Trust me, it’s different now.

Laid-off? Sure, it happens.

Downsized? You bet!

Fired? Unfortunately, it happens every day.

We tend to take our foot off the gas pedal when life is good. We stop updating the resume. We get out of touch with what’s happening in the world. We allow our skills to atrophy. We think that our job needs us too much and there is no way they could function without us. We buy new homes, cars, clothes and jewelry.

We get a little cocky and we take our situation for granted by thinking this roller coast will never end.

If that’s not your story then this is – you worked there so long because you didn’t like the other options and you didn’t make time to try to learn a new skill, trade or more education. I undersand life gets in the way. One year has turned into several and the company has announced cutbacks

Or maybe you are just tired and want to do something new.

What ever the case, the job market has changed in the last 5 years so just imagine now you have social recruiting to contend with and increased competition since the recession – people really did go back to school learning trades and earning degrees in order to position themselves higher in the food chain.

You’re lost now and need some help. So here it is. The resume is not dead at all and  you need one – an updated visually attractive resume that will get you noticed. That’s going to be your biggest weapon.

You also need help with your social persona because now over 50% of all employers look for you on social media and if you aren’t searchable, they become suspicious. Suspicious that you are too old school and not open to new things. Get on LinkedIn.

Recently, I did some crowdsourcing – crowdsourcing is when you ask the “crowd” that you are connected to – in this case I asked my Facebook and Twitter connections (mostly HR and recruiters) this question. “What percentage of resumes would you say are bad?” and the response was “65 to 95%” (the lowest was 65 and the highest 95).I believe it those numbers because most of the ones I get are bad and nearly all of them can be improved.

I look at it like your mobile phone – each year a new phone comes out which is better than the previous version. Your resume is the same way it needs to be update annually.

Here’s a free tip: If you wrote your resume yourself, it’s probably bad.

Many of you are thinking you don’t need help and if you do you will just call a friend – like it’s that easy. Even with friends, chances are they aren’t happy with their own jobs and they are getting asked by a bunch of other friends for help as well. Keep in mind if you have poor resume credentials it’s even harder for a friend to refer you because they don’t want your lousy resume to reflect negatively on them with the boss.

Since it’s been so long since you’ve searched for a job, do you even know where to look? Monster, Careerbuilder and Linkedin, but what about Simplyhired, Indeed, Jobs.com, Glassdoor, the Ladders, Jobvite and the most important one of the all, the unpublished – informal job network.

In every community there is an unofficial job network which basically consists of emails sharing the latest job openings. Many of these jobs go unlisted. You have to network to find that information – network to get work!

The game has changed and its gone all social now – so are you ready for the new age in social recruitment?

Join the Resume Crusade – contact me ‘[email protected]’