Building Your Resume
Introduction
Resumes are an essential part of the job search to master. Your resume will determine if you get that first interview or not. Unfortunately, most people don’t know how to build an effective resume and so while they might be a great fit, fail to convey that to the recruiter. In this chapter, I will explain how you can build a resume that is effective at doing what it needs to do: convey fit in a clear and easily searchable way to the recruiter. We will cover Philosophy of a Resume, Resume Structure Philosophy, Standard Resume Structure, Styles of a Resume, Written Content of The Resume, and Resume Creation.
Philosophy of a Resume
Understanding Your Goal - Effectively Convey Fit
The first area that job seekers go wrong is thinking that the resume should be a summary of their work experience so far. But the real goal of a resume is to convince the recruiter or hiring manager that you could be a good fit for the job and are worth having a conversation with. This means you will need to read through the JD, research the company, and identify the things the company is looking for in the right candidate. Your resume should look to emphasize those parts of your experience that align to clearly convey you are a fit.
Understanding Your Audience - Intuitive and Quick Information
If our target audience is the recruiters and hiring managers looking at resumes, we have to understand the circumstances under which our resume is being evaluated. When a recruiter has to review potentially hundreds of resumes for a job, they cannot spend much time digging deeply to find the information they need to determine fit. So the better you can make that information clear and easy to find, the more likely you are to land that first call.
I will cover how we can use tricks like understanding the valuable real estate of a resume that gets the most attention, using keywords from the JD, and using a clean, clear, and easily searchable format can make it easy for recruiters to identify fit.
Build a Resume Specific for Each Job
Because the resume needs to show your fit for the job you are applying for, you should always update your basic resume to be more in line with that job. It could be as simple as identifying the words that each company uses in the JD and using the same ones. But the idea here is any job you apply for means you will tweak your basic resume to emphasize the parts of your experience that the company is looking for in the right applicant.
Don’t Lie
The strategy of tweaking your resume to be a better convey fit for the role is to highlight the experience that is relevant and make sure it is easy for the recruiter to find it and understand your degree of experience. It is not to pretend you have skills and experience you don’t have.
If you do lie, this will either become clear during the interviews and you will have wasted your time and the company’s, or, even worse, you will get the job and then be in way over your head, fail, and get fired later.
Resume Structure Philosophy
Clean layout
You need to look professional. Appearance matters.
Knowing the Value of Different Real Estate
Some parts of the resume are going to get more eye traffic and you need to know which ones those are and optimize there. Mostly the professional summary, the first job listed, the first line or two of each job outline.
Making Information Easy to Find
A well laid out resume makes information easy to find. Clearly label each section. Make sure to include important information the recruiter will want to know. For example, if there are skills necessary for the job, there should be a skill section and those skills should be prominently featured earlier in the resume layout.
Include the Information Needed to Understand Your Abilities
Recruiters don’t just need to know the skills you have but the level of those skills. Whether you are listing skills in the skills section or talking about them in your work history, you should always give information that conveys your level of mastery with that skill. “SQL” is not nearly as good as “SQL - 2 Years” or “SQL - Advanced”.
Standard Resume Structure
Heading
Name and Contact Information. Should look clean.
Professional Summary
The single most valuable piece of real estate in your resume and you should treat it as such. This should summarize the main points you want to convey in your resume. Basically, a recruiter should be able to read this and say, “this person sounds like a great fit and I want to read more of their resume to confirm.” I highly recommend using as much common language from the JD to explain your fit as possible.
School Experience
After you have 2 years of work experience, put your college at the bottom. College is only relevant if you are just graduating and want to show a relevant major and a high GPA.
Small aside: I have very strong opinions on how our college systems are already dead and useless and people are starting to catch on. I talk to many entry level applicants just coming out of 4 years of undergrad and can’t explain basic things like how to be well organized, how to communicate effectively, effective processes for learning, what they want to do in their career, and a standard approach for solving problems. These are basic things colleges should be teaching and the fact that they are not means they are completely failing our students. Not to mention they are putting an entire generation in debt right from the start of their careers. As a recruiter I can tell you I basically pay no attention to college unless the applicant is right out of school, and even then it is only a very small part of what I consider. I am sure I will write a blog on this at some point and will link to it when I do.
Work Experience
The first job is your most visible and therefore most read and most important. Jobs DO NOT have to be in chronological order. You want to put the job that is most relevant to the role you are applying to at the top. You can still keep a good structure by breaking your work down into categories and putting the most relevant category first.
The first line or two of the job description is the most important and most likely to be read. The first line should summarize your work and your accomplishments. From there, you can go into more detail.
When you list your experience under a job, it should be in bullet points. Do not use a full paragraph. Paragraphs are hard to read quickly, and don’t do a good job of laying out clear points.
Skills
If you are in a technical profession like engineering, business analytics, or any another role that is looking for a technical proficiency, you should put the skills after the professional summary.
For skills, I think it is important to include your skill level. Just putting “SQL” tells a recruiter nothing about how much mastery you have.
Even in seemingly non technical jobs, skills can also be important. Knowing how to use things like Gsuite, Slack, LinkedIn, Excel, and even Google Search are important. Sales people have things like Hubspot and Salesforce. Recruiters use applicant tracking systems like Greenhouse and Lever. But for these roles, I would probably put skills later in the resume.
Blog, Portfolio, or Personal Website
If a candidate seems like a fit and they have included a link to their personal blog or website, I will almost always take a quick look. You can learn a lot about a person by the content they put out on the internet: what they are interested in, what they think is important, the quality of the work they are doing. I also have a lot of respect for people who create content like this as it is not easy and not many people do it.
Projects/Papers/Publications
You should only include these if you are just getting out of school or they are serious contributions to your field.
Volunteering
Do not include this unless you are just out of school and limited in experience or it is somehow relevant work experience to the job you are applying to. Probably better to lump it under interests if you want to include it.
Interests
I like this personally. It gives a little bit of personality to the resume. I am not saying spend a lot of time on this section, but if you actually do things besides watch netflix in your free time, you should throw it out there. Who knows when you will run into someone with similar interests, or it could give the recruiter something to chat with you about during the small talk part of interviews.
Resumes Should Be High Quality
This should go without saying, but a good resume should look clean. Everything should be clearly labeled and organized. Take advantage of headings, bold, italics, bullet points and lines to make sections clear.
There should be ZERO mistakes. No misspelled words, no incorrect grammar.
ALWAYS PDF! If you send a doc file, there is always a chance the formatting will load incorrectly. There is nothing that is more of a turn off than a resume that loads in weird and has big gaps or ugly formating.
Styles of Resume
Basic
Good for people with 10 years or less experience. Standard format with professional summary at the top, skills if relevant, jobs with summaries, school at the bottom, and any extras like interests, hobbies, volunteer work, or side projects at the bottom.
The Experienced
For job seekers with more than 10 years experience, I think there is a lot of value in summarizing your experience more and leaving less information under each job. Again, you want to make the resume easy to read and find that information and if you bury it in pages of job summaries, the recruiter will not be happy.
The Creative
If you are applying for a role as a designer or some other creative field, it is very strongly suggested to build a creative resume that is not just text but with graphics and visually appealing elements. This is simply a great way to show off your creative ability. I would still use all of the fundamental principles we talked about earlier in regards to which parts of a resume to include and the hierarchy of resume real estate. I would also say that if you are in some sort of creative discipline, you should have a blog, personal site, or portfolio that showcases your best content.
Written Content of The Resume
Broad then Narrow
The first line of your professional summary and the first bullet point in each work history should be a strong summary. After that, you can go into more detail. For example, for the start of my professional summary, I might write “A full life cycle recruiter for 6 years, I have built and run recruiting processes that effectively assess, engage, and hire high value candidates for seed to late stage tech startups.” For the first line of my last job I might write “At this seed stage company, I built and ran the full candidate life cycle, driving 35 high value hires in an 18 month period for all departments and levels across the business.” The following lines will go into more detail and you will see examples of this in the following sections.
Information Dense
All of the words you use in each sentence should convey meaning. For example, “I sourced candidates” is boring and doesn’t convey much. “I drove top of funnel by sourcing high value candidates using tools like LinkedIn Recruiter and leveraging bullion” conveys a lot more information.
Use Concrete Examples
The more you can cite specific numbers and results of your work, the more clearly the recruiter will be able to understand your ability and success. For example, “Over my year and a half with the company, I personally was responsible for 35 new hires, ranging from C suite, SVP, Director, and entry level roles across software engineering, finance, product management, marketing, and operations.”
Not Just What, But Why
I think it is really important to also give a glimpse of the philosophy that underlies the actions that you take. We will get more into this idea in the chapter How to Explain Your Work. For example, I might write “I believe that to hire quality candidates, companies need to sell and engage through the recruiting process. To this end, I developed a deep understanding of the company value proposition and always work with hiring managers to understand what would make these opportunities attractive to the right candidate.”
Not Just The Skill But The Experience Level
Especially if you are applying for a skill based job, it is important to be clear about your experience with that skill. Just listing SQL under skills is very nebulous, but if you put “SQL - 2 Years” or “SQL - Daily User” or “SQL - Beginner” that already tells me way more.
Resume Creation
How to Build a Resume from Scratch
Writing process could be a whole other chapter that I write, but a quick summary is as follows: Start with an outline. Put together an outline of everything you think could be important. You can use the previous sections on parts of a resume as a starting point and fill them in.
Build that into a rough draft. I would suggest finding some resume template online and fill in the information from your outline. Don’t worry about high quality at the start, just get something built.
Iterate between outlines and drafts. My personal approach to writing is to outline, draft, outline, draft until I get to a draft that feels comprehensive and well organized. Then I start to polish it up. The idea is you keep distilling down and clarifying the parts of what you want to say and the things that evolve through these iterations are important and well defined by the end.
Polish. Once you get to a final draft you like, really go over it. Have other people read it and give thoughts. Make sure that it has no errors and that audiences find the information you are trying to convey clear and powerful.
Build Targeted Resumes
As I have mentioned before, it is important to tweak your resume to be relevant to the role you are applying for. You can use your base resume and just rewrite or reorder different sections. I would recommend saving each one of these resumes separately as you will probably be applying to similar roles and will find you can often use past tweaked resumes as a better starting point than your baseline resume.
Conclusion
Ok so we cover a lot here, but hopefully this level of detail will help you build that ideal resume for the job you really want to land. To reiterate, our goal with each resume we send out is to effectively convey to the recruiter that we are a great fit for that role. This means a resume that focuses on demonstrating fit in a way that is easily searchable and understandable. We want to leverage our understanding of high value real estate, use common language, and provide relevant information. If you do that, recruiters will be able to understand your fit and you will be much more likely to land that first interview! Good luck!
