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7 Tips For Modernizing Your Résumé

You tried “retiring. You thought retiring would be some great, well-earned and well-deserved extended vacation, only to find out that you were bored, feeling “purposeless,” and all sorts of other feelings for which you didn’t sign-up. After some careful planning, you’ve decided you want to re-join the workforce. Terrific! One thing’s for sure — now more than ever, you will need an impressive resume to facilitate your re-entry.

Ugh. A Resume. You might think you can just dust off the old one, add a couple of lines of text about your recent work, and be done with it. Um. No. Chances are, your last resume might have been composed on an IBM Personal Computer, saved to a 5.25” floppy disk, sent to your dot-matrix printer, and then taken to the local copy shop for mass Xerox production.

The technology we use to craft our resumes has certainly changed, making production and distribution so much easier, yet our evolved and improved technologies bring about new considerations that must be attuned to in the current employment market. In addition to new considerations as to the “form” of your resume, there are critical new issues of “substance”. While no real rules exist for writing resumes, there is a “new normal” that if not followed, will suggest you are out of touch and unfit for the competitive job market that seems to be ruled by the Age of the Millennial.

So what do you do and how do you do it? Here are 7 considerations for getting your resume up-to-par…

✅ Target your résumé to a specific job and employer. Gone are the days of producing 500 copies of your resume and distributing them to your favorite Fortune 500 flavors. Government unemployment statistics would lead people to think that the competition for jobs is not as fierce as it once was. Wrong. Many people are looking at a limited number of opportunities so the competition is tougher than ever and your value must be clear to a prospective employer. Your target audience simply must see your potential fit. The goal of writing a good resume is to land an interview, so your paper resume must speak to the employer, or you may never get to speak to them personally.

Select job postings that actually interest you and read them closely. Consider how your valuable experience measures up to the employer’s needs and likely expectations. Select and apply for those few jobs in which your experience most closely fits the employer’s needs. Then, craft your résumé according to the keywords and skills outlined in the posting.

✅ No one needs to know where you live. Nowadays employers don’t need to know or expect to know your physical address. However, “where” you  “live” in the “virtual world”, is an expectation for a hiring manager. While we used to include our home addresses in the contact section of our resumes, the digital age has brought with it issues of privacy and identity theft.  Sounds crazy, for sure, but including your home address on your resume could potentially open you to a whole host of privacy problems.  Including your city and state is enough; a street address and/or zip code are not essential.

Include your email address, yet be sure that your email “handle” as well as domain name are professional-sounding as well as modern.  For instance, [email protected] is neither professional-sounding nor modern.  While you might be proud of being a grandmother as well as a cat-lover, such an email handle does more to hurt candidates than it does to help them.

If you’re attempting to downplay your age, then sign up for a Gmail account, and get rid of AOL, Yahoo, or Hotmail addresses, all of which suggest you might be stuck in some decade other than the current one. Remember– you want to attract attention to your impressive and worthwhile experience, not the possible association of your AOL email domain with the notion that you might still pay for dial-up access to the Internet.

Also, consider including your LinkedIn address.  What??! You’re re-entering the job market, and you don’t know what LinkedIn is or why you should have a LinkedIn account? Check out this article for some great LinkedIn advice.

✅ Say goodbye to the “Objective” statement, and say hello to your “Professional   Summary”  At the top of the resume in days gone by, we included an Objective Statement to let our readers know what we wanted from the employer. “My objective is to yadda, yadda, yadda”.  Unfortunately, with the exception of family, few people care what you want.

Readers of resumes care about What’s In It For the Company. Companies have “problems,” problems for which they seek job candidates to help them solve. Readers of resumes want to know how you can help them, not how the job might fulfill some untapped potential in you, or might light a fire under you, or might relieve your feelings of purposelessness or boredom.  Don’t get me wrong—it’s GREAT that you want to tap into your potential…and I hope that you are successful at doing that…but the resume is not the place for you to talk about what the job can do for you.

Instead of an objective statement, your resume can begin with a Professional Summary, offering readers a succinct statement of your value to the company, not the company’s value to you.

✅ A resume should include only your Greatest Hits, not your entire Discography. This is not your grocery store list…you do not need to include every single bless-ed work experience you’ve ever had.  In my work career, I’ve held 16 different jobs and positions.  Can you imagine including ALL of those experiences?!?! No! What a waste of time– of yours as well as your reader’s.  Your resume is a marketing document, and YOU are the product being “sold.” Include work history that is relevant to the sought-after position, and leave most of the others out

I can hear what you’re thinking: “but wouldn’t including all 16 of those impressive roles show off your experience, and thus your worth to the potential employer?” Well, yes and no. Yes, it could show off my “impressive” career. Or…in more likelihood…No…it won’t. Instead… It might communicate that I job-hopped or couldn’t sit still. It could make me look flighty or high-maintenance. It can make me look like I think everything I’ve ever done in my entire life is worthy of specific attention. And worse… It can make me look old. And we all know that even though ageism is illegal, there are still plenty of HR “criminals” who are tasked with screening job candidates.

✅ Consider writing a combination resume rather than the traditional chronological one. First, you’ll need a brief primer on the different styles of resumes: chronological, functional (or skills) and the combination resume.

A chronological resume is the one of which you’re most likely familiar. The chronological resume is the most traditional style, organizing your work history according to dates of employment. This resume begins with your most recent job, working backward to include all your other jobs that seem to fit or have a place on the resume. The major emphasis in this kind of resume is on the job title you’ve held and the company for which you performed the job. It illustrates your progressive career path and is easy to follow

Retirees returning to the job market might be tempted to try writing a functional or a skills resume. The choice seems reasonable, for a functional resume is for job candidates who are changing careers or fields, or for those who have gaps in work history, or for those who have worked for some obscure employers. This option allows you to focus on what you did, not on where you did it or what your title was. Most recruiters and employers frown upon this style of resume, however, because it suggests that the candidate has something to hide.  Since its focus is PURELY on skills and not employers, the work history is completely absent from the resume.

The combination resume is likely going to be the type you need to write if you are looking to come out of retirement and into a new field, or maybe even a former field in which you have some experience. This kind of resume focuses on the core competencies of the job candidate that align with the job listing’s requirements, while still presenting a relevant work history.  The focus of this resume is on the skills and competencies acquired over a rich career history while minimizing that actual history.

✅ Consider including a section that conveys your energy. After following all of the above suggestions, if you are STILL concerned that your new, modernized resume is going to make you appear “old,” then you might want to include another section that can convey to the reader that you are an active person as well as a lifelong learner.

You might label this section as “Activities” or “Continued Education” or something to that effect.  In the section, you could include relevant activities and continued education that would matter for the specific line of work in which you are applying.

For instance, perhaps you know that the hiring company has a softball team.  Maybe you play or coach softball– include that in the section.  Or maybe you’ve taken to learning a new language– include that coursework.  Maybe you continue your education by watching a series of relevant webinars– include your participation in the series. Anything that can demonstrate that you are active and engaged– include (so long as it’s relevant, at least in some way, to the sought-after job).

✅ Know the difference between a pdf and a doc file, and know that you should send your resume in both file forms. After spending all that time painstakingly formatting your resume, making sure it looks perfect, the last thing you want to have happen is for the file to not transfer appropriately when you send it as an attachment via email.

Let’s say you composed and formatted your modernized resume on a PC, saved it as a doc file….and then sent the file to a Mac user. Guess what happens to all that formatting you did to perfect the design of your resume? Poof! Gone-zo! A pdf, however, will transfer your file to PC and Mac users without making changes to your formatting.

Some companies will request resumes be submitted as doc files, though. That’s fine; but send along a pdf version, too; doing so will show your reader that you like to stay one step ahead of the game. Tell them that you’ve included a pdf version “for your convenience.”

Resume-writing, for anyone at any stage in their career, is hard work.  It’s time-consuming, too. The final test will be if your newly improved résumé gets results. Are employers getting in touch with you to schedule interviews? If not, consider reworking your résumé or maybe hiring a professional to help you. A winning résumé is a prelude to securing an interview that could lead to your re-entry into the workforce.

Gregory H. Wolf
Gregory H. Wolfhttps://www.throughwolfseyes.com/
Greg is an accomplished Speaker, Writer, Trainer, Consultant, Coach, Investor and Chief Executive. HIs executive experience includes service as the CEO of Humana, Inc.; President of Cigna Group Insurance; and Chairman and CEO of Medical Card System. Greg’s most recent corporate consulting experiences have been with product and service companies seeking to understand and fulfill the needs of mature (Age 50+) consumers. His counseling with individuals includes those who are undergoing significant life and career transitions such as an executive appointment, termination, substantial inheritance or retirement. He is the Founder of Wolf Media Group (WMG) which owns the popular Through Wolf's Eyes “Site for Seniors”, featuring video and articles written by Greg, WMG staff – all experts on issues of interest to a more mature market, and the content of I-Generation (people born after 1995) writers. A special feature of the site is an effort to connect the I-Generation with older generations.

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