Although many prospective employers will only spend an average of 30 seconds looking at your resume or curriculum vitae (CV), this is a vital document that can speak volumes about your capabilities in a small amount of time and space. When it comes to bouncing back after a felony conviction, the resume becomes an even more vital piece of the puzzle. Your resume gives you a chance to make a real impression on a prospective employer, so that they will see you for your qualities and capabilities rather than the mistakes that you have made. Here is a quick and straight forward guide to creating a winning resume despite your felony conviction.
Basic Tips -
- * If you are moving into a new type of career or industry, then your resume should never be more than just a single page, summing up the most pertinent information.
- * You must remember that spelling errors, formatting errors and grammatical errors can actually have more of a negative impact than your felony conviction in some circumstances, because these errors denote sloppiness or poor attention to detail.
- * When you are applying for specific jobs, you should custom tailor your resume to that industry and even that specific employer in order to get your resume noticed. A resume that screams “I want to work for you and you only” is a much more attractive resume to most prospective employers.
- * All information included in your resume should be the absolute truth. While it may seem beneficial to cover up gaps in employment so that a prospective employer will not find out about your felony conviction or other periods of unemployment, lying is much more devastating to the health of your job search than honesty.
Putting your Resume Together -
- * Your resume should include a title, a career summary, a career objective, an experience section, an education section, an additional information section where necessary, a personal information section where necessary, and a references section. Each of these sections holds different weight for different employers, so it is important to include all of the sections if possible.
Title – Your name should be listed first in your title section, and it should be larger and in bold. What follows should include your present address, your phone number and a professional e-mail address. Center all of this information at the top of the resume in order to draw attention to it.
Career Summary – If you are a professional in the industry in which you are applying, then this section will come in handy. Here you should list achievements within the industry, as well as knowledge, skills and specific work history applying to the career that you are applying for. If you are applying in a new industry which you have no professional experience in, then you can leave this section blank.
Career Objective – This section is specifically useful for people who are newer to the industry or who have little experience. You can mention your immediate career goals here, and also can mention how your experience can match with whatever position it is that you are applying for. Push your positive skills here and put emphasis on how you can contribute in addition to how you can benefit when it comes to the job you are applying for.
Experience – If you are more experienced, then the experience section should come before your education section. If you are less experienced, then your education section should precede your experience section. When you mention work experience, the details that you should mention include the name of the organization, your designation, the time period from when you began working for the organization until the employment ended, what job responsibilities you were required to perform and any special achievements that you had. You should state your most recent experiences first, and then list the rest in reverse chronological order.
- * The experience section of your resume should include all of your work history. If there is a gap in your work history because you served jail time for a felony conviction, then you need to find a way to fill this gap in, even if it means explaining the job you did while in jail. It may not seem positive to include information about your jail sentence in your resume, but if the length of time that you were unemployed is sizable, then prospective employers will want to know what you were doing. Dishonesty in such a situation will harm you more than honesty will.
Education – If you are fresh out of college or less experienced in the work place, then your education section should appear before your experience section. If on the other hand you have more experience than education, then your experience section should be featured first. This is the section where you will mention any degrees in education and other education information that is pertinent to the job search. You would want to mention the name of the degree that you were pursuing or are pursuing, the duration of the course, the name of the institution and the result or achievement if you have graduated or achieved a degree. Your most recent or most pertinent degree should be mentioned first, with the rest falling into reverse chronological order.
- * If your resume is light on work experience or educational experience because of the jail time that you served for a felony conviction, then it would be beneficial for you to start finding ways to pad it. You can consider taking correspondence courses, local community college courses or enrolling in seminars that will further your knowledge or skills in the area where you are hoping to be employed. This effort will be vital in showing a prospective employer that you are serious about moving past your felony conviction and may encourage them to help you accomplish that.
Additional Information – The information that goes into this section is whatever does not fall into the above sections but is still in some way relevant to your job search. This may include professional achievements, language proficiencies, awards, computer skills, voluntary work, church work, licenses, government identities, publications and other such information. You are not specifically required to mention your jail stay here unless you picked up skills during that time that you would like to mention.
Personal Information – Here you can mention anything you like, but you should make this information really count. Do not load your resume up with information that is irrelevant to your job search.
References – Listing family members as references in job applications is usually okay, but doing so on a resume is generally frowned upon. The people that you mention in this section should be people who have worked closely with you in your student life or in your professional life. The information that you need to include for them is their full name, their phone number, their address and their e-mail address. You may also want to mention their relationship to you. Mentioning between two and three different referees is generally the best way to go about this. Make sure that they know you are mentioning them so that they will expect a phone call from your prospective employers.
More Tips for Effective Resume Creation
- * Leave irrelevant information out and keep things concise. Employers are not looking for a long and drawn out document because there are stacks of resumes for them to read and they only have about a half minute for each one. Be concise, list your skills and your abilities in a way that appeals to them and move on. Your resume should only be containing information that will help net you an interview – Not the job itself.
- * Do not forget to include a career objective. Before you dive into writing the remainder of your resume, you should put some real focus into planning out your career objective. Your career objective should be both focused and clear. You want the message that you are creating to be consistent throughout the entirety of your resume as you work to accentuate your strengths and skills.
- * Make your opening statement a powerful one. Your job objective statement should help to focus the reader’s attention, describing the type of position that you are specifically trying to fill. If you have experience in the career field of your choice, then you are going to want to have a powerful statement that illustrates the best qualifications that you have so that an employer will be encouraged to keep reading.
- * Use jargon that shows your understanding of the industry. If you use acronyms and jargon that are related to the industry you are applying within, then you will be reflecting your familiarity with the business that you are applying to work for. Just make sure that you are not overloading your resume with jargon to the point where it is hard for anyone to read and understand. If an acronym is not easy to guess right from the beginning, such as SEO, make sure to spell it out in parenthesis the first time it is mentioned, like so: SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
- * Customize your resume in order to focus your skill set on how it will benefit your employers. Describe your skills and experiences in a way that will relate to what the prospective employer is actually looking for. Focus on the personal highlights that will actually arouse their interest when they are reading your resume. How can you fulfill the roles the prospective employer is attempting to fill and how can you make a positive impact? These are vital questions that your resume should specifically seek to answer.
- * Include relevant keywords. You can draw a significant amount of good attention to your resume simply by adding in keywords that describe your experience and skills as they relate to the job that you are applying for. Descriptive keywords are becoming increasingly popular as a method of allowing employers to find the right prospective employees. These are words that should relate to your skills ad the job that you are applying for.
- * Focus on using action statements and benefit statements rather than boring lists. Phrases like “Analyzed decline in sales and developed a campaign to increase sales by 30% in 30 days,” is an action statement that describes a challenge that you faced and overcame, rather than simply saying “ability to increase sales”. Do you see the difference?
- * Qualify your achievements by quantifying them. Give the reader an idea of what you have accomplished by using quantifiable facts to back your claims up. Mention numbers, dollar amounts and percentages whenever possible to show how successful you have been in achieving goals for the companies that you previously worked for. Rather than just saying “Increased sales in my territory”, you can say “Increased sales in my territory over six month period by 150%”.
- * Make sure to be professional rather than personal. Since there is not much space in your resume, it is important only to fill it with pertinent, professional and important information. Focus on professional experiences and leave personal information out. You should also leave the humor, clichés and other random stuff out of your job resume. It may have been fun to list hobbies in your resume when you were in high school, but once you hit the real world, that no longer applies.
- * Always be positive. Your resume should always be presenting you in the most positive possible light. If you do not possess every single skill that a particular employer is seeking, do not emphasize your flaws or shortcomings, simply focus on what it is that you CAN offer.
- * Always be honest! This is the theme of this eBook after all: You should always be honest, because lying or exaggerating your skills or your abilities or lying or exaggerating elements of your experience or education will only come back to bite you later on.
- * Be logical and organized in how you present your resume. Your resume will show prospective employers whether or not you are concise, logical or organized. Make sure that your resume is all of these things: Neat, balanced, appealing on a visual level, and consistently flowing. Section titles should be emphasized, and sections should be clearly separated for the best results.
- * Communicate simple and briefly, abandoning the use of vocabulary that is exquisite or exorbitant. In other words, you should not be trying to impress your prospective employers with the depth of your vocabulary, but rather should be using clear and concise words that everyone would be capable of understanding.
- * Use common section headings, like those mentioned before. Your prospective employers will be looking for specific section headings such as Employment history, Experience, Objective, Skills, Qualifications, Capabilities, Achievements, Professional Affiliations, Licenses and Certifications, Honors and Awards, Publications, Accomplishments, Summary of Qualifications Work History and so on.
- * Never include salary information in your resume. Save your salary expectations for the interview.
- * Try to include references in your resume, though know that you are not required to. Always make sure that you have references listed, however. If they are not in your resume, make sure to bring your list of references to your interview, because they may be requested from you later.
- * Make sure that you understand the value of the length of your resume. Resumes should only be as long as is needed for providing the most important qualifications for the job that you are trying to get. If you only have a few years of experience or are recently out of school, then a single page resume should be more than sufficient. If you are fresh out of jail and starting a new career path, then you definitely want to keep things to a single page. The length is not actually the most important consideration for your resume, but rather you need to consider whether or not the length of your resume is sufficiently allowing you to describe your absolute best characteristics and qualifications for the job in question.
Finally, keep these things in mind when putting together your resume. These details may seem trivial in the grand scheme of things, but every detail counts when you are trying to re-establish yourself following a felony conviction.
- * Paper Size: You should be using the standard A4 or letter size paper, 8 ½ “x 11 “. Recruiters are handling hundreds of different resumes. If yours is a different size than every other resume, it is likely either to get lost all together, or to be crumpled or destroyed because it is too big for the file or folder the rest are being sifted into.
- * Paper Color: The only paper colors that are ever considered to be acceptable for resumes and for cover letters are ivory and standard white.
- * Word Processing: The most flexible way for you to type out your resume is by using a computer and a word processor. This will allow you to make changes as needed, and to store different copies or drafts in a single place. Word processing systems also add a lot of extra functionality such as spell checking and the ability to bold face or change type face for emphasis and better organization as well.
- * Printing: You are going to want to find the best quality printing process available. You should print each copy fresh rather than making copies of a printed resume. Copies of copies of copies can quickly become illegible, so make each resume that you print the highest possible quality.
- * Proofreading: Mistakes can be embarrassing on resumes. Proofread your resume as carefully as you possibly can, and then have someone else read it as well just in case. Make sure that your spelling is perfect and that there are no punctuation or grammar errors. Do not rely only on the spell checker in your computer, because they can make mistakes as well. Spell checkers on computers cannot tell if you used “two” instead of “too” or typed “chose” when you meant “choose”.
- * Bullet Points: You should be using bullet points rather than long paragraphs in the body of your resume to emphasize your skills, your job history and other pertinent information. Resumes are skimmed through rather quickly by most prospective employers. Anything that you can do in order to draw your readers in will bring you another step closer to netting the interview for your dream job. Breaking things up into easily readable bullet points is a great way to make sure they get the gist of what you are trying to say without being bogged down by big blocks of text.
- * Formatting: You are going to want to make sure that your formatting is consistent throughout your resume. You should choose a font that is easy to read, and bullet points and headings should all have consistent formatting throughout. Also, you should make sure that section headers are bold or have capital lettering and that there is enough space between each section to differentiate between them. You should use emphasis like bold, italics and underlining in order to highlight the information that is the most relevant in your resume. You should steer clear of flashy sorts of formatting like images, unconventional fonts or dingbats unless you are applying for a creative position. Above all else, your resume should be simple, professional and bold.
- * Format Overuse: Although using formatting was mentioned in the last bullet point, if you draw attention to too many things, it is just as if you were drawing attention to nothing at all. You should feel free to use highlighting effects like bold, underline and italics, but you should do so sparingly if you want to have the greatest possible effect on the areas that you are intentionally trying to draw attention to. Be consistent in the technique that you use for highlighting rather than highlighting too much or highlighting the wrong things.
- * Sending your Resume: There are several different ways that you can send a resume, including e-mail, fax, regular mail, express mail or hand delivered. When it comes to deciding how you will send or deliver your resume, it is always best for you to figure out what the employer will prefer. If a job advertisement does not specifically tell you what way to deliver your resume, then it might be ideal to call the employer and ask them specifically. If there is no way for you to know, then here are some considerations:
- * The advantage of postal mail is that you can make sure the resume will be delivered in the best possible way, its perfect printed form.
- * The advantage of fax and e-mail is that your resume will be viewed much more quickly than if it has to arrive by post.
- * When possible, hand delivered resumes are almost always the best way to go, since you may be able to put it directly in the interviewer’s hands.
