Elevating Your Resume Game
Prior to creating the Strategic Career Planning: A 10-Step Guide to Realizing Your Potential training program and becoming a prolific mentor, I primarily helped my friends and colleagues in their careers by writing and updating their resumes. Resume writing is challenging for most people. The difficulty lies in being able to capture the essence of what makes you stand out from other candidates (experience, education, accomplishments, etc.) and doing so in a way that makes it through the bureaucratic and often impersonal human resources vetting process.
As is often the case nowadays, there is no shortage of candidates for available jobs. The last time I advertised for an open position in my department, we received dozens and dozens of resumes. During a pandemic and worldwide economic downturn, the competition has grown even more. As such, the human resources department at many companies will use software to search resumes for key words as a means for whittling the many down to a manageable few. For those applying online, and who lack personal connections at a given company, playing the “key word” game with your resume is a must. If you don’t have the right key words in your resume, your resume will likely get round filed (moved to the virtual trash can). You will find those key words in the company’s job posting and description.
For my clients, I recommend staying away from the computerized, online application process as much as possible. We focus on three areas:
1) Networking, networking, networking. The best way to a hiring manager’s desk is through the recommendation of a well-regarded fellow employee within the company. You want your contact to forward your resume to the hiring manager, accompanied by a note of personal endorsement. This is why it is vitally important to generate and maintain a strong network of professional contacts. And by professional contacts, I do not mean someone you happened to meet at a mixer three years ago who handed you one of the 50 business cards they distributed that night. A professional contact should be someone with whom you have developed a professional relationship, who is aware of your particular skill set, the projects you have worked on, and why you would be a great addition to their company. Follow up on those mixer business cards with an email or a hand written note. Go to lunch with them and learn about their projects first. Find ways to help them achieve their goals. In the process they will learn about your work history, they will see your unique skill set, and they will feel a sense of ownership over your long-term success.
2) Format matters. I call my resume the “Holy Grail” because I believe it has the power to grant eternal employment. Whenever viewed, the clouds part, angels sing, and the reader is bathed in a warm, heavenly light. Actually, the format is just really eye catching. I don’t use colors or a picture of myself or anything like that. It is all about layout, fonts, and the use of bold to capture the attention of the reader. Luckily this format was bequeathed to me by a trusted friend who spent literally years perfecting it. He did so only after I took a blood oath to never give it to anyone else—at least not in Word format. Even if you saw it in PDF form (the only way I ever send it), there’s no way you could replicate the various fonts, line spacing, and margins. The reason it stands out so much is that most people make their resumes based on a template that they found on the internet or in a word processing program. This is fine as a starting point, but we must remember that pretty much everyone else is doing that as well. The trick is to develop a personalized format that looks different, catches the readers attention, highlights your most cherished accomplishments, and does so in a way that allows you to maximize the amount of information provided while not turning the reader off by appearing too verbose. If someone is going half blind looking through a stack of hundreds of resumes, you want to catch their eye and make them say “Ooh, look at this one! I’ll give this one an extra few seconds of my attention.” That is where content comes in.
3) Content is key. Recruiters, hiring managers, and—most importantly—prospective bosses, want to know what you’ve done. That doesn’t mean that they want a list of your duties at your previous jobs. They can generally assume those based on your previous job title. What they want to know is what added value you bring to your job. What impact did you make? The more quantifiable the better. Did you reduce costs or generate revenue? If so, how much? Did you grow the business by 25%, reach 1,000 customers, or improve customer satisfaction scores by 62%? Were you recognized for your achievements, either by the organization, a professional society, or the local media? My recommendation: A short paragraph describing the scope of your responsibilities, followed by bullet points outlining your key accomplishments. Keep it pithy, but don’t short change yourself by being too brief. Managing content and format is a delicate dance.
Do these three things correctly and you will have accomplished the goal of resume writing: Getting from the big stack to the little stack (those who will be granted an initial interview). Next, we’ll prepare for the interview…
In the mean time, if you need assistance with your resume, please reach out at aaron@galvanizedstrategies.com
