Guest Post on Resume and Interview Preparation

Because sometimes we all need a little help, I thought I would ask my father who is an expert on resume and interview preparation to write a guest post.  Having run his own Job Training Partnership Act program in the 80s and 90s and now holding department chair at College of the Canyons in Hotel and Restaurant Management, my father has trained thousands in resume and interview prep. I don't throw the term "expert" around lightly, but the man is truly an expert on this topic.

Resume and Interview Preparation According to Professor Kevin Anthony

I always begin my interview preparation classes with a simple question, “What did you give your
last employer for free?”

Rarely, has an attendee given the correct answer to this question.  And it is at the very core of preparing a resume for employment.

Make no mistake, resume, interview preparation, job search and the rest are more closely related to sports than to academia and in sports you are far better served by practice.

First off, resumes need to be prepared in tandem with the interview.  Resume preparation books that focus solely on the construction of the resume so often disconnect from the interview.  We need to do them both together so that we are not putting interview statements on the resume and slipping resume statements on the interview.

For example, one of the most common mistakes of doing resume work on the interview is when the interviewer asks, Why should I hire you? And the applicant responds by explaining what their skills are.

Trust me, if the interviewer does not have a good sense of your skills they would never interview you in the first place. One of my clients went to an interview and when she was asked why the company should hire her she explained in detail what her skills were and the interviewer smiled politely and responded, “I know that from your resume; if I didn’t think you had the skills I would not be interviewing you.”

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In answer to the first question, (What did you give your last employer for free?) everyone who receives a paycheck is basically being paid for the work they do — not their time. Everyone gives their time to the employer for free.  Your time is not compensated for.  For my students that do not yet grasp this concept I ask them if they would work for me at double their last working wage.  They always agree to that offer and then I tell them that when they work for me they will have to sit in a chair in an empty room, alone and do nothing.  They look at me as if I am crazy. They ask, “But, what do we do?”

“Nothing, just sit there.”

Nobody wants that job to sit there and do nothing even if you are getting paid double your current wage.
At this point they have opened a door and I ask, “So, you are willing to work for half the pay I offered instead of twice the pay for doing nothing.”

Then I close the deal with, “Time is an investment and cannot be bought or paid for.”

What is a good investment of your time? Creating relationships, achieving a goal? What about education?  Is that a good investment of your time?

When I ask students if education is a good investment of their time, I always get a Yes answer.
Can a person learn in employment? Of course, they can. Good, what did you learn in your last employment?

Answer this question and we can begin to construct your resume.

Stay tuned for more resume/interview tips or check out this book and get started now!