A career counselor is a job search coach who can help you develop a career plan and
implement a job search strategy. If any of the following situations apply to you, you might
want to consider working with a career counselor.

1. I often get stuck in stressful and/or dead end jobs.
2. I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.
3. I have trouble getting along with my bosses or co-workers.
4. I often get passed over for promotions.
5. My work bores me.
6. I don’t respect the people that I work for and with.
7. I feel like I’m not living up to my potential.
8. My work is meaningless.
9. I change jobs a lot, but the new job isn’t any better than the last one.
10. I have trouble setting or meeting goals.
11. I had bigger dreams for myself.
12. I often get fired or laid off.
13. I have a reputation as a troublemaker.
14. People take advantage of me at work.
15. I never get any credit for the work that I do.
16. I feel like I don’t have any skills.
17. It’s hard to get up and go to work in the morning.
18. I don’t know how to sell myself.
19. I feel like I don’t have anything to offer an employer.
20. I never get the salary that I deserve.
21. My resume is a disaster.
22. I don’t know what I want to do.
23. I don’t know how to look for a job.
24. I hate authority.
25. I can’t stand the people I work with.
26. I feel like an impostor at work.
27. I’m too much of a perfectionist.
28. My work doesn’t fit my personality.

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You may be wondering what is the best format to send your resume. I.e. do you send your CV/Resume via snail mail i.e. postal service or via email?

1. What are the pros and cons of doing so?
2. How do I avoid being filtered as spam!

Employers will have different preferences with regards to this so if in doubt simply call them up and ask. But remember to print out a copy for yourself to take with you to the interview regardless of what the desired format is by the employer. If you are not able to find out what they prefer then always forward it by post. After forwarding an email resume always call and ask if it was received safely. If it was not then forward a hard copy. You may wish to do this anyway as an extra precaution.

Pros and cons of sending via the post

The cons of course are the time and cost concerned, in that you need paper, ink, printer, envelopes (A4) staple gun and postage and then of course a trip to the post office. Make sure if sending CVs this way that you are prepared and have all these items handy and ready to go when you need to send out that application. The pros’ of sending a hard copy CV is that for the recruiting employer they are much easier to read and refer to than email ones.

Pros and cons of sending email resume/cv

You can forward CVs in bulk from the comfort of your own home in minutes! It doesn’t cost you anything in paper, ink, envelopes or postage! On the downside the CV/resume is hard to read, the employer may forget it exists and worse it may be filtered out as spam!

To avoid Spam filters you should do the following:

• Avoid sending bulk messages. It is better to add some customizing to each CV rather than making it clear to the employer you are just doing a mass mail out and really have no great interest in their company! Additionally your ISP may identify a bulk mail out as Spam.
• Put something simple in the subject line and do not use punctuation, numbers, and monetary signs and do not capitalize words or swear though this is highly unlikely when sending a CV!
• Don't use the words used by Spam sites such as ‘free’ etc.
• Send a plain text" e-mail as often as possible with few links. Plain text means that you do not add colours or change the font etc.
• Using words in your CV that relate to monetary figures and symbols may trigger Spam filters so perhaps write those figures out full in words rather than using £/$ signs and numbers.
• Don't attach your resume to your e-mail unless requested to do so by the employer. Instead copy and paste your resume in plain text into the body of the email.
• Make a follow up phone call to ensure that the employer rec’d it.

Note: These tips may help reduce the problem but there is still no guarantee that even after following the rules that your email will get through. As spammers find ways around the Spam filters so do filters change and update to find ways around the Spam. So while these tips may help they by no means guarantee success.

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Although faxing your resume may seem like a good choice since it will reach the recruiter fast, the quality and neatness of your resume will be compromised. For this reason, you should only consider faxing your resume and cover letter when:

• The employer requests it in the advertisement.
• When you have to meet a deadline for an application.
• When you have already spoken to the recruiter or employer and informed him that you will fax it and will send or deliver a hard copy of the resume at a certain date.

Disadvantages of faxing your resume

• Besides the poor quality of faxes, most employers regard unsolicited faxes as rude. Their first impression of you when you send a fax without prior arrangement is that you are unconsidered of their resources and ignorant about business ethics.
• Your privacy can be compromised when faxing your resume since several employees may share the same fax facility and may read your resume.
• Your fax can get misplaced.
  

Things to do when faxing your resume

• Always mail or deliver the original CV or resume after sending the fax.
• Make use of a good quality fax facility that provides a record of when the fax is received and that indicates how many pages have been transmitted.
• Call the recruiter or employer to confirm that the fax has been received and is eligible.
• Include a cover page that includes your contact information, purpose of the fax, recipient details and your cover letter.
• Use black ink or font color on white bond paper. If your font color is blue or another color on the original resume or CV, the fax will not be legible for the employer.
• Never use color paper.
• Don't use too small fonts but remember that your font size may not exceed more than 20 points. The font size must be no smaller than 12 points. Many employers may wish to scan a copy and thus need a larger font.
• If your original resume has a lot of dark borders, you should first make a print without the borders. Too much black lines will appear untidy.
• First print a copy to make sure that it is legible before faxing your CV from your computer.
• Set the fax machine to fine mode to ensure high quality transmission.
• Include a header with your name and contact details on every page.
• Don't condense your letters; rather use normal spacing or an extra point apart between two letters to make the resume more readable.

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Do you prefer hand made china or the mass produced kind? There is something about individual items that gives them an edge over mass produced products, isn't there? Most of the time, even the best resume software cannot replace the individual touch that a real person can give to a resume.

A resume program cannot read the job advert and tune the resume to the job requirements. Resume software cannot actually show that you increased newspaper readership by 15% once your ideas were implemented. It is better to use a professional resume writing service where you deal with real people, or even better, write it yourself. Sometimes, the writing style of a professional writer will give the impression that you are a much better writer than you really are, leading to expectations from the employer that you simply cannot meet.

Employers & recruiters receive thousands of resumes and they are used to seeing resumes created by programs. The candidate is immediately labelled as non- creative and dependent on templates, something that does not reflect well when it comes to attitude and work ethic. Keep your resume based on recent accomplishments related to the job you are applying for. Give real numbers and facts to back your claims.

Resume Software Overuses Resume action verbs and keywords. These words are important in your resume - they give the whole resume a 'do it' attitude. Your resume, needs a 'raison d'etre' so your interviewer can justify your employment. Creating the resume yourself gives you the advantage of knowing exactly what is in it. This may sound obvious but in your interview you need to expand and give more details about your previous jobs and achievements.

When creating your resume, you are your best resource!

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The same rules for a cover letter or a resume apply to an Email. You have limited time in which to grab the reader's attention. In order to have served its purpose, a response to a job advertisement has to be: opened, read and saved.

Some important resume sending tips:

• Include a relevant subject that describes the email.
• If the email is unsolicited than include, looking for x position.
• It is a good idea to include both your resume and cover letter in the email, In the body of the email include your full personal profile.

A cover letter has to be customized for the company you are applying for. A 'general' resume and a general 'cover letter' are not effective. Try to find out the name of the HR manager and do some general research in view of getting the job. Find out more about the company. The more knowledge you have, the better equipped you are to get the job.

Your text resume has to be in the body of the email. If you attach your resume, chances are the potential employer won't even open it. Send your resume to yourself to see how the text version of your resume is modified by the email software.

If you are applying responding to a specific job advert, read the application instructions and follow them! A surprising number of candidates do not.

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The financial value of your resume is defined as the increased income that a well written resume can provide. This can also be measured in the time it takes for you to get a job - time is money and every day without a job is lost revenue. Without a properly crafted resume, it will have taken you far longer to land a job. Most job candidates never understand the true value of a well written resume. A good resume is one that will generate far more interest from interviews than an average resume ever would.

Careless job seekers that do not put enough time and energy into writing their resumes will experience the following:

• More time out of a job leading to loss of income.
• Stress due to rejections.
• More time available to be looking for work.
• Possibly loss of confidence in your resume.
  

These should be enough to motivate you to make more effort when creating a resume.

Realise that your resume is not the only tool in your job search the Cover Letter ↦ Interview are equally important.

Express the same confidence during your interview as you express through your resume. A more confident job seeker will relax. Rejections will affect you less and employers will offer you higher salaries.

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As in our post on resume advertising, we strongly suggest you send your resume to the most reputable resume databases first as these will have the highest number of employers subscribed to their services.

This way you will be able to retain control of your resume which means you'll be able to remove it from the database whenever you wish. If you post your resume on twenty databases it will be far more difficult to ensure it's removed from all of them.

The privacy policy on the website you post your resume will affect how the resume is handled and to whom it might be distributed. Some resume databases reserve the right to sell your personal information to third parties. Always check this.

Resume blasting is when certain companies post and send your resume to thousands of resume databases and potential employers. This is never a good idea as you would have no control over where and to whom you resume is sent. Once a resume blast has been made, it's impossible to undo.

Limiting the number of contact details on your resume is another factor that can help you improve your privacy.

Create a specific email address for the individual job hunt. Include the job hunt email address as the only method of contact change the names of specific employers to generic employer descriptions

Resume databases sort on a number of variables including the posting date so it's worthwhile posting your resume once a month.

When you find a job, remove your resume from all databases. If your resume is still on certain databases, your new employer could find it and believe you are still looking for a job a situation that could lead to disaster.

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In order to get the kind of exposure you need, it's important you post your resume to a variety of resume databases. This has two major effects - your private details will be open to recruiters and employers/employment agencies will be able to access it.

It is important to post your resume to recruiters and other employers but careful not to reach spamming levels. Posting your resume too often won't be beneficial to your job search. Employers looking for jobseekers will quickly notice that you've posted your resume 'everywhere' and may mark you a spammer to be 'removed' or 'banned'. Keep a list of where you have posted your resume and any passwords and user names used. Post your resume on the busiest job sites first and then move on to the smaller services.

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This kind of resume is especially useful for contractors resume or self employed resume. People who work on a project by project basis usually upload their resume as part of their website to enable their clients to learn more about them. Another area where a html resume is useful is when some of your work is online and you would like to include links to it in your resume.

Building your html resume is not as difficult as it sounds. HTML is relatively easy to understand and there are lots of very cheap software programmes available to help you. You can use tables, bold, italics in the HTML version of your resume, just like in your printable version. The same rules for resume building apply - keep it short. However, in an online resume you do not have space limitations - you can be creative and create a non-standard resume where each section has links to more details on that section.

Keep your resume as professional as possible. Even if it is tempting to link to your personal website, this will reduce the professional appeal of your HTML resume.

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Several online recruitment websites have forms that allow you to build your resume automatically. Resume experts do not recommend the use of this type of service.

Why Not? :

• You cannot use a spell checker.
• Your cannot choose your resume style.
• You cannot review it easily.
• It's time consuming to do this for every job recruitment site.

As an alternative to using their 'piece by piece' resume forms, career websites generally allow you to enter your resume in text format. This is where you'll find it handy to have such a format at hand.

To create a text only resume, open your document editor (example : Microsoft Word).
1) Click on the file menu,
2) Choose the save as type option and
3) Choose the plain text version.

After you have created the initial draft of your text resume, open notepad and edit your text resume.

Text Resume Tips :

• Use capital letters instead of bold fonts.
• Use the * symbol instead of bullet points.
• Avoid using curly brackets - use single or double quotes instead.
• Omit all hard returns. This has to be done throughout your entire CV or Resume. Do not use hard returns in the middle of a paragraph. This means do not press the enter key unless you have finished typing the paragraph. To help you with you this, choose the menu format and the option 'word wrap'.
• Send the resume by email to yourself before sending it to a potential employer. That way you can see how the email software will display it and you'll have the chance to improve any mistakes.

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There are two ways to go about searching for a new job. You can either look for employers who have job vacancies or you can make it easier for employers to find you. To do this you need to post your resume on the web. The best place to start is on job sites that are directly related to your field of employment as that's where employers are most likely to start their search for potential candidates.

• Job Banks
• Specific Job Banks
• Recruiters
• Employment Agencies

There are several types of recruitment and employment agencies: regional, local and those specific to particular careers. It is important to make a list of where you have posted your resume along with any login names and passwords you have used. However, before posting your resume online, consider the following two issues: Your present employer can discover you are looking for a new job, and people will have access to personal details that can be used in identity theft and similar.

It's best to have your resume available in different formats such as pdf and html.

When posting your resumes on the internet, your standard MS Word formatted resume will not suffice. You will also need your resume formatted as a pdf file, a html file and have a text version available. Although this is not vital for your job search, it will certainly help you reach a wider audience, become more organized, give a more professional impression with your resume, get an edge over the other candidates, and prospective employers will immediately notice they are dealing with an organised, professional person.

You need these formats mainly when looking for jobs on the internet. If you are doing your job search the 'old fashioned way', your word formatted resume will probably be enough.

What type of resume do you need ?

• You will need a resume that can easily be printed and used to send via snail mail. This version can contain any formatting that will make your resume more easily read, such as the use of bold fonts, italics and similar.
• Resumes are sometimes directly scanned into a database - it's therefore important you have a version that can easily be scanned. This would be the same as the print formatted resume but without the use of bold, italics and similar. These databases are used to match employees with job candidate. Learn more about scannable CV's and resume keywords.
• A text version. A text version is very hard when you need to post your resume in online forms.
• A modified text version that is used to send emails

These different formats of your resume are all the same but saved in different formats.

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What is a Spam filter ?

Spam filter is software that decides if an email is a Spam email or a genuine email. Spam is email that is sent by people trying to sell all kinds of things. Without the authorisation of the recipients.

How will this affect you in your job hunt ?

If you apply for a job and send a CV or resume by email. This email has to pass through the spam filters, which can decide that your application is spam email.

You will never know that an email you sent was classified as Spam email. So All you do is follow these brief tips and contact the recipient of your email to check if the email has arrived safely. You could also send the resume via snail mail.

How can you avoid your resume to be classified as spam ?

In the Message Subject line

• Avoid punctuation
• Avoid the word free
• Avoid all caps

In the Message Body

• Avoid the usual subjects of spam mail which include pharmaceuticals , mortgages
• Includes the text '4176'
• Avoid HTML Format
• Avoid Colour HTML Format
• Do not send your resume as an attachment
• Do not send your resume as a zipped attachment
• Send your resume in text format

Avoid the phrases

• list
• removal unsubscribe
• click here / now / below
• million dollars
• money back guarantee
• while supplies last
• while you sleep
• compliance with Spam regulations or with US Senate Bill 1618 or House Bill
• free

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