• Sales manager to financial advisor
• Restaurant manager to training and development manager
• Quality assurance specialist to human resources generalist
• Communications specialist to instructional designer
• Marketing manager to adjunct professor
• Travel agent to customer services manager
• Chemical engineer to organizational development manager
• High school English teacher to content writer
Once your career direction is clear after working through the first two sections of this book, you can follow these steps to approach your resume.
Step 1: Set the current resume aside and start fresh!
Step 2: Disregard the chronological resume format. Use a functional resume format, placing emphasis on “Accomplishments” and “Skills” sections at the top of the resume.
Step 3: Base the new resume on the position being pursued and use the job posting or description as a resource. Include your identified transferable skills and experiences. Current and past job titles are not relevant—strengths and achievements are.
Angela is one client who changed career paths.
Angela’s Story
Angela was an elementary teacher whose second home was a museum.
She came to me completely burned-out from teaching second graders for twenty years. She loved the interaction with youngsters but was fed up with all the administrative responsibilities. When I asked her to imagine herself in a perfect role, she immediately smiled and said, “I have always seen myself as either a librarian or as an educator in a museum and teaching children.”
Her love for children and teaching came through—loud and clear.
We researched her options and located a few museum educator positions. I customized Angela’s resume so it would be keyword rich and achievement-based. Then we tackled her LinkedIn profile, where she connected with recruiters and directors of museums to manage a children’s science museum on the west coast.
Angela’s story is certainly inspiring! I (Kristin) agree with Patricia that if Angela can do it, you can too. I specialize in career transition and have clients who were told by recruiters it would not be possible for them to transition from their current career to their new career target. Yet they have. The recruiters were partially right—transitioning to a new career is much less likely if you present yourself in your current package. It’s all about how you position yourself!
Next, you’ll hear from storyteller extraordinaire, Kerri Twigg. Kerri will help you develop a different frame of mind as you consider how you want to showcase yourself in your resume as she teaches you to authentically tell your story.
Kerri began her career in the arts where she worked as a drama instructor and playwright, both of which inform her coaching methods. Stories are powerful, and Kerri is an expert who can help you capture and hold the attention of those who read your resume.
Your Resume Tells a Story by Kerri Twigg
I’m romantic about resumes. I think they are the single most important document in a professional’s life, which is sad, considering the state of many people’s resumes. It doesn’t need to be that way.
Before I meet with people about resume development, I have them do two things.
Use Index Cards
First, buy a package of index cards. Write down an accomplishment story from your career every day on a card, one per day, for the next seven to ten days. Some people can take these instructions and run with them; others need a few prompts. Here are some prompts I recommend.
Write down a story about a time you helped a coworker.
What was the biggest impact you had on an organization?
When did you have flow at work, where it seemed that time stopped and this flow allowed a great thing to happen?
Tell me about a time you left work feeling awesome about what you did that day. It can be teeny or huge. Describe that day.
List Jobs That Attract You
Next, I ask clients to find and send me three to five positions they are attracted to. It doesn’t mean they have to apply for the jobs. I am looking for clues about what their desired job includes. Often people will select job descriptions where they don’t even want to work, but they want to sound like the kind of person who has that job. I use the job advertisement as a map to explore other stories with my clients. I take apart the job ads, find common elements, and send a list of questions related to those job ads to my clients.
You can do this yourself by selecting three to five ads you are drawn to. Look for common words, phrases, or ideas. What do you like about that word, phrase, or idea? Why would you thrive in that environment? What words from that ad could you start weaving into your everyday language so it becomes a part of who you are?
Leave Your Comfort Zone
I work this way because job search requires laser focus and strong targets the further you get into it. Job seekers try to blend in and make a safe resume from the beginning. Safe resumes don’t get read. If I can work with a client from their core stories and find their transferable skills, we can play with a lot of input as we develop the resume. We aren’t starting the process from a limited place. We are starting from a possibilities view.
Tip: If you have followed Kristin’s career exploration process, look at your preferred, motivated skills and write down stories about each of those pieces for this part of the process.
Working with Stories
After the stories are down and clients have answered additional questions relating to the job postings they shared, we have a meeting. During this meeting, I ask them to share their stories aloud with me so I can get a feel for their language. I use this to write their resume.
I am a playwright and see each client as a character. Their objective is to land a certain kind of job where they get to use their top skills in their ideal environment. Everything needs to sound like them. I think one danger in hiring a resume writer is that you can feel that the resume looks great, but it needs to look great and sound like you because you are the person going to the interview, not your resume writer. Your stories are the foundation of your job search.
You can do this on your own by recording yourself talking. You can even speak out your entire resume and then edit it into accomplishment statements.
Keystone Resume System
My favorite way to work with resumes is to create a keystone resume. This is where all your stories, job postings, education and community involvement go into one master document. This document might be ten pages long to include all your accomplishments. The keystone resume is a living document, so once you have created it, you can keep adding to it for your entire career.
For example, if I had three stories about helping a client, I would add them to my keystone resume:
Story A: Story about helping a client with a resume
Story B: Story about driving through a snowstorm to help prep someone for an interview
Story C: Story about a client who got a 40% salary increase based on the resume
I add categories to my keystone resume and then when a job comes up, I choose the best story to tell them. For example, if a job came up with Virtus Career Consulting, I would think about the values and personalities of the people on their team. I think they would be most impressed by the driving through the snowstorm story, so that is one story I would choose to tell.
If a university were hiring someone to teach resume writing, I would choose Story A.
After you have all your stories down, it gets easy to select the rig
ht ones to share each time.
Here’s how.
When a job comes up that you want to apply for, you look at:
• What the company says they want
• What words they keep using that you’ll want to integrate
• What angle you’ll highlight in your resume
Then, using that lens, select stories from your keystone resume to populate an ultra-focused resume for the position. You choose stories that company will care about based on your research on the role and reading the job ad. You just copy and paste the stories over to your resume, play around with the summary to make sure it is a match, and you’re done.
Throughout your career, keep an email folder called “great job” and save any thank you letters or words of praise in it. Schedule time every quarter to add new material to your resume, and you will always be prepared. Chance favors the prepared!
From Weak to Wow
While the keystone resume creates a great system, the core content still needs to be great. You can move a resume from weak and ignored to people saying, “Whoa, wow, they are perfect!” with just a few changes.
• Always tailor your resume. I am not joking. Always tailor it. The payoff is worth it.
• Know your angle before you start writing. Decide on what you want to emphasize and stick to the script. You are not trying to tell the hiring person EVERYTHING. You are trying to tell them enough to get them to call you. Save something for the interview rounds.
• Show personality. You don’t need to crack jokes in your summary but give a taste of your soft skills and how you work, instead of all facts.
• But not too soft. While soft skills are necessary, having numbers to back up your work adds tremendous value.
• Do the ex-test. If an ex-partner or friend saw this resume, would you be proud? Does it sound like you and celebrate your best career accomplishments? If you feel shame about it, keep working. Your resume should be something you are proud and eager to send people.
• Check the flow of the document by acting it out. Read each section and act out the punctuation. Walk as you read the words, come to a full stop at periods, and hang a leg in the air with commas. Does the resume have flow, or is it a bunch of short choppy sentences? Play around with sentence length and structure to ensure it is enjoyable to read.
Next, we’ll hear from Kamara Toffolo as she walks you through the anatomy of an amazing resume!
The Anatomy of an Amazing Resume by Kamara Toffolo
Just like when you’re trying to find the best chocolate chip cookie recipe, when you ask your peers and colleagues for advice on resumes, you’ll get varied responses.
“Add pecans!” says one friend. “No, never add pecans. Add extra brown sugar,” says another. The advice you receive for resumes will be even more diverse.
At the most basic level, a resume is a marketing document. It sells your unique value while also telling your story.
In this section, I will dispel some ambiguity, clear up some myths, and discuss a few best practices for writing a resume that stands out from the crowd and gets noticed.
Stop Sweating Applicant Tracking Systems
The two most common resume questions I receive from job seekers are:
1. How do I work with the Applicant Tracking Systems?
2. What template should I use?
My answer to both of these questions is always: Keep it simple.
In a nutshell, an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is software used by hiring professionals to make the job application review process more efficient. But efficiency for employers means fear, worry, and confusion for job seekers.
Many job seekers get too hung up on the ATS and beating the bots, so to speak. If your job search strategy lives and dies by the ATS, it’s time to reassess. Nothing beats the bots like solid relationships and investing your time and energy in human connection.
There’s a lot we can’t know about how the ATS is used at any given employer. What we do know is that keywords and structure matter.
To uncover appropriate keywords, analyze job postings and identify the skills that strike you as important. List the skills you have in your skills section (more on this later).
This brings us to the next point—templates.
Pretty Templates Aren’t Your Friend
You’ve probably seen them on Pinterest or possibly Instagram—really aesthetically-pleasing resume templates that use colors, borders, panels, or more. But that’s all these templates are: easy on the eyes. Don’t fall into the trap and invest in a template just because it looks good.
ATSs have difficulty digesting over-designed resume templates and the designs detract from the content and important information.
In today’s competitive job market, a clean and simple resume layout is critical. Statistically speaking, your resume has six seconds in front of a hiring professional for an initial review to determine whether to interview you or send your resume to File 13 (read: the trash).
So, what does clean and simple look like? Let’s dive into some detail.
General Structure: Two Pages or Bust
I believe that resumes should not exceed two pages. Page limits on a resume shouldn’t be seen as stifling but giving you structure. Even CEO resumes I’ve written fit comfortably in this structure. A page limit helps you prioritize what’s important to include and what’s not.
Where I deviate from this rule of thumb is when the job seeker has work experience of five years or fewer. If you have only a few years’ work experience, just use one page. Hiring managers appreciate brevity!
If you’re having trouble trying to polish a dated resume, stop! Earlier, Patricia recommended starting fresh with your resume and for me this was, well, a breath of fresh air. Trying to iterate a resume that you drafted when you were graduated from college, now as a senior manager, just doesn’t fly—especially if you’re making a transition. Scrap the old—it probably wasn’t working for you anyway—and start anew.
Resume Header: Call Me Maybe? Make Contacting You Foolproof
The first text to grace your resume should be your name, followed by your contact information. There should be easy access to your contact information, which includes:
1. Your location: City or metro and state or province will do. There’s no need for your full snail mail address.
2. Phone number: Include only one number if you have multiple, but make sure it’s the one that you’re most likely to answer and that it also has voicemail.
3. Email: Level up by hyperlinking your email address to give a reviewer a one-click option to email you.
4. LinkedIn Profile: Most recruiters use LinkedIn to source candidates. Make finding your profile easy for them.
Tip: For help with hyperlinking an email and LinkedIn profile, check out my video on this topic: https://youtu.be/biEKkjPoq-U
While you have a handy header option in word processing software, you don’t want to use it for your resume header. Let me explain.
Resume headers should go in the body of your resume to accommodate our friend, the ATS, to ensure that your contact information is processed. Sometimes an ATS has difficulty reading information embedded in the header section of a document.
Here is an example:
Another detail you can indicate in your header is any willingness to relocate or any relocation plans or preferences, especially if you’re applying from outside of the job posting’s city, state, province, or even country. They’ll know that you’re committed to moving, if needed.
Professional Summary: Tell Them About Yourself (Short and to the Point!)
&nbs
p; After your contact information, you should include a brief paragraph that summarizes who you are as a professional. This is where you get to use adjectives to describe your strengths. A frequent hang-up for job seekers when they’re trying to write a professional summary section is that it often can feel boastful. But rather than trying to self-describe how amazing you are, include what others have said about you.
Patricia posed the question, “If I were to ask your manager or colleagues what your top five strengths are, what would they tell me?” This is a brilliant question in the way it’s framed. By asking the question this way, although the answers are coming from you, they are validated through an external lens and sometimes reflective of actual feedback you’ve received. This allows you to dig deeply into your self-awareness and powerfully uncover how awesome you really are!
Here are some professional summary examples:
Career Transition
In this example, the summary explains the return to school to obtain an additional degree, yet specifies any transferable skills from the individual’s past positions that match the needs of the desired role.
Recent College Graduate
In this example, the summary emphasizes academic credentials and areas of strengths. Internship or coursework can also be emphasized if work experience is lacking.
Lateral Career Move
The individual in this example is seeking a lateral move in operations management. The emphasis is on this individual’s experience, which matches the requirements in the job description.
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