by Jennifer Hart Yim | Dec 21, 2017 | Blog, Strategy
Resumes are hard. Always have been, always will be. It’s hard to write and talk about yourself. It’s even harder to boil years – or even decades – of experience and accomplishments into a few short pages of text and visuals.
This guest post comes to us from Argentus Supply Chain Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and Procurement.
You’re probably more focused on your job than keeping a resume updated, and if a few years pass in between the times when you need a resume, you often find that resume trends have changed, and it’s hard to know how to format it, what to include, and what to leave out. It’s easy to feel lost because, of course, resume writing is one of the toughest tasks of any professional.
Let’s revise that slightly: it’s easy enough to write any old resume, but it’s difficult to craft a document that actually boosts your credibility.
A recruitment firm like Argentus is something of a resume clearing house. We see them all: the good, the bad, and the ugly. We see resumes that have up-to-the-minute style, as well as resumes where we have to brush off the cobwebs as we double click on the attachment in our inbox. We’re frankly bored of the latter. That’s why we’re doing a new miniseries on the Argentus blog, called The Quest for a Better Resume. We’re going to dive into some key aspects of resume writing and give examples to help you craft a resume that wows hiring managers and, hopefully, us!
In the first installment of this series, we gave some tips for boosting your resume’s style, which is something that sadly doesn’t get enough attention in fields like Supply Chain and Procurement.
Today, we’re going to dive into the Content side of things and help answer: if you’re a professional in Procurement, Supply Chain, or any of their related fields, what exactly should go on a resume and what doesn’t belong there?
Read on to hear our advice!
Resume Content:
Supply Chain and Procurement professionals make their careers by extracting relevant insights from complex sets of data. So it makes sense that they’re often skilled at loading their resumes up with valuable content – even if their resumes lack visual panache. The resumes we see tend to be stronger from a content perspective than an optics perspective – but there are still common shortcomings in terms of what people choose to write on a resume.
So when it comes to content, what does a bad resume look like?
Obviously, the worst resume is one that doesn’t show that the candidate has any relevant experience, or one that misrepresents that experience. But let’s take it for a given that you’re a professional with a solid background, trying to communicate the breadth of skills and work experience that you’ve accumulated:
- A bad resume tends to be overly stuffed with buzzwords. It tends to talk a lot without actually saying anything, full of words like “self-motivated,” “detail-oriented,” “team-player” – qualities that you shouldn’t have to put on a resume. These kinds of qualities are “table stakes” for getting an interview. They should be self-evident when the hiring manager speaks to you in person – on a resume, they come across as empty.
- It might tend to contain irrelevant experience, or show a lack of focus. This flavor of resume tries to be all things to all people – the resume equivalent of the job seeker who applies to every job we have, without tailoring their resume to one particular niche. We get that often people do have a wide variety of experience – some professionals at the director or VP-level have touched on every aspect of the Supply Chain, from inventory management to procurement to distribution. But you should tailor your experience to the role for which you’re applying.
- It talks about “duties fulfilled” instead of accomplishments. We’ve blogged a lot about how important it is to create an accomplishment-based resume. Bad resumes tend to read like job descriptions instead of describing what the person has delivered to their employers.
- It has extra info that isn’t relevant. Trends are always changing in terms of what info your resume should (and shouldn’t) include, and it can be hard to keep up. But as of late 2017, headshots, marital status, personal info, and links to multiple social media profiles are distractions from what’s important.
With these common shortcomings in mind, what approach should Supply Chain and Procurement professionals take when trying to write a resume that impresses?
- Show, don’t tell. This old writer’s adage is also the best rule of thumb both for avoiding buzzwords and packing your resume full of impressive accomplishments instead of squandering the precious few seconds that a hiring manager will dedicate to your resume. Don’t just say that you’ve “increased cost savings,” show the amount of money that you’ve saved, and how you did it. Speak in terms of numbers: how many people did you oversee? What size of budget were you responsible for? Don’t just say you have “exceptional communications skills,” show it by presenting a resume that’s concise.
- Include the meat, not the fat. As recruiters in Procurement and Supply Chain, there are a few pieces of vital information we’re looking for when assessing a resume – beyond the accomplishments we mentioned above: if you’re in Supply Chain, what aspects have you touched on? (e.g. inventory management, logistics, warehousing, distribution, sourcing). What software do you have experience and skills with? (e.g. SAP, ARIBA). If you’re in Procurement, what categories have you purchased in? (e.g. raw materials, information technology, marketing, etc.) This is key information that sometimes gets lost within long bullet-pointed lists of “duties.”
- Less can be more. Similar to how white space is important from a visual perspective, concision is key when it comes to content. Try to write your resume with more action verbs and fewer adjectives.
If you’re like us, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of the resume advice floating around the internet is distressingly general – shouldn’t it be obvious that resumes need to avoid typos, grammatical mistakes, and incorrect contact information? So hopefully these tips give a bit more detail about how to approach a resume’s content in a blue-sky way.
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by Fronetics | Dec 19, 2017 | Blog, Marketing
Email is one of the most utilized tools in your marketing toolbox, but marketers need to continuously develop their email practices to keep up with the rapidly changing interests of audiences.
Email marketing is a powerful tool for growing and developing your business. You probably get hundreds of marketing emails from all kinds of companies you patronize (and even those you don’t) every day. So you know as well as anyone that not all email marketing is created equal.
Especially in B2B culture, there is a right way — and many wrong ways — to do email marketing. Our blog hit on many best practices in 2017 that are important for B2B marketers to keep in mind as they create marketing emails.
Here are the top 7 email marketing posts for 2017.
1. 7 Email Marketing Tips for Manufacturers and Industrial Companies
Here are seven tips for manufacturers to improve your email marketing strategy in the manufacturing and industrial sector. Many manufacturers and industrial companies are still stuck in the one-off batch and blast mode of email marketing. That strategy is not likely to work very well in industrial marketing, where most of the purchases include complex products with long sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, and stakeholders are involved. Read more.
2. 7 Techniques for Personalizing Marketing Emails and Boosting Engagement
Personalizing marketing emails increases open rates, click-throughs, and revenue, but it takes so much more than addressing recipients by name. Marketers can use information they have about subscribers to tailor email content for individuals, based on who they are or where they are in the buyer’s journey. Read more.
3. 4 Email Marketing Stats that Prove You Spend Too Much Time Creating Emails
Email marketing can be a challenge — to say the least. The constantly changing email landscape, marketing trends, and privacy regulations can make staying on top of your email game very tough. Take a look at these 4 statistics and why streamlining and automating certain aspects of your email marketing program might free you up to focus on factors that can make a difference. Read more.
4. Increase Revenue from Marketing Emails by 760% with This One Trick
Email list segmentation is the one of the simplest and most critical practices to improving marketing email performance. Marketing emails are an important part of lead nurturing: They can make or break whether a lead becomes a sale. So marketers spend a lot of time and money thinking about how to perfect their messages. Read more.
5. 5 Biggest Email Subject Line Mistakes to Avoid
Email marketers, beware: If you’re tasked with writing compelling emails to capture online customers, the subject line — the headline of your message — is the first and main spot to grab the viewer’s attention. But, while a cleverly written subject can boost open rates and click-throughs, a poorly written one can have the opposite effect. Read more.
6. Three Marketing Email Crimes to Avoid
Are your marketing emails annoying your customers and prospects? We’ve all felt it: the visceral annoyance on opening an email — because it’s the fifth one from the same company in two days, or because it’s packed with hyperbole or an off-putting sales pitch. As it turns out, recent research has shown that this reaction is only too natural. We’re predisposed to view the tone of email more negatively than it was written. Read more.
7. Mobile-Friendly Emails: 6 Tips for Success
Use these 6 tips for more mobile-friendly emails to improve recipient engagement rates and to promote profitable customer action. When a majority of your audience is reading your marketing emails on their mobile devices, it’s imperative that you’re creating emails that are optimized for mobile viewing. Here are 6 essential tips for creating mobile-friendly email campaigns. Read more.
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by Fronetics | Dec 12, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing
Our most-viewed content marketing posts indicate that marketers are seeking solutions to improve their content marketing programs.
Supply chain and logistics marketers are increasingly seeing the value of content marketing. It is the most cost-effective method to earn leads and sales because it takes into account the way modern B2B buyers are making purchasing decisions (evaluating content they find on the internet).
Looking at our most-viewed content marketing posts this year, I see a trend: marketers are looking for solutions to improve their content marketing programs. I am currently working on our content calendar for 2018, so if there is anything specific you would like to know about, please feel free to email me with suggestions!
Top 10 content marketing posts
1) 4 Ways to Measure Brand Awareness
Building brand awareness is one of the key benefits of content marketing, but it’s notoriously difficult to measure. These four metrics can indicate that you are successfully drawing the public’s attention to — and heightening their knowledge of — your business. That will ultimately generate leads that turn into sales, which is the end marketing objective. Read full post
2) How to Write Better Headlines for LinkedIn Content in 2017
A study of 2016’s most popular content on LinkedIn used data to measure the most popular headlines and topics. The results are really interesting and say a lot about what content resonates with the general LinkedIn community. Tis post summarizes the most popular headline phrases and the most impactful headline words and topics, and suggests ow to use this knowledge to write more successful headlines for your LinkedIn content. Read full post
3) 4 Steps to Building a Successful DIY Content Marketing Strategy
Setting your content marketing strategy is a crucial first step in trying to reach your target audience. Before you begin writing blogs and posting tweets, you need to set goals. A content marketing strategy outlines the methods by which you will target, reach, and engage your audience. Here are four steps, outlined in the guide, to creating a successful foundation to your content marketing strategy. Read full post
4) Want More Leads? Write Better Content
All too often, marketers fall into the trap of sacrificing quality for quantity in their content writing efforts. It’s an easy mistake to make — the pressure to produce a constant stream of content can naturally lead to a drop in quality. But if you’re not writing high-quality, substantive content, you’re wasting time and energy. If you’re wondering whether your content might not measure up, ask yourself these six questions. Read full post
5) 7 Marketing Tasks Supply Chain and Logistics Companies Should Consider Outsourcing
Everyone needs a little help sometimes. In fact, 52% of B2B marketers attribute stagnancy in success to not having enough time devoted to their marketing programs, and 49% attribute stagnation to content creation challenges. Outsourcing marketing allows you to focus on insourcing your core competencies while delegating specialized tasks to external experts. And it’s important to note that you don’t have to outsource ALL of your marketing. Choosing several areas beyond your staff’s expertise or that are particularly time-consuming can help you improve your marketing efforts and take stress off an overworked internal marketing team. Read full post
6) 10 Stats You Should Know about the B2B Buyer’s Journey
Marketers need to be aware of the ways in which the B2B buyer’s journey has changed over the last decade. The vast amount of information available on the internet has afforded buyers a level of self-sufficiency that renders traditional sales models moot. It drives the need for new strategies, like content marketing and social media marketing. The latest B2B Buyer’s Survey offers insight into how B2B buyers are finding vendors, engaging with them, and — ultimately — deciding to work with one. Read full post
7) 3 Tools for Measuring Your Content Marketing ROI
Analyzing the right metrics is crucial to determining whether you are achieving content marketing ROI. According to our Social Media Use Report, 81% of respondents wanted a tracking and measuring tool to prove their ROI. Your resources are limited, so it’s crucial to evaluate your efforts with meaningful numbers that illustrate their effect on your bottom line. So what are they best metrics to use? Here are three of our favorite tools. Read full post
8) 3 Content Marketing Challenges Large B2B Enterprises Face
B2B enterprises with 1000+ employees face unique content marketing challenges that can hinder a program’s overall success. The Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 B2B Enterprise Content Marketing Report brings many of these issues to light. For example, pressure to produce results quickly is a death sentence for content marketing. And being forced to create content for a brand, rather than a specific audience, can be detrimental to content marketing results. Yes, challenges facing these enterprise marketers are often as large as the companies for which they work. This post looks at some of the reasons why that is, and a few solutions for solving them. Read full post
9) How Word of Mouth Can Work for You
Buyers value the opinions of peers and colleagues. In fact, B2B buyers rank it among their top three resources for information. And, in general, 82% of Americans seek recommendations when making a purchase of any kind. Make their chatter work for you. Here are three tips to turn word-of-mouth marketing into leads. Read full post
10) 3 Quick SEO Tips to Improve Your Blog Right Now
Content marketing aims to draw potential buyers who are searching the internet for products and services like yours to your website. The strategic distribution of content helps search engines understand what your website is all about and direct relevant parties to it. You can help the search engines’ algorithms more effectively link searchers and your content by doing these 3 easy things. Read full post
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by Fronetics | Dec 4, 2017 | Blog, Leadership, Strategy
Making the shift from doing to leading can be challenging for any supervisor, but great leaders need to master the skill of delegating.
Delegating is a true skill set. Some leaders find it very difficult to let go of the control over daily tasks. They spend their time focusing on mundane details, instead of passing the work to their qualified team members.
To be an efficient leader, you must develop the skill of moving tasks off you plate. Delegating is a great way of encouraging your team members and creating new opportunities for their professional growth and development.
“True organizational productivity requires engaged, informed personnel willing and eager to work toward the organization’s mission and vision. And it all starts with a simple concept that’s amazingly hard for some people to implement: letting go of control,” writes Laura Stack for Vistage.com.
And though letting go of control can be very difficult, the increasing pressure of having all the responsibilities fall on you can have major impacts on the quality of your work. If delegating doesn’t come naturally to you, practice! In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, Director in PwC’s Leadership Coaching Center of Excellence Jesse Sostrin suggests three practical tips for easing into the art of delegating.
3 tips to master the skill of delegating
Choose the right people
If you want to save time and focus on leading your staff, you need to have a strong team behind you. A large part of feeling comfortable delegating is having trust in the people that support your efforts. Knowing you have smart, capable team members allows leaders to be confident in the work that’s taking place. To get the most out of delegating, set up a reporting structure and make it known that you’re available for help. Then step back and give your team the space to do their jobs.
Inspire their commitments
Fully committed team members understand how their work is contributing to the big picture. “Once you’ve defined the work, clarified the scope of their contribution, and ensured that it aligns with their capacity, carefully communicate any and all additional expectations for complete understanding. This is crucial when you have a precise outcome or methodology in mind,” writes Sostrin. Make your expectations challenging, yet achievable. And always keep your door open. Open lines of communication are key in ensuring your team understands your expectations and is committed to the work.
Stay engaged, but not involved
Being too involved can lead to micromanaging. Being too hands-off can lead to missed opportunities to offer support and help. Finding the balance between the two is crucial in being an efficient delegator. You need to find the spot where you can offer support but give your team the space they need to feel confident in their own abilities. Not sure where that sweet spot is? Ask! Some employees will appreciate a little more guidance, where others will want to figure it out on their own. As you practice delegating, you’ll get to know your team better and learn the best ways to support them. And never shy away from sharing praising when a task is done correctly.
Delegating is a must for saving time and money in any office. However, delegating is much more than just assigning tasks. When done correctly, it creates opportunity and empowerment for your staff, as well as yourself. It will take a bit of practice, but it’s never too late to start mastering new skills.
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by Jennifer Hart Yim | Nov 30, 2017 | Blog, Leadership, Strategy
More and more companies are leveraging digital technologies to keep extra tabs on their employees, both in the office and at home.
This guest post comes to us from Argentus Supply Chain Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and Procurement.
As part of our efforts to chronicle the ways the workplace is changing, we recently wrote about how more companies are adopting formal work from home policies. More organizations realizing that these policies – and other alternative working arrangements – can help them attract and retain top talent in a thriving job market. Working arrangements are becoming more flexible, but today we wanted to write about another countervailing trend.
The rise of digital communications (and applications like Skype, Google Docs, and Slack) has enabled work from home policies that let workers collaborate in real time across big geographic distances. Now, an article in the Guardian by Olivia Solon details how more companies are leveraging other digital technologies to keep extra tabs on their employees, both those who work in the office and those who telecommute.
Companies have long monitored their employees’ email, and blocked certain websites from company networks (as well as, of course, monitoring their physical presence in the office). But Solon writes about how more and more high-tech pieces of software are encouraging companies to monitor their employees’ screens, keystrokes, social media posts, private messaging, and even face-to-face interactions. As Solon puts it, “today’s workplace surveillance software is a digital panopticon” that makes employees assume they’re being watched so that they’ll stay on task and avoid any kind of distractions.
(For those who don’t know the reference, the Panopticon was an architectural design for a prison made by philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century in which a central guard tower, shadowed under darkness, kept watch over a circle of inmates who weren’t able to see at any given moment whether they were being observed.)
These technologies include Crossover’s WorkSmart, which bills itself as a “Fitbit for how you work” and offers managers a numerical score after measuring employees’ keystrokes. It also uses remote employees’ webcams to take photos of them every ten minutes and make sure they stay on task. Another technology named “Wiretap” – charmingly enough, for employees who don’t see themselves as criminals – measures the number of emails an employee sends, the number of times they open documents, the programs they use, and their keystrokes, alerting supervisors about any deviations from their normal numbers. Teramind, another employee surveillance solution, measures the amount of switching between applications that employees are doing, supposing that a high amount of switching signals a distracted employee who needs to be reprimanded. Another service, Qumram, monitors employees’ personal devices, including messaging apps like WhatsApp, to make sure that they aren’t discussing anything untoward.
It’s a new level of penetration into employees’ activity and private lives, and it all raises some interesting privacy and employee management issues. On the ethics front, it kind of comes down to this: does the idea of your employer taking a picture of you through your webcam every ten minutes give you the creeps?
Everyone has different opinions about the privacy aspects of these technologies, and whether it’s good for employees’ mental health to have all their computer activity monitored. But we’re interested in discussing these technologies from an employee management perspective:
From our perspective, what’s dangerous about this isn’t necessarily the technology itself – and believe us, it’s truly disconcerting to see one of these app’s founders literally saying “big brother is watching you,” (seriously, read the article!). But from our perspective, the issue is really the larger ethos of extreme micromanagement that this technology serves.
It’s reasonable for companies to want to protect their data. It’s fair for them to want to keep an eye on what their employees are doing – they are the ones paying for the time, after all. But the idea that an aggressive focus on every keystroke is going to improve white-collar productivity? To us, that’s specious at best. From our perspective, companies thrive when they trust their employees. They succeed when they grant them the autonomy to go above their “assigned duties” to find new projects, new lines of business, and new efficiencies – not when they obsessively monitor them to ensure those duties are being carried out.
Micromanagement often leads to loss of trust, a dearth of creativity, burnout, and high employee turnover. Is all of that worth it for the opportunity to catch an employee “stealing” ten minutes of the day to check social media, or use the bathroom if they’re working from home?
In our opinion, it’s not.
It’s telling that a lot of these software solutions use language that treats employees like children or criminals. Solon quotes the CEO of Awareness Technologies, who says “if you are a parent and you have a teenage son or daughter coming home late and not doing their homework, you might wonder what they are doing. It’s the same as employees.” Is it? Employees are people that you’ve vested with your trust. They’re people you’ve specifically hired because of their skills and creativity. They’re the critical success factor to your organization. So why should the assumption be that they’re up to no good? Isn’t it better to hire with trust in mind, and measure results to see if each employee deserves that trust?
The evidence is pretty clear that companies innovate when they treat employees like adults. Is it a coincidence that some of the most innovative companies in the world, including Google, Uber and 3M offer employees enough freedom at the office to work on non-assigned projects, and even nap?
There are legitimate reasons for this kind of surveillance: in parts of the financial industry, these solutions can prevent insider trading. They can also help monitor sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior. When you’re talking about management style, a certain amount of micromanagement is inevitable, even warranted. But in our opinion, these kinds of total digital employee surveillance schemes will most likely result in an atmosphere of fear and distrust in the workplace, which is the opposite of a productive environment.
But what are your thoughts? Do these heightened employee surveillance systems encourage excessive micromanagement, or do you think they stand to make workers more productive? We’re open to all perspectives and experiences. Let us know what you think in the comments!
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