Resume Spans Geography Gap

Resume Spans Geography GapResume Spans Geography GapMalcolm Anderson wants to woo U.S. companies from his home in the U.K. Revising his resume helped bridge the distance.How do you apply for a job in another city or state? Will you disqualify yourself from the start if the recruiter or hiring manager reads your resume and discovers youre not local?OpsLadder member Malcolm Anderson had bigger problems The director of supply-chain operations is a U.K. citizen living in Kent, England, outside London, but hes looking for jobs in the U.S. That means minimizing or obscuring thousands of miles of spaces long enough to be considered for the job.Anderson is no stranger to the U.S. he has family members here and has worked for U.S. businesses in the U.K. He felt the distance was really just a matter of perception, and the fix started with his resume, said Donald Burns, a certified professional resume writer who works with Ladders and helped Anderson address the issue.He had a long internationa l phone number and a U.K. address on his original resume, Burns said. But eventually we found out that he also had an address in Florida and a cell phone with a U.S. area code, despite still residing in England. Burns used the address in Kissimmee, Fla., and the U.S. cell number as the contact information for Andersons new resume.Thats the way to go, he said. You dont want to put on the resume willing to relocate or will pay own relocation costs because you might get passed over as a candidate on the issue of location alone.Delete and HighlightAnderson also struggled with a lengthy resume that gave nearly equal weight to his 22-year military career in transportation and logistics support and the more than 10 years he spent doing much the same work in the private sector.Because Anderson was looking for a new private-sector position, Burns decided to push Andersons military career to the bottom of the document and limit the 22-year experience to a small Additional Experience section. We had to top the resume off with highlights of his more recent jobs and summarize the rest, he said. We basically had to re-weight it. We had to find the highlights and delete a lot of the other stuff. When you do that you get a much stronger resume.Burns also tightened Andersons chain of jobs and promotions to highlight the progress he had made in his career. For instance, at one organization, Anderson progressed through three positions transport manager, regional general manager and general manager of transport strategy. His original resume lumped together all three jobs, hiding the fact that he was promoted twice by the company. In another organization, Anderson started as sales manager and wound up as logistics director. Burns restructured the resume to reflect the progress and promotions Anderson had achieved.The summary approach cut Andersons resume nearly in half, from about 1,600 words to about 900 words Thats about as much as a person can digest in 10 to 15 seconds. What is left is a much more punchy resume.