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 for jobs for felons
- * 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 for the felon job searcher
- * 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.
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