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The Skinny on Resume Writing

Basic do’s and don’t on resume writing

Resume writing to perfection
There’s an art to resume writing but it’s not rocket science.

The job market is tough; that much is true. But if you’ve been sending out your CV with very little response, the job market is only one part of the problem. It’s more than likely that your resume isn’t doing you any favours.

Keeping resume writing simple

Resume writing is about showing prospective employers why you are the best fit for a position and their organisation. It’s not about listing all the jobs you’ve ever had in the past — a café owner looking for a new barista is probably not interested in the three years you spent working in a corporate law firm.

When it comes to pointing out your experience, there are some basic do’s and don’t’s to resume writing. A resume shouldn’t be like a laboured novel; nor should it be so subtle in pointing out your experience that the reader is left to work out exactly how your experience applies to the position they need to fill — recruiters don’t have time for that.

And remember, the majority of companies today outsource the recruitment process to recruitment agencies that receive thousands of CVs and resumes on a daily basis for their large portfolio of clients. Even those companies that still  handle recruitment themselves will have extremely busy HR departments; even in large companies, often there’s only one person reviewing the abundant CVs they receive.

35 seconds to make your mark

When it comes to resume writing, you have to get them in quick! Being time poor and exceedingly busy, most recruiters only spend about 35 seconds on each CV or resume.

This means you have 35 seconds to convince a recruiter that it’s worth reading your CV further or, better still, getting you in for an interview.

You’ll achieve this if you:

  • Get to the point, but don’t be arrogant — this is a massive turn-off.
  • Don’t over-embellish: if you didn’t actually do something, don’t say you did — you will get found out.
  • Are concise: don’t cram your resume or CV full of interesting (to you) but ultimately irrelevant previous positions (like dog walker in 1982), achievements or interests (ferret racing is better kept to yourself).

But don’t see the minimalist approach as an opportunity to get fancy with the design of your CV.

Unless you actually are a designer of some sort, just use a clean template that clearly highlights why you’re the right person for the job. I once received a CV formatted like a crossword puzzle to list the person’s experience and education; clever perhaps, but the CV after that was easy to read and it was that person I called in for the interview.

To avoid the daunting task of resume writing from scratch each time you decide to change employment, you should get into the habit of updating your CV on a regular basis.

Need more help?

EzyLearn is in a great position to help you with your resume writing because we understand the employment market and the needs of employers. We also have team members with top quality resume writing skills and experience in creating quality resumes for administration and bookkeeping positions in particular. Other related blog posts: Finding a Job Using LinkedIn

If you’d like to share your job hunting experiences with us and others, please visit us our Facebook page — you can also let us know here if you need help with resume writing. We can also help you brush up your Microsoft Word skills for resume writing. 

Social Media and Digital Marketing online training course_comp

Are you in business as a bookkeeper, tradesperson, retailer, trainer or real estate agent and want to stand out from the crowd? We can teach you the online marketing techniques to help you do just this! Check out what’s included in our comprehensive Social Media and Digital Marketing online training courses.

 

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Is Reach Accounting good for serviced based Small Businesses?

We have previously written blog posts about our Bookkeeping Academy and in particular, how students of our MYOB training courses can gain access to this for FREE. We are currently creating training materials on how to use Reach Accounting from NetRegistry.

We are currently creating new content for various cloud accounting software vendors, and in particular is the Reach Accounting package. This package is ideal for small serviced based businesses such as graphic designers, website designers and even bookkeepers . The Sales layout (Invoice) is more suited to small service based businesses’ as it does not allow you to manage items or inventory, but at only $14.95 per month it is extremely affordable while enabling you to remain compliant with your recording and reporting requirements.

Reach Accounting BAS Calculation Report
BAS Calculation Report

Our Course Designer, Certified Bookkeeper and Registered BAS Agent had this to say about Reaching Accounting:

I love the report functionality and its ease of use, especially for people who are not familiar with bookkeeping or accounting reports. The BAS Calculation report is a prime example of this, whereby [quote]it gives us the information needed to simply transfer onto the BAS[/quote] . Another thing that really impressed me was the Thank Client Email functionality, this is received by the client in a professional look, displays the information needed and they can also see a list of their transactions regarding the invoice just by clicking a link in the email.

We are continually creating new content for our Bookkeeping Academy and if you have not already, sign up to one of our MYOB courses which include Lifetime Membership, and free 12 months access to all the content at the Bookkeeping Academy.

Please feel free to share your comments with us our Facebook page and connect with us at Linkedin.

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I was scared of social media

EzyLearn facebook page for MYOB coursesI recently featured Robert Crane from CIAOPS with his advice to small businesses regarding Linkedin ( I hope I didn’t confuse him with the CIA in the USA!?) and I’m following it up with our own story about social media.

Two years ago we were promoting our online MYOB training courses knowing that the MYOB Setup course used training materials from version 15. I know, you might be thinking to yourself that MYOB is now past version 19.5 (if you are using the old naming convention), but if you know MYOB software you’d know that the navigation around the software didn’t change significantly until their latest version. Regardless, I was afraid!

I felt VERY comfortable keeping our training materials at that version, but I was terrified of people talking about it! Particularly in social media. Most of our courses now have updated videos, workbooks and knowledge reviews for the latest version (2012) so I am proud to announce it! We also offer both versions to all students (along with lifetime access) and the video format we use is not longer flash so the training videos can be viewed on an iPad.

You might not know that we also make a lot of our MYOB training videos available for free at YouTube and I was scared to share that information as well because I was scared that no one would then do our online MYOB courses! What I have learnt in the past few months is to embrace social media. My team and I are very proud of the MYOB courses we offer, our lifetime access, our money back guarantee so we are now announcing all our social media websites.

Please feel free to share your comments with us our Facebook page and connect with us at Linkedin and here’s to a successful social future to us all! Let’s not be afraid of social media any longer.

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Don’t oversell your MYOB bookkeeping skills

writing a resume for an MYOB bookkeeping jobI recently wrote about resumes and social media that is being used by people to help them find employment and I touched on the topic of Linkedin. Of all the social media tools available to you, LinkedIn might be the best to focus on because it has all the tools available in social media (like recommendations, professional profile and education and more) and it is focussed on people and their professional connections and careers.

Michelle Hammond wrote an interesting article for SmartStartup way back in 2010 about “over-used” phrases in resumes and here’s the key phrases from that article:

According to LinkedIn, the three most overused terms are “extensive experience”, “innovative” and “motivated”, followed by “results oriented”, “dynamic” and “proven track record”. Rounding out the list are “team player”, “fast paced”, “problem solver” and “entrepreneurial”.

This view is backed up by our own resident resume writing expert Nicholas, former CEO of a UK based head-hunter who confirmed that “overselling stands out a mile when you are the person having to go through hundreds of resumes for each position. What really makes a difference is when you go into a little detail about what changes you contributed in your last position or some other specific information that the resume reader can delve into and explore a little more. It’s got to be real because a conversation can often evolve from what you write”

If you are compiling a resume for your own job seeking efforts make sure you demonstrate some sound information about the evolving legislation around BAS agents and information about Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for bookkeeping professionals.

Make sure you subscribe to our blog to receive other job seeking tips and tricks in your email inbox. If you are interested in our online MYOB training courses, remember that you receive LIFETIME student access.

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The death of the resume

Social-Media and online MYOB Training coursesI was reading an article in SmartStartup by Brad Lindenburg just the other day where he writes about the “death of the resume” and thought that this would be an excellent place to begin a topic for EzyLearn online training students. 

We’ve written before about formatting resumes and how they are sometimes read by a machine, but the concept of them dying is a little silly. If you are a high-tech hirer you will be searching for potential employees blogs or Twitter conversations, but if you want to find someone to perform bookkeeping tasks for example you will most likely welcome a comprehensive resume demonstrating your training, skills and experience. Most students of our MYOB training courses have a written resume that they use to apply for positions.

What we have found is becoming more relevant to jobseekers is Linkedin. Although the major social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter are good tools to connect to people with, we’ve found that Linkedin is the place where professionals are often head-hunted because it shows you professional connections and gives high-level hirers a better idea of the circles you “connect with”.

Ultimately, which-ever medium you use the key skill you need is using the right keywords and this will remain the key ingredient until we all focus on the use of videos as resumes. The term resume is here to stay!

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How’s your resume looking?

Resume writer and writing service
Resume Template

Find a job or become more valuable

Apart from our corporate customers who have their staff training on programs like Microsoft Excel to improve their productivity, many students complete their MYOB accounting or Excel spreadsheet training courses to make them more employable because they are in search of work. Their circumstances vary and include:

  • Advancing from one position to a better one,
  • Being made redundant and in search of a new job,
  • Returning to the workforce after bringing up a family
  • Want to work from home while bring up a child

Resume Writing

We are in a great position to help you with your resume writing because we understand the employment market and the needs of employers and we have team members with excellent writing skills. Some of our EzyLearn team members have written resumes and application letters for students and we want to know if you or a friend of yours needs a resume written (or re-written).

Read more about EzyResume combined resume writing and online Microsoft Word Course and use this discount voucher (eler1) to receive a $50 discount. This offer is valid for a limited time only, so be quick.

Share your resume writing experiences with us

Many of our students are looking for work in an administration and bookkeeping capacity so the format for the resumes are fairly consistent. Have you had an experience where you learnt something valuable about what to include and what not to include in your resume?

If you want to share your circumstances (including the success of your job hunting) with us please send visit the EzyLearn Online Training Courses Facebook page and let her know your successes or if you need a resume to be written.

We look forward to hearing from you.

See other blog posts we’ve written about writing resumes and tools to help you find a job.

Linkedin: Will it replace your written resume?

Social-Media and online MYOB Training coursesIn the course of our business we’ve used Linkedin to find people with certain skills and after speaking to recruitment offices and HR personnel we’ve discovered some interesting things about linkedin and how it can help you get the job (or customer) you’re looking for.

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How valuable are words?

It seems that Google has brought back the magic of words. Why? Because they can be indexed and used in search results.

Can you index an image or a video? You can, but you need to index them using words.

You can find almost anything on Google but you need to use words to do it. When you click on a paid Google Adwords advertisement its usually due to the words the advertiser used to catch your attention. If you want to improve your Google organic search ranking you need to use the right “key”words on your website, they call that Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO).

Keywords, SEO, marketing, Google Adwords, resumes

Can someone in the Phillipines, India or Eastern Europe Write Like You?

You might be aware of the value of words these days because you need this skill to be effective in marketing your business online. The role of the copywriter is often undervalued because you can now hire someone in the Phillipines, India or Eastern Europe to write the content of your website or blog for a couple dollars per hour, but would you? After testing out individuals, copy-writing services and other international contracting companies we realise that the quality of the words we use and the ability to relate to other Australians is something only another Australian can truly do effectively. With all the talk about workers in developing countries taking jobs away from Australian workers, we realise that it’s their knowledge of Australian lingo, Australian tastes and Australian attitudes that makes their writing style truly Australian – and that makes it valuable to other Australians.

Work at Home

There is a way of getting good quality words for your website or blog for a reasonable price and that is by using a Virtual Assistant (sometimes called a remote worker, home worker or a remote contractor). There are some great writers out there who choose to work from home and if you use the services of an organisation like Virtually Yours you’ll find top quality writers and remote contractors with many other skills that are part of an organisation designed to find good virtual assistants and promote them as well as provide them with tools to be effective small business owners.

While we are on the topic I want to share the success of Terry from Ramancorp. He operates a small wholesale business supplying a range of framing, hanging, display and packaging materials and he lists them all on his website. Because he has gone to the trouble of providing as much information as possible he uses some very niche words that attract customer looking for the exact product they need. As a result Terry is getting a good amount of NEW customers EVERY month without having to pay a cent in Google Adwords advertising.

Words are Valuable in Resumes, Website and LinkedIn

Words are just as valuable in your resume so the next time you think about what kind of job you are looking for, think about the words that the advertiser might use to attract the right candidate and make sure your resume has these words in it.