Executive Jobs - Softcover

E. Montag, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0471232874 ISBN 13: 9780471232872

Verlag: John Wiley & Sons, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

The Proven, Professional Resume and Job Search Guide for Executives in the 100K and Above Salary Range

This new, expanded edition of a classic bestseller supplements veteran career advisor William Montag's years of experience with the powerful online resources of CareerJournal.com, The Wall Street Journal's own career Web site. Let this handy resource be your own professional executive coach with up-to-the-minute advice on how to land your ideal executive job using proven high-visibility marketing techniques.

The top-notch, real-world resume and cover letter samples inside will help you launch your search with the same competitive edge held by the top-level clients of Montag Associates. You'll learn how critical self-marketing is to your success and how to maximize your marketability by pairing the perfect cover letter with the right resume for any job opportunity. By combining the author's power packaging and patented Expansionist Theory(TM) methods with 24/7 online job search strategies you can outmarket, outsmart, and outclass the competition.

Put your executive job search on the fast track with:
* All the marketing techniques and online skills of professional executive career coaches
* Up-to-date listings of the best career and job search sites on the Internet
* Sample resumes accompanied by their own specially designed cover letters
* Frequently asked questions and market-tested answers
* Top ten rules for the twenty-first-century job market

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

WILLIAM E. MONTAG is the founder and President of Montag Associates, an executive career consulting and outplacement firm in Stamford, Connecticut. He has more than twenty years of experience as an executive career advisor, professional writer, and Fortune 500 manager with such blue-chip companies as Xerox and Exxon.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

The Proven, Professional Resume and Job Search Guide for Executives in the 100K and Above Salary Range

This new, expanded edition of a classic bestseller supplements veteran career advisor William Montag?s years of experience with the powerful online resources of CareerJournal.com, The Wall Street Journal?s own career Web site. Let this handy resource be your own professional executive coach with up-to-the-minute advice on how to land your ideal executive job using proven high-visibility marketing techniques.

The top-notch, real-world resume and cover letter samples inside will help you launch your search with the same competitive edge held by the top-level clients of Montag Associates. You?ll learn how critical self-marketing is to your success and how to maximize your marketability by pairing the perfect cover letter with the right resume for any job opportunity. By combining the author?s power packaging and patented Expansionist Theory™ methods with 24/7 online job search strategies you can outmarket, outsmart, and outclass the competition.

Put your executive job search on the fast track with:

• All the marketing techniques and online skills of professional executive career coaches
• Up-to-date listings of the best career and job search sites on the Internet
• Sample resumes accompanied by their own specially designed cover letters
• Frequently asked questions and market-tested answers
• Top ten rules for the twenty-first-century job market

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CareerJournal.com Resume Guide for $100,000 + Executive Jobs

By William E. Montag

John Wiley & Sons

ISBN: 0-471-23287-4

Chapter One

Frequently Asked Questions with Market-Tested Answers

Your most important job search/marketing tools are your resume and cover letter. As you think through the following questions and answers, please remember three market-tested philosophies that guided the development of this workbook:

Philosophy 1. Conventional, simplistic, and dogmatic how-to advice published in the past has helped to produce a 99% nationwide rejection rate for resumes-hardly a ringing endorsement for perpetuating past practices and advice.

Philosophy 2. The only opinion that really matters in judging the quality and effectiveness of your marketing resume and cover letter package is the opinion and response of the marketplace. The real-life sample resume and cover letter packages in this workbook were well-received by the marketplace, resulting in successful career moves up to six-figure salaries at the senior vice-president level.

Philosophy 3. Individuals need to be professional marketeers in planning their job search campaigns and developing their marketing presentation packages. The increasingly volatile, hostile, and challenging white-collar job market of the twenty-first century will require and demand nothing less.

Q: Why doesn't my old resume generate more quality interviews and multiple quality offers?

A: The marketing resume and cover letter package should, but rarely does, present your strongest possible case so as to increase your chances of landing on the potential candidate pile rather than on the no pile allotted to 99% of all resumes. Most resumes reach the no pile for a sadly legitimate reason-they fail to market and sell the individual.

Resumes are rejected for other reasons (e.g., a true non-match or lack of needed technical skills or credentials). However, based on two decades of experience, I have concluded that the overriding reason for the nationwide rejection rate of 99% is that most resumes simply do not achieve their intended goal of marketing and selling the candidate.

Q: How then do I present my strongest possible case?

A: You achieve this by focusing on and presenting, in your resume and cover letter, a well thought out, well-crafted, and hard-hitting presentation of your marketable skills and achievements. When you cut through all the superficial theories postulated about resume content, the undeniable fact is that you will (and should) ultimately be judged by the reader/decision maker based on your applicable skills and past accomplishments.

Few decision makers care much about the extended and detailed job descriptions that fill most resumes. While the resume and cover letter packages that you develop here will include brief job descriptions as secondary data, the primary emphasis will be on developing the strongest possible achievement statements (i.e., success stories) and skills definition sections of the resume and cover letter.

Strong, hard-hitting achievement statements convey this message: "Since I directed these successful efforts, accomplished these management goals, resolved these major problems, and achieved these targeted results for past employers, I can do the same for you."

Q: Should my resume be no longer than one page? How critical is the cover letter?

A: Epitaph for the One-Page Resume Theory: Once and for all, let's put this overaged turkey of a theory to rest.

A key principle behind the oft-quoted one-page resume theory is indeed a sound one, stating that your presentation must be succinct and to the point because you only have 15 seconds of the reader's review time to make your best case. So far, so good.

It is the interpretation and application of this principle, namely, that the resume must therefore be one page, that is all wet. In fact, the principle that you must present your best case as succinctly as possible for a 15-second review process leads instead to the following conclusion: If you don't first sell the reader with your marketing cover letter, you are not likely to sell the reader at all!

As detailed in Chapter 5, the marketing cover letter is the single most critical document that you will produce. While the resume must be as strong as the letter, the cover letter must do 98% of the initial marketing. I can state this unequivocally, based on my experience in the marketplace and on feedback from clients.

The cover letter is a chance to speak to the reader/interviewer. By developing the type of skills and achievement-oriented letters outlined in Chapter 5, you give yourself the same competitive edge that led to my clients' successful career moves into international growth companies as well as emerging mid-size and start-up companies. Failure to develop a hard-hitting, creative, achievement and skills-oriented cover letter results in a missed opportunity.

As for the resume, by using the recommended combination format (see next question), which positions your skills and achievements on page one (functional format) and all employer names, dates, and job descriptions on page two (chronological format), you accomplish the following: All the marketing (i.e., communication of your skills and achievements) is indeed contained on the first page of the resume so that if the reader only reviews page one, that is okay.

The cover letter and first page of your two-page resume should and (by applying this book's techniques) will contain 99% of your marketable selling points. This is a sound application of the principle behind the outmoded one-page resume theory. Decades of firsthand experience and the success of my white-collar clients, 98% of whom had two-page resumes, indicate that the rule that the resume must absolutely not exceed one page is simplistic tripe.

Q: What resume format should I use?

A: The typical analysis of the chronological versus functional versus combination formats is frequently characterized by lengthy lists of simplistic pros and cons that complicate the decision-making process and divert attention from the most critical factors to consider in determining the optimum format, namely, the impact of and market response to the various format styles.

Based on a busy decade of measuring market response through clients who made successful career moves, my experience has been that the format producing the greatest market impact is the one that best highlights and sells your most marketable assets-your accomplishments and skills. I, therefore, recommend (and demonstrate throughout this book) the combination functional (page one) and chronological (page two) format, which is, in most instances, the most marketing-driven format for presenting your skills and achievements.

Grouping and presenting your skills and achievements on page one of the resume while presenting your reverse chronological listing of employers (with dates, job titles, and job descriptions) on page two has several marketing advantages:

* First of all, and most importantly, by grouping your skills and achievements together on page one of the resume, you are presenting your most marketable and highest impact information first-a sound application of fundamental marketing principles. Remember you are the product, and the resume and cover letter package is your chief preinterview sales tool. You should, therefore, develop your chief sales tool using the same proven marketing principles and techniques that apply to any product.

* Second, by using this recommended combination format, you are demonstrating your respect for the employer's valuable and limited time by not forcing the reviewer to read and sort through a bunch of job descriptions, dates, and other low-impact, nonselling data better presented in the chronological section (page two).

If for reasons of convention (remember that conventional methods have helped produce a 99% rejection rate), you choose to use the chronological format, refer to Appendix I for an example of how to convert from the combination format to chronological format.

Q: Should my resume always include an objective statement?

A: An objective statement should always be included somewhere in your resume and cover letter marketing package but not necessarily in the resume itself. In fact, safe rules of thumb are that:

1. An objective statement will always be included in the marketing cover letter.

2. An objective statement will be included less frequently or not at all in the resume.

Q: Why is this so?

A: Including an objective statement in both the resume and cover letter is unnecessarily redundant.

Since the recipient of the marketing package will, in most instances, read the cover letter first, the objective statement must always appear in the letter, which is developed as a high-powered marketing tool in Chapter 5. It is, therefore, not necessary also to include an objective statement in the resume. Moreover, by not including the objective statement on the resume, you make the resume less restrictive, thereby leaving the door open to targeting multiple objectives each of which can be readily expressed by simply modifying the objective statements in the cover letter.

It is obviously not forbidden also to include the objective statement on the resume. However, if you decide to include it, have a better reason than "the Sunday newspaper supplement says the objective should always be on the resume." Such Sunday-supplement advice has been a major contributor to the extremely high rejection rate for resumes.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from CareerJournal.com Resume Guide for $100,000 + Executive Jobsby William E. Montag Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: John Wiley & Sons
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0471232874
• ISBN 13: 9780471232872
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 364
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar