Blog - Carolyn Smith

How to write a resume for Australia

September 17, 2013 by Carolyn Smith Leave a Comment

Australian resumes are unique, and in this article I quickly outline some of the key characteristics of the modern Australian resume.

Length of the Australian Resume

In Australia, we like our space and this love affair with space is also evident in our resumes. If you undertake a search on how to prepare a resume, so often you end up on career sites that make a strong suggestion as to the length of your resume. Please IGNORE those sites that advise you to limit your resume to one or two pages, as usually these are American or UK sites where the recruiting practices are different from those prevalent in Australia.

Instead, focus on a resume that truly reflects your skills and experience and even if this takes five pages, so be it (unless a page limit is imposed by the employer). HOWEVER, make sure you don’t waffle, and don’t include information that is not required, repetitive, or irrelevant.

Note: The average length of an Australian resume is usually anything between three and five pages long.

Brag in a subtle but effective way

In Australia, we are lousy at bragging about ourselves, but not as low key about telling the world how great we are on paper as the English. We are probably half way between the Americans and the English in how we talk about our accomplishments and achievements.

So if you are creating a resume for Australia, make sure you really focus on contributions and achievements, but don’t go over the top with the language.

Objectives are just ‘oh so old fashioned’

In Australia our love affair with objectives within a resume is coming to an end. Instead the modern Australian resume usually incorporates a profile, which outlines the skills, knowledge and experience that meets the needs of the employer.

Personal data is no longer required within resumes

In Australia, there is a large trend away from providing any personal details, such as date of birth and marital status. While in Australia, there is a raft of legislation protecting candidates from discriminatory practices, most professional resume writers, don’t include personal information that could unnecessarily place their client in a position of being ‘pigeon holed’ by employers and selection panel members, or indirectly discriminated against. In Australia, the following details are usually left out of the resume, unless these personal attributes will enhance the application.

Date of birth
Martial status and number of children
Photographs, no matter how photogenic you are
Personal data, such as health status, height and weight
Interests and hobbies
Photocopied written references attached at the end of your résumé. Save these for the interview, unless specifically requested in the application form.

Formatting trends

Yes content is KING – but equally important is the formatting of your document.

In Australia we tend to be conservative, so it is important to use a conservative formatting style. This includes being consistent in design treatments, adding white space, breaking up lengthy paragraphs, using bullet points to highlight skills and achievements balancing the resume top-to-bottom and left-to-right and using no more than 2 font styles.

The difference between a resume and curriculum vitae

September 16, 2013 by Carolyn Smith Leave a Comment

There is quite a lot of confusion in Australia over the different use of the terms curriculum vitae and resume.

Some employers request the submission of a curriculum vitae rather than a resume and likewise, some job candidates tend to think they should title their document, a CV, rather than a resume.

So what is the difference? Well the literal Latin translation of curriculum vitae, means ‘the course of one’s life’, and is usually used by job candidates within the areas of science, education/academia or medical communities. CV’s within these professions incorporate-detailed information relating to their professional activities, including journal articles, research, scholarships and publications and the correct term for this type of detailed document is curriculum vitae.

The term curriculum vitae is also used to describe documents submitted by job candidates in countries such as New Zealand or the United Kingdom, where the term resume is not commonly used. (So if you are applying for a job in these countries, uses the term curriculum vitae (CV), not resume).

However in Australia, the terms CV can be used interchangeably with resume and so you can use either term to describe your document, although the term resume, is the more common approach used here in Australia. If an employer requests that you forward a CV, rather than a resume, just simply change the heading of your current resume, or alternatively, don’t provide your document with a title. After all, it is pretty obvious to the reader, what the document is about, even with a title.

The 10 vital things you need to know as a job hunter

September 2, 2013 by Carolyn Smith Leave a Comment

If I had exactly 5 minutes where I could make a major impact on how a job hunter approached finding a new job, I would provide them with the following list:

1. Job boards have a very low success rate so don’t focus all your energy on finding and applying for jobs online.

2. Rejection is just part and parcel of finding a new job – (in particular if using the job boards) so don’t take it personally – EVER.

3. You can have the best resume in the world, but unless you get it in front of the right decision maker (that is the person that has the ultimate say on who employs you or not), then it is a waste of time.

4. You need to tap into the hidden job market – if you don’t, you are missing up to 80% of the job opportunities out there.

5. A LinkedIn profile won’t work for you, unless you have a complete and effective profile and use the right strategies.

6. Job interviews are about making a connection. If employers were only after a particular skills set, they could easily just read a bunch of resumes and hire someone without spending hours interviewing potential employees. They are not just after a particular skills set, they are after someone with whom they can make a connection, will fit in with the culture, have the right interpersonal and communication skills and are enthusiastic about the opportunity (that is not just after a pay check).

7. While not all employers or recruiters read them – still send a cover letter, since many employers will reject an application without one. If sending a cover letter, don’t send a generic one – make sure you address the specific needs of the employer.

8. After a job interview, ALWAYS follow up with an effective thank you letter/note. It could be your ticket to success.

9. Recruiters are working for the company, not you! So don’t be lulled into thinking it is OK to spill the beans, or that they are somehow obligated to find you a job.

10. Employers are after a solution to their problem – a statutory or policy obligation to fulfil (particularly if government), or they want to make a larger profit. Period. To make a larger profit or to fulfil this statutory obligation, organisations/businesses need help and support (that’s you), from administration officers (task orientated), managers (managing people, resources and projects), through to the CEO, Director or Business Owner (the visionary leader). SO to succeed – you need to become the SOLUTION to their problem, so focus on employer needs and what you offer that can solve their problem.

Using personal branding to become irresistible to employers

August 20, 2013 by Carolyn Smith Leave a Comment

What is it that all successful companies have mastered — and what job seekers looking to advance in their careers need to master? It is called a BRAND!

Brands are irresistible to us consumers. We spend twice as much to buy Nike sportswear, than the Target specials, in spite of rationally understanding that the product is produced in exactly the same factory in China. In fact the Nike’s brand has been so effective – that they have successfully forged such a strong identity, that in spite of a scandal a couple of years ago of using child labour in China, there has been little or no backlash from consumers.

Likewise, I find myself quite happy to purchase expensive coffee or latte at Starbucks. Starbucks is also superb at branding, from the logo of a sea goddess, the décor, through to the number of available choices of coffee, milk and syrup, which makes ordering a coffee a statement of personal identity.

And if you don’t think you succumb to branding, because you don’t believe in mass consumerism, or you are rebel at heart, than what about the superb branding of green products, such as the Body Shop, or the rebellious, more for your buck brand of Virgin.

The reason why branding is so successful is that branding resonates with us as individuals and is very powerful at making the right connection. Branding is best defined as a promise…a promise of the value of the product and that it is better or different than all the competing products.

So why not use your own PERSONAL BRANDING in your career marketing portfolio, in order to communicate your unique value proposition and distinguish yourself from hundreds of other job seekers. By using branding, you can build a name for yourself, and develop a powerful profile, which describes the value you bring to the employer.

So just how to you promote your personal brand in the job market?

Here are my top tips for establishing a brand, so you ensure that you distinguish yourself and position yourself as better than anyone else.

Track your experience and accomplishments

Building your unique brand begins with tracking your past accomplishments and gaining strategically important new experiences. Your achievements and accomplishments are the foundation of your career brand.

If you don’t have the relevant experience or achievements in the area you want to be in, then seek out new challenges and gain this experience. You might consider freelancing, or consulting, or use volunteering to gain experience.

Complete Education & Training

Get the right qualifications, which can greatly enhance your career brand. For example, you might consider obtaining an MBA if you want to enhance your value proposition and brand as a leader. Find out exactly what you need to enhance your brand, from internal workplace training, to external courses and get started.

Promote your Brand

Branding provides your resume and other career marketing documents with a focus that positions you as the ideal candidate for the specific type of opportunity that interests you. An unfocused resume is boring and ineffective. An unfocused resume wastes your readers’ time and it will land in the bin, or circular file. A branded resume is, by definition, focused, and addresses not only your unique value proposition, – but it does so in a way that addresses the concerns of your target audience.

In order to provide a focussed document, you MUST provide a cohesive brand image, across your career marketing documents. After reviewing literally thousands of applications, the most common mistake people make is to be too many things to too many people, namely developing a generic resume, or worse still developing generic selection criteria.

If your resume, selection criteria and cover letters are a hodge-podge of documents written over a number of years and added onto when ever the need arises, then it is time to completely revamp your documents, so that they provide a ‘personal brand’.

In developing a personal brand:

First impressions do count – so enhance readability, with a document that is visually appealing by being consistent with design treatments, breaking up lengthy paragraphs, balancing the resume top-to-bottom and left-to-right, using one and no more than two fonts, and add sufficient wide space
Filter out material that does not enhance your brand message. For example, if you want to brand yourself as an executive, don’t put in your older work history that reflects your time as a junior consultant.
Incorporate a brand statement by developing a profile or summary section of your resume in a way that ensures that you stand out and get attention. For example, develop a headline statement, followed by a short paragraph that promotes your value proposition.
Accentuate your personal strengths within a cover letter. Personal branding requires you to be really courageous, so pinpoint your personal strengths and highlight these. For example: ‘Acknowledged for capacity to resolve complex problems due to tenacity and understanding of human nature’.

Become an Expert

Nothing builds credibility in a career brand more than establishing yourself as an expert in your field. Start by writing articles that showcase your knowledge — and then get them published, in particular online.

Seek out conferences and meetings where you can give speeches and presentations.

Play up awards and other recognition that can help label you an expert.

Get quoted by offering your thoughts, ideas, and opinions to journalists and reporters.

By building a brand as an expert, you will become the hunted, rather than having to hunt for that next opportunity.

You will also be able to take advantage of the latest trend, in which employers ‘Google’ the names of prospective job seekers – typing each name into one or more internet search engines and basing initial candidate screening decisions partly on the number and quality of hits for each job seeker. By becoming an expert and publishing online, you will be able to establish a strong brand identity online.

Build Relationships

There is nothing in marketing and branding more powerful than a promotion tool called word-of-mouth, which can be defined as what people say about you. So build your career brand, by building a network of contacts, your friends, colleagues, customers, clients, and former bosses.

And remember keeping your network strong involves nothing more than relationship building; by keeping in contact and making sure they know about your recent successes.

Final Word

Personal branding is becoming increasingly important with the advent of the ‘online world’ An effective personal brand can distinguish you as a job seekers and make you irresistible to employers. It will also be fascinating to see how establishing a strong personal brand online will influence recruiting practices in the future. I’ll keep you posted on that issue!

How to ensure you don’t stuff up online job applications

August 5, 2013 by Carolyn Smith Leave a Comment

With an increasing number of applications, (both in the private and public sector), requiring candidates to submit their information online – this week, I thought I would devote some time to the tools and techniques that you need to know in relation to resume formats and submitting a government application online, so that you don’t stuff up your online application.

Yep this stuff is as exciting as watching paint dry, BUT with the explosion of the internet during the job search, it is really important to keep abreast with these changes, because if you don’t – it could mean disaster for your online applications.

Use the right resume format for online applications

In the past decade, the most common resume-related questions have shifted from the standard functional versus chronological resumes, whether to include dates of education, removing or keeping experience and so on, to what type of resume should be used for transmission and online.

With the advent in the last few years of online technologies, we have seen the email resume, web resume, HTML resume, scannable resume, ASCII resume, PDF resume, along with the traditional word resume.

So what is the difference between all these resumes?

Word Resume (or traditional resume), is designed to compel the human audience to take further action and call you for an interview. Designed in word, they are formatted and written in a way to draw the eye to areas that focus on your achievements and are written in a powerful way that holds the attention span of the human reader.

PDF Resumes – are traditional resume converted to PDF for online transmission. If you want to convert your word document, without buying expensive software – try

Scannable resumes – are designed to meet the needs of resumes fed through OCR (optical character recognition) software that reads and extracts the text. The extracted text is database for storage and later recalled by keyword from an applicant tracking system.

Text (ASCII) resumes is an ASCII-formatted version of either your traditional or scannable resume. Text resumes are universally readable on all computer systems and platforms. An ASCII resume received in email can be entered directly into an applicant tracking system without the added step of needing to scan it. Entry into the system is fast, easy, and accurate.

Web resume – also known as the HTML, a web resume may be uploaded online, allowing 24 hour access and provides a technology-savvy image.

When ascertaining what type of resume version you require, you also need to take into account, whether the resume audience is going to be the human reader, or computer reader. So many job seekers post their resumes online (for example major online job boards) with no success, as they have failed to develop a resume for the computer reader.

To develop a resume for the computer reader, you need to understand that the computer will review resumes based on keyword searches – hence the need to incorporate keywords throughout the resume, so the computer reader is alerted to your suitability.

How to incorporate key words in your resume:

The most common types of keywords that signal to both the computer reader and human reader that you have the relevant background are:

Job Titles
Skills related to the role
Jargon/Technical terms

For example:

Job Description:

The Operations Manager is accountable to the Director of Engineering and Environmental Services for the progression of the asset management strategies of the Mater Health services. Maintenance of infrastructure including maintenance planning, condition assessment, asset register, statutory compliance, budgets are key components.

Key words that should be incorporated into the résumé

Operations manager
Asset management
Strategy
Maintenance
Infrastructure
Planning
Condition assessment
Asset register
Statutory compliance
Budgets

Submitting an application online

An increasing number of agencies and companies require information to be submitted via online application forms, entailing specific questions, or your answers to selection criteria, within a word, or character count.

When preparing these documents, use MS Word so you can use features such as spell check and then copy and paste your answers into the provided box. However when preparing in MS Word, ensure that you don’t use auto formatting, such as italics, bolding, underlining, or other automatic formatting allowed in your word processing. These features get stripped or transformed into weird character combinations, when your application is copied and sent online. Basically, you need to work within the limitations of what you see on your keyboard (or rather you need to create an ASCII text version).

For example you will need to replace any bullets with ASCII supported keyboard characters (if it appears on your keyboard, it’s an ASCII character). Such as use an asterisk (*), or (~), which is located on the left hand side of the number 1.

Also remove all centre, right hand margin and justification alignment, table characters, columns and graphics.

This will make your application universally readable and allows for easy to manipulate for entry into applicant ranking databases.

In conclusion:

While the internet can be confusing, by just following a few simple rules, you will be able to use the right sort of document and formatting to ensure that you effectively promote your qualifications and skills to secure that job online.

Staying motivated after rejection

July 16, 2013 by Carolyn Smith Leave a Comment

If Christopher Columbus had turned back, no one would have blamed him. Of course, no one would have remembered him either. Unknown Author

Let’s face it – job hunting is a pain in the neck and it is especially irritating if you need to address complex selection criteria or write ‘war and peace’ just to secure an interview.

But it is more painful, when you get a rejection letter after spending hours putting your application together, only to be ignored and relegated to the ‘not interview list’. Yet the reality is that rejection is a fact of life when you are job-hunting. You can either take it all very personally, or you can develop that critical ‘can-do’ attitude, in which you accept the setback as only temporary and part of the process of securing your dream role. To stay motived after rejection:

Surround yourself with support

Surround yourself with positive people. Get rid of people who zap your energy and self-esteem and gather support from people that will give you the encouragement and the critical feedback required to stay on track. You want people that remind you of your strengths and help improve your weaknesses, as opposed to people who commiserate with you, but only focus on the negative, not the positive.

Stay focused

It is easy to lose focus on the task of job hunting, in particular when working full time or when you receive rejection letters. But you need to stay on track, by developing your own personal action plan. Job-hunting is like any campaign, you need to choose specific actions and take and perform them on a daily basis. These actions might include researching industries or employers, looking on job boards every day, networking, contacting industry contacts, cold or warm calls to employers, follow up calls, applying for specific vacancies, obtaining feedback from job interviews, sending follow up letters, role playing a job interview twice per week, practice negotiating a job offer, getting feedback on written applications and extensively repackaging yourself in your current marketing documents (resume, cover letter, selection criteria).

Think positive

A positive attitude is vital to your success. Most successful people fail, more than they succeed, but the difference is that they realise their own self worth, so always end up succeeding spectacularly.

One approach to stay on track and remain positive is to write out positive affirmations about your job-hunting skills. Affirmations are based on the theory that every thought has an impact on actions. If you believe you are going to stuff the interview up, or not get that dream job, than this becomes a reality. If you believe you are going to be successful, than this too becomes a reality. Obviously it is more complex then this and there are countless books and research papers on the subject area, based on how the mind works consciously and subconsciously.

Put simply, affirmations are a way to help re-program the mind, in which you start to believe in yourself, through positive statements and putting your intentions in writing to help you focus on the goal. “Affirmations imprint thought upon the subconscious mind” says behavioural psychologist and educator Gene Schirmer. “By nature the subconscious mind accepts everything it’s told by the conscious mind and services as an automatic pilot in guiding our conscious behaviour, sharpening focus and reinforcing commitment”.

So write positive affirmations about your job-hunting skills, such as:

My unique qualifications and solid experience have prepared me to be the new team leader at DIAC.
I will perform like a star in the interview.
I come across with confidence in interviews.

Stay healthy and be social

Get enough sleep. Eat well and exercise. Go out and see your friends and don’t talk about your job hunt all the time, but enjoy yourself.

By staying motivated and positive after rejection and accepting rejection as a fact of life when job hunting, you will be able to regard every ‘no’ as a ‘not today’ and a step closer to success.

How to pass job selection tests

July 2, 2013 by Carolyn Smith Leave a Comment

c1d45b99-6f6f-417d-a9a1-6d1baab1b7c7 So you got through to interview, and the next major obstacle to obtaining that dream job, or career is passing the selection tests.

Companies, recruiters and agencies use tests for selection purposes, with the primary purpose to narrow down job candidates and to appoint, transfer or promote the best person for the position.

The most common types of selection tests currently used are:

Verbal reasoning, which test how well you understand ideas expressed in words and how you reason and think with words, including tests that assess spelling, grammar and punctuation.
Numerical reasoning, which tests how well you understand and reason with numbers, including the use of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division (depending on the position, they will also include the handling of percentages and fractions)
Diagrammatic reasoning, which deal with diagrams
Computing tests, that assess your relevant competencies in computing software
Clerical tests that test skills such as the management and assessment of data
Abstract reasoning, which assesses your ability to manage a problem and to think in abstract terms.
Personality questionnaires, which aim to identify the type of person you are, from extroversion, tough minded, dependent, or interdependent and so on. These are used to measure how well a person will fit into a company culture, including ability to work under stress and work well within teams.

If you are required to sit selection tests, it can feel a bit overwhelming. But the good news is, the majority of people can improve their score by practicing selection tests. (However, in order to show improvement, you need to have reasonable rates of literacy, or numeracy, so if you are a poor reader, weak at maths, or have low computer competencies, then you will probably need tuition or classes before seeing any noticeable improvement).

If you are invited to sit a test:

Find out what tests will be involved (if this information is not volunteered up front, then give the organisation/contact person a call and ask)
Seek out relevant material and search on the Internet for tests relevant to the position and designed to measure things such as your verbal and numeral skills, and abstract mental reasoning.
Set aside time to practice, until the selection tests become second nature.
Get a good night sleep and do not drink alcohol the night before or on the day of the test, as this will affect your score detrimentally.
When sitting the psychometric testing, (personality tests) you can improve your results by:
- Visualising yourself fitting into the culture.
- Avoiding absolutes such as always and never.
- Choose answers suggesting positive traits, for example optimistic, agreeable and trustworthy.
- Avoid answers suggesting negative traits, such as prejudice, stressful.
- Practice personality tests, like you would any other tests.