DiversityInc - January/February 2009

help. Take the time to review it carefully. Make sure it details all the relevant work experience you’ve accumulated at your previous positions. Focus on words that illustrate leadership, initiative and achievement.

“I just had a client who sent me a one-page résumé and I couldn’t tell if he was a machinist, a customer-service rep, a tech-support person or a guy who did drywall because I saw all four of those on one page,” says Robinson. “It took a few minutes to figure out that the best job he ever had was for a position he didn’t even have on his résumé because someone told him to keep it to one page.”

Avoiding costly résumé blunders is just one key to landing that next job. Just as your résumé will be dusted off, your interviewing skills will need a good tweaking if you haven’t interviewed for a new position in some time.

“Like anything else, interviewing is a skill. If you haven’t done it in awhile, you’re going to need to practice,” Robinson says.

Put those networking contacts to work. Hopefully you were collecting business cards and making phone calls during your previous tenure because now is when you’ll put those contacts to work. “It’s really important to have a wide berth of relationships. You can never tell what can come from a relationship,” Margot Copeland, executive vice president and director of corporate diversity and philanthropy with KeyBank, told DiversityInc in an article about the importance of networking. “I believe you should never underestimate a contact or what that contact can mean and bring you in the future. Nobody is too big and nobody is too small. Everybody counts.” KeyBank is No. 33 on The 2008 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity® list.

Be prepared to answer “The Question.”

It’s easy enough to explain a long layoff caused by medical reasons or because your company went out of business. But how do you offer a reasonable explanation for getting fired?

Says Robinson, “You’re going to get asked during the interview. So have a concise, simple explanation for what happened. The best way to deal with the question is to be prepared for it.”

Recommended Reading:

Best seller

White Men I love,

White Men I Hate

By Chuck Snowden and

Genghis Snow

Chuck Snowden has written an outrageously now on SALE! honest book on race, racism, religion, sex, sexism, discrimination, politics, and human

weaknesses. In fact, he touches on every controversial topic imaginable in a rapid-fire, expressive style.

White Men I Love, White Men I Hate offers readers a unique glimpse of life and a thought-provoking look at the two very distinct and opposite views of the American white male from the standpoint of one Black male’s life.

This is not a book of biographies of the famous and infamous. Snowden is a skilled essayist and inspired storyteller who weaves his own personal experiences into his work.

318 pages 2005 Hardcover

sNOW01: $29.95 $19.95

Best seller

A groundbreaking work that exposes the twisted origins of affirmative action.

When Affirmative Action Was White

An Untold History of Racial

Inequality in Twentieth-Century America

By Ira Katznelson

When Affirmative Action Was White demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner.

Through mechanisms that specifically excluded maids and farmworkers and through laws that kept administration in local hands, the gap between Blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity.

The publication of this deeply disturbing work promises to create a national debate on the meaning of affirmative action and the responsibility of government.