Bracket Madness: 13 Tips for a Winning Resume

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basketball-1263000_1920Spring is here and you know what that means: March Madness.

Basketball brackets.

Extended lunches at sports bars to watch the games.

I’m not really into basketball, yet even I get caught up in “Bracket Madness”.

Now we are down to the Final Four.   While these are considered the “big games”, every game each of these teams played that led up to this point was pivotal in getting them to the Final Four.

Same with your resume. Each part of the document is pivotal in creating a winning resume, one that will help you land an interview – and ultimately, a job.

In light of all the ‘hoopla’, here are 13 tips for winning resume – Bracket-Style.

Go, You!

Bracket Madness

 

Does Your Resume Answer This Question?

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burger-760873_1920Have you ever read a book that seemed to list endless details about a character, or went to great lengths to describe a location, noting every little obscure fact?

You kept reading because you were confident there was going to be something exciting and worthwhile at the end.

Much to your dismay, the plot never thickened and you were left with of a bunch of inconsequential details instead of an enticing drama.

Basically, there was no real meat to the story.

Many resumes read like a novel without a plot, listing inconsequential details that leave the reader asking the question, “Where’s the beef?” 

The reason for this is simple: Most people describe their work experience as a series of responsibilities.

  • Financial responsibility
  • Staffing responsibility
  • Responsibility for generating reports

Wrong! And boring too.

Your resume really has little to do with your responsibilities and presenting it as such is a rookie mistake.

It has everything to do with your achievements.

Big Difference.

Hiring managers are searching for answers to the question, “How can you help solve my problems?”

They are not looking for a laundry list of your job duties.

How do you move from “boring list” to “interesting plot development?”  

Use action verbs with results that show what you accomplished.

Examples of phrases to use include but are not limited to:

  • “Saved the company $XX by …..”
  • “Improved operations with ……”
  • “Developed new plan for XX resulting in XX for the company”
  • “Grew new subscribers by XX% over last year, exceeding our goals”

Results drive the interest of hiring managers. They answer the question, “How can you help solve my problems?”

Right now review your resume. Anywhere it reads, “Responsible for…”, replace it with an action phrase that highlights your achievements rather than your duties.

We all should have at least one – if not several – quantifiable achievements for each job.  Accomplishments that show how you took action and made an improvement or delivered on a promise, even if it’s not quantifiable.

Make sure your resume has enough “beef” to attract the interest of hiring managers by answering their most pressing question: How can you help solve my problem?

 

 

5 Ways to Improve Your Resume In One Hour

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smart-watch-821557_1920If you’re anything like me, quite often you wish for more time. More time to finish a project, go to the movies, take a vacation, go to the gym, or spend time with family and friends.

You might say “falling back” with Daylight Savings Time is like receiving the gift of an extra hour. Despite my desire for more time, I have a love-hate relationship with this particular extra hour.

Love it because I get an extra hour once a year and the sun shines earlier in the morning so I’m not trying to pry myself out of bed in the dark. Hate it because it’s dark by five o’clock and it feels like midnight when I’m eating dinner at my usual hour.

Honestly, I will spend the next five months counting the days until we switch back and I lose an hour. I love the daylight that much. Not to mention I love warm weather. Hate the cold.

Right now, we’ve got an extra hour and we should use it to our advantage. Here are five ways to improve your resume in one hour:

  1. Add Social Media Links. Include a link to your LinkedIn page, as well as your website and other relevant social media accounts.  This is a good time to personalize your LinkedIn address too – www.linkedin.com/firstnamelastname. Reminder: make sure any links are live and connect to the correct page.
  2. Update Your Personal Statement. At the top of your resume should be your personal statement that tells the hiring manager who you are and what you can do to solve their problems.  If the top of your resume still says, “Seeking a job in X industry”, it’s time to start over.
  3. Highlight Career Wins. Show hiring managers what you bring to the table by sharing quantifiable success stories from each of your jobs. “Reduced operating expenses by eight percent in first quarter” or, “Developed and executed consumer program resulting in ten percent sales increase”. Show the hiring manager you mean business.
  4. Add New Skills or Awards. Did you take a course? Earn a certificate? Receive an award or other recognition?  Be sure to include any new skills, education or awards.  Remember, though, it must be relevant to your career.
  5. Out With the Old. There comes a time when our first job(s) need to be removed from our resumes. Same for irrelevant information such as street address (list only city and state), the words “cell phone” or “home phone” (simply list the number, preferably your cell phone), hobbies, personal information (age, height, political affiliation, etc.), anything related to high school, and the phrase, “references available upon request”.

Curate Your Resume

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Curate: a verb.

It’s an interesting word. By definition, it means “To pull together, sift through, and select for presentation, as music or website content”.

I often think of a museum curator, who must sort through hundreds if not thousands of paintings by the great masters like Da Vinci or Picasso, choosing only a handful for patrons to view. The purpose is to select the best of the best; to curate the collection down to tell a story in a limited space.

What a difficult job!

Right now I am trying to “curate” my personal belongings in an attempt to keep the best of my best.

Not because I need to tell a story with my clothes; simply because my goal is to keep everything in my closet in the bedroom.

I started out with the simple stuff: Hubby’s things. It’s easy to curate his personal belongings. After all, no one needs the 100 thing-a-ma-bobs I found spilling out of his tool chest.

Most difficult? Trying to curate a woman’s shoe collection. Ten pairs of black pumps may all appear identical at first glance yet upon closer examination it becomes clear that, much like snowflakes, no shoes are exactly alike and each serve a different purpose.

Hubby is shaking his head. This from the man with 100 thing-a-ma-bobs in the garage.

Curating my belongings is hard. I guess I’m just sentimental since each time I try to rid myself of an item, I remember when I purchased it or who gave it to me and I just can’t bear the thought of losing that memory.

Here’s another curating challenge that I bet many of us struggle with: the resume.

Our tendency is to over-tell our story. To share every detail of each job and sometimes to list every job we’ve ever had, which is too much itself.

Like too many clothes in the closet or too many thing-a-ma-bobs in the tool chest, too much information on the resume is not always the best form of presentation.

The key to being a good curator is to look at a collection with a critical eye; select only the best work and being strict enough to say “no” to the rest.

When it comes to our resumes we should do the same. This can be super-hard because it’s personal. This is our story of our hard work, and we want everyone to see it.

Plus, it’s difficult to determine what to keep and what to eliminate. The key is to remember that the resume is just one tool in the job search process, so use it to focus on the highlights; key points of interest that may entice the hiring manager to bring you in for an interview.

Some thought starters:

  • Review everything with a very critical eye, looking for the most important information you want to share
  • Hone your best success stories for inclusion on the resume
  • Say it with fewer words wherever possible
    • Even career veterans with a long work history should keep a resume to two pages; those starting out should have only one page
  • What are the three things you want the reader to know about you?
    • Start writing with this information; make sure each is clear and not cluttered with unnecessary information

Using these thought-starters, write your resume. Curate your information to provide a succinct presentation of your story.

Just like our closets and drawers become overstuffed and we need to curate our collections, our resumes can become overstuffed with words and information as we hang on to all of our work examples and stories.

Take time to curate your resume. You – and the hiring manager –will be pleased with the results.

If It’s Broke, Fix It

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Resume meme

Why do we always say, “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it”?  Seems like that statement sets us up for mediocrity, settling for something that might not be quite as good as it could be.

My guess is that we sometimes follow this path because it’s easy.  Change is hard, man!  It takes work and effort and time.  Not to mention the frustration we all feel during the “improvement” process.

We might not have this old saying if it was easy to come up with something new. Usually there are multiple iterations involved.  If we are developing something new at work, then there are meetings and committees and disagreements and setbacks and more meetings.

Fixing something is a pain.

Despite the pain or frustration of making improvements to something that already works, there comes a time when we must realize that adjustments need to be made.

Take our resumes.  Many of us – myself included – work diligently to get our resumes to a good point. The format is good, the wording is good, and we are comfortable with the result.  The resume has received good reviews from others and we’ve even secured interviews –and jobs – using this version.

It’s tried and true. Why would we want to change something that’s worked so well for us?

Because even tried and true solutions can get stale. 

As a career coach and mentor I’m constantly looking at resumes.  I find inspiration in some of them, particularly in formatting.  Many are in dire need of improvement, particularly the wording or the type of information included.  All of them serve as a reminder that while mine is good, it could always be better.

There is always room for improvement.  Yet it’s hard to get started making a change because it’s not easy.

And this may come as a shock to some, but it’s important that we tailor our resume to each job application using key words that may help secure an interview.  That’s right; a different version each time we apply.

If one version is difficult, multiple versions may seem like a nightmare.

In reality it’s not.  We develop a “base” resume with our information and then create separate versions that focus on different accomplishments.

For example, I have a version that better highlights my marketing skills and experience, and another version that focuses on my PR experience.  The differences are subtle but they are important.

Word of caution: be careful about getting too caught up in the minutiae. The goal is to develop an improved resume quickly so we can use it for interviews, our LinkedIn profile, etc.  It’s easy to get so obsessed with making improvements that we never arrive at a usable version.

Trust me; I know this all too well.  As a writer I’m never quite satisfied with my work and if given the opportunity I will always be editing.  There came a point when I was writing my book, Tales of the Terminated, that I finally had to stop editing and start publishing. Otherwise I would never have finished the book!

I challenge all of us to take a hard look our resumes and if it’s broken, fix it.  For some, this may be as simple as changing the font and/or format. For others it means letting go of some information that is no longer necessary.

The important thing is that we acknowledge that change is scary, frustrating, time-consuming and a pain. But it’s worth it in the end.

When It Comes To Resumes, Content Is Critical

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Christmas at our house was a big deal when we were growing up.  Who am I kidding?  It’s still a big deal to me and Hubby knows it.  He has a hard time trying to live up to the expectations established by my family, particularly my grandmother.

Grandma always gave good gifts. I mean REALLY good.  We thought she was super rich. Only much later did I realize that she carefully planned her money and preferred to give it to the grandchildren instead of spending it on herself.

What Grandma understood best was presentation; the drama leading up to the gift.  She knew that we knew the gift would be good and she wanted us to work for it.  We had been taught to be so polite that if we opened her gift and were disappointed, we still smiled and thanked her profusely.  That’s when the fun began for Grandma.

Like the time I opened a huge box with a beautiful large bow, only to find a pair of fuzzy socks from the dollar store.  I smiled and thanked her, wondering if she’d lost all her money.  She coaxed me to try them on; I thought she was nuts.  But I did as she asked.  To my surprise, I found a diamond ring sewn inside the toe of the sock.

Score one for Grandma!  She knew the content of the gift was more important than the fancy wrapping and let me discover a true diamond in the rough.

Resumes are a lot like gifts.  They can surprise a hiring manager by presenting a good picture of the candidate or they can disappoint by looking good yet lacking substance.

Throughout my career I’ve interviewed a lot of candidates, as well as helped students and others with their job searches – I have seen my share of resumes.   Resumes on different kinds of paper, with all sorts of fonts and creative interpretations designed to make them stand out in the crowd.  One memorable resume was a on a DVD – talk about making me work for the information.

I imagine most hiring managers appreciate efforts by candidates to be unique.  Believe me when I say that I’m right there with you in wanting to separate myself from the pack during the recruitment process.

The truth is it’s the content of the resume that’s important.  Just like a Christmas gift, the fanciest wrapping doesn’t always yield the best present.

Make sure your resume really tells your story.  Sometimes this is the only piece of information a hiring manager sees in determining whether or not to interview a candidate.

I know; it’s hard to write about yourself but you have to try.  Ask a trusted friend or two to review your resume and edit it.  I’ve done this before and have received great feedback.  Sometimes we are too close to the subject to have an objective view.

There are also certified professional resume writers who do this for a living.  Yes, you’ll have to spend some money, although it’s worth the price if it means finding your next opportunity.

Worst thing you can do is limp along with a poor resume.  I’ve seen some doozies over the years.  Misspelled words, date errors, including way too much information or irrelevant information, information that indicates age or even includes skills that may be outdated – and those are not the worst errors.

The resumes that are most difficult to understand are the ones that fail to tell me succinctly who you are, what type of work you are looking for and why you are successful.  A good resume helps me understand why you could help solve my problems and intrigues me enough to schedule an interview.

Remember, the resume provides a snapshot of your personal brand to the hiring manager.  While a resume alone won’t get you a job, it may open the door for an interview where you can shine in person.

Your resume can still look good. Just make sure the content lives up to the wrapping.