Experience

There are so many highly skilled and well-qualified people looking for jobs that hiring managers can now demand a very close match between their imagined Ideal Candidate and the Human Candidates who have submitted resumes.  They no longer have to settle for hiring a “close match” that would demand resources to bring new employees to the point where they deliver value to the organization. 

Generally, the Ideal Candidate is someone who has done this exact job in an identical setting.  The old concepts of “transferable skills” and “on the job training” are dead.  The level of competition between businesses is simply too great to allow very many resources to be dedicated to bringing new employees up to speed. 

If you know what the hiring manager is looking for you can present yourself as someone who can meet those expectations from the very first day on the job.  And that is what the experience section of your resume needs to do.  You need to integrate the hiring mangers vision of the Ideal Candidates employment history into your employment history.  That history should describe what the hiring manager imagines the Ideal Candidate doing for his company in the future.

I’m not suggesting that you make up things in that are not true.  Instead, use words, phrases, and concepts that match the culture of the organization to which you are applying.  Your goal is to package, position and present yourself in a way that shows how closely your history, background, experiences relate to the target organization.  You want to give the impression that the culture of the organizations you have worked with in the past is a lot like the culture of the target organization, and that you are like the other people who work there as well.