Are you a seasoned wellness
professional getting ready
to make your next career
move?
Bad news: Your resume almost
certainly contains these
five mistakes.
Good news:
They're easy to fix.
Let's take it from the top:
1) Pointless statement
of purpose
All together too many resumes
start with a "Purpose" statement
at the top. It usually
looks like this:
Purpose
Seeking senior position
in growing and successful fitness center that will allow me to help
others realize their full
potential while fully utilizing
my education and skills
Well, gosh, we'd all like that, wouldn't we? Let's throw in world peace
while we're at it!
The problem is
that this statement gives the person reviewing your resume no reason whatsoever to call you in for an interview. It tells them nothing about your qualifications and accomplishments for the kind of position
you're seeking.
Instead, center something like this at the top of your resume, right after
your name and contact info:
Experienced Customer Service
Director
Successfully motivates membership staff to provide great service while managing
a tight headcount and compensation budget.
Key skills: Hiring and
retaining highly empathetic and service-oriented employees, maintaining employee
job interest and low turnover through cross-training and special projects.
Which resume would get your attention?
2) Tasks vs accomplishments
When you describe your current
and previous job history,
focus on your results and
accomplishments. Don't simply
list the tasks you performed.
Instead of:
Corporate wellness manager
- Met with corporate clients
four times/year.
- Supervised trainers and
instructors and developed
staffing schedules.
- Completed monthly reports
on facility usage and member
activity.
- Scheduled executive physicals.
Reads like your job description,
doesn't it? Instead, try
this:
Corporate wellness manager
- Oversaw day-to-day fitness
center management for five
largest corporate accounts
totaling $700,000 in revenues, 10 employees and 2000 members
- Introduced six new classes
which received highest satisfaction
ratings ever from members
- Reduced employee turnover
to virtually zero by encouraging
staffers to experiment with
new fitness techniques
3) I was born a
small child in...
Two things to watch for here. First, give the most weight (and space) to your
most recent accomplishments:
- Go into more detail on the scope and results of your current or most recent
positions.
- Provide progressively fewer details about older positions.
- And yes, you can absolutely leave out temp jobs, short-term positions, jobs you
held twenty years ago, and the like.
Second, most personal details just
don't belong on resumes. In fact, they often make the applicant look clueless about how
business works.
In general, omit the following:
- Your hobbies (you
can mention them in
the interview if appropriate)
- Whether or not you're
married or have kids
or a life partner (not
appropriate)
- Where you were born
and all the towns you
lived in growing up
(totally irrelevant)
- If you have a college
degree, skip the name
of your high school
(it just doesn't matter
- even if you were president
of the National Honor
Society)
- All the details about your minimum wage
and temporary jobs early
in your career (this
isn't your biography)
- Organizations totally
unrelated to the position
you're seeking, or those
potentially a turn-off
for many interviewers
(say, local chair of
the National Smokers
Alliance).
4) But everyone knows what
ADL means!
Oh yeah? Google it
and see how many different
ways ADL is used!
And that's just one example.
Even health and wellness
professionals have different
levels of familiarity with
jargon and abbreviations
you take for granted.
Show your resume to a friend
who doesn't work in health
and wellness. Ask them to circle the terms they don't understand or recognize
and check these frequent gotchas:
- Are you using ambiguous
terms? For example,
PT could mean personal
trainer...physical therapist...or pulmonary
technician.
- Are the terms truly
widely used? For example,
would everyone really
know that ADL means
"activities of daily
living"?
- Are you using internal
project, process and
system names that are
unique to your current
employer? For example,
if you represented your
department on the PPPHIR
team, spell out "Patient & Professional
Partnership for Hospital
Infection Reduction".
- Or if you used your
health club's 3M program
with clients, spell
out "Member Metabolic
Measurement Program"
on your resume.
5) Much too much
Always remember that the purpose
of your resume is simply
to create enough interest
that you get invited to
the next step - usually
a phone or face-to-face
interview. It's NOT your professional biography or a curriculum vitae that
includes everything you've ever done.
Hiring managers and human resources departments scan resumes, usually for about
30 seconds. So keep it short, sweet and focused on your "greatest
hits".
(And don't squeeze the margins and use 8-point fonts - that's
cheating! It looks ugly and it's hard to scan quickly.)
- If you've got less
than five years of experience,
your resume should fit
on one page using normal
spacing and normal font
sizes.
- If you've got five to ten years of experience, aim for keeping it on one
page - but if you've really got some amazing accomplishments, it might be
OK to slip onto that
second page.
- Once you've got
10 - 20+ years of experience,
you've probably got
enough accomplishments
to justify two pages
- but no more!
Pare things down to the
highlights - the really,
really good stuff that'll
get a hiring manager
(or human resources
department's) attention.
That's usually no more
than five bulleted
accomplishments per
position, with a brief description the scope of the position, of
what you accomplished
and how you did it.
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