With the daily rise in job losses, there has been a huge increase in the number of people who are unemployed, leading into more people looking for a job. While this can be detrimental looking at it from the outside, it is a great opportunity for you to stand out and get noticed. One of the best ways to get you noticed more is to become proficient in writing a cover letter.

Like many other Americans, you are probably not too fond of writing a cover letter and if you are, you are probably doing bare minimum, which is writing a generic cover letter for all of your positions. This is definitely not the way to get yourself noticed and it is not the way into a new position, so making sure that your cover letter is tailored for that position is going to be very important. The cover letter must be able to give the person enough information on you where they will want to find out more.

photo credit: quinn.anya

Over the years, it is extremely hard to find good cover letters that give you all of the details that you can offer as a potential candidate, which is why I have given you 3 tips on how to improve your cover letters.

Research the company you are applying for- A common mistake is that sometimes we forget to dig a little deeper with the company that we are applying for. We are so used to creating a simple cover letter that is basically a “one fit all” that we truly get lazy and end up not taking the time to find out about each company that were applying for. Make it a priority for you to go in and research the company in full so that in your introductory paragraph of your cover letter, you can tell them why you are applying for their company.

Cite a Recommendation- Companies love to hear about what others have to say about you, so it is a good idea for you to take a small quote from someone else in regards to your work ethic, experience, etc and place it on the cover letter.

The last thing that you want to do is to come across like someone who does not value the interviewers time. You will find that your resume will not even get a second look when you write long, drawn out cover letters that are just full of fluff.

When you learn how to write a cover letter, the first thing that you will want to keep in mind is that short and simple wins the race. You definitely want to restrain from writing too much information because you do not want to overwhelm the reader. Get to the point and explain why you are the best candidate for that position.

Steps to Writing a Cover Letter

Now that we have taken a look at how to get your cover letter noticed, I will show you how to put it all on paper. Let’s take a look at what you should have in your cover letter.

Introduction-Of course the introduction is the first paragraph where you introduce yourself. Here you will want to share why you like the company and why you have applied for the position. Since you have done your research on the company you will be able to share why you applied for their company.

Body- This is the most important section in your cover letter because it is where you will discuss more information about yourself. Here you will want to discuss why you think you would be the perfect fit for the position. You want to give them “enough” information about you where they will want to find out more.

Closing- Just like any other business letter does, you want to make sure that you thank the reader for taking the time to read your cover letter. This is the perfect time to tell them that you value their time. Moreover, you will want to let them know that you will contact them and when you will contact them in regards to the position. You will also want to give them your contact information and “tell” them what the best way to be reached is.

Writing a cover letter and having attractive business cards is a way that you can really sell yourself without having to be in from of the possible employer. If you are scared to write a cover letter and have no clue where to get started, you will find that online there are a number of resources that will show you what you will need to do. Remember, short and precise wins the race.

The certified resume writers at OlympusResumes.com have shown that these top 5 techniques are best for a top-notch teacher resume:

photo credit: annrkiszt

1. Stories. Every teacher has great stories about students. How did you change a child’s experience? What did you do to make that happen?
2. Challenges. Your district is different from neighboring districts—explain how your student population is different and show how you incorporated this knowledge into your curriculum and teaching strategies.
3. Test Scores. We all know that funding for public schools depends on improvement in student achievement. How did your students improve on the standardized tests?
4. Awards. What awards did you receive from your district leadership?
5. Recommendations. Did a parent write you a terrific note?  Include it on your resume. If your principal or colleague contributed powerful comments in your annual review, include those as well.

OlympusResumes.com uses these techniques and many others to create your teacher resume. If you’re a great teacher but unsure about how to put all of these details into a winning teacher resume, contact us at 1-888-822-0562. OlympusResumes.com writes teacher resumes that beat your competition to the top of a hiring manager’s pile. Order your teacher resume package to get the interview you want quickly, easily, and inexpensively.

photo credit: jczart

OlympusResumes.com has proven that these top 5 techniques drive a sales resume to the top of the pile:

1. Stories. What did you do to get that key sale or convert that key account? Tell the stories that show you can get the sale.
2. Statistics. Where are you in your company’s ranking? In sales, it’s all about the numbers. Use statistics to prove you’ve gotten sales in the past.
3. Awards. What annual or quarterly awards did you receive? Highlight the awards you earned for exceeding sales goals, improvement, or any other increase in productivity.
4. Recommendations. Did a customer say something nice about you in a letter to your superior? Include it. Likewise for great comments on an annual review.
5. Challenges. Is there something specific about your territory, product line, or competition that makes getting the sale difficult, yet you overcame it with style, power, and confidence? Make sure your reader understands your specific background and situation.

OlympusResumes.com uses these techniques and many others to create your sales resume. If you’re a great sales leader but unsure about how to put all of these details into a winning sales resume, contact us at 1-888-822-0562. OlympusResumes.com writes sales resumes that beat your competition to the top of a hiring manager’s pile. Order your sales resume package to get the interview you want quickly, easily, and inexpensively.

Author: Anthony Chapetta

The Different Types of Resumes

Writing a resume can be such a daunting task that it may be difficult to even figure out where to begin or how to gather your thoughts enough to place them in an organized format on paper. Although most conventional resumes follow a basic format which always includes experience, skills and education, the way in which you can organize and categorize that data can greatly affect the influence your resume will have on potential hiring managers. This article will hopefully elucidate and clear up any concern over how to get started with your resume. The following are the various types of resume styles that cover most of what exists out there as far a resume styling is concerned.

1. Chronological Resume

Chronological resumes showcase your work history and more importantly highlight your historical experience in chronological order. All previous jobs/careers and work experience you’ve had gets listed chronologically with your current or most recent job listed first. Employers tend to prefer these types of resumes because they can easily see what types of work experiences you’ve had in the past without spending too much time trying to sift through the rest of your resume.

photo credit: Ak~i

2. Functional Resume

The functional resume focus on your technical skills and experiences rather than your strict chronological work experiences. This type of resume is used mostly by people who are looking at changing careers or professional fields. This type of resume is also a good choice for those who have career gaps in their work history.

3. Combination Resume

Combination resumes focus mainly on your skills and experience. You should start out by providing a detailed list of all skill sets you have including all areas of the function you’re applying to. For example if you are applying to an open project manager position, you’ll want to make sure you include very specific skills involving project management principles, interpersonal communication and software knowledge.

4. Targeted Resume

Targeted resumes are very similar to functional resumes however here you are specifically highlighting the skills and experiences you have for the job you’re applying for. In a functional resume, the skills you choose to include in the resume are much more broad than the specificity in a targeted resume. Targeted resumes without a doubt take much more time and effort to customize then the rest simply because they are different for each job that you apply for. These resumes are exceptionally effective when applying for jobs that you know you’re highly qualified and have not only the skills but also any technical jargon that might be keywords for the hiring manager.

5. Mini Resume

The mini resume is simply a brief collection of your most important qualifications. It provides a quick and easy way to network with other prospective colleagues or even a prospective employer. This is not a full-length resume and should be used as a substitute, its purpose is simply to provide a quick reference and snapshot of who you are professionally.

These five different types of resumes should help you in your resume development. The main goal here is to always look for ways you can highlight your major accomplishments and show the hiring manager why you’d be a great asset to the company.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/resumes-articles/resumes-the-different-types-and-styles-5012299.html

About the Author

Anthony Chapetta

The Resume Center

NEW RESUME WRITING SERVICE proves affordable resumes can get interviews for job seekers.

Careerient, LLC, announces launch of OlympusResumes.com, a low-cost resume service for job seekers.

Salt Lake City, UT, June 16, 2011: Careerient, LLC, announces the launch of a new discount resume writing service that proves resume writing can be effectiveand inexpensive. Inspire Smart . Most resume writers charge in the hundreds of dollars. OlympusResumes.com delivers professionally written resumes for less than $100and they’re all crafted by Certified Resume Writers. Amy L. Adler, MBA, MA, CARW, Chief Executive Officer of Careerient, LLC, which owns and operates OlympusResumes.com, reported, “Our new service contradicts the prevailing wisdom that you get what you pay for when you hire a discount resume writing service. We use the same proven techniques as do the large, expensive services. But we make getting a great resume easy, cheap, and quick for job seekers who don’t have a lot of extra cash.”Because resumes are essential documents for job searches, job seekers need to have resumes that catch a hiring manager’s attention quickly. But most people are not professional writers, so their resumes can be ineffective at getting interviews. body shopHaddonfield NJ . And job seekers without jobs often don’t have the money to invest in an expensive resume writing service, which can cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Therefore, there is a prime need for a quality, credentialed, inexpensive resume writing service for these job seekers.OlympusResumes.com makes the resume writing process a painless and quick process, delivering quality resumes, cover letters, thank you letters, and reference sheets in 3 business days.

ABOUT OlympusResumes.com and Careerient, LLC

Careerient, LLC, is a professional career search strategy firm located in Salt Lake City, UT, and offering expert resume writing and editorial services to entry-level through executive clientele in the global marketplace.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Email: Amy L. phlebotomy certification . Adler, CEO, aadler@olympusresumes.com Tel: 888-822-0562. To learn more about OlympusResumes.com visit its website at www.olympusresumes.com.###

Lately, I’ve been hearing from a few entrepreneurs who need to return to the corporate world for critical financial reasons. Atlanta SEO . Resumes for entrepreneurs are similar to professional resumes in most ways. However, you need to convince the hiring manager that you’re not a lone cowboy out to make all your own decisions and turn the company into something it’s not. You need to prove that you can work with the group to make your target company the best it can be.

Resumes for Former Entrepreneurs

First, Your Job Search Is Your New Job

As an entrepreneur, you focused on achieving certain goalsSales goals, customer conversion goals, marketing goals, advertising goals, operational goals, and probably a hundred other quotidian goals that made your business function every day. Set similar goals for your job search. Track your progress. Change what doesn’t work. Emphasize and repeat what does. Seriously evaluate whether you’re ready to

• Throw your lot in with the rest of the professional world
• Work with others on teams
• Take direction from someone who might not have the same perspectiveor experienceas you.

Think About Your Resume

You might never have written a resume before, because your company was flying high, and you loved the responsibility, pressure, and elation of success. But if youre ready to take the plunge, your resume has to show some serious innovation and expertise.

Talk about Teamwork

First, emphasize any team projects youve participated in, whether inside your company with subordinates, with other industry players, or with clients. Ensure that your prospective hiring manager knows youre a team player and you arent afraid to collaborate.

Show Increasing Levels of Responsibility

Within your own organization, you probably started with smaller projects and worked your way to bigger ones. Great challenge-action-response statements, or CAR statements, will show how you wrangled the most success from sticky situations that resemble the kinds of problems hiring managers are desperate to solve.

Write for Your Audience

Demonstrate your growth with strong action words and as many quantitative and qualitative assessments as you can. Pick powerful language; dont use boring text that doesnt grab attention. Emphasize the skills and requirements mentioned in the job posting, and use the language that the posting uses, because this is how Human Resources will search for you in their database. Additionally, it’s how the hiring manager thinks about the position, so the more you can mirror his or her approach to the position, the more prepared you will appear on paper.

Dont Forget a Great Cover Letter

Despite what you might have been reading lately, you must include a cover letter, perhaps pasted into your application e-mail. You never know whether your future hiring manager loves them or hates them, but if you get the type who loves them and you don’t have one, you’re sunk.That having been said, your cover letter is the introduction to your resume. It has to be polished and professional. Highlight the specific skills that you believe are the most important for the roleand tell a brief story or two about how you’ve knocked them out of the park in your prior positions.

Hire a Professional

When you were out pounding the pavement as the leader of your own company, you made sure that your clients knew they were hiring an expert. If youre stuck about what to say in your resume, you, too, can hire an expert. Here is how to pick a professional resume writer.

Are you feeling lost, as one of the discouraged workers who simply have dropped out of the job search because you don’t believe you can find meaningful work? If you are, I feel for you. I follow the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), because the discouraged worker stats truly

This week’s roundup contains resources for the long-term unemployed, some of whom might become discouraged workers if their situations do not turn around.

First, let’s examine once again what the definitions are. According to the BLS’s glossary, an unemployed person is counted as someone who has been available for work and searching for work but hasn’t worked in the 4 weeks measured. This is a short-term version of the long-term unemployed, who are experiencing this frustrating cycle of search and not-find over weeks to months to years. On the other hand, discouraged workers, according to the BLS glossary, are:

Persons not in the labor force who want and are available for a job and who have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months (or since the end of their last job if they held one within the past 12 months), but who are not currently looking because they believe there are no jobs available or there are none for which they would qualify.

In other words, these people are essentially lost to the employment system, because they simply gave up.

This week, the issue of the long-term unemployed has been in the forefront

The article
99ers and the Long-term Unemployed Are the Elephants in the Economic Recovery Room stated that “44,000 jobs were created, but 21,000 additional workers have been unemployed for more than 99 weeks.” Focusing on the extremely long-term unemployed, The Layoff List blog is a great source of news and analysis of the data related to people teetering on the edge of becoming discouraged workers.

More to the point for most workers, however, is the looming question of “What do I do now that I need to find work?”

Here are some great resources for you to jump-start your career search strategy, if you’ve been out of work a while and need to refresh your approach:

In 12 tips for a lengthy job search,Pat Mayfield, president of Pat Mayfield Consulting LLC (San Francisco and Pleasanton, CA) gives a laundry list of 12 good strategies to use to revitalize your job search attitude.

Overcoming Long-Term Unemployment presents some important analyses of the BLS data, but it presents some optimism in terms of the types of new and revamped strategies that work for the long-term unemployed. Of note, “An aggressive job-search strategy often requires you to do something that makes you uncomfortable.” Thus, outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. gives 6 critical strategies that, while they aren’t exactly new, are definitely well described and, in a way, uplifting. Most important of these, I think, is the mandate to “Uncover the hidden market.” Too many job seekers, whether they’ve been looking for a short time or are among the long-term unemployed, think that the newspapers and job boards are the best source of job listings. This key article points out that only about 20% of jobs are filled via these outdated mechanisms. The others, as we all know, are sourced through individuals’ networks—who you know, then, becomes what you do, and in a very critical way.

Last, for advice on any topic related to job search strategy, look to Nick Corcodilos. I think this expert is truly an excellent resource on all things job search-related. This week he turns the issue on its ear in Advice for the long-term unemployed. Fundamentally, he says that if you don’t like the conversation, change the discussion. If you don’t like being unemployed, then start your own enterprise, and use it as a launchpad to catapult you into your next role—even thinking the plan through, he comments, is enough in some cases to show a hiring manager that you understand the business well.

Where Are You in Your Job Search? Post a Question or a Comment

This week’s questions: Are you one of the long-term unemployed? Are you a discouraged worker? Are you afraid you might be getting to that point? What advice would help you the most in your job search?

Did you find this article helpful? Click Share This to like it, tweet it, or post it to your LinkedIn network. E-mail it to a friend or colleague who might need it. Thank you for reading!

If youve had your resume prepared professionally by a reputable resume writing service, youre probably preparing for the interview for a job you truly want. Congratulations! Make sure that your interview kit is ready to go with a properly fashioned reference sheet.

Best Practices for Your Resume Reference Sheet

First, Do Not Waste Valuable Resume Real Estate

You have about two pages of resume real estate to convey your superior qualifications. Dont waste that space with a comment that your references are available on request. The interviewer knows that, human resources knows that, and you know that. exhaust system . Instead, take the time to provide more details about your amazing accomplishments, expertise, knowledge, skills, certificationsanything but the trite references available upon request. Instead, make sure that you have prepared for your interview and brought with you all the items you will need to make it a success, such as extra copies of your resumeand a properly formatted job reference sheet ready to go.

Your Interview Kit Includes a Prepared Reference Sheet

When you get the call for the interview, you need to source several references whom you know will provide prospective hiring managers with a glowing review of your competencies. You can choose to ask former managers, who will know your strengths first hand. But dont neglect other potential reference opportunities, such as customers, colleagues, and, if youre a recent graduate, professors who directed your studies. Each of these can serve as excellent sources of positive comments that will enhance your presentation in your job search.

Ask Your References Ahead of Time

Its critical that you call your prospective references ahead of your interview to request the use of their contact information.

• First, you want to be sure that the person is available to serve as your reference. In other words, you want to make sure that the person will agree she or he has only good things to say about your experience and performance.
• Second, you want to prepare the references for the types of questions they can expect from your prospective hiring manager. Tell the references about your potential job, and emphasize to them the skills you would like them to emphasize. It will help these people, who might not have worked with you for some time, to know what will likely impress the hiring manager.
• Last, nobody wants to have a call for a reference check sprung on them unannounced. An unannounced call will catch them unprepared to say the most important, positive, and helpful things about youand might actually annoy them to the point that they dont want to say anything about you at all.

Visit OlympusResumes.com to get your resume reference sheetits a critical part of your job search package.

Choose the words you use in your resume wisely, and youll be more likely to be found in applicant tracking systems operated by hiring managers companies. Your resume and cover letter need to reflect back to the hiring manager (and the applicant tracking system) exactly what they want to read and know about your experience.

How Do You Choose the Right Words for Your Resume and Cover Letter?

Your primary resource for resume vocabulary comes from the job posting. florida defective product lawyer . Lets examine a snippet from an actual job posting, taken from Indeed.com, from a company seeking a pharmaceutical sales representative*:

Representatives are responsible for all sales activity within their individual territories. This includes (but is not limited to) sales calls to physicians, pharmacies, wholesales and any medical professional (or organization), which may influence FPI promoted product sales.C andidates should possess 1-2 years medical and/or sales experience with proven track record.

How to Choose Your Resume Language to Get More Interviews

Now lets look at what the job description is actually requesting. The critical phrases are:

• Sales
• Territories
• Physicians
• Pharmacies, wholesales,
• Medical sales
• Proven track record

By examining the words that the hiring manager believes are critical to the position, you can increase your chance of being selected for an interview.

How Can You Get More Interviews?

Think about the Hiring Manager (Human Readers)

By reflecting the language that a job posting uses, you can incorporate the language that the hiring manager expects to read, demonstrating that youre attentive, sharp, and aware of what the hiring manager wants. Youre reflecting corporate culture, and youre plugging into exactly what the hiring manager needs.Additionally, when you use these phrases in your resume and cover letter, youre addressing the exact experience that youve had that will be necessary in the job to come. If youre not a sales professional, the likelihood of your being able to come up with relevant experience to amplify these topics is slender. florida car accident attorney . However, if youre a sales leader extraordinaire, these phrases will naturally become a part of your resume, because your track record will reflect them time and again.

Think about the Applicant Tracking Systems (Machine Readers)

In large companies, hiring managers can one step removed from the process of selecting the initial stack of resumes to review. The team that accomplishes this first step will be in Human Resources; theyll take phrases from the job description and plug them into the ATS to get a good reasonable start. By using the exact phrases in your resume and cover letter, youll have a better chance of coming strongly in the searches.* Full job posting here: http://www.pharmadiversityjobboard.com/view_job.php?post_id=514777&tag=indeed&r=447620