Nothing that you do should ever be arbitrary. That is what I was told in professional resume writer training. When writing a resume, every word, every bit of positioning, every design element must have an intentional reason — a purpose behind its use. Think about the value in completing a process, in which everything you do, every step you take is premeditated and not wayward. 

Do you think this methodology is reserved just for highly programmed code writers or artists? Perhaps, but there is a lesson in approaching pursuits both small and large with deliberation and with mindfulness. When searching for a new job or planning and following through with a career development decision, being random or inconsistent decreases your chances of achieving your goal. Getting what you really want and need from your work requires focus and sound decision making. 

Easily said and understood, right? Yet, the reality seems to be that most of us feel like we are chronically afflicted with attention deficit disorder when it comes to putting into action one of life’s most important undertakings — achieving a career of meaning. 

It becomes easier to approach career development systematically when you have a framework of best practices within which to operate. Professional people have all they can do to stay current and productive with their fields of expertise, plus all the activity life in general throws at them. Expecting that career management will come naturally or be fully understood with just conventional wisdom is not reasonable. 

Acquiring the necessary resources to comprehend the career process is desirable if you want control over the direction of your life. The good news is that the study of career development is not particle physics. You can prepare yourself or get a professional consultant to help. But either way, devising a customized plan that yields a career which optimizes life should be deliberate, purposeful, and not arbitrary. 

The issue arises, however, that just because we have the needed information to plan a career development direction, moving forward effectively is something else. Decision making, the base skill required, is a complex concept. How we orient ourselves to the world and its inhabitants and how we take in information both factor greatly in how we make decisions. 

It is helpful to reflect and to observe the way in which we make important choices. Just as there is no one optimal personality, there is no one best way to choose. But refining our skill in decision making is paramount if we are going to act strategically and not randomly. 

When helping clients think strategically about career related options, I like to get a sense of their desired outcomes. It is useful to know what kind of ball one is keeping their eye on. Achieving outcomes that lead to fulfillment, satisfaction, stimulation, and contentment can form the basis for individual strategic planning. 

Giving personal shape and meaning to these objectives is the first step in acting purposefully. Whether the goal is to simply extract pay and benefits from an employer or whether it is to satisfy intrinsic motivators, having a clear idea of what you want from your work is key. 

Sure, there is plenty to be said for the role serendipity and good luck play in how our lives go. But acting deliberately and shunning poorly thought out and arbitrary decisions can go a long way in helping us to live lives of full measure. 

Among the things in need of consideration when preparing your resume, especially if it is to be sent or posted electronically to recruiters or hiring managers, is having it ready to pass unscathed through Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). 

ATS are software applications for managing large volumes of recruitment, resume, and job application data. They may be a subset of a Human Resource Information System or a stand-alone app. Either way, an ATS is a database of recruitment data configured to the specific needs of the hiring end-user. Although in rural areas many resumes still make it to human eyeballs, you still must be prepared that it will be screened with an ATS. 

For the job applicant, ATS presents a particular challenge. Either ATS will accept or reject your resume. It should be expected that ATS will be designed to only accept resumes that contain keywords and phrases specific to the open job position. When using a single resume to try landing interviews for multiple job descriptions the applicant runs the risk of getting rejected too often by ATS, because their resume may not contain enough keywords and phrases pertinent to what the employer wants. 

Getting around this problem may require more work, but it is not unmanageable. The goal is to obviously have your resume address as closely as possible the job description to be filled, while staying true to your value proposition. Therefore, being mindful of keywords that make up the job description you are interested in should be included in your resume. If you notice a lack of keywords in your resume, then decide if the job is really a good fit for you or if your resume is inadequate. 

Following are some techniques to consider when getting ready to send your resume electronically to firms or agencies that require digitally formatted resumes:   

• Follow up your contact information at the top of page one with a well-written and terse professional profile or executive summary. It should contain keywords and phrases for the kind of position you are best qualified to perform, and which aligns with what the employer is seeking. 
• Include an achievement or significant accomplishments section, which is again sensitive to keywords pertaining to desired functions. 
• ATS are becoming more sophisticated and may include a contextualizing ability. When using keywords, include them in the context of skills and functions that demonstrate your knowledge and command of the job. Do not just insert a list of words. 
• Be wary of fancy text or graphics. They will not impress a machine and may confuse it. 
• In many cases, do not send your resume as an attachment to an email, but rather paste it right into the body of the email. The website you are responding to may specify file type. If you are given a choice between pasting and uploading, however, go with the upload. It will retain your resume structure more reliably. Do not be surprised that you may be asked to paste a Plain Text (.txt) file format into the message body. I recommend having your resume in three formats: Word (still the industry standard), PDF, and Plain Text. 
• Be careful of misspellings and abbreviations. They should be avoided. Assume the ATS will be programmed to pick up fully and correctly spelled keywords. And do not get cute with all capitals or all lower-case letters. Standard capitalization still rules. 
• When completing an online application, you may be asked to repeat information that you know is included in your resume. That’s okay. Fill in all fields, even if you are repeating yourself. 

With some care and attention to keywords and phrases you will increase your chances of having your resume and its accompanying job application make it to the all-important hiring manager inbox and avoid the screening filters of ATS. 

It has been reported that 32% of U.S. manufacturers are reporting skill shortages during the current Recession. Projections are that this number could increase to 62% soon. 

Corporations are also reporting that there is a lack of leadership talent from which to choose. Among the workforce areas claiming that jobs are available are in the skilled trades, sales representatives, technicians, engineers, accounting & finance, administrative & production assistants, and laborers. And this list is not complete. 

Despite an unemployment rate stuck at 10% one of the great ironies of the Great Recession is that there is a shortage of high quality and desirable job applicants. There certainly is no shortage of sad, demoralized, and desperate Americans begging to be hired. But when it comes to potential hires who meet the valued qualifications of many employers there is a dearth of possibilities. How can this be? 

Logic and supply & demand theory dictate that a necessary workforce adjustment should be occurring whereby industry needs are accommodated by a willing and resilient population of workers. Given these atrocious employment times you would think the migration of the unemployed to fill vacancies would be rapid. But it is not, and it is not expected to be anytime soon!   

So, what’s going on? At this point in time, I’m seeing two issues: 

Matching: Along with just about everything else in the 21st century the nature of work and the needs of industry are quickly changing. For potential employees keeping up with and being prepared for the new, innovative, and hybrid positions now in demand is not being efficiently handled. The skills needed are not possessed by enough workers. 

A requirement for any professional is to continuously build knowledge capital. If you snooze you lose. The better you know your industry the less chance you have of being caught unprepared. 

But industry too has a responsibility here. Identifying, recruiting, and developing talent creates win-win situations. Succession planning, quality onboarding, and timely training can enhance employees’ careers and company productivity. 

Both parties need to do a better job of discovering one another. 

Searching: Following from the above point is the issue of how these parties go about finding one another.  For many, the value and necessity of networking has just become apparent over the past couple of years. For those who have cultivated a rich set of contacts there is a relative ease in learning about new work opportunities, including the hard-to-fill positions. 

Yet, if you are not a great networker, and many people are not, you may be reduced to looking at job boards and other web site postings. I do not have to tell you how frustrating and ineffective that can be. 

So, a big part of the problem is that the means of searching for elusive positions are ineffective. Even networking can be hard to apply systematically. Good real-time ready and solution-oriented databases, which are dedicated to critical shortage job positions, are not yet there. If industry marketed more effectively what their hiring needs are in the short and long-term, then I am confident more of the workforce would prepare themselves to fill those gaps. 

Adapting to this Recession is difficult in many ways. One of the most egregious is in trying to accept that a) corporations are not allocating huge amounts of cash reserves to hire new workers, and b) that available positions are not being filled because talent is not being found. As a country we are suffering, in part, because we cannot seem to fit square pegs into square holes! Responsibility for remedying this mess should be shared. 

Workers, whether employed or not, need to do a better job of tracking industry current trends, projected needs, and best practices. Excelling in a rapidly evolving work environment requires nothing less. 

And industry needs to do a much better job of communicating in an accessible way talent and skill inadequacies, which will alert the American worker to this urgency and to where good jobs can be found. 

The pace of reconciling America’s unemployment dilemma needs to quicken. It is simply not acceptable for critical shortages and high unemployment to exist simultaneously. Solving this mismatch is everyone’s responsibility. 

A spot-on career choice can be judged as so because it results in certain outcomes. Among these is that a happy worker feels stimulated and continually interested in what they are doing, enjoys the compensation and recognition they receive, is content with a well calibrated work/life balance, and thrives on being productive. Satisfied workers do not have to be told to get busy. They are internally motivated to do so. 

It is no secret that employers want motivated employees. Companies get high productivity without the intrusive burden of having to implement excessive oversight and punitive incentives. Having inspired employees can make it easier for management to retain talent and maximize performance. Given these potential advantages and benefits it would be expected that recruiting and keeping these intrinsically motivated workers would be a high priority for company management. 

So, why does it seem that front offices miss the mark so often as evidenced by too many workers being largely unhappy with their jobs and who are just going through the motions to get a paycheck? The conventional attitude has been and continues to be among the general workforce that work stinks and is done only because it needs to be and is not because people love their jobs. 

It is in the interests of employers and employees alike to reverse this situation. To do so, it may be worth examining characteristics of the motivated employee at the workplace. 

To be fair, it is not simply a matter of employers alone creating a magical set of conditions which result in a motivated and positive workforce. Motivation, and its close cousin engagement, are the co-responsibility of employer and employee alike and should be delivered in equal parts from both. 

Regarding the individual worker, successful ones bring to the workforce an innate and compelling belief to be independently conscientious, dependable, and efficient. They want to do fascinating and highly interesting things and are energized by a sense of accomplishment. Driven by values and vision, the motivated working person strives to produce quality products and services that are desired by managers and customers alike — both to satisfy stakeholders and themselves. 

Fulfillment with career choice and direction comes largely from within and is not principally from what others can consequentially provide for them. These are the kinds of employees or contracted independents who add value beyond implementation of an organization’s stated business. They are keepers for sure. 

The obvious objective for companies is to figure out how to populate their workforces with as many motivated and engaged employees as possible. It should begin with management recognizing that motivation is at the core of performance and that they share in the responsibility of fostering it among their employees. 

In practice, this means partly devising the right mix of meaningful rewards and extrinsic motivators. Competitive monetary compensation, attractive fringe benefits, generous vacation time, family care and leave flexibility, job security to the extent that is possible these days, and internal and public recognition all significantly contribute to workforce motivation. 

However, employer facilitation does not end there anymore. There is an intangible consideration that more workers are expecting from their employers, and it involves sharing an emotional and purposeful connection that what is collectively being done at work matters. It is easier for everyone to feel as if they are being treated right when there exists a shared belief that the organizational mission and vision holds great value for others, the community, even the planet. 

For employers to actively express appreciation in as many ways as possible to their workers for participating in a common ambition will enhance employee involvement. Reducing or eliminating any discrepant gaps between an employer’s business and their individual employee’s career goals, including intrinsic motivators, will necessarily result in a high engagement and more productive work environment. 

When employers can begin moving away from thinking that the traditional carrot and stick, if-then, extrinsic-only approach to incentivizing is their only responsibility in creating motivated workforces and alternatively accept and embrace the internal drive, values, and career intent of their workers, then companies and organizations will yield more gain from colleagues who are only too glad to contribute.