[wavetossed]

If you don't get enough interviews in a week of sending out resumes and cover letters, rewrite the resume. Week after week. During interviews you will learn what you forgot to mention, and you should get a sense of what is best left out. Resumes need to be short. They need to sell you as a solution to a company's problems. They need to leave out a lot of details which can be filled in during an interview.

Hone that resume. Try several different versions targeted to different types of jobs. Carefully write your cover letters based on the job ad, and with the intention of getting an interview.

A resume is not an employment history so don't include any more of that than is necessary to be conventional. Leave out the summer jobs in highschool if you are older than 25. Focus on achievements, projects completed. Tell them how you helped your employers over and over again.

And weave lots of technical terms into the text so that it shows up on a keyword search. But do leave out useless keywords like COBOL and VMS.

Don't say your age, and be careful not to inadvertently disclose your age by saying that you worked X years with Y technology which we all know was obsolete in 1995.

[toadi]

VMS and COBOL are still good keywords at my current client. they even offshored COBOL development and trained COBOL developers in the off shore to make sure they still have qualified people supporting and adding to application(s).