How to Write Exceptional Resumes and Cover Letters to Forward Your Career ― Professional Guidance to Support You Step by Step

Here’s How This Book will Help you, Specifically. Inside this book you will find a simple Blueprint for making successful job applications. It is the guiding light, the logic that underpins everything we do, making for an easy and sensible process to follow. You’ll find plenty of examples, tips and advice to support you in creating exceptional job applications focussed on one thing: advancing your career. Here’s the Blueprint: • Align the job application precisely with the job advertisement • Communicate directly to the recruiter • Make it easy for the recruiter to find the information they want • Produce clean, simple documents that are easy to read • Eliminate errors Hitting on these 5 points will improve your chances of success and the simple step by step guide covers these points and much more. Here’s what you’ll find inside: Introduction How to get the most out of this book, the job application process, the Successful Applications Formula, rookie mistakes. Module 1 Who job applications are targeted to, how recruiters deal with multiple applications, Automatic Tracking Systems, Blueprint for making job applications. Module 2 The job advertisement, Selection Criteria, capturing all information, company information. Module 3 Providing evidence - this is all about supporting your skills and experience with numbers, results and facts that back up your claims. A host of examples, ideas and tips are provided to help you come up with as much evidence as possible. Everyone uses the obvious numbers like KPI scores, performance to target percentages, amount of revenue responsible for etc. And there’s so much more! With some thought and effort, you’ll find there’s a lot more information you could be bringing to the table. Module 4 The cover letter – first impressions, cover letter structure, structure in detail, example cover letters with notes. Module 5 The Resume Part 1 – The structure. Every component of the structure shown and explained with plenty of examples, guidance and advice. Includes how to use job history dates, how to deal with gaps in your job history, optimising company descriptions (why describing companies you’ve worked for should be different for every application), how to describe each job in your work history (three parts: Selection Criteria, Experience, Results with plenty of examples and explanation), education/professional qualifications/development, the finished product, re-cap structure. Module 6 The Resume Part 2 – What not to put in your resume, where to put education/professional qualifications/development (at the start or at the end? It depends!), how much space to allocate to each job with reasons, explanation and tips, how to use company information, how to cover as many of the Selection Criteria as possible (tips, techniques and ideas with plenty of examples to show how to maximise the efficiency of your resume), what if you have a limited, or very limited job history, addressing weaknesses (we all have them! We go through a technique – Editing – that minimises weaknesses while still allowing you to address Selection Criteria), summary, checklist, a reality check! Will this Book Work for You? Think about this: you have a logical framework that drives every step of this book - the Blueprint, a simple and sensible process over 6 Modules that describes each step, with a stack of tips, examples and ideas to show how every component works and why. This is a practical book, no fluff and bubble here! BUT….THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR EVERYONE! This book cannot write your cover letters and resumes for you. It’s for people prepared to understand the concepts and implement them. It’s for people prepared to invest some time to maximise their chances of career progression. If you are dissatisfied with your current job applications in any way, I sincerely hope that this book can be a valuable resource for you. If you pick up one or two points to tweak your current documents, or completely re-write

During my business career, from start-ups to a global Fortune 500 company, I’ve read thousands of cover letters and resumes, conducted hundreds of interviews and hired more than one hundred people. Importantly, this recruitment was done as the hiring manager, not as a recruitment agent. In other words, these people worked with me in the business – that’s having real skin in the recruitment process! Over time it dawned on me that few people crafted their job application documents to what I wanted to see. It’s like they got their old resume and updated it with their latest job and that was it. Not surprising really, I’ve done it before, we’ve all done it before and it accounts for why sifting through job applications can be a pain because most people are not providing the right information. I have no doubt that some excellent candidates never made it to interview because their cover letters and resumes were so poor. It became clear that most people could do a much better job of their job application documents. Here’s how: Give the recruiter what they want! That’s exactly how this book started – all based on that one sentence. Have a look at the Blueprint and the contents, it all comes back to that concept. If I could articulate it and make it easy for people to understand, then a book could be a good resource to really help people progress their careers. How cool is that?! After many months of drafting, re-drafting and re-drafting the re-drafts, and then talking to a recruitment consultant, and re-writing the book again, it’s finally done! Everything is here to help you create resumes and cover letters that are not only tailored to job advertisement requirements, but also gives the recruiter exactly what they want. Use this book to pick up one or two useful ideas, or completely re-write your resumes and cover letters. Either way, wishing you successful job applications!