> All they care about is presenting well to the the companies > that are paying them thousands of dollars to hire someone. > Which means they don't really care about you.
Yup, all very true, but that is the purpose of their business. To dress up a potential employee to look their absolute best for a prospective employer. It's really this way, Scott. If you were going on a date with somebody you REALLY wanted to go out with. Wouldn't you at least shower? Maybe comb hair? Wear pants that weren't ripped (unless that was the style you were going for)? That's all a headhunter does. They look at your résumé, which is your one shot to impress an employer, they clean up the info and pass it to the employer. Now, if you don't want that to happen, you don't go through a headhunter. As an FYI, last time I was shopping for an employer (I didn't go headhunter route), I found that many management level positions hire only through headhunter firms. The reason is that employers risk a lot by hiring somebody. Training, benefits, etc. As to the résumé, Brandon. You've got a lot of advice given here, so I'll try to keep the reiterations down. However, from the hiring side of things. When I post for a position and start to hire, I take the printed résumés and put them into 2 piles. Those that use MS Word Résumé templates, and those who don't. Those who don't instantly get a +1. The reason is that the résumé is your one doc to represent you. Your one chance. And you chose a prefab creation? Maybe for somebody else's company, but not for any of my positions. I don't toss the word ones, they just get a -1. Then, I look for the cover letter. A bulleted résumé is received exactly as it is presented. Cold hard facts about you. The specific. But what about you as a person? Will you work together in our business atmosphere? Will we get along? Those kinds of questions can be better answered by a nice cover letter. (For those of them that have somebody else write their cover letter to make it sound better, the first interview will reveal this. Especially, if the vocabulary from the cover letter doesn't match that of the first interview.) What Wade says is very true. You have many many skills you're very proud of. Keep the very best of these skills and drop the rest. I've got a really nice sentence in my cover letter explaining that the prospective employer can request additional information about the particulars of my skill set. Now truth told, I'm at a page and a half on the résumé. While being equally accomplished, my résumé doesn't have quite the density, that I instead mention in the first interview and make available in the first interview. The strategy being that I want to always present my prospective employer with my name and phone number. So, I email my cover letter and résumé in. I get called for interview. During interview if we talk about my skill set, I have an additional document I only hand out there with all the particulars customized to the job requirement, name and phone at the top. I hand it to the employer. The couple of times that I've tried it, it has worked well, including for my present job. Hope this helps. mj/v _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
