Simple Things You Can Do to Improve Your Resume

It may be back-to-school season for kids and their parents, but for a lot of people it has been find-a-good-job season, especially for recent college graduates who have spent the summer interning or preparing for the work force all summer.

In order to score the interview for that job you saw that you swear was made for you, you’re going to need a resume and because you have a lot of competition, being one person in a big crowd of people who all firmly believe that job was made for you, you’re going to need a resume that accurately sings the praises you know you deserve. So here are some simple things you can do to improve upon that resume you’ve been pouring over.

• Keep It Up-to-Date
  If you’re still sending out the resume you wrote three, six, or even twelve months ago, make sure to take a few minutes and think back over the course of where you have been and what you have done since you first wrote your resume. Have you acquired any new skills or become more proficient in something you didn’t feel confident including in your first draft? Be sure to add them before you change anything else. Potential employers want to know who the person applying for the job they are offering is now, not who they were a few months ago.

• Organization is Key
  If you Google how to write a resume, you’re going to find a ton of results that look super fancy, have embellished language and design and frankly, a lot of stuff that doesn’t need to be there. To pull off a distinctly professional and clear resume, all you need to know is how to use headers to announce distinct sections of your resume and bullet points to separate your thoughts and experience.

• Don’t Marry Your Words–Self-Editing is Your Friend
  Speaking of embellished language… a resume is a list of your skills and accomplishments and it is meant to be a quick way for your potential employer to see if you possess the skills and knowledge in order to get the job done. While correct spelling and grammar are a must, you do not need to include your life story in your resume, nor do you need to write more than what is necessary. Keep your resume condensed and easy for someone to read quickly.

• Use Keywords
  Managers who are constantly receive a high volume of resumes are beginning to rely on search systems that filter through someone’s resume and places them in an automated search based on whose skills match those of the job description. Use keywords when and where they make sense, but be sure to include the keywords that you saw in the job description for the job you’re applying for without copying and pasting the full job description language.

• Include Your Name in the File Name
  Instead of just naming your resume ‘resume’ on your computer and sending it to your potential employer, be sure to get noticed and stay noticed by including your full name in the file name of your resume. For example, your file name could be “Jane Doe Resume” or you can also include the date along with your name to refresh the employer’s memory of who you are and when you first showed interest in the job.

Personal Credit Cards: Better for Your Business?

This is a guest post by Odysseas Papadimitriou, founder and CEO of CardHub.com, an online marketplace for credit card offers.

Running your own business takes energy, organization – and a whole lot of money. Using a credit card for funding a small business can provide you with the resources you need when you don’t have the cash. However, due to small business credit cards’ exclusion from protection under the Credit CARD Act, you should think twice before carrying a balance on your small business credit card.

Even though it’s called a business credit card, the business owner is still personally responsible for the debt incurred at the end of the day. Since the owner is assuming this risk already, it makes sense to use a personal credit card for purposes such as funding or any other expense that you can’t pay back right away. This way the Credit CARD Act will provide the protection you need when carrying a balance.

A personal credit card offers much more predictability and stability for someone managing a business. For instance, the credit card company cannot increase the interest rate on existing balances and cannot apply the penalty APR until you are 60 days delinquent. The Credit CARD Act also enforces a payment allocation system for personal cards that is more advantageous for the cardholder. Credit card companies such as Capital One, Chase, Bank of America, and Citibank do not have to adhere to such restrictions when it comes to business credit cards.

Don’t get me wrong, a business credit card offers its own advantages and can play an important role in financing your expenses. For example, a business owner can set individual credit limits for each employee, which makes managing and tracking expenses much more efficient. Business credit cards also often offer higher credit lines, making it a more effective spending tool when multiple people are using the same account.

These factors make business credit cards an excellent choice – even better than personal credit cards – when used as a charge card. In other words, it is my recommendation that you use a business credit card for making company purchases, but only those purchases that you plan to pay back in full at the end of each month.

When making decisions around financing your business, you should take advantage of what both business and personal credit cards have to offer. The combination of the two will give you the most purchasing power while allowing you to fund your business without being subjected to the whim of credit card companies.

5 Minutes for Mom Job Board: Helping Moms Find Real Work at Home Opportunities

Everyone has different reasons for deciding to work from home, but when you decide to work from home as a freelancer, getting started could end up being what makes you decide to retreat to the formal workforce again.

When I first started working from home, I know that I would not have been able to stay afloat for more than two months, never mind four years, without the help of some truly amazing friends. I was lucky, but a lot of women aren’t so lucky when it comes to getting up and started as a home-based entrepreneur.

So where do you go to get your first opportunities? When you finish your first job, what’s next, where do you go from there and where do you get more freelance gigs?

5 Minutes for Mom, a tremendously popular community for moms, recently added a job board to the website. The job board pulls in project listings from all of the top job board and websites for freelancers to find opportunities to help moms find real work at home opportunities. The opportunities the job board pulls up are from sites including Elance, Freelancer.com, ScriptLance.com, among others.

After looking through the job board I found that most of the opportunities look legitimate and could very well end up being worthwhile opportunities to keep your work day full and exciting. There are a few of them that look more than a little suspicious, but not too many and I think they’re pretty easy to spot so you won’t be wasting your time. What I really like about this site is that instead of going to all of the freelance sites you can find individually and searching through countless categories, this job board pulls in all of the relevant job opportunities and makes them easy to find in one place.

If you’re looking for legitimate work at home opportunities, you should definitely check out the 5 Minutes for Mom Job Board.

“Normal” Schedules and Mojo — One Does Not Always Follow the Other

I have always been a night owl. I don’t think it’s necessarily a choice that I have always just happened to stay up all night and find my time to sleep during some mornings and most afternoons. It just comes naturally to me and it always has.

For a little over a month now I have been making a conscious effort to be up during the day and to sleep during the night. You know, attempting to keep the same schedule as all of you normal people out there who work real jobs and keep real schedules. It has been difficult. You would think that if I just slept during the night then obviously I would be up during the day and able to work and get everything that I set out to do every day accomplished. I thought the same thing and I was wrong.

Sure, I’m up during the day, but I am not able to work. I end up sitting here all zombie-like, trying to force words to come to my brain and get my fingers to type the words into the computer and then suddenly I’d have some awesome stuff written. And you know what else? All of you people out there whose day job it is to develop Facebook games, I am not happy with you. Well, in a way I’m extremely happy with you, but my productivity is not happy with you. So while I am here during the day, sitting here trying to force the productivity to take place, I don’t manage to get much done and for the most part, I have come to the conclusion that I’m just insane. That has to be it! It is the only logical conclusion I can come to and I’m sure it’s the only logical conclusion that all of you out there reading this can come to. Anything else just doesn’t make sense, right? RIGHT.

When you work from home, as I do and have done for the past five years, it’s important to keep track of trends; especially when you work from home primarily as a blogger and freelance writer. I’m not talking about boyfriend jeans or mom jeans or whatever type of jeans people are making fun of this week. It’s important to keep track of what is being read and most importantly, when. Turns out that everything happens throughout the daylight hours. Imagine that! Emails get sent during the day, people expect replies to emails during the day, people write during the day making all of the important news and information spread like wildfire throughout the day, and even the majority of people read websites throughout the day. Everything happens during the day, so it would make sense to do business during the day.

Except for when your brain doesn’t function during the day, even with copious amounts of coffee. But I do get a great deal of work done, it’s just during the night time hours. Like right now. Right now at around 4am and all of my writerly mojo is flowing and everything is just great. The words come, the fingers type and before you know it, I have over 600 words typed into this little box.

But that right there–this, the entire point of this post, is where the writer and the professional blogger with the professional presence clash. A great deal of people find that they can only truly get great work done when the mood is right. For me, it has always been when everything is dark, quiet, and there is a stillness that cannot be mistaken with anything the daylight has to offer. But when the business world operates during the day and you operate at night, it’s easy to always feel like you are playing catch-up. Not just when it comes to returning emails and phone calls in a timely manner, but even when you’re working with strict deadlines or just deadlines you’ve placed on yourself.

So what do you do? Well, I’ll let you know when I’ve got it figured out. I do know one thing for certain though, and that is that just because you make the conscious effort to accomplish your to-do list every day does not necessarily you can make it happen–especially if your to-do list heavily relies on you being creative in any way whatsoever.

Book Review: Tribes by Seth Godin

Seth Godin is the most popular business blogger in the world. He has authored several books, one in particular, The Dip, was a New York Times bestseller. His books have been translated into more than 25 languages. He is the founder and CEO of the social network Squidoo.com. Seth Godin is a real leader and up until a few weeks ago I had never heard of him. Sure, I had heard about Squidoo.com a few times within the past two years or so, but after looking at the social networking site I dismissed it almost immediately, as did a great deal of social media strategists. However, when someone is a true leader they are not going to reach each and every single person instantly; it takes time to build a fan base and eventually, when you create or come up with an idea that appeals to people in their own, personal lives, your fan base will continue to grow well after your book hits the New York Times best seller list.

Tribes was recommended to me by a business colleague of mine and the day I heard about it and about how inspired and motivated it made her feel after reading it, I ordered it that same day. After a mere to days I, just like my colleague, felt an immense sense of motivation to continue on the path I have been paving for myself in my business and also, I felt the validation that home-based business people sometimes need in order to keep doing what they’re doing. When people start to think outside of the box and start to initiate radical change within any field, those people are often greeted not with the support that they deserve for being creative and industrialist minds from the people around them, most often they are greeted with criticism that emerges from people when they think that the ideas of others are worthless or won’t work or are too obscure and out of the box. It is these people who often stop the people with remarkable and out of the box ideas. As Godin pointed out in the book, people are not afraid that their ideas are worthless or won’t work, they are not afraid of the so-called unknown of their future; they are afraid of the criticism they will receive from the people who doubt them.

Tribes is not laid out like your standard usually boring business book; it is more fluid and laid out in chunky prose. It is to the point, highlighting an assortment of advice, admonitions, case studies, experiments, quotations and anecdotal stories. It gives you snippets of absolutely remarkable achievements of people who have proved to be true leaders and in Godin’s terms, they are leading a tribe of people who all see one person (the leader) doing something right, something that inspires, motivates and resonates with them and they begin to follow that person and support that person in whichever way they deem appropriate.

Tribes successfully reveals the entrepreneurial mindset and what is needed in order to succeed in a market that is against you; determination, motivation and the positivity that you can truly and successfully build your ideas into something remarkable. It includes case studies and short stories about people who have truly made an impact on social networks like Twitter and how the amount of people they reach with social networks is impressive, but in actuality, they had built that tribe of people throughout the past months and even years.

If you are an entrepreneur of any kind, a blogger, a person with a different take on something or a new, completely radical idea that you think no one believes in or could believe in, I could not recommend a better book to get you thinking and feeling like the leader you know deep down that you truly are.