RESUME PREPARATION

• Sales and Sales Management resumes should be achievement oriented (i.e. % of quota, ranking relative to branch, region, number of new accounts opened, revenue in dollars, awards, etc.)
  
• Sales resumes should also be very specific referencing accounts sold (Los Angeles Times, TRW, JPL, etc.) and vertical industries assigned as a territory (i.e. Entertainment, Aerospace, Public Sector, etc.)
  
• Pre and Post Sales Technical Support resumes should be responsibility and function oriented with a clear outline of technical skills (i.e. Hardware, Operating Systems, Applications, Languages, Databases, Development Tools, etc.)
  
• All resumes should have as many action verbs as possible (i.e. achieved, supervised, coordinated, etc.)
  
• Sales resumes should be no more than two pages and half long.
  
• Technical support resumes should be no more than three pages long.
  
• Place your name, address, work, home, mobile telephone numbers and e-mail address at the top of a resume. Your most recent position should be first and education should be placed last.
  
• Avoid a job objective section in a resume. This section often tends to hurt your chances for a face to face interview rather than help. Often these sections have conflicting goals (i.e. seeking a sales or sales management position...or a sales position leading to a...etc.)
  
• Avoid a job summary section or a summary of achievements in a resume. The information provided often does not correlate to a specific job or dates. Achievement and responsibilities should be associated with specific positions in the body of the resume.
  
• Resumes should always be written in the third person (i.e. Managed seven Systems Analysts... Originally hired as... Promoted to...) The word "I" should never appear in a resume.
  
• If your dates of employment are not contiguous, use a month and year format (i.e. 5/90 to 7/94). This will stress your stability. If your dates of employment are contiguous, think about using a year format (1990 to 1994). Lastly, your most recent position should always read the date you were hired to "Present" (i.e. 5/90 to Present).
  
• While traditional methods for writing resumes are still effective, the Internet has created opportunities for a new resume format -- the electronic resume. Today, without exception all resumes are e-mailed to our hiring-managers. All our client-companies have electronic resume tracking systems to process candidates. How are electronic resumes different from the traditional print resumes? Electronic resumes are indexed for retrieval purposes.
  
• Keywords: You've probably been told to use as many action verbs as possible in your resume, and that is correct. However, for indexing, it's the nouns that count. Remember that you are basically putting together a list of keywords. For a sales resume include the products sold (Data Base, CRM, ERP, etc.) major accounts (Los Angeles Times, TRW, etc.), and vertical industries (Public Sector, Aerospace, VAR, OEM, etc.). For a support resume include operating systems (i.e. Unix, NT), programming languages (Java, C++), company and product names (Oracle Discoverer), tools (Oracle Jdeveloper 3.0), include product versions (5.01), applications (CRM, ERP), etc.
  
• Lastly, remember you have the top 5 inches of your resume and the first 5 seconds that your resume is read, to catch a manager's eye -- otherwise it winds up in the "round file".