Resumes and Cover Letters – Page 8

5 things you can learn from Thanksgiving to help you in your job search

Dr. Joseph Barber

1) Don’t use pepper spray…, ever. No matter how much you want a job – pepper spraying the other candidates will not help you get it. You might have heard about the Wal-Mart incident. There will always be highly qualified candidates applying for the job you want, but it is not worth thinking about these people too much. You can’t do anything to about their qualifications and experiences; you can only maximize the effectiveness of your own. Make sure the way you describe your experiences speaks to the requirements of the position. If you want more information on this, then read some of these posts.

2) Keep your focus. Who knows why this newscaster did what she did – but she assumed that the camera was not watching and that her gesture would go unnoticed. Whether you are attending a social function during an on-campus interview, or chatting with friends in a café after meeting with recruiters as part of OCR, don’t let your professional guard down. Read this post for more on this.

3) Ignore silly names and labels. After Thanksgiving we have “Black Friday”, and then “Small Business Saturday”, and then “Sunday”, and then “Cyber Monday”. It is all a little silly, if you ask me. However, it does give me the opportunity to talk about the benefits of thinking about your career in terms of what you are doing rather than at what company or institution you might be doing it. Job titles and company names are just labels – what you do on a day-to-day basis may be much more relevant. There are some of you who think you might like to work for a big company, be it a consulting firm or investment bank, but who might enjoy using your skills in a similar way for a smaller-scale organization. This could mean working in a start-up rather than for a more established company. This could mean working for a non-profit instead of a corporate giant. This could mean working for yourself rather than for someone else. Your career path is yours to choose, to a certain extent, and if you can gain satisfaction from the application of your skills and knowledge in a variety of different settings, then you might find many more opportunities out there.

4) There’s always a sale at Macy’s. Has anyone else noticed this? I’m not complaining, mind you, but the constant sale does seem to play a significant role in Macy’s business model. Perhaps they had an even bigger sale over the Thanksgiving period, but chances are that anything you missed out on during this time (if you are afeard of shopping during this heinously busy time like me) you’ll be able to find on sale at some other random point in time when it is much less busy. Depending on the careers you are interested in, you might find that there can be seasonal fluctuations in the number of job opportunities available. Let’s say you want to apply for academic jobs as an assistant professor, then applications are often due starting from September – depending on your discipline. By January and February, the number of open positions may be significantly less. Does this mean that you should stop looking? No. Set up email alerts on some of the job aggregator sites (e.g., for academic jobs take a look at www.indeed.com; www.higheredjobs.com; http://chronicle.com/section/Jobs/61/), and you’ll always be informed of openings as they arise. More importantly, keep a dialogue going with people in your network who might hear of opportunities as they arise. It is possible that a search committee will not be able to agree on a person to hire for a full-time position, and will find themselves scrambling to fill a more temporary position for the year before they conduct the search again. This could be a great opportunity to get a foot in the door, and search committees may often look more favorably on people they know (i.e., internal candidates, even in visiting professor positions) than on unknown entities when it comes to filling the full-time position. So, keep your eyes out for sales outside of the traditional sale periods – you never know what you might find.

5) Be thankful whether or not it is Thanksgiving. Don’t forget to thank those people who have helped you in your academic and professional careers – this can be a great way to get back in touch, and people always like to hear how their actions may have contributed in some small way to any successes you have had. Also, keep the people you have in mind as potential reference letter writers updated on your professional comings and goings. It is hard to write a good letter of reference for someone you have not thought about for five years. It is almost impossible to write one for a student who took your course in the past, but didn’t say or contribute much, and who expressed no obvious enthusiasm or passion for the subject being taught either during or after the course. Maintaining your network of contacts is very important throughout the year (especially during the summer !), as these posts affirm.

I want to work here because…

by Sharon Fleshman

When I work with students on cover letters or mock interviews, they can find it challenging to articulate what appeals to them about a particular employer. Indeed, all of the non-profits, businesses, schools, hospitals, and agencies seem to look alike after writing the umpteenth letter. Yet it is crucial to pinpoint why you want to work at Employer A, Employer B, Employer C, etc… Here are some thoughts on how to proceed in an efficient way.

Explore the employer’s website.

Fortunately, the internet makes it easier to conduct employer research. Be on the lookout for a mission statement or a list of core values and reflect on how they resonate with your own work values. Even if a mission and core values are not posted, perusing the website can give you a feel for the company’s approach to providing products and services, conducting business, and developing staff. Also, check out recent news items, projects or initiatives as some of them may intrigue you and reaffirm your interest in the organization.

Document highlights from conversations with employees.

Talking with those who work at a given organization can generate interest, so keep track of your chats with those representing the employer at career fairs or information sessions. Make sure that the exchange is still fresh in your mind by taking notes on business cards shortly after the conversations. Another source of good dialogue about an employer is an informational interview, where you typically have more time. With this approach to employer research, you can be more prepared for the job search and eventually write or say something like, “During my conversations with alumni during the recent campus information session, I was pleased to hear that company X values ….”

Reflect on any previous hands-on experience with the employer.

You may have interned or volunteered with an organization of interest. While it may seem like a no-brainer that you would love to keep working there, you still need to make it clear that you enjoyed the experience and would continue to add value and thrive as an employee.

Iterative Design and Your Resume

Iterative design of your resume can…help you to develop the strongest possible document for your search.

The term iterative is commonly used in design circles; it is defined by Wikipedia as “…a design methodology based on a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining a product or process.” Stretching this definition just a bit, I think that it has great value to you as a job seeking candidate when you are preparing your resume. Your resume is the prototype of your “product”; the content of job descriptions in your field(s) of interest is the test; and your analysis of connections between the two (should) lead you to refine your document for your target market. Iterative design of your resume can therefore help you to develop the strongest possible document for your search.

A resume by its nature is a recitation of your history – your education, experiences, acquired skills and how you’ve applied them, and most likely brief descriptions of projects or responsibilities. You may have a very nice version prepared – your stellar education (you’re at Penn, after all!)…lots of interesting details of projects and experience…a great lay out with chronological organization…and something that’s easy to read. However, when you’re reaching out and applying to opportunities of interest, it’s quite possible that your history, however detailed or nicely presented, may not be a direct match to your interest area (well, unless you’re an accounting student with accounting internships who wants to be an Accountant – and in that case, good for you!) If you think, however, that your major doesn’t match your future job title, then you may be very well served by seeking out “tests” for your resume – use PennLink, other job boards or an aggregator like Simplyhired.com or Indeed.com to find a few opportunities of interest to you.

Closely review the responsibilities and qualifications of your selected role. If, for example, a position requires a candidate with strong written and verbal communication skills, you’ll want to go to your draft and ask yourself, “Have I included information on how I demonstrated and applied my communication skills wherever possible on my document?” If you have descriptions of a course project – have you detailed how you developed and presented that project in 20 minutes using a succinct 15-slide presentation deck and to an audience of 30+ students and faculty? If you used email or any other kind of collaborative software (Google Docs might be one to consider) as a significant communication tool in working on a team project, have you included that? I could continue with examples, but I hope by now you see the value of this exercise, or perhaps now have a name to assign to what you’ve already been doing. If the latter is the case, again – good for you! However, if you’d like assistance in this process given your individual resume and interest areas, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with one of us in Career Services!

5 Job Hunting Tips You Can Get From Dr. Who

Dr. Joseph Barber

1) Your resume is actually bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside. What? Well…, ok, all I mean is that the way you describe your experiences and knowledge by using specific illustrations of your skills in action achieving tangible outcomes will make even a 1-page resume feel like it is chock-full of relevant information. Your resume won’t contain any swimming pools, though.

2) You can’t actually regenerate – and so don’t try, but you can and should talk about your experiences in a different way when applying to different positions. There is no one-size-fits-all resume that will work for two different jobs, even if they are in the same industry (e.g., pharmaceutical industry jobs, consulting). The more time you can take tailoring your resume and cover letter (and even your academic CV to a certain extent), the better you will be able to convince an employer that your experiences are a good fit for their requirements.

3) If you spend too much time by yourself, you will end up talking to yourself. If you spend too much time looking at your own resume, your brain will begin to tune out, and you will start to miss those small errors that can creep in. Additionally, sometimes we can find it hard to think about the range of different skills we have used in different experiences – we get so used to talking about ourselves in one way that we can forget that we do actually have a bunch of transferable skills that are applicable to many jobs. Come to Career Services to get a critique of your resume, and you’ll find this fresh perspective to be helpful.

4) Time travel is actually quite hard, and rarely goes exactly according to plan. This means that you can’t go back and change your past – that really never works out well in the future anyway. For example, back in the past you may have started a PhD thinking you wanted to be a professor, but in the present you may have decided not to take the academic career path. Make use of your time at Penn to gain a wide range of different experiences to explore your options, take some courses outside of your subject, join and actively participate in some student/postdoc groups. Make sure you also have a convincing narrative as to why you are seeking the jobs you are applying to. Note: no employer wants to hear: “I realized I didn’t want to be a professor, and so I decided to apply for this job”. This isn’t a convincing reason why someone should hire you. Talk about what you gained from your academic and non-academic experiences, and how you can use your skills and abilities in a way that would make you an ideal candidate for the jobs you are interested in.

5) For someone with an identity problem, the Doctor has a rather extensive network of contacts. True, it is easier to make contacts when you own a small blue box that is bigger on the inside than the outside, and travels across time and space…, and when you are 900 or so years old/young. However, with a bit of courageous outreach to your own list contacts, and good use of social networking platforms like LinkedIn and Academia.edu, you’ll find that you can soon generate a comparable network – relatively speaking (which when talking about relativity can get very confusing). Don’t leave it up to chance, though. Set aside some time each week or month to connect with new people who might be doing jobs you are interested in, or to get back in contact with former colleagues, supervisors, and advisors. Networking is about building and maintaining meaningful connections with people over time…, wherever or whenever that time is!

The Emotional World of Job Seeking

Dr. Joseph Barber

I teach an “Applied Animal Behaviour and Welfare” course up at Hunter College (CUNY) in New York, and one of the lectures in this course focuses on the question of whether or not other species have emotions. This is a very important question from an animal welfare perspective, because negative subjective emotional states (like fear, pain, frustration, boredom, loneliness, etc.) can be a potential source of suffering if they result directly from the way that we house or manage these animals in captivity. There are no easy answers to these questions, because emotions by their very nature are subjective states that are unique to the individuals experiencing them. I assume that other humans feel emotional states in a similar way that I do, but it is almost impossible to show that in any objective fashion. We cannot measure the experiences that we feel, even if we can measure changes in blood flow or nerves firing in parts of the brain. What we are left with, then, are some general questions we must ponder. Here are two examples:

Do other species have the same range of emotional states that we do – and do they have some that we don’t experience?
How can we try to perceive the environment from the perspectives of these other species when they see, smell, hear, and experience the world in such different ways from us?

Now, I bring up the issue of differing perspectives because in many cases these types of questions are also important when thinking about employers – especially those who have the types of jobs you are looking to apply to. Yes…, I know that employers are humans too, and so they should experience the world in the same way that you do. However, their environment is very different from yours, and environmental factors play a significant role in affecting behavioural responses and emotional reactions.

The idea of trying to figure how employers perceive their environment, and how they respond to the application materials you send to them in their environments, is actually quite a crucial step in the job application and interview process. So, let’s look at the questions I listed above from a job perspective.

1) Do employers have the same range of emotional states that you do – and do they have some that you don’t experience?

In general terms, the same things that would annoy you will annoy employers. If they ask for a resume, and you send them a 10-page CV instead, they will find that annoying. If they ask for a writing sample and you don’t send one, then that too will cause irritation. I don’t think there are studies that look at this, but I feel sure that chronic irritation will inhibit open-mindedness about your potential as a candidate.

While employers probably don’t experience employer-specific emotions that you don’t have, they will generally not feel the same extremes of fear, desperation, or worry in the same way that some job candidates may. After all, they are not the ones being judged, and the people at these institutions and organizations already have jobs. It is important not to let the “smell of fear” permeate into your application materials or your interview answers. It can happen quite subtly, with an innocent-enough sounding “although I don’t have all the experience you are asking for, I do have…” statement in a cover letter. Don’t dwell on the negatives. Let the spring-filled scent of optimism waft from your letter instead. One easy way to do this is to simply remove the first part of the sentence I used as an example above, and start with what you can do, and what you will offer that will be make you an ideal candidate. Focus on the positives, and ignore (as much as possible) the negatives so that you present a confident aura.

2) How can you try to perceive the environment from the perspectives of employers when they see, smell, hear, and experience the world in such different ways from you?

The first thing to realize is that employers do see the world differently than you do. Your priorities might be to find a job for some of the following reasons: to have enough money to eat and stay warm, to get good health insurance, to be able to work with an interesting group of colleagues, to continued being paid to do the research you love doing, and so on. There are many reasons out there, and each of us will have some unique ones. Employers may be much less interested in your reasons, and much more focused on their reasons for advertizing the job – and the main one usually always boils down to the fact that they need someone to get the job done effectively, whether that is teaching courses, working with clients, developing new protein sequencing pathways, or managing programs. They don’t care what you will spend your salary on, but they do care about whether you are going to be a good investment.

To be convincing to an employer, you need to have a good answer to the question “why do you want this position?” that puts less priority on what you might get out of it, and more on what you can offer them. Focus on their needs first, and it should become obvious to them that you want the job because a) you have the abilities to do it; and b) something from your past experiences has shown you doing something similar, doing it effectively, and enjoying doing it.

If you spend too much time telling an employer how excited you are by the possibility of working for such an impressive an organization as they obviously are, then you are missing out on the chance to highlight the skills you bring to actually get the job done effectively. The senses of employers are keyed into abilities, experiences, and knowledge that will help them build capacity within their organizations. Academic experiences are important, but can often represent passive experiences (a lot of sitting in a room being talked at), and so you will need to talk about your academic credentials and relevant non-academic experiences in as active terms as possible. So rather than, “My academic experiences have given me…”, which is passive, consider something like “I actively sought out opportunities to study X subject with X professor so that I could connect X concept with X reality, and I have used this knowledge in X situation to help me X” (where the concepts and realities mentioned in this case were in some way relevant to the job, and where the outcome highlights how effective your knowledge and skills truly are). Employers are looking for patterns: if you have used a skill successfully in the past, then you will be likely to do so again in the future. You need to find a way to show them how effective you have been – and this will always be more interesting than just telling them that you have been effective.

But the real question is “how” do you see the world from the employer’s perspective. The easiest way is to read the job advert really, really, carefully. This is where employers layout what they need to get done, and the type of skills they believe are necessary to do so. If your cover letter, resume, or interview answers are not addressing these points, then you need to spend some more time figuring out how to see the world from the employer’s perspective. Remember, try to talk about your experiences in the language that the employer uses. Another approach is to speak with people from the types of organizations you want to work at (and Alumni are often a good starting point for this type of outreach) to learn about what are important trends you should be aware of, what skills are valued on a day-to-day basis, and what experiences you have had that might be good to focus on as illustrations of your effectiveness. Ultimately, you should be able to put yourself in the shoes of the person who will be reading your cover letter and CV/resume, and who will be listening to your answers in the interview, because this will help you to tailor what you say and speak most effectively to their needs and interests.

When you make it easy for employers to see how your experiences make you an ideal candidate to get the job done that they need to be done, then you will make them happy. It is probable that happy employers will more likely see you as their preferred candidate. So yes, employers do have emotions, and you will need to make sure that you give some thought to how you can keep their subjective states as positive as possible.

Schedule an appointment with us at Career Services and bring your questions about how to tailor what you say to the needs of the employers you want to connect with. We’ll be happy to help you. I can also tell you a thing or two about the emotional world of primates, elephants, sheep, cows, and chickens…, if you think that will help!