is nearly zero. When applying to a new job, there is invariably going to be some nuance of the job posting that the applicant is going to have to correlate to his experience to date. Examples could include,

Managing other people.
Setting goals and a course of action for projects.
Working within a budget of varying sizes.
Demonstrating some knowledge of government law such as safety, employment, environmental, etc.

Experienced job seekers, if they work hard to chronicle their career to date, would have a much easier time getting under the bar to fulfil what the employer is looking for. Then there are a host of subjective considerations that the senior job candidate is far more likely qualified.

Conflict resolution among individuals, teams or departments.
Proactive problem solving.
Identifying the chain of command and working within it to get buy in.
Generally more likely to be looked to as a leader by subordinates than by someone closer to their own age.

A cornerstone of JobTabs Job Search & Resume success has been its ability to easily manage a large number of resumes for a wide number of job opportunities. As the experienced job seeker applies to more and more positions, he gradually accumulates more and more supremely tailored resumes for different job descriptions. Here is the lynch pin . . . . as the experienced job seeker creates more resumes in JobTabs, it becomes easier and easier to create even more refined dead-on resumes for each job they apply to. The breadth and depth of their experience is pared down to only what is absolutely relevant to the immediate job posting – as it should be! Creating a copy of a resume that meets 80% of the requirements and bringing it over 95% becomes incredibly easy!

While the junior candiate has his own advantages, he does not have the experience pool that a 50 something job seeker has. This is a very touchy subject among many. If you have any enlightening comments to share with me I would readily welcome them. Otherwise, age discrimination is over!

Comments (0)

January 9, 2009

Resume Writing [5 of 5] – Glow

Filed under: Job Searching,Resume Writing — Tags: Career, Employment, jobs, resume, Resume Writing — admin @ 11:31 am

Job seekers are bombarded with advice, tips and articles from every corner of the internet on how to write a fantastic resume. Some of the most visible resources are,

Alison Doyle from About.com

Randall Hansen of QuintCareers.com

Susan Joyce of Job-Hunt.org

Some people are obviously paying attention. We have seen wonderful examples of well written resumes that incorporate our basic recommendations as well as the recommendations of other professionals. Sadly, for many, for all of the effort that has been put into writing the resume it manages to read like a military specification for a lug nut. Our last article in this five part series covers selling your self as a competent professional who is appreciated by his subordinates, peers and management. Glow. Bring your resume alive by taking the following cues,

Make it apparent that you do your job well
Read the bullets from your most recent job and ask yourself one extremely important question, “Could some guy who got fired for doing my job badly say the same thing?” Really, look at your resume and ask yourself that question.

To illustrate our point, let’s look at some of the bullets that a SEC Auditor of Bernard Madoff, LLC could put on his resume,

Audited the books of major Wall Street investment firms for trading irregularities.
Investigated investment banking compliance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and FTC trading regulations.
Conducted detailed investigations based on transaction anomalies and whistle blower reports.
Monitored trading transaction streams for key variances that would point to a breach in normal trading behavior.
Worked closely with federal agencies to include the Department of Commerce, Office of the Treasury and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Apprised upper managements of audit schedules and resolutions.
Oversaw a staff of nine accountants.

For those of you unfamiliar with the case, as of this writing Bernard Madoff is accused of having masterminded the largest Ponzi scheme in Wall Street history. He emerged unscathed from as many as four SEC audits all the while bilking investors of more than $50 billion dollars. Yes, that is ‘b’ as in boy, $50 billion dollars. That Bernard Madoff is a crook is of secondary importance. What is of primary importance is that the SEC auditor of his books can’t possibly profess to have done a decent job yet can still put together a respectable resume even though the biggest crook in Wall Street history waltzed right under his nose.

Don’t be afraid to sprinkle some color to let it be known that you do your job well. For those subjective issues which you cannot quantify, you can complete bullet points with statements such as,

“Commended by management for demonstrating a clear understanding of regulatory procedure.”
“Received a non-periodic raise for performance.”
“Evolved as the go to contact for all issues pertaining to database architecture.”
“Mentored junior sales associates on working within the system to accomplish their professional goals.”
“Conducted workshops for peers on advanced programming techniques.”

A common approach to let the reader of your resume know that you perform your job well is the Problem – Action – Result (PAR) approach. This acronym varies from CAR (Challenge – Action – Result) to SAR (Situation – Action – Result) but the emphasis is still the same. Describe the Problem, the Action you took to fix it and the benefit that Resulted from that action. I will cover this in greater detail future blog posts.

Come across as a person who is easy to work with.
Remember, if your resume bores the reader, then they are not going to be able to appreciate your accomplishments. Add some color which brings you out as a person and and draws their interest. Consider,

“Oversaw the United Way fund drive for our division. Raised over X dollars by . . . . .” Suggests you have a heart.

“Mentored junior peers on succeeding in the organization by working inside the system.” This is a subtle way of making you look like a kinder, gentler employee as well as allaying any concerns that you will be an organizational anarchist if you do not get your way.

“Received non-periodic raise for outstanding performance.” This suggests that you work hard, get results and please your superiors.

These are our examples, but you get the picture. Whatever you have done that would instill confidence that you are a nice person who works within the system will do wonders. These are the testimonials which can vault your candidacy to the top of the resume stack. Whether you got the interview via a network connection, a recruiter or by knocking on doors, chances are there were plenty of candidates to choose from. Once you can prove you are qualified, the next concern on everybody’s mind is whether or not you are going to do your job well and fit in. This is just as important as having the right credentials. The right credentials is only the first hurdle; the assessment as to whether or not you will be a valuable and respected member of the team is a much larger hurdle.

John Coffey is the President or JobTabs, LLC the makers of JobTabs Job Search & Resume. Working as an IT Contractor for over fifteen years, he has the distinction of having been a professional job seeker. His success in the job search process and the computer program he wrote to manage his job search became the basis for JobTabs Job Search & Resume. He can be reached at jpcoffey@jobtabs.com or the JobTabs website at http://www.jobtabs.com.

Comments (0)