To change careers, job hunters must tailor resume

The New Rochelle, N.Y., resident left his last sales job at a small manufacturer of industrial products in July. "All the work was done on the phone," he said. "I was not out selling the product itself. It just wasn't the (type of) sales I was hoping to do."

He's worked with a career coach, joined a public-speaking group to sharpen his presentation skills and spends time each day searching for work, but has not had any interviews in his new field of choice.

O'Toole believes the skills he's developed in prior jobs qualify him to do something like in-house corporate training, but his resume does not show experience in the profession. So he faces a question common for those attempting to switch professions at mid-career--how to get noticed when applying?

An important step is to tailor his resume to fit the criteria for jobs he's targeting.

"Your goal with any resume creation today is to get the interview, and then in the interview you can tell your story," said Eric Winegardner, a vice president at Monster Worldwide Inc., parent of job hunting site Monster.com.

At many companies, the first review of resumes is done electronically, because hundreds of applications are often submitted for one opening, Winegardner explained. And when companies with jobs to fill tap into a database like Monster's, they do searches through countless resumes "to try to find the perfect person in that proverbial haystack," Winegardner explained.

That means that while some mid-career professionals may remember the days when the way to get noticed was high-quality paper or a well-designed resume, today it's more important for your resume to contain the words or phrases targeted by impersonal software.

"You want to make sure you don't get missed accidentally, just because you didn't have a certain keyword in that electronic resume," said Tyra Tutor, a senior vice president at MPS Group, a staffing firm based in Jacksonville, Fla.

That's not to say applicants shouldn't pay attention to the paper quality or presentation of the resumes they carry when meeting prospective employers, Tutor said. "But it's the electronic one these days that's going to get you to the interview."