Where the Executive Jobs Are

A recent ExecuNet poll of executive recruiters and search consultants reveals that they believe healthcare and green technology will be the industry sectors with the highest growth in executive and management jobs over the next six months. Other fields that are expected to afford significant opportunities are the life sciences, energy, and environmental. Hiring in retail, distribution, media, advertising, publishing, and entertainment is expected to be slow.

For more details, see ExecuNet's RecruitSmart newsletter.

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Should You List Your Street Address on Your Executive Resume?

An interesting topic has been under discussion on the NRWA's professional resume writers forum this week: Is it advisable to list or to exclude your street address on a resume, particularly one that is going to be posted to the Web on job or recruiter sites?

With the increasing incidence of identity theft nowadays, omitting at least part of your contact information would seem to be a wise move. Since e-mail and telephone are going to be the route taken by most recruiters or hiring executives to initiate contact with you, the street address becomes the obvious candidate for omission.

If you provide your city and state, or perhaps city, state, and zip, that should be sufficient to indicate your general geographic location. Some opt to omit only the actual street or box number, and still include the street name. It would seem that the danger of identity theft would increase as the level of detail given increases, so omitting even a small portion of the information is preferable to publishing all of your contact information in full for anyone to see.

One of my colleagues pointed out that if you include your full street address, an employer can look it up and find out the value of your home through zillow.com or the local tax assessor. They'll know when you bought your home, the annual taxes on it, and whether it's for sale. This info could easily be used in determining the amount of any salary offer to be made.

I see more and more resumes every day that list only city and state in an effort to safeguard privacy. Some list either a cell number or an e-mail address, but not both. However, I have also seen a fair number of executive resumes that include neither an e-mail address nor a phone number. This is not a wise move! Even if your resume is going to be circulated in an extremely limited fashion, at least some contact information is necessary in order for someone to interact easily with you regarding an opportunity.

To protect your privacy and avoid the annoyance of spam e-mail, you can obtain a special e-mail address that is exclusively for your job search from one of several free Internet providers (e.g., gmail, ymail, hotmail). You can also forward all e-mails to your primary address, avoiding the inconvenience of checking multiple e-mail accounts several times daily. (Speaking of e-mail addresses: Be sure your e-mail address is dignified, not frivolous, vulgar, or silly! Also that it does not indicate your political views or a non-traditional lifestyle!)

I do routinely recommend that work phone numbers be excluded from the resume, due to privacy considerations and the fact that including them can be considered poor business etiquette by both your current employer (risking your job!) and potential employers. Privacy considerations and the fact that you do not want your 3-year-old taking important job search messages also make it a good practice not to use your home phone number in your employment search materials.

This leaves your cell phone number. If you are greatly concerned about telemarketing calls on your cell, you could set up a separate cell phone number for your search. However, the question then arises of when or if to disconnect this number, since resumes often remain on file with recruiters and corporations for months or years.

The level of interest in this topic has been high. One member did note that she had asked the chief HR officer for a very large company about it, and he responded that they do like to know the candidate's city, state, and zip, but do not care at all about the street address. A survey of employers' views on the subject is contemplated in the near future. Once that is completed, I'll post a summary of the results here.

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Executive Job Interview Landmines

I've been reading a series of articles based on research a colleague Katherine Hansen has been conducting with great interest. The data she gathered regarding executive interview peeves of hiring decision-makers for her upcoming book Top Notch Executive Interviews is fascinating, and I am sure the book will be an excellent resource for executive job candidates.

I find it particularly amazing that anyone would actually DO pet peeve #11: "Candidate trashes former employers." Finger pointing, playing the victim, expressing anger or dislike of your previous employer -- no matter how justified -- is obviously going to be an immediate turnoff in an executive job interview! One would think that this is not rocket science, but it is apparently something of which even some very accomplished and seasoned executives seem to be unaware.

Among other turnoffs cited were lack of enthusiasm, a weak handshake, reeking of cigarettes, scripted responses that sound like they came from a book, and failure to provide good examples of skills and experience. One that is particularly disastrous for any executive candidate is inadequate knowledge of the prospective employer's history, mission, business practices, and industry challenges.

I'll be watching for the book to come out in October.

Don't Date Yourself by Using Two Spaces after a Period in Your Resume!

I received the following question from an executive resume client today:

"I notice the spacing after a period is one space...is that standard for resumes?"

The answer to this question is an emphatic "Yes!" A single space after a period is standard in resumes, as well as most other documents today.

Most typeset text, both before and after the typewriter, used a single space at the end of sentences. The only reason that two spaces were used after a period during the 'typewriter' age was because typewriters originally had monospaced fonts. (With monospaced typefaces, every character takes up the same amount of space on the page. ‘M’ uses the same amount of space as ‘I’.) It was a readability issue--the extra space was needed for the eye to pick up on the beginning of a new sentence.

The current typographic standard for a single space after the period is a reflection of the power of proportionally spaced fonts, which even typewriters (what few there are left) have nowadays. Not only is the need for an extra space negated w/proportional space type, using two spaces creates 'holes' in the middle of a block of text that invariably annoy graphic designers, typographers, and publishers. The extra spacing makes the body text both unattractive as a visual element and distracting to read.

For those of us (including me) who learned to type on a monospaced typewriter, spacing twice after a period was a hard habit to break! But be sure you do, because this seemingly small thing will date you, give the impression that you are not someone who keeps up with the times, and detract from the appearance of your carefully crafted executive resume!

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