Career Warrior Podcast #270) Why You Should Only Include 10% of Yourself on Your Resume

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. I’m Chris Villanueva the host of this podcast and co founder of Let’s Eat Grandma, a resume service designed to help job seekers, land more interviews. Listen up, you’re probably including too much on your resume. Yes, you I’m actually talking to you. Because you are an accomplished son of a gun, who has done a lot in your career. You are listening to this podcast because you’re a go getter.

And you’re listening this podcast because you are a career warrior. And with all of those things comes a great risk, which is the likelihood that you have too much on your resume. Well, today we’re going to discuss why you should only include 10% of yourself and your resume, and how that will ironically make you stand out. I sat down again with David Fano, serial entrepreneur and former WeWork executive. His latest venture, teal helps people optimize their job search by providing the level of tooling and infrastructure that companies have, but for the individual professional. In just over a year, teal has grown to over 65,000 users committed to advancing in their careers. You can also find out more about teal by heading on over to thq.com. And you can also find and follow David on LinkedIn by typing in David Fano teal on your LinkedIn search bar.

Before we get started, I had to just highlight this Let’s Eat Grandma customer who posted about us publicly. Gary says what a great experience, Lydia hit a grand slam for me. Two days after finishing my resume and LinkedIn account, I received four requests for my resume. The second one I received the job a few weeks ago, I consistently received two to six requests for my resume weekly. Thank you to everyone at Le G that’s Let’s Eat Grandma. Gosh, I have to just sit in gratitude and say thank you so much, Gary, for taking the time to post that review. I’m ecstatic for you as you embark on your next adventure. And we’re proud to have you as a part of our client base, we hope you come back to us for life. And I will say if you want to be a part of our tribe, and you haven’t used a resume service yet, have faith in check out let’s eat grandma.com forward slash podcast we do everything we can to allow our customers and give them the best experience possible. All right. Without further ado, this is episode 270 of the Career Warrior Podcast. Are Dave, I want to grab people’s attention. But the statement here one that I get excited about one that you’ve presented to me, but we should only present 10% of ourselves on the resume. Can you talk about what that is? And yeah, why 10%

David Fano 2:52
of using 10% as a you know, an indicator of a fraction of myself, right? How do we quantify what our percentage of ourself is, but you want to present a sliver of who you are. Because the truth is, we’re all good at a lot of things. But companies generally don’t want to hire a generalist. They value a generalist once you get in. But in the hiring process, they have an acute problem, they wrote a job description, they have a particular need. And if they could do this themselves, they wouldn’t be hiring you. They have a skills gap, a skills deficiency, they have a lack of abilities to execute on this thing that they think they need. Therefore, they open up a job. And they try to hire a person to expedite their ability to succeed by filling in these skills. And they have these needs. And so what ends up happening is that people generally approach the resume as here’s 100% of me, right? Here’s everything I can do. I can do some marketing. But I’ve also done some operations. One time I helped out in HR at the company, so I can do that too. And

Chris Villanueva 4:02
we call that resume boarding. It’s just you they stack on everything because you’re afraid to let go.

David Fano 4:07
And what they think is like they’re gonna see that thing, and they’re gonna make Oh, right, they have that one skill. But the truth is, that’s not how companies hire. And that’s not what people do. They don’t, it’s not a process in which you give the benefit of the doubt. It’s actually the opposite. It’s a process in which you benefit from doubt. And you need to apply as much doubt as possible into it because it can be quite damaging to let in a bad hire. So you this isn’t a place for you to take bets on people where you take risk that happens I won’t say that never happens, but mostly not the case. And so it is your job to show that you are highly highly qualified for that 123 things they need. And the chances are that is not 100% of you. So and this I think people struggle with this because it’s like I’m so much more than that. I know have all I spent so much time learning all these things. I can add that value, I can be so helpful. But then what ends up happening is you write a novel A biography, and people don’t have time for that, you know, they want to know quickly, can you help me achieve this thing I need to do. And so I give the example, I am a multi hyphenate, I am a person who is I am the book range, like I’m one of those people, I can 3d model, I can video edit, I can do a little bit of coding, I’ve can do sales, I wouldn’t say I’m like, world class at any of them. But I just like learning and so I can do a little bit of a lot of things. And if I put that on a resume someone to be like, there’s no way you’re good at any of this. Yeah, like you’re

Chris Villanueva 5:43
ever there’s like if I had $1 for every job. So if you said I am really good at a lot of things, then I would not have to do this job myself. Like this is seriously a common thing. So I don’t think it makes you special or unique, because every other job seekers like that, and instead, I would advocate for exactly what you’re saying, which is, pick one good thing to highlight on your resume focus on that thing, because that’s what the person’s the who’s doing the hiring is paying attention to

David Fano 6:11
and reinforce that, right? And it’s like, oh, I don’t want to be repetitive, no be repetitive, right? There’s these old things in marketing, it’s like, tell them, show them and then tell them again. And so just you know, but that’s like the same achievement. That’s okay. Right? If this company is hiring for an email marketer, show me time and time again, how You’ve crushed it an email marketing, how many subscribers you got, what that open rate is just reinforced that I have put out a role for email marketing, and you have presented a resume? To me, that shows me, yes, we are going to be good at email marketing with you on the team. And then sure, you’re gonna have all these other things. And it’s also some of those things can come up in the interview, that’s okay, there’s a time and a place to reveal some of these other layers, but don’t just volunteer, it only reveal it, when the company is saying, hey, it would be good. If we did, then reveal it, I think it’s also this kind of mind, I’m gonna put it all out there. And then the company is going to strategically select the things that they want. No, that’s just not going to happen. Do the editing and the curation. For I imagine a movie studio showed you every piece of film that they cut in a movie, and they’re like, hey, now you piece it together, what makes a great version of Avengers. That’s not what I paid for.

Chris Villanueva 7:23
Yeah, or even in your case, I mean, you’ve done so much in your career. I mean, with different jobs as a serial entrepreneur, you know, from we work to the next architect, like imagine if you put everything, but I’m sure you can draw from all those experiences. But I think we’re telling people to, like, look at it a certain way cut it, if we’re talking about the movie metaphor, but cut it from a certain perspective, that highlights a certain skill set, but one that you’re going for,

David Fano 7:47
again, the company did the work to write a job description. Now, there’s a lot of trash job descriptions out there. But they put out a document that, you know, that you can use as a way to base what you think they want. That’s all the information you had, like, look, you can do more research, you can like see where the company is if, you know, if a company just put out a role for growth marketer, but you see them doing layoffs, and the jobs still there, and you’re applying to it, you know, something’s a little funny, you know, read the tea leaves, and just, you know, think about the way you’re going to talk about it. So, you know, mostly can take a job description at face value as what the company thinks they need. And start from that.

Chris Villanueva 8:22
And I was gonna have a question for you. It’s I don’t know whether you have certain practices you advocate for it to but what are some best practices when it comes to? I guess we’ll call it matching the job posting with your resume? Do you have any things that you’d recommend that jobseekers do to maximize the interviews that they’re getting? Yeah, so

David Fano 8:41
I’ve been thinking a lot about this problem. And I’m actually trying to build some software to help with it is by this idea of qualified at the end of the day, you need to present that you are qualified. And I’d say qualified goes into main buckets with some subcategories. Bucket one is what I would call skills. And then bucket two is what I would call knowledge. So and then skills breaks up into technical skills, non technical skills, and then knowledge I would call domains and environments, and be mindful in the job description how the company is talking about it. And so like, in his example, as an environment, actually, I think a lot of companies really highly prioritize environment, you’ll see things like, Oh, you’ve worked at startups before. And like, this is a philosophical thing. Some companies really want you to prove that you have like the technical competence. Actually, it’s some people I would say this is at the hiring manager level. Some people philosophically believe, like, look, I can teach you how to do sales. But if you understand the medical industry, I can’t teach you that. So I actually bias industry knowledge, then I can teach you the tactical and again, there’s no right answer. This is truly at the hiring manager level I’ve seen because they’re looking for someone who knows how to sell. They’re really I can teach them any domain and that will usually come through in the job description, they will have a sort of semantic bias in things like good in the fast paced environment, good and when that could be a red flag for a crappy startup, but whatever, you know what I mean? Like they’re saying things like environments, you’ve worked with enterprise companies before. Those are all knowledge. But then it’s hard to like take a course on how to interact with enterprise customers like to know that you’ve experienced that in life. And then like more tactical stuff, so look for the way the company is talking about in skill form, knowledge form, which one do they have a higher preference for? And then talk about yourself in that way. You know, if it’s more of like the knowledge base stuff, We’ll then talk about your experiential knowledge about how I’ve worked in the airline industry, I get it, I get aviation, I understand the complexities of it, or I’ve worked in government, I understand that it works in a different slow pace. I understand procurement is long, that might be more valuable to someone that you know how to use salesforce.com Just look for how they’re talking about it and present yourself in that way as the way that that company is speaking about it.

Chris Villanueva 11:08
Wow, that was a lot. And I really love the insights that David shared 100% of yourself, yes, it’s too much. And we don’t want to overwhelm people. We don’t want them to drink from the fire hose, so to speak, and for them to get lost in why you’re applying for them in the first place. Get targeted, as we’ve always said. So thank you to David Fano, and the team at teal for helping to make this episode happen. And again, you can head on over to to hq.com To find out more about their career resources. And if you need a human being to write your resume, head on over to Let’s eat grandma.com forward slash podcast. We can’t wait to help you out. All right, this concludes it for today. Thanks so much for tuning in. And we’ll see you next time to let her rear warrior podcast and before you go. Remember, if you’re not seeing the results you want and 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