Befor you can get an interview you need to get your foot in the door. As you resume/CV (curriculum vitae) should be a fairly bare bones list of your education, work, etc. you need to concentrate a lot on the covering letter.
krets gave some great advice on T-Letters (aka Q-Letters):
quote:My uncle is the VP of a large career counseling service here in Kansas City. Its not a place for people like us, they deal mostly with displaced executvies, CEOs, that kind of thing. His services can run upwards of 15K. They do all kinds of things for a client though.
He helped me with my resume when I was thinking of leaving the teaching field and I can tell you that it would have been worth every penny if I were to spend a couple grand on it. I got my first post-teaching job based mostly on my abilities as an instructor BUT I got the interview because they enjoyed the T-letter I wrote as a cover letter for my resume. My boss at that job said that she knew she was going to bring me in as soon as she read that and just skimmed my resume.
About 4 months into that job a friend of mine came to me about the job I have now which is doing training for a pharmaceutical related company. My boss at this job has also said that my resume was outstanding and she also wanted to bring me in after seeing the cover letter alone.
As far as the services go, I\'ll just say this: I am making in a week right now what I was making in two weeks at either of my past jobs. So yeah, I\'d say it would be worth talking to a career counselor.
Make sure there is some kind of guarantee in the contract though. My uncle said if they can\'t give you some kind of guarantee then you should shop around more.
Good luck!
Oh, and here\'s what a T-letter is:
Start with something like this....
\"In response to your advertisement dated August 4, 2001 on monster.com, for “Web Build Specialist,” please consider the following:\"
Then create a two column table. The left column should have the heading \"Your Requirements.\" The right column should have the heading \"My Qualifications.\" Then just go down, cell by cell, detailing their listed requirements on the left and your qualifcations on the right. For your qualifications use words of action like.
\"Organized a team to....\"
\"Managed an effort to....\"
\"Completed a class in....\"
Things like that.
The basic structure of a T-Letter are the 3 main parts:
1. The introduction - this should contain the anme of the job and where you found it (recruitment always like to know how people find a job) and then lead into the bluk of the letter with soemthing like \"having read the advertisement and researched your company I believe these are the key requirements which I have matched with my skills and experience\".
2. The meat - this is the main part of the letter and the person reading it should really scan right over the start and end and see this. In essence the person reading your letter (or CV/resume) will be trying to pick out your skills, experience, qualifiations and match them to their needs - with a T-letter you are doing the work for them gretaly increasing your chances of being moved on to the interview stage and your application letter and/or CV/resume are purely designed to get you that interview.
3. The end - use this for winding things up, directing people to your CV for the details and (most importantly) forecasting - i.e. \"As can be seen from the information above the job closely matches my skills and experience\".
Then sign off \"Yours Sincerely\" and your name (signed and also typed below).
Get More Interviews With a T-Letter - as well as being a leading source on T-Letters the \'see also\' list of links to other articles on the site is also well worth checking out.
