Career Warrior Podcast #268) Resume Do’s and Don’ts

Episode Transcript

Chris Villanueva 0:00

Hi. And welcome to the Let’s Eat, Grandma Career Warrior Podcast where our goal is not only to help you land your dream job, but to help you live your best life. Today, we have a minisode, where I try and answer commonly asked questions in 10 minutes or less. And today recovering resume do’s and don’ts, what are some things that I should be including on my resume? And what are some things that I should not be including on my resume.

But first, before we get started, I will recommend you to head on over to Let’s eat grandma.com forward slash podcast, you’ll not only find the show notes here, if you want a little bit more of a deep dive, but you can also find a free downloadable guide, where you’ll get bullet points you’ll get verbs and things like that to include to have a really good strong resume. So head on over to Let’s eat grandma.com forward slash podcast to find out that info.

All right, why am I qualified to do this episode? Well, I have founded an entire company predicated on resume do’s and don’ts. These are the standards that we’ve used at our company at Let’s Eat Grandma. It’s these standards that have gotten people hired. And we’ve learned really, what are the things that recruiters are looking for? Versus the things that turned them off? What are some things that generally? And you know, of course, we’ll make some exceptions every once in a while to the don’ts. But generally speaking, what are some things that should be removed from your resume? So it’s important to get your resume down, Pat, and I have to emphasize that, first and foremost, we’ll get to that breakdown in just a second. But I want to talk about why the resume is so darn important.

Having a strong tailored resume is one of the most overlooked parts of the job search. And it’s probably the reason why you’re not landing as many interviews as you wish you were, or at least the interviews that count. Your resume is more than just a formality. It’s a sales pitch. It’s an invitation to get you hired as a candidate, and recruiters want to immediately see why your experience is relevant, so they can quickly fill the role. If you don’t believe me consider that Glassdoor has reported that the average corporate job posting receives 250 resumes, and they have to fill these jobs quickly. Sometimes, depending on your industry, that’s the average number of candidates that you’ll be up against. And of those four to six are typically called in for interviews. So you might feel like the odds are stacked up against you. But rest assured that with these tips, you’ll be able to make your mark and get noticed.

According to a 2021 Sherm statistic, a new position takes an average of 27 days to fill. So as soon as you see that new position, you can bet that the clock is ticking, and you don’t have much time to submit your resume. And to get noticed, I have spoken to probably too many friends of mine who have said, Oh my gosh, my dream job was just posted on indeed.com, can you help me get my resume in shape. And by the time the resume looks in shape usually takes an overhaul and a little bit of tweaking, sadly, the job has already been filled. So I will tell you to get proactive and get your resume updated. Now to get your resume overhauled and looking like it’s in good shape. Before your dream job gets posted. You want to be proactive, because this is how you’re going to be able to beat the clock and make sure your resume looks in a great shape. Alright, so let’s cover the do’s and don’ts here. We’ll start with the do’s. I like to be positive here.

So we’ll start with the do’s the things to focus on. When it comes to your resume. I’ll cover four here. Number one, tailor your resume for every job description and optimize it for the ATS. This is a question I often get is how often? Or how much should I be tailoring my resume to the job description? The answer is as much as humanly possible. Now I’m not asking you to go crazy and to spend hours upon hours every single time he received a job description to adjust your resume to that job description for hours on end. No, I’m not saying this. But you should be doing a little bit of tweaking whenever you send out your resume to a specific job or a specific opening. Now with that being said, I do want you to already have a targeted resume that speaks to the position you’re generally applying for. So an example of this is if I’m applying for a customer success, Representative position across the board, I’m looking for those customer success rep jobs, then I should have a resume that’s already geared towards customer success.

And when I received the perfect opening for whatever job I’m applying for, say it’s a company based in Seattle. I’m like oh my gosh, this looks like an amazing job. It is offering all the flexibility I could ask for and their work culture is in alignment With what I want as a human being, then I already have that customer success resume ready to go. And then what I can do is simply tweak my resume a little bit to match the needs of that job posting. So this is what I mean by tailoring to every job description. I don’t mean going crazy and driving yourself nuts here. But I do mean tweaking and making sure that you’re the best match possible for the opening that you want. Second do is using active verbs. This is a really easy one.

But every single bullet point for the most part should start with an active verb, an action verb, if you will, so implemented, managed, supervised increased, these are all the action verbs or active verbs that I’m talking about a huge mistake a lot of job seekers are making are starting off their bullet points with non active verbs that they’ll say, was responsible for or responsible for dot, dot dot. And this is not the right way to start a bullet point because you want to show not only I think this is going to be better. It’s just more powerful phrasing. It’s more concise. But you want to show that you’re somebody who takes initiative, and you’re somebody who gets it done. And so make sure that all of your bullet points start off with action verbs, that’s a huge mistake a lot of job seekers are making is don’t include the action verb, but then the next bullet point will be passive. So make sure you’re doing that right.

Again, our downloadable guide, which you can download for free, should be able to help you out with that. Third thing to do is use accomplishment based bullet points. Oh my gosh, if I can pinpoint one mistake that if every single job seeker, if they stopped making this mistake, then the world would be a better place, and people would get hired to positions that matter more, it’s probably this mistake, use accomplishment based bullet points don’t just post job descriptions Don’t just post what you did on a daily basis on your resume. This is what most people are doing is they’re just posting their own job description on their resume instead of showing the impact they made for the company. So use accomplishment based bullet points. And a really good formula for this is to think about the task that you did, as well as the result.

So including the result, change that you’re able to affect for the company, however small, is something that I recommend all of you do, takes a little bit of soul searching a little bit of research, but I recommend doing this. And if you’re going to be lazy, if you’re going to fight me on this one, I just can’t emphasize this enough. And I think this is the one thing that’s not getting people hired. If you are going to not do this fully, then at least and this is an absolute minimum, at least make sure you’re doing this for the last position that you were in. So if you have been working for a company for the last three years, and it’s on your resume at the top, then make sure to focus on this by including accomplishments, and making it more focused on the outcome and the amazing things you did for the company. It should not just read like job description.

Unknown Speaker 8:09
All right thing number four to do on your resume is to spend more time on crafting a strong summary. The summary for jobseekers, for whatever reason seems to be this overlooked part of the resume, it’s oh, I need a summary. So I’ll string a few sentences together and make it sound nice in theory, but it doesn’t really tell me much. And so that summary section is really important because oftentimes, it’s the first place where you know, recruiters or hiring managers might look because it’s at the top of the resume. And it’s a really short and sweet way to get the point across. But in a lot of cases, people are just stringing together their sentences.

So I’ll ask you, what is the best of the best when it comes to the things that you’ve done? Why are you especially qualified for the roles that you are applying for? This is what the summary is for. We’re not expecting this super drawn, drawn out long summary, but just a few good short sentences, showing why you are an especially good candidate, why you are going to stand out. Alright, so those are the resume do’s. Let’s look at the resume don’ts. This is where I like to have a little bit more fun because these are just funny. Whenever I see people making these mistakes, I think you’ll laugh at yourself when you look at the fact that you have these in your resume. And now you don’t because you heard this podcast, but these are the things not to do on your resume. And again, these are almost like blanket statements. So 95% of cases this is going to be the truth. Do not include this in your resume. However, if you find in whatever situation you have, you know you can make an exception I understand that. But I’ll try to call attention towards those exceptions, but for the most part, you’re not going to want to include these things on your resume.

Tip number one are photos, graphics or any other fancy design element. Do not include this in your resume. In fact, unless you are applying for positions that are within graphic design, or these are really creative positions, you should not be including these things in your resume there. In fact, it’s going to work against what you’re trying to accomplish. Because recruiters hire people based on whether or not they’re going to be a match for the role they’re trying to fill. They’re not hiring based on how pretty graphically your resume is or how visually attractive your resume is. Again, if you’re in the creative industry, I might make an exception for you where you’re applying for graphic design positions. But don’t include these things because they end up detracting away from the content of your resume, which is eventually going to get you noticed. So that photo, because you downloaded a Canva resume Canva template, and they happened to have a photo on the top, do not include it, as well as the other elements. In fact, I recommend going to any other template, I think templates are okay, but you have to make sure that they’re ATS friendly and focused on the content.

First and foremost, if you want to know more about that head on over to Let’s eat grandma.com. And I’m sure you can find a really good solid template, or at least a blog article about that. But let’s not get too fancy here. Thing number two to not include on your resume are cliches do not include cliches. And I know this is one that oftentimes a lot of job seekers do because something sounds good, something like you know, team player motivated, or just any of the other things that are commonly repeated on resumes. What asked you to do as a rule of thumb is if it’s something that you just wrote on your resume, because you thought it sounded good, ask yourself did I just put this on my resume, because it sounds good. If so, then it’s probably a cliche, and it’s probably something that’s just taking up space and your resume. Instead, go through your resume and highlight everything that is fluff, so to speak, or everything that doesn’t really give substance, and instead, just cut it out altogether. Or if you could find something meaningful to replace it. But I’ll tell you that most of you probably have a little bit of your resume that you can probably cut out, that’s going to end up serving you in the future, if you do thing number three to not include in your resume. This is a don’t design inconsistencies. This is a rather easy one. And I’ll give it as a freebie for something that you can take, you know, maybe 10 to 15 minutes, and quickly fix in your resume, but it’s gonna make a huge difference is a design and consistency.

Look throughout your resume and see if there are inconsistencies and whitespace or the space in between the words or font. These are two of the most common ones. If you can find inconsistencies in your font or whitespace. And fix those make it consistent, then you’re going to be getting a leg up against all the other job seekers who did not pay attention to this. So look throughout your resume, make sure that the font is consistent throughout the entire resume. And the font size as well. You also really want to make sure that whitespace is also the same in between each section. So for example, if I have my top level sections, such as education, professional experience, skills, you know, the ones I’m talking about, and I have 12 points of whitespace in front of skills than I want to make sure that there’s 12 points of whitespace in between but in front of every single one of those sections, find a good template. If you don’t want to worry about this stuff, then I recommend working with a resume writer, or finding a good template that can take care of this stuff for you. There are way too many bad templates out there. And so I recommend finding the right ones.

Alright, the final don’t is adding unnecessary skills. adding unnecessary skills is one thing that can detract. In fact, it will detract away from your resume as you end up sending it out to recruiters and hiring managers here. A lot of people think that if they include every single skill that they’ve done in the past, if they just kind of data dump everything from their experiences, then it’s more likely to end up getting more interviews and attracting more people. Well, we’ve debunked this myth before in the past. And I will recommend and I’ll remind all of you that this is something that you need to not do, you need to make sure that you don’t have too many skills on your resume. The reason behind this is because people who are quickly scanning through your resume and again, they’re doing this in six to seven seconds in the very beginning. Oftentimes, they are looking for reasons to throw your resume in the trash. One reason to throw your resume in the trash is that you have skills and experiences that are not a good match. Again, this goes to the very first point we made within this episode is you want to make sure your resume is targeted for all the jobs you’re applying for. For a good way to not be targeted is to include all of the skills that you’ve acquired and all of the experiences.

So again, I recommend cutting out the ones that aren’t geared towards the jobs you’re applying for, and making sure to only include those necessary skills there. So Alas, we’re done. This is in a nutshell, these are the resume do’s and don’ts. I selected four do’s and four don’ts that I really spoke to me, I think that I think a lot of listeners in this podcast could really benefit from if you want the unabridged version, head on over to letseatgrandma.com/podcast, you could find our blog. And you can also find our free downloadable guide to writing better resume bullets. So again, head on over to letseatgrandma.com/podcast, I had so much fun doing this episode. And thank you for bearing with me with this list.

I hope you don’t feel overwhelmed. That’s not the goal of this episode, I’m not going to be like, feel overwhelmed. So you can go get a resume service. Really, I just want you to look at your resume and truly examine whether or not you are doing these things I mentioned and not doing the things that are under the don’ts because the world will be a better place if you are getting more relevant interviews and landing meaningful work. That’s my goal here. So without further ado, this concludes Let’s Eat Grandma episode 268. Thanks so much for tuning in. I will see you in two weeks from now on Monday, and I can’t wait to see you next time to live career warrior podcast and before you go remember, if you’re not seeing the results you want in your job search our highly trained team of professional resume writers here at Let’s Eat Grandma can help head on over to letseatgrandma.com/podcast to get a free resume critique and $70 off any one of our resume writing packages. We talk all the time on the show about the importance of being targeted in your job search and with our unique writing process and focus on individual attention. You’ll get a resume cover letter and LinkedIn profile that are highly customized and tailored to your goals to help you get hired faster. Again, head on over to letseatgrandma.com/podcast. Thanks and I’ll see you next time

Transcribed by https://otter.ai