TalentEgg: Our Eggcelent Journey

The TalentEgg team wishes you all a very Happy New Year and all the best in 2009!

It’s very exciting that TalentEgg is now in its second year of operation. 2008 was great, but 2009 is going to be even better! We’re looking forward to continuing to connect students and new grads with meaningful entry-level jobs, internships and summer jobs.

Before we leave last year in the dust, however, I want to congratulate TalentEgg’s founder and president, Lauren Friese, on being named a 2008 “Woman of the Year” over at She Takes on the World, which is a lifestyle and business blog for female entrepreneurs.

Lauren is recognized for her hard work getting TalentEgg up and running, and for her continuous efforts to make TalentEgg so successful. Way to go, Lauren! You definitely took on the world in 2008 and I’m sure I can speak for everyone when I say we can’t wait to see what you accomplish with TalentEgg in 2009.

If updating and perfecting your resumé isn’t one of your New Year’s resolutions - make it one. You still have about a week until you get busy at school again. Now is a great time to make your resumé sparkle!

The resumé is a constant point of discussion here at TalentEgg. Many students and new grads don’t have the work experience required to fill up a resumé. Some have so much work experience they could fill multiple pages, but it often has nothing to do with the job they’re applying for.

Lauren started Talent Cards to be used by students and new grads on TalentEgg because resumés are not the ideal way to show off your potential. Talent Cards encourage you to showcase your top experiences to employers and sell yourself by explaining them in detail.

But the reality is that most employers still require you to submit a resumé when you apply for a job. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t show off your potential in your resumé. Not all employers want the same thing from a resumé, but here are some general tips I’ve picked up.

Keep it to one page. Your resumé should be short, easy-to-read and packed with information. Each word should be carefully chosen to showcase your experience and abilities. You don’t have to include everything you’ve ever done, just the stuff that’s relevant to the job you’re applying for. Don’t make it easy for employers to skip over you because the first page of your resumé doesn’t include everything they need.

• As a student or recent grad, your skills, education, experience, and contact information should fit nicely onto one page. If you’re having trouble cutting it down, get friends or family to look it over and suggest areas that still need tightening. Also, try making the page margins and font size a bit smaller.

Create a different resumé for each role you apply for. You don’t need to start from scratch each time, but you should tailor your experience and skills to match important keywords in the job description each time you apply. Scrap any unrelated details.

• It’s a good idea to maintain different “skeleton” resumés for each industry or sector you would like to work in. Add in specifics and change around words as needed.

Be specific about your achievements. To avoid just listing your former responsibilities and duties, be specific about the results you achieved. For each point you add, ask yourself questions such as: How many times did I do this? How often? By how much did the company’s bottom line increase? How many clients did I interact with? How many co-workers were in the group I led? Figures like these are an easy way to help employers decide if you meet or exceed their expectations.

• Show, don’t tell. Let employers draw their own conclusions based on your experiences about more abstract and subjective concepts such as leadership, creativity, flexibility, pace, etc. You can suggest and explain these abilities in detail later on in the interview. (Check out: 25 words that hurt your resumé)

Think functional rather than chronological. As a student or new grad, you probably had long gaps between work experience while you tried to balance school, finances and gaining meaningful work experience. That’s okay! You have two options. Put your past roles in order of relevance to the job you’re applying for, or put the one you think says the most about your abilities at the top and move down from there.

• Work experience is still experience, whether you got paid or not. Students and recent grads often work without pay to get experience in their desired field. To save space, put everything under Work Experience and scrap the Volunteer Work section.

Be yourself, but keep it clean and simple. Although a creative, non-traditional resumé will make you stand out, be sure the person doing the hiring will really appreciate it before you go in that direction. Usually a resumé prepared in a word processer, such as Microsoft Word, printed in black ink on a white sheet of paper will do. There are hundreds of great looking templates out there, or you can start from scratch and create your own.

• Easy-to-read fonts (avoid Times New Roman), bullet points and lines are great ways to ensure your resumé is not only readable but also visually pleasing without the use of colour, pictures or graphics. If you want to show off your creative side, point employers to your blog or online portfolio by including it with your contact information.

Ask around. Talk to profs, fellow students, co-workers, bosses - anyone working in your area of interest - about what generally works and doesn’t work for resumés in your industry. You’ll probably find that everyone says something different, but hopefully you can discover some personal rules of thumb to hold yourself to when applying for internships, summer jobs and entry-level roles.

What do you already do to make your resumé sparkle?

If your network of family and friends is anything like mine, it has undoubtedly been affected by the current economic situation.

While catching up with family over the holidays, I’ve heard a handful of stories from some who have already been laid off and others who are crossing their fingers while co-workers with less seniority are let go.

It was strange to be comparing job searching strategies and resumé writing tips with my relatively wealthy uncle who is in his 50s and has been jobless since October. He’s taking a resumé workshop, filled mostly with other middle-aged workers who have recently lost their jobs as well, while he decides if he wants to go back to work or retire early.

My cousin’s husband recently lost his sales job as well. He was successful enough that my cousin quit her job earlier this year to stay at home with their two young children. Within a few months, they went from being a stable single-income family to a no-income family that has to put plans of moving into a bigger home on the back burner.

I know they’re lucky and things are a lot worse for some others who have been laid off.

Hopefully things will turn around soon, but “experts say” things are only going to get worse in the new year:

As bad as the past few months were, even the rosiest of economic forecasts shows on average Canadians will get poorer in 2009, and many – perhaps as many as 200,000 additional workers – will lose their jobs as the economic recession deepens.

However, we should look at the types of jobs that are being lost. Some are demanding government cash to stay afloat: manufacturing, particularly the auto sector, along with the financial sector, is hemorrhaging jobs. Forestry, retail, travel and tourism, and real estate aren’t great industries to be in either, if you believe all the hype.

But things aren’t all bad.

Currently, Canada’s unemployment rate is sitting at 6.3 per cent and it’s predicted to rise to eight per cent in 2009. Looking back to previous recessions, however, we saw the unemployment rate reach as high as 10 per cent in the early 1990s and 13 per cent in 1980-81.

In fact, some industries, such as IT, the skilled trades and health care, can’t find enough people to fill their jobs. As an educated, motivated work force with comparatively low salary expectations, recent grads are probably in the best position of any group of job candidates in the current economy.

TalentEgg itself is a great indicator that employers are still hiring for a lot of entry-level roles, as Lauren said almost a month ago. TalentEgg wouldn’t exist if they weren’t. New entry-level roles are added to the site almost daily. In particular, agriculture, energy, engineering, health care, management, marketing, sales and technology jobs seem to be the most in demand.

Brazen Careerist founder Penelope Trunk recently posted some encouraging evidence that young workers are holding their own in the current economy:

• jobs for candidates with little to no experience are increasing
• there have been and still are plenty of entry-level jobs to be had
• the unemployment rate for workers with a post-secondary education is much lower than that of the general population

She says “that young people shouldn’t be thrown by the bad news that old people are pushing. Things are not that bad if you’re beginning your career.”

A good indicator of these points might be that while everyone else is cutting back, Gen Y is still spending.

What do you think about the current job market for new grads? Should new grads be worried about finding jobs in 2009, or is Penelope Trunk right?