Quintessential Resumes and Cover Letters Tips Blog

Okay, so you have painstakingly prepared a powerful, attention-getting resume that fully highlights your accomplishments and frames your skills using the keywords and language of the target industry. Don’t make the mistake of sending it out into the world undressed—that is, without the appropriate outerwear — the cover letter!

Few applicants give much thought to their cover letters, even though they have put blood, sweat, and tears into their resumes. The job of the cover letter is to identify the job you want to do, and to sell yourself as the ideal person to do it. Industry professionals agree that at the very least, your cover letter should hook your reader, promote your viability as a candidate, and generate enough interest to inspire reading beyond the letter and on into the resume for more information.

It is also EXTREMELY important to know to whom your resume package should be directed, so you can send it addressed specifically to that individual’s attention, with his or her name spelled correctly, and followed by their title. Don’t make the mistake of addressing your cover letter “To whom it may concern” or a generalized “Dear Human Resources Director.” With that approach, it may as well be addressed to “Dear Circular File” as the odds will be against it getting into the right hands from the outset. Taking the time to learn the correct recipient’s name identifies you as someone who goes the extra distance to sure-up the details - a definite plus for any job candidate. >

Get a FREE resume evaluation from Quintessential Resumes and Cover Letters, powered by About Jobs Resume Writing Service. Or order a resume, cover letter, or other career-marketing document.

The first step toward preparing a powerful resume, is to fully consider the market you are targeting to determine the job skills necessary to work and excel in it. There is little point in developing a resume that highlights specialty cake-making expertise to appeal to an audience of steel workers. An ill-targeted execution is destined for hardship and likely failure from the outset. So step one of the mission is to define your focus. Begin by determining what your career goals really are, get to know the current hiring and performance trends in that market, research the qualifications typical for that type of job, and get ready to get to work tailoring your execution to fit the chosen profession. With a bit of mental elbow grease here, square pegs can be reshaped to fit round holes by highlighting skills that can be considered as transferable. Focusing on strengths, such as communication, organization, interpersonal skills, management capabilities, and leadership — to name a few — can be applied with great success to almost any job title, but you must be the one to connect the dots for your reader in persuasive, discipline-specific language. The Internet is a goldmine for conducting this type of career-related research.

Get a FREE resume evaluation from Quintessential Resumes and Cover Letters, powered by About Jobs Resume Writing Service. Or order a resume, cover letter, or other career-marketing document.

It may be no secret that having a professional-quality resume is a must to compete in today’s job market, but the means to creating one may be somewhat less clear and perhaps a bit daunting to do-it-yourselfers. Developing a powerful resume that will fully optimize a job search takes preliminary strategizing and a systematic follow-through to ensure an effective, attention-garnering execution. In an age of technology-enhanced job-search tools — online job postings, and electronic resumes — a resume in any form must be considered as nothing less than a powerful personal marketing tool that spotlights career accomplishments, touts job skills, and identifies you as a viable candidate in the job market.

Experts in the resume-writing field may have style differences, but all seem to agree on the importance of a final presentation that is rich in accomplishments and action-oriented language with unique qualities and special skills promoted as “value-added” extras. It seems to be universally agreed that resume writing is about creating powerful career-marketing documents that identify you as a candidate who is in-step with leading-edge job-search trends and technologies.

Get a FREE resume evaluation from Quintessential Resumes and Cover Letters, powered by About Jobs Resume Writing Service. Or order a resume, cover letter, or other career-marketing document.

Not possible! A common mistake jobseekers make is to submit the same version of their resume for each and every position to which they apply. This approach to job-hunting makes no more sense than wearing your summertime Tevas through the rains of autumn and on into the snowdrifts of winter and wondering why your feet are cold and wet! In almost all circumstances, this practice is destined for repeated failure in a job search. Even jobs with the same title can differ distinctly from each other, from company to company, on a range of levels.

The wise job hunter will use some minor sleuthing skills to decipher the advertising language of each listing, identify exactly what hard and soft skills a specific employer seeks, and utilize that information to tweak a resume and cover letter to play to the target reader. Picking up on the keywords in employment ads and job postings can truly be the key to success in the job market. Making minor adjustments in language, to otherwise identical documents, can mean the difference between getting an interview and having your resume land in the circular file—especially in an age where use of keyword-based resume screening software is becoming more common.

Get a FREE resume evaluation from Quintessential Resumes and Cover Letters, powered by About Jobs Resume Writing Service. Or order a resume, cover letter, or other career-marketing document.

Are you a bystander in your own career? Have you watched colleagues get promoted and move up the ladder while you remain in the same old job and ruminate on their good fortune? Chances are the only real difference between yourself and your “lucky” colleagues is preparation.

Oprah Winfrey rejects the very idea of luck, believing instead that moments heretofore defined as lucky are instead highly charged instances where preparation meets opportunity. This concept can certainly hold true in a competitive job market where the earliest bird may indeed catch the worm. Having a well-written, up-to-date resume at the ready for an unexpected opportunity could very well position you ahead of the competition. Being able to produce current, professional-looking career documents at not only a moment’s notice, but THE moment’s notice can speak volumes about your viability as a qualified candidate.

Submitting your documents for an objective critique can be a solid first step in your preparedness process. A resume critique provided by qualified professionals can shed light on how the current state of your resume may be hitting or missing its mark in a target industry or with recruiters and hiring managers. You may also gain valuable insight on how best to optimize your documents for electronic submission and screening.

Get a FREE resume evaluation from Quintessential Resumes and Cover Letters, powered by About Jobs Resume Writing Service. Or order a resume, cover letter, or other career-marketing document.

This entry is one in a series by Deb Walker on avoiding the top three cover letter mistakes:

Repeating the exact same things you wrote in your resume is one of the most common cover letter mistakes. No one wants to read the same thing twice. By the time most people have finished writing their resume, they feel that they have run out of ideas and just cut and paste to create a cover letter. Instead, the cover letter should be what sells the reader on your skills. Like the jacket-cover introduction to a good book, the cover letter should give the reader a taste of the great things to come and encourage them to read more. If you are don’t have any idea what your top skills are and how they will help the company, neither will your reader. Take the time to craft the right words and statements to make your skills shine.

Get a FREE resume evaluation from Quintessential Resumes and Cover Letters, powered by About Jobs Resume Writing Service. Or order a resume, cover letter, or other career-marketing document.

This entry is one in a series by Deb Walker on avoiding the top three cover letter mistakes:

A major mistake is not understanding the hiring motives of your audience. Job-seekers target their resumed to three basic audiences: executive decision-makers, resume screeners, and third-party recruiters. Each of these groups has its own hiring motives.

• Executive decision-makers are looking for candidates who will have a significant impact on bottom-line initiatives, such as time saved, income generated, revenue built, etc.
• Resume screeners are searching for candidates who directly match the lists of qualifications in the job description.
• Third-party recruiters are looking for selling points to help position you as a top candidate.

Knowing these hiring motives will help you craft your cover letter specifically to catch the attention of your particular hiring audience. By appealing directly to the reader, you are creating an immediate bond that will make you a stronger candidate.

Get a FREE resume evaluation from Quintessential Resumes and Cover Letters, powered by About Jobs Resume Writing Service. Or order a resume, cover letter, or other career-marketing document.

More than 80 percent of employers place resumes directly into searchable databases and at least that many employers prefer to receive resumes by e-mail. At least 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies post jobs on their own Web sites — and expect job-seekers to respond electronically. All these stats mean that you need at least one other version of your resume that can go directly into a keyword-searchable database with no obstacles. To read more about how to format an electronic resume, go to The Top 10 Things You Need to Know about E-Resumes and Posting Your Resume Online.

Get a FREE resume evaluation from Quintessential Resumes and Cover Letters, powered by About Jobs Resume Writing Service. Or order a resume, cover letter, or other career-marketing document.

This entry is one in a series by Deb Walker on avoiding the top three cover-letter mistakes:

As a career coach and professional resume writer, I’m often asked “How important are cover letters to my job search?” My answer is, “It depends on how long you want to search for your next job.” If you are in no hurry to get interviews, then don’t worry about your cover letter. The fact is I’ve never met a job searcher who wants to have a painfully slow job search. The whole point of sending out resumes is to get multiple interviews as quickly as possible. But many job seekers still unwittingly sabotage their efforts by using substandard cover letters. Instead of helping you, your cover letter may actually be hurting your job search.

Get a FREE resume evaluation from Quintessential Resumes and Cover Letters, powered by About Jobs Resume Writing Service. Or order a resume, cover letter, or other career-marketing document.

A job-seeker simply cannot succeed these days with just the traditional formatted resume intended to be printed out as a visually pleasing marketing piece. The formatted “print” resume is still important, but it can no longer be the only resume tool in your kit. Read about electronic resumes at The Top 10 Things You Need to Know about E-Resumes and Posting Your Resume Online.

Get a FREE resume evaluation from Quintessential Resumes and Cover Letters, powered by About Jobs Resume Writing Service. Or order a resume, cover letter, or other career-marketing document.