If Interested, Please Send a Resume and Cover Letter…
Ah, the dreaded resume. Isn’t it frustrating that standing between you and the job of your dreams is a ridiculous sheet of paper that barely even hints at your abilities?
I want you to notice something about the responsibilities bulleted under each past job in the resume example. Notice the words that begin each sentence: Assist, mediate, counsel, assisted, reviewed, ensured, created and interviewed. What do each of these words have in common? First, each of them is taken from the job ad, so they are keywords. Secondly, and more importantly, they turn each sentence into an active voice sentence instead of the passive voice sentence.
In the case of cover letters, we have a slightly different job to do. For that matter, we have a slightly different objective. Cover letters are rarely if ever read by the same first readers (the HR people) that read the resumes. Instead, cover letters are in fact normally read by the supervisors who will be in charge of the new employee. Hence, we still need to worry about key words, but we also want to communicate that we can and will be able to do the work involved in this position.
Again, though we will discuss this more, I want to point out the difference in proving your qualifications or skills. In the resume it’s a bit easy to show what you’ve done or what you know in order to demonstrate you’re the perfect candidate for the job you’re applying for. There are certain things in the resume you can simply list: education or training, classes, volunteer work, jobs, or tools (such as software). Other things in the resume—as already exemplified in the previous example—are proven by discussing what you’ve done in the past: the duties that you carried out in past jobs, or projects that you completed in past classes.
So now that we’ve looked at how resumes are looked at, and we’ve discussed a little bit about how they should be written, let’s take care of another issue that my students often ask about. Many of my students wonder if they can just make one, standard resume and cover letter, and then send those off to their different potential employers. I cringe when they ask me this.
