I have an acquaintance, we’ll call her “Sam”.  Sam has been trying to get a job for three years now, ever since she was laid off from her accounting job at the start of this recession.  Sam keeps complaining to me about why she can’t find a job.  Sometimes she complains that the job postings companies put out there are not real. Sometimes she complains about how the only people who get the jobs are the ones who are friends of the hiring manager.  Last week she complained to me about how all the good jobs are going overseas.  At this point I offered to sit with her and go over what she was doing and see if there was room for improvement.  She sent me her resume as a starting point and I spent about 30 seconds looking at this document before determining that Sam’s biggest problem was Sam.

Sam’s resume looked like something out of a resume nightmare.  It was poorly formatted, full of spelling errors, filled with massive run on sentences and overflowing with useless information.  It was 5 pages of utter nonsense which would make any would be hiring manager toss it into the garbage can as soon as they saw it.  When I further asked Sam about her job search, I found out she had done no networking and no research into the various companies she was trying to get hired at.  Think about that for a second.  Here’s a woman who had been looking for a job for THREE YEARS and she was utterly clueless. [Read more...]