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A Resume for Disaster.. How Not to Land a Work at Home Job

After running a successful telecommuting site for over 8 years and an employment agency before that, I still get that one question over and over. "Why have I not been able to land a work at home job?" My first answer is always the same. "Let's look at your resume."

So, inevitably, I take one look at their resume and know exactly why they have not been able to obtain the job they have been seeking. I call it the Lazy Resume Syndrome.

Case in point, one person, who will remain nameless, wanted to obtain a work at home position as a Customer Service Rep but had not pointed out any experience (although they had this) in customer service either in their objective or job experience. Another person who sent me their resume wanted a clerical position but in their objective had put that they wanted to use their management experience to obtain a job. Well, needless to say, that was not going to get them the job.

People just tend to use the same resume over and over for every position they apply to.

Being in the employment business, I have literally looked at thousands of resumes and I am still amazed at the lack of understanding of the importance of your resume matching the job you are applying for. The employer is going to reject you flat out if they do not see the skills they are looking for in the first 20 seconds.

So in this article, I hope to address how to put together a successful resume that will help you to land that coveted work at home job.

First off though, let me stress that you do need skills to obtain one of these positions. There is not a real work at home job that will say that you do not need skills. If they do they are most likely ad typing scams or other schemes that are launched by unethical individuals to lure you into ?seeming? employment with them when they are only out to scam you out of money.

So, with that said, let?s start with the most important part of creating your resume for telecommuting.

THE OBJECTIVE

Your objective is so very important because this will be the first thing the employer sees. Your objective should be focused on ONE job. So you may need several resumes, each with a different objective, for different jobs.

Ok, let?s say this person wants to obtain a Customer Service position that they can work from home. In this position, say they would be taking orders over the phone and inputting them at the same time into the computer.

It should be obvious to a person that their objective should now focus on this skill and reflect this in their objective but many people miss this point.

So let?s go with a few examples of objectives based on that particular job:

BAD: Seeking to gain employment with a company using my management, administrative and clerical skills.

GOOD: To obtain a telecommuting position using my 5 years of customer service and data entry skills.

BETTER: To obtain a Customer Service Rep / Order Taker position that will utilize my 5 years of customer service and data entry experience.

So, now of course you can see which one the employer is going to see as the better match for their position.

The first objective has a myriad of skills that the employer isn?t necessarily interested in. The employer is not looking for a manager, administrative assistant or for clerical help for this position. Yet I see this time and time again where people do not take the time to focus the objective on the job.

So, to sum it up, your objective should closely match the job you are applying to.

Some people like to put a summary of skills right after their objective but I think it is not necessary and somewhat distracting. I think the next thing to list is your job skills.

Now, I am going to make a very important point. Your job skills need to match your objective. So in the previous case, your job skills should immediately reflect this experience in the first few points.

Using the previous case, then their employment history should read something like this:

Job History

Customer Service Rep The Company 2003 ? 2007 * Assisted customers over the phone with problems, issues. * Helped customers with phone orders. * Input customer data into computer system.

Now, not everyone is going to have a perfect job title that will match the objective but there are ways around this. You can either shorten your previous job title or change it slightly to try to ?inch? this into the title. For instance, say your actual job title was actually, Support Administrator, but you actually provided customer service to customers. You could change this to Support Admin / Customer Support. As long as you stay fairly close to the truth, I do not see anything wrong with this. I think what is most important is that you do have the skills to do the job.

So on the first two or so lines of the job skills, you should always list the skills that match up with your objective first.

I suggest using a bulleted format when listing your job skills. I think this is easier to read and also easier for the employer to spot the skills they are seeking.

Next, if you are looking for telecommuting work, I suggest listing your Home Office Equipment / Software. I think this is important because this will let the employer know that you are well equipped and ready to work remotely.

In the instance above, I think it would be important to list that I have high speed internet access, computer, operating system and that you have a separate land line with no call waiting. For this job you may even want to add that you have a distraction free environment as this would be important to that particular job.

As you can see it is very important to create a resume that closely reflects the job you are seeking. So, if you really want to get that elusive telecommuting job, always do the following on each of your resumes:

FOCUS your objective to the job you are applying to. MATCH your job skills to the objective. UTILIZE a bulleted list of job skills. INCLUDE your Home Office Equipment / Software.

Wishing you resume success and happy telecommuting!

Belinda Stringer worked for a staffing employment agency for 7 years as a recruiter, placement specialist and finally as Operations Manager for the agency before founding VirtualAssistants.com, a telecommuting employment site, in February of 1999. Her main agenda in creating the site was to create a safe environment for other like minded Virtual Assistants to find legitimate work. You can find out more about telecommuting work at http://www.VirtualAssistants.com

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