Career Warrior Podcast #273) Answering HOTTEST Reddit Questions for Resumes

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 answer commonly asked questions in one concise episode.

Well, I went back to Reddit today in which my love hate relationship has never been seen before on the internet. And I’m going to answer the hottest resume Reddit questions that have been asked. And man, these questions are hot. They’re so hot, in fact, that my friends at Siracha are cowering in fear. These questions are so hot that Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney had to take a lesson out of their book. And these questions are so hot that Nelly had to write a song about it in 2002. And I’m not even a dad yet. And I am rolling with the dad jokes. You’re gonna hear questions in this episode, such as? Is it okay to mention on your resume that you left the job due to personal illness? Are there ways to incorporate stories in your resume that can grab attention? And is it okay ever to lie about my job responsibilities? Some of the questions that you’re going to hear feature today. And before we get started, I just wanted to shout out our review of the month. Quinton says about Let’s Eat, Grandma are lovely resume service, awesome resume service, my writer took the time to get to know me and my professional goals before building a new resume and cover letter for me. While many services just use a generic template for their documents, I felt like my specific skill set experiences and circumstance were taken into account when building a resume that showcases all of the things I bring to the table highly recommend. Thank you so much Quinton, for your review on Trustpilot. And if you are hankering for a good resume, if you just can’t do it yourself, it just takes too much time. Or it’s just not working for you head on over to letseatgrandma.com/podcast, we have a really good deal for Career Warrior Podcast listeners. And more important than what you’re going to spend on a resume service is going to be the pain that we take out of the process, as well as the results you’re going to see faster with getting more interviews. Alright, just want to preface this by saying that these are questions that I found on Reddit ones that I really liked, and ones that were actually upvoted a lot, actually. So these are really good questions. I also want to preface this by saying that I got kicked out of the board/resumes subreddit, I want to say in 2018, and two really sad sob story. That’s why I have a love hate relationship with Reddit. But I guess I was just trying to promote the Career Warrior Podcast back in the day. And I was just trying to get the name out. And the moderator was like, you can’t put links in here. And you know what, fast forward four years later, look at me now Reddit moderator, the podcast is doing pretty darn good. And I didn’t need you. Nevertheless, I love Reddit and the types of questions that are asked. And you know, I found a lot of inspiration through finding out you know, what are job seekers really wondering how can I help job seekers to get the things that they want in need, which is a good job. So here are some questions that you listeners will hopefully find it valuable, and it will help propel your job search forward.

Alright, so the first question is, Is it okay to say that you left a job due to mental health issues on your resume? This is a really good question. And it comes from little twink. Love that name. It’s kind of funny, actually, what I would say is be careful with this. I was even asked this during a live event one time and I get it. You know, mental health is incredibly important. And especially with everything that’s happened in the last few years, believe me, there are plenty of reasons to have left your job due to whatever issues that you may have had. Now, with that being said, just be careful. Remember that this is your resume that we’re talking about. And, you know, I’ll tell you, we are all empathetic creatures, you know, mankind or humankind is empathetic when it comes to understanding each other. When it comes to your resume. However, I will say it’s a little bit different. When we are in the resume mode as a recruiter or a hiring manager, we have the really tough job of quickly and I mean very quickly, filtering, sorting and distilling that candidate pool until it’s just a few people. And when you include something like this on your resume, there’s always the chance that a flood of curiosity and actually call it a negative curiosity will come through. People might ask questions such as well, what was the mental health issue? How bad was it? Will this affect their future at the job I’m trying to hire them for? This is just the natural tendency of humans to have some sort of bias or to ask questions that may not be relevant because you included something like this on your resume. Now again, I’m not taking away from the realness of of your illness or the issue, I believe that mental health has become and should become less of a stigma over the years. However, this may cross over into TMI territory, especially for the resume stage. Now the interview is the only point I might consider opening up a little bit more if somebody asks you about it, say, Hey, why did you have this career gap? Or why did you leave this position, but even then I recommend leaving the issue as general as possible. Again, you don’t want to cross over into TMI territory. So you can include phrases such as personal matters, or family medical issues, which I think are perfectly acceptable. In fact, it would be inappropriate for anyone to ask like, Okay, well tell me more about this personal matters or family medical issues, what was it specifically? If they do then they are done, but I would try to leave it just as general as possible there. But a really good question MLS. All right. So the second resume, Reddit question comes from calculated careers. And shout out to you because you had a great question about storytelling. How do I include storytelling within my resume? Well, it’s easier said than done. But when it is done, and it is so effective, because stories are what lands interviews, whether they’re actual drawn out stories, or concise ones, such as the ones in your resume, every bullet point has a story behind it. So when crafting bullet points, under your professional experiences, I recommend using an exercise called the car technique, car stands for challenge, action and result. So think about the challenge you had at a job and think about the action you took to meet that challenge. And think about the result pretty much came after you took action. So an example of that, in a bullet point could be streamlined curriculum, resulting in double the number of course registrations while maintaining educational content. So the implied challenge was that you had to streamline the curriculum, because it probably was inefficient. This probably was a really tough thing that your school was dealing with. And the action you took was that you streamline the curriculum, and the result was doubling the amount of course registrations. So this tells a story. No, it’s not this drawn out once upon a time Disney thing here. But it is a really concise way of telling a story under a professional experience, it actually takes me as the reader through what happened or at the time. Another example of a bullet point that uses the car technique is implemented new CRM for a sales team of 100, resulting in 20% increase in response time. Again, the situation was that your sales team had a very clunky system to manage your leads, and the action you took was implementing a new CRM, don’t forget to include the result. This is one thing a lot of jobseekers forget, which is resulting in a 20% increase in response time. In this case, it’s worth it to find out those numbers and it’s worth it to really dig in and explain what happened.

As a result, this is actually what gets interviews and what intrigues the people who are looking at your resume enough for them to call you into the interview. Alright, so the third question comes from Laddie V. 00. They asked is leaving out a title on my resume. Okay, is leaving out a title on my resume? Okay. Yes, but be careful is my response. In this situation, laddie had three positions under the umbrella of one company. And they felt that one of their titles didn’t really do much. So they wanted to remove the title, and say that they were there at their more recent title for longer. So just sort of extending that last position. First of all, good instinct, I will say that you can and should shorten your resume to the most important stuff. Sometimes, you know, even job titles are irrelevant, and you might want to cut those down. However, be careful, because if you’re going to shave off titles, you never know, if somebody is going to run an employment verification check. There are companies out there that do this, of course, and you don’t want to come across as dishonest. So if you’re going to shave titles, I would actually recommend putting dates next to your company to show how long you were there at the company. But removing those dates from your specific titles. This will actually give you the freedom to remove the roles but it won’t put you at risk of unintentionally lying on your resume. So really, the tip here is this is a good blanket tip here. But write your resume with the context in mind of somebody running an employee verification check. You never know whether it’s going to be done. People have called me up plenty of times as a manager or business owner asking whether somebody’s resume was true. They’ll actually killed line by line with their resume and I’ll have to say yes or no if something was true, so be careful here but It’s okay to shave things off as long as you don’t accidentally or truth or intentionally lie. This is a great segue to question number four. I’m not even going to say who the fourth question was, because I’m going to go off on them a little bit. But they said lying on job responsibilities, is it okay to lie on job responsibilities? For example, if in this Reddit question, the job seeker wanted to show that they had an experience or skill for longer than they actually had, so it’s not a bold faced lie, like, I was a manager when I never was a manager a day in my life, but it still is a lie in and the less so first of all, employee verification, employment verification checks aside, if that’s not even a concern for you, just ask yourself, what would happen if I was put on the spot and asked to explain this skill in an interview or perhaps in the job that you ended up getting? I’ll tell you, the truth is always coming out. People can always you know, us, humans are really good at sniffing out BS. And in this situation, your BS might come out, which would be the worst possible thing. And I’ll just tell you on a completely different level, that this is not really the job seeker culture that I would like to manifest as the owner of a resume company. I don’t want people exaggerating or lying on the resumes and then all of a sudden, we have this culture of job seekers trying to get ahead of each other by just lying on their resumes. And it’s just this thing that everyone does. So I have to do it, too. That’s not the case here. Always tell the truth on your resume, you know, give your best to the best show why you are the best person for the role. But at the end of the day, you’re just shooting yourself and everyone else in the foot by including a dishonest resume essentially here. So don’t inflate. Don’t exaggerate. Just show why you are the best person for the role by highlighting your strengths. It’s all be honest here. Alright, the final question I’m going to go over today comes from Jay ball 8890. Stay at home, mom returns to the workforce, please advise.

I love this question. And even if you’re not a stay at home mom listening, I think that there’s some wisdom in the question. And hopefully the answer I’m going to give is going to help with your situation. So let’s look at the context of the situation. We had somebody who took the time to do a very noble thing, which is be a stay at home mom to raise the kids. And they wanted to return back to where they were before they were a stay at home mom. So questions that come to mind are you know, what’s the best resume format that I’m going to have or that I need on when I’m applying for jobs? How do I make my resume stand out and show that I am a qualified candidate. So I recommend for a lot of people who have a big honkin gap or they had to make a big change in their career is either going functional either having a functional resume or a hybrid between a functional and a chronological resume. I can’t go into this podcast on that that would take way too long. But you can check out our blog, we have a blog article, a really good one on how to write a functional resume. And what’s the difference between a functional and a chronological. So I would say that, and also you need a really strong summary statement, you need to grab someone’s attention at the very top of your resume, not necessarily with your professional experiences or your timeline. But with that summary at the very top, I think that’s your biggest area of opportunity there in your resume. I also would mention this in your cover letter, unapologetically, just include a line or two about you taking time to raise a family and now that you’re enthusiastic, ready to return back to the workforce, in the role that you are now going to be seeking here. And perhaps this is career coaching advice. But I would tell you keep doing and know not just learning not just taking courses on Coursera or LinkedIn courses, but actually do the stuff that you’re going to be doing in the future. I know you’ve done it before in the past, but a lot of the times people want to see relevance and today, so do whatever you can to get active in the field that you are seeking to return back to. So if I am looking to go into product management, and you know I need to get back into it, maybe I’ll go ahead and start a consulting business for you know, this doesn’t have to be a full blown 40 hour a week thing. But a consulting business where I help a few select people doesn’t even have to be for a lot of money, really, but I’m helping people with their products essentially. So go out, get active because these are the types of things that are going to sound really good in an interview and it’s going to get you back up and running in order to end up landing your dream job. Alright, hope you found this episode to be useful. I definitely had fun in going back on Reddit and just scrolling and seeing what people were asking but these are really good questions and I hope that you’re able to take these answers and apply them into your own job search. situation, make sure to post this episode on LinkedIn. If you’re active on LinkedIn and tag me connection request me on LinkedIn. And please leave a note that you’re a Career Warrior listener, I always accept the invitation requests when that is mentioned there because I love connecting with fellow warriors. Again, this was a really fun one. Thanks so much for tuning in. And I’ll see you next time 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 leteatgrandma.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