In the description I would also include a (brief! and on-point) list of transferable skills you used at that position. General skills that are required for many jobs such as supervision of employees, customer service, scheduling etc.
What kind of work do you do?
I reread the OP and I see you’re undecided. I agree temp work is probably your best bet. I would forget about writing, graphic, or computer work unless you have job history in those areas.
p.s. – Whole Foods is supposed to be a good place to work but I don’t know if they’re hiring.
I found temp agencies to be rather worthless these days due to the large amount of candidates they can choose from.
If you do go with one, make sure you follow their rules and do it to the letter. Even turning down one job, that you dislike can get you sent to the bottom of their list and that means they won’t look very hard for you.
Craigslist can be good but watch for scams and telemarketing type things disguised as “good” jobs.
Part time work at companies would be a great way.
First of all get a resume organized and go to the companies YOU’D like to work for. Go to their websites and look for “careers” section, then start by applying to their websites.
Don’t expect too much and you will get the hang of it soon. You’ll go on lots of interviews and that’s good. Each time you go, and don’t get a job, don’t be disappointed, but be willing to learn from them.
Maybe you’ll get lucky right away, who knows?
Be prepared for the tough qualifications employers want. They want you to be willing to work on their terms. They want you to BE RELIABLE. This is one of the most important things. Be prepared to stress, you have reliable ways to get to work and would have no hassles finding places for your kids to stay while you’re at work, even in an emergency.
Stress how flexible you are. Stress how much YOU WANT to work for them.
The job market has changed so much in the last ten years. The employers call the shots
The thing is you said you’re going in blindfolded and don’t let that scare you. You WILL make mistakes, but SO WHAT? You LEARN that way. Making mistakes is fine, making them over and over again is not.
There really is not wrong or right format for resume, the one that lands you an interview is the right one. Just make sure it is short, readable and everything is spelled correctly. No more than two pages. And list ten years of experience or you last four jobs.
Finally and this is VERY important to closing the job, GET YOUR REFERENCES in order now. You don’t have to list them on the resume or application. Put “Will provide upon request.”
But employers are busy now. It’s vital when they referenence check, and they will the reference you give will talk to them or call them back ASAP. Employers are trained to fish out negatives from references you give, so make sure those you list are going to give you good, believable reviews.
I’ve been working temp jobs for three years and I know in Illinois the employment situation is awful. I can land temp jobs so I have the skills, I get the interviews so I know I have the right resume, but obviously something is lacking in that final punch I am giving or there’s just too much competition. Or maybe a bit of both.
I spend at least two hours a day looking for work on days that I am working at my temp jobs and at least EIGHT hours a day looking for work on days I am off, and I take one day off a week to rest.
Looking for a job is a job in of itself. An unpaid one, but still a job.
I don’t know whether Boston’s job market is anything comparable to the ones I’m familiar with, but if you are somewhat flexible about the hours you’re available, consider hotel night audit work. (I’m assuming that you are reasonably presentable and intelligent, since you post here!) Seriously, even in a tight market, decent night auditors can be hard to find, and if you are computer literate, able to handle simple math, and able to supervise yourself, it’s a pretty simple and stable job. Many hotels don’t advertise positions, so it doesn’t hurt to dress professionally and hit the local hostelries with resumes. Actually, I was first hired in the hotel biz after 7 years as an at-home mom - spotty job history and all - based on a walk-in application, on-the-spot interview, and “Can you come in to train tomorrow, Wednesday, and Thursday?” It’s often an interesting job if you like people, and frequently tests my “how can I fix this issue creatively?” skills.
If you haven’t worked for a while, consider a different format for your resume than the standard job job job skills format. If you go with a skill-based resume (and those are the words to google for examples) it puts your best foot forward.
Don’t forget to include volunteer work or anything else that looks good.
I just got hired by a temp agency. My interviewer said things are picking up, so look into those. (They found me by my incredibly out of date resume on Monster, which has since been updated). For many of them you have to bug the heck out of them - call them every week.
Make yourself a cheatsheet with your references, starting dates of jobs, salaries, addresses, and phone numbers. It makes your life easier when you’re filling out applications.
If you’re interested in doing art, check out Artbistro.com. It’s part of Monster and you can post a portfolio and stuff. There’s also CreativeHostList, but that seems to be mostly high-level design careers (I don’t know specifically what you do)
Get on LinkedIn, connect with everyone you can, and fill out everything. Let your friends know you’re looking (I’ve gotten a lot of my jobs through family).
Good luck.
If you’re going with a fancy resume, consider putting your pic on it.
Another vote for temping, that’s how I got myself back into office work a few years ago. Usually your first few temping assignments will suck - the temp agency doesn’t know you, doesn’t trust you, doesn’t want to risk their reputation, so they will send you on the least risky assignments so you might find yourself stuffing envelopes all day. Do it cheerfully and do it well, and that feedback will get back to the temp agency and they will be more willing to get you the bigger and more lucrative assignments.
You might want to consider doing a skills-based resume. That means you start by describing your existing skills in some detail, then have a chronological work history further down.
Some great advice here, I can only add a few things that I’ve noticed in the past few weeks that I’ve been looking (and thank you Secretary Gates).
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If you’re applying online, be prepared for them to have a specific application that they’ll want you to fill out. Sometimes it’s as simple as your contact information and one or two other fields, other times it’ll basically be your entire resume put into their format.
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If you have an electronic copy of your resume that you’re posting online or submitting to a company, be sure that the resume itself contains your name, email address, and at least one phone number. I’m not a fan of putting my total address in the resume, because a lot of sites (like Monster) are searchable by a wide range of people.
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Make sure you know what you need to make, and don’t be afraid to put that down. Count in wear and tear on your vehicle, and potentially having to update your wardrobe depending on the office environment.
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If you go the temp route, be careful to be bland at your workplace. Participate in conversations, but steer clear of detailed discussions about most subjects. Mentioning that you’re married with a teen age son is ok, going into detail about your first husband, that break up, and your operations in South America may throw some red flags. You can never be sure how someone will take something you say, so keep conversations very shallow.
Good Luck, and if you’d like, PM me and I’ll take a look at your resume. As I said, I’m in the process of looking now myself.
Your profile mentions a degree, what is that in? There’s a lot of competition for starter jobs out there, so even if it doesn’t reflect in your resume, make a good argument for your experiences being an asset. There is also something of a trend by employers to hire people who have some maturity. Many in the newest generation of job seekers have an unrealistic view of the working world. Employers are looking for stability, reliability, honesty, communication skills, and don’t care much how many facebook friends you have or how many harry potter books you’ve read. A good cover letter may do more for you than your resume. The form of a resume isn’t anywhere near as important as it’s content, so if you don’t have much useful content, find another way to convey your skills and abilities.
Definitely do not mention that you plan to leave the area in a year and half.
And it will get trashed right away. Putting a picture on/attached to a resume can lead to illegal discrimination issues so a decent potential employer won’t even consider your resume.
Lots of good tips so far. I’ll try to stay away from repeating them, and go with some other thoughts.
Two years ago when my entire department was…eliminated…my former employer sent us to a career counseling agency. Some random tips from there (and other past history):
Go for an interview for a job that you don’t care about. It’s a good way to get experience and ease the nerves of the interview. I’m an embedded SW developer. One time when I had to look for a job, my first interview was with a Java firm. I could do the work, but was fairly certain going into it that I could find a better match. It really helped me get used to the process.
For most job interviews, you should smell like…nothing. No strong perfume. Nothing that would upset customers or trigger allergies. I suppose there may be an exception to this…certainly not in my industry, though.
There are some online career assessment sites. It’s like a personality profile - you answer a bunch of questions, and it gives potential job matches. The ones I used were restricted to the counseling service, but I bet there are some public ones. It may give you ideas for the type of work you might enjoy and be qualified for.
When you put together your reference list, make sure you ask the people if it’s ok to list them. If you actually give the list to a prospective employer, tell the people on the list again, so they are ready for a call.
Many companies look for key words on your resume before deciding if they want to talk to you. Entry level positions may not do this, but it doesn’t hurt to have the right language just in case.
You don’t need to have one resume for all situations. For instance, if you’ve had past experience organizing and leadings groups of people, that can help find a management position. If you’re applying for something entry level, it might scare off an employer, because you seem overqualified. Then again, some employers will see that as a chance to grow an employee into higher roles. The basic point is that tailoring a resume to the job can help.
If you need someone to proof read and give feedback, feel free to send me a PM.
-D/a
Another vote for temping. Although a lot of temp jobs are the kind of mind-numbing grind portrayed on that documentary, Dead Like Me and not especially well-paying, they also afford you the opportunity to network with potential employers and demonstrate off the organizational and creative skills that don’t get a fair showing on your c.v. and resume. Once you have a few temp jobs under your belt and have demonstrated that you’ll a) show up on time, b) follow instructions and perform beyond (typically minimal) expectations, and c) contribute to the projects or jobs you are assigned to in ways that are novel and useful, you can start asking about permanent or contract-to-hire positions in fields or industries you really want to work in. I’ll take someone who is motivated and takes initiative but has been out of force for a few years any day over some mope who has being grinding out the minimum acceptable work product for the last twenty years. In fact, one of the best engineers I have working for me right now finished school, tutored for a couple of years, and then ran a cleaning service for a decade before falling back into engineering, and she’s a fantastic find albeit one we had to put a lot of work into to bring her up to speed in her area.
Although I wouldn’t go that far, I don’t think any purpose is served by putting a picture on the resume or attaching it to the cover letter, unless you are in a field where public presentation is necessary and then, it should be a professional and subdued picture, not a candid or glamour shot. Dressing up the resume with a subtle but interesting watermark or icon can be an attention-grabber, especially in a design field, but honestly, most of the resumes I see are plaintext or OCR, and I vet the substance before I look at the formatting.
Good luck to you.
Stranger
Thanks for the tips, everyone–keep them coming!
On reflection, the picture on resume is bad advice for Americans (other than actors or models) based off Google’s result. Too bad, it made my last resume look less generic and demonstrated that I wasn’t a complete idiot with document prep. My bad, I should’ve thought about location.
A couple of tips that I’ve read in several places:
[ul]
[li]Tell everyone you know that you’re looking for a job, and[/li][li]to help them help you: create a little card, maybe business card with printing on both sides, that has your contact information, your objectives, and a bulleted list of your skills.[/li][/ul]
Good luck!
Well I just took a resume class and here is the stuff they said.
If you are submitting online, you need to realize that it will be read by a computer program first, then only certain ones (10 to 15) will be printed out and actually looked at by a human.
You should have three sections to your resume.
Section one is simply your name and contact info.
Section two is your summary / objective.
Section three is your work history.
Section two is the most important. This section will be changed for each individual application.
Parts of this section can and will be just a string of words. A simple listing of your skills like this.
Word / Excel / PowerPoint / Adobe Photoshop / Farmville / SDMB
You can do something similar with just adjectives about you
detail oriented / self starter / manager / people person / licensed driver
Employers write a job ad and then tell their computer to look for certain words from the ad in the resume. This can be something like a certification, (like it is a job for CPA) or they put in phrases like "We are looking for a detail oriented, self starter, who can orginize bla bla bla…
You work those words into the second section and it is like playing bingo with the software to get your resume noticed. If they say they are looking for someone who is good with excel and working with macros or formulas, and you have those skills, those words need to be in that section. Also be sure to include the title of the job they posted.
Note that I put a space between each word and the slash (/) mark. If you don’t it can interfere with the word search the computer is doing while it reads your resume.
This section is also important with the humans. It is the 25 second review of you. That is what they’ll read and then decide if they should read the rest and call you for an interview.
In the third section, numbers are good. If you did supervise anyone, how many? 5 people? 500 people? Did you or your group generate revenue for the company? How much? Did you increase that? By how much? “Our group increased sales by 23%.”
Make sure that when you do submit a resume you save it to a folder with the company name/date you submitted and the position. If you get called into an interview, you need to bring the correct resume with you. (bring 5 copies at least) This should be printed on watermarked paper and you should be able when reading your resume to hold it up and read the watermark. (It should not be upside down or backwards, feed the paper into your printer properly) I know that sounds petty but if you are claiming to be “detail oriented” and don’t do that, well…
Another tip they taught us was to work on your 30-second commercial…or elevator pitch. Have a short statement that you’re going to give to anyone you meet that is a prospective employer. Think of it as something you say while walking to the parking lot with someone.
Mine went something like this…it was more polished when I used it a lot…
I was never happy with the last sentence…and I changed the way parts of it went depending on who I was talking to. The basic idea is to have a few key points you want to bring up, and have some stock phrases to make it easy to slip into conversation quickly.
-D/a
Jesus, is this why I’ve been getting resumes for the past couple of years that are literally nothing but a career objective/mission statement/whatever followed by a list of generic buzzwords? These things get shitcanned immediately in my office because they tell me nothing about the skills of the candidate other than that they can also skim resumes in the field in interest and repeat buzzwords and computer codes. If a candidate can’t string together complete sentences or a comprehensible list of actual experience, I’m not going to waste the time to ring him up and have a ten minute conversation, much less fly him in for an interview. Don’t tell me you’re a “self-starter” or just throw it into a list; tell me about a project you worked on and what you did to take initiative.
I got one resume a few months ago that was nothing but “I want a job in [industry]” and a ginormous list of computer simulation tools that went across every discipline. The list of tools was so vast, disparate, and in some particulars obsolescent, that I immediately knew that there was no way he could have any but the most superficial exposure to a small fraction of them, much least have developed a level of competence on any of them. My bullshit meter immediately pegged at 11.
The counterpoint is the guy who sent a 12 page c.v. that not only detailed every work experience he had but also provided abstracts for every paper he’d ever written, details on is undergraduate research experience, and way too much coverage of his personal interests, including nuclear fusion, zero point energy, and extraterrestrial encounters. That one did get circulated around the office albeit not with any intent of employment.
Honestly, the two things you can do to advance yourself to the top of the stack of resumes is make your resume stand out in a way that is memorable but not offensive or prejudicial (i.e. distinctive but not overly ornamental formatting) and know someone inside. When I get a resume from a coworker or friend, I guarantee that it gets looked through even if it is clear that they aren’t suited to any positions I’m looking to fill, both because I have to respond to the person in question and explain why they aren’t suited (and what they might be suited for), and because if I know of some other position that they may be a fit in I’ll pass it onto someone else as professional curtesy. We get nearly all of our interns this way, and the ones that work out are either offered full-time employment upon graduation or are sent along with sterling letters of recommendation from the program director.
The stack of resumes I get from the recruiter, on the other hand, I’ll shuffle through, see if any are vaguely qualified for the position they applied to (1:20 on a good day) and shred anything that doesn’t look worthwhile. It’s just not worth my time to spend more than a couple of minutes reading and reflecting on one candidate out of a stack of three hundred. This is why doing temp work and getting some genuine kudos from a few employers is worth more than any amount of time spent on trying to refine a resume to perfection. The professional resume writers don’t want you to know (and perhaps themselves aren’t aware) that even the best written resume with no intimate references and pertinent experience to back it up is just not very worthwhile. Don’t bother giving me a complete list of Microsoft Office products you know how to use; if you don’t know at least the fundamentals of Word, Excel, Outlook, and Powerpoint (or something similar enough that you’ll be able to figure it out within a few minutes), you’ve either been living under a bridge or you’re not remotely qualified for any other tasks I would expect of you. Just tell me that you know the Microsoft Office Suite or “common office productivity applications” and move on.
Stranger
Good lords. When I read something and remark, “Holy shit, we have the crabby,” we have a crabby ass individual on our hands. And this comes from someone whose daily affirmations don’t include Oprah-endorsed bullshit like “You’re beautiful,” but instead consist of reminding myself that is not okay to strangle the entire office.
I don’t think Zebra’s point was people should create a resume that’s just full of buzzwords, and nothing else. Unless I am I reading incorrectly (possible), the point was you need to include robo-words, because as qualified as you may be, your resume is likely being scanned by robots, which means your skills and experiences will not be detected unless you use the correct search terms.
Either my reading comprehension processor is on the fritz or Zebra explicitly said to provide a list of keywords separated by slashes. Let’s see:
Yep, a string of slash-delimited buzzwords. I’ll note that Zebra was simply reiterating advice at a resume-writing class. I see these kinds of resumes with increasing frequency, and they’re utterly infuriating, because what this obfuscates the candidate’s actual experience rather than help me look for a qualified candidate. This is an example of resume writers advising their clients on how to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse rather than to display their experience and skills correctly and then go out and do the hard work of networking and building up actual skills. A resume with mediocre formatting and a recommendation goes a lot further than a resume with the latest formatting fad in a full of resumes with the latest formatting fad.
I’ll agree that it is important to include industry-specific terms in a resume, with critical ones should be repeated, but they also be need to used in a context to indicate that the candidate has at least the faintest glimmer of what they actually mean, and also spelled correctly (another thing that many candidates are sloppy about and will get a resume round-filed if I see three or more errors, as it indicates a gross lack of attention to detail on a critical document). A section entitled “Computer Skills” or “General Experience” or somesuch might contain a bullet list of pertinent skills, codes, or whatever is appropriate, but a list like “detail oriented / self starter / manager / people person / licensed driver” is just buzzword gumbo.
I’ve discovered by reading resumes just how unambiguously brilliant, indomitably motivated, and far above average in every category the great mean of the population is, including some who couldn’t be bothered to complete a bachelor’s degree in general studies and who have sat around in a turd-like state in their parents’ basement for the last five years, believing of themselves to have the makings of an “highly motiving aerodynamical engineer looking for an enovative position in space,” (a genuine quote that came from one of our self-identified top minds.)
As for being crabby, it’s a fair cop. You’d be crabby, too, if you spent three days going through a stack of three hundred supposedly vetted resumes (i.e. those who met the keyword criteria of the recruiter) and came up with about a dozen mediocre potential candidates. You would absolutely not believe the number of people who are “experts” with over “10,000 hours of experience” in the latest computer simulation or CADD tool even though they’ve been out of school only two years and worked four or five contract jobs in engineering meatgrinders for a few months apiece. And every single one of them is a “highly motivated self-starter.”
Stranger