So today, let’s talk about three big keys about the resumes, do’s and don’ts, but really great techniques. And I’m going to get into some really good detail here about what you should be thinking about as you write your resume, where this came from. I don’t know if some of you caught it. Yesterday, I did a segment on one of Chicago’s popular morning TV shows, The Jam. They’re going through jobs. Jobs month in September, the producer called me a week or so ago, wanted me to come on the show, which is tons of fun. I love doing the morning talk shows. And he looked at me, and said, ” Hey, Hey, we’ve got jobs month going on.” My executive producer told me I needed to call you.
I looked at your stuff. You talk about everything. Is there anything in particular that you want to speak to our audience about?” And I said, Yeah! Resumes. People hate writing resumes. It’s terrible. It’s difficult to do. People often struggle to articulate themselves in the best light. Let’s talk about that. He said, ” Great. Give me three points. So I did. I talked about them yesterday in a three- or four-minute clip, but today you’re going to get tons of detail. Let’s get rolling. The first thing I want to talk about in resume writing is: how does someone look at your resume? Now, a lot of you who have been following me for a while, you know I got a lot of stuff out there on resumes.
We’ve got videos. I’ve got a great webinar. I’ve done several other special things related to the resume. But… Resumes are not read left to right and top to bottom. People don’t read resumes like they read a book. Keep in mind that the employer, the recruiter, or some human resources official is opening a resume and looking at it very, very, very quickly. The first place their eyes go is to the top center of the resume. They’re just trying to get a feel for who you are. So I want to talk about what that means for you. If their eyes go to the top center of the resume initially, it’s like your smile.
It’s like the first thing that they see— beaming bright, saying, ‘You are going to love looking at my resume.’ Or are you going to fall flat? And I’m going to show you a few samples of what the top of a resume can look like. But this is really important: you grab their attention first. So top center, top center, top center. You need to be thinking about what that will look like. Now, this is so critical. Actually, I want to spend most of our time today on what to do and what not to do. First thing, let’s talk about what not to do. What not to do. Under no circumstances does it matter if you’re a college student or a pro. Do not include an objective statement.
I have absolutely no idea where objective statements came from. None, mind you. Uh, it never made sense to me at any point in our existence why anybody would put something they want on a document intended to show what you offer. An objective statement is typically what your objective is in seeking this job, in your career, whatever it might be. There’s no place for that on the resume. There are other vehicles you could use, such as the email, the cover letter, or other approaches, but definitely no objective statement. For both students and professionals. professionals, your education should also not be the first thing somebody sees. They’ll get to it soon enough. Even if you’re a college student, resist the temptation to put your education at the top.
Your degree is no longer a voucher for anything. You need more. Employers are looking for more, so you’ve got to give them more upfront before they get to you. Your education. The other thing that you shouldn’t do is not go right into the current company that you are working for. I’ll explain in detail why we don’t want to do this, but if this is your place to shine and show them who you are in all your glory, at least at a summary level. Starting with where you’re currently working answers the question ‘Where are you now?’ And then they’re going to have to look through the rest of the resume to figure out who you really are. So don’t put your company in there.
We’re going to talk more about that. I’ll give you some more clarity on that. Don’t put tables. Don’t put tables. Anywhere in your resume, but especially not at the top. Especially not at the top. Tables are… are boring. They oftentimes don’t include the right information. Applicant tracking systems don’t like them. So don’t put tables up at the top in whatever you do. And nowhere in the resume, but especially not at the top, should you be putting any opinions about yourself. So these are things like those meaningless buzzwords. That says that you are detail-oriented, a strong communicator, a leader, or whatever it is that you think you are and may very well be, but on a res- resume, you need evidence to back that up.
So don’t put those words anywhere. Please include evidence in your resume to show the employer that you are detail-oriented, a great leader, organized, or whatever else it might be. So those are things that I don’t want you to do. Now I want to talk more conceptually about what’s going on at the top of the resume. Some people think, well, I need to have a lot of white space there. It’s more pleasing on the eye. You know, people have a difficult time if there’s a lot of text there, skimming the text, and I’ve been told that I should list my skills at the top and all of that stuff. Now, let me answer a few of these for you very specifically.
I want to show you something about skimming. And this might be a decent way to do that. Look at this sentence. I bet it doesn’t take you but a mere two seconds to read that. Or that. Can you make that out? If you can make that out, give me a hey in the chat. Say whatever you want. But you could read that sentence without a problem. Absolutely, absolutely no problem. So imagine, let me go back to my face for a second. I’m assuming you can read that. Imagine what a trained recruiter can do. With a few seconds, when those words are spelled correctly, and they see hundreds of resumes a day, day in, day out, for years and years and years.
So you guys get my point. But if I know what I’m looking for and you are giving me the right kind of context to frame it, I can pick that up in a nanosecond. So trust me when I tell you, this is what I’m talking about. And now imagine these samples I’m going to show you. And I want you to just for a second. Think about how you feel, just about the way they look, and the content that you’re going to see. Let me switch back here. But let’s take a look at. John Smith. What do you know about this guy? He’s a senior project manager. See all that other stuff? Look at all that. To me, those three words— ‘senior project manager’—were really all I needed to know.
It was all I needed to know because all that other stuff below, all that other stuff below, is stuff that any project manager would know, especially a senior project manager. I already know that, so I wouldn’t even spend any time looking at it. What about my girl Jane here? Look at Jane’s profile. So, in Jane’s instance, please cut me some slack here, too, because I had to frame these together, and I made the font bigger at the top because I had more real estate to do that. But assuming that all of these were the same font, and you took a look at Jane’s. Jane’s profile. Look at her. So when I look at this, I can see senior project manager on the left, information technology, Fortune 500.
Financial, healthcare, software development, 500K, 2 mil, 525. I could get all of that in one or two seconds, and I am going to love looking at this resume absolutely. And below that, she has a paragraph on core competencies, if you see it. Notice how, in John Smith’s case, in the table I just listed the same 12 things. Now, here’s the interesting part. In John Smith’s case, I just blew by it. In Jane’s case, she held me up at the top because I wanted to soak in that first paragraph. Like the way the text reads, she’s got rich words in there. I can already tell there are more facts and interesting words than buzzwords.
The second paragraph, the second paragraph, I want to go back to … I want to go back to me. The second paragraph, in the Jane Doe one, where she had the two little paragraphs—I wouldn’t even have read that. I wouldn’t even have read that. That’s okay. That’s not the point. She already had my attention. And she had laid the foundation. Which, if I had read the second paragraph, would have made the second paragraph believable to me. John Smith didn’t do any such thing. He, he gave me nothing. So I have to buy that. So now he basically wasted two and a half inches of his resume telling me nothing. Some people, however, might read Jane’s second paragraph with the core competencies in mind. They might look to see.
Does she have anything out of the ordinary? But you know who’s going to read that? Paragraph 100% of the time. the computer, the applicant tracking system. Remember, resumes are not solely for people. They are for hopefully people. That’s the goal: to get them to the person, wow them, and then get the interview. But you, a lot of you, are also going to have to get them past the applicant tracking system. Well, the applicant tracking system will pick up the second paragraph of the second example, Jane’s example. The applicant tracking system won’t recognize the bullets in the hidden table in the Microsoft Word doc you looked at. Applicant tracking systems don’t like tables. They don’t like graphics. They don’t like acronyms.
They don’t like a lot of these things. The research has shown this. Many of the tools out there support this and educate us about it. My experience reviewing over half a million resumes tells me the second one works more effectively. My informal interviews with hundreds of my clients tell me that. Surveys that we run with side-by-side samples of resumes and ask people to choose the preferred format tell me this, and the applicant tracking system tells us this. This is why the top center of the resume is so important. If you think for one second that you are repeating yourself… Jane Doe put together a profile that immediately got me excited and gave me a frame of reference for what I’m about to read. She put my bias on the positive side because now I’m excited.
John Smith, on the other hand, put me to sleep. And it’s, you know, when I have to go through all these resumes, if I’m a human resources person or a recruiter working for a company, I’m getting all these. It’s just, it’s not exciting to me. I’m not in a great mood when I get down to the rest of your resume. But Jane gets the benefit of the doubt. So, you get to control the narrative. Plus, for all of you career changers, for all of you that are staying within the same types of jobs, but maybe you want to get… Back to your roots—or something you did three or eight years ago—you can pull a lot of this stuff forward. This is why it’s so important to have a career profile.
You get to say whatever you want to say, up top. The top, center, stay away from those things that I told you to avoid, and this is more in line with what I would do at the top center. All right, let’s talk about point number two. There are lots of formats out there, and I have always, and will always, favor the chronological format. Technically, the reverse-chronological format is used for the work experience section of your resume, or the professional experience section. Whatever it may be. That means you’ve got the company name at the top left of that section. You could include a line or two about what the company does and what you do within it. Then your title.
And then your responsibilities. And then your previous title, those responsibilities, and so on. And then, the further back you go in time. Those companies list those out in order as well, so that your first company or the longest ago company that you have on your resume, whenever you decide to cut your resume, is at the bottom. There are other types of resumes. You guys have probably seen them or heard of them: the skills-based resume or the functional resume. A skills-based resume highlights the skills you have. So in John Smith’s example, where he has project management, quality assurance testing, or whatever, he might call those out and then highlight the companies that he worked at. That’s where he actually gained those skills. The reason those styles and those layouts are ineffective is number one.
The second question an employer asks after ‘Who are you?’ is ‘Where are you?’ First, I mean, think about it. All of you are senior people, you’re in my programs, you’re in my community, you follow me, you email me, and you comment on my stuff. I know you’re in your 40s, 50s, and 60s, and many of you are hiring people. Think about when you get a functional resume. What’s the first question you want to know? Where are they now? Or where were they most recently? And it’s very difficult to tell. So employers, hirers, HR people, recruiters, whoever it is, they like to see that chronological order. It shows them the evolution. The other thing…
What the skills-based or functional-based resumes do is raise suspicion in the recruiter’s mind, like you’re trying to hide something from them. As a matter of fact, I—I kid you not—when I get a functional resume, the first thing that goes through my head is, “I now start looking at what they’re trying to hide.” That’s actually where my attention goes. Think about that. You’ve now put me in a position where I’m looking for something bad, like an unemployment gap. I don’t mind if you have a gap in your employment history. Show me where it is. So just really, really stick to the chronology. It’s much easier. It’s much easier for everybody to follow.
Now, the third point I want to make is about how you articulate yourself in the bullets or in the sentences you write, whether it’s in the career profile or in a career highlights section for those of you who have the Andy Lasavita template. But I also want you to focus on your accomplishments and your benefits. I’m going to give you a sample in the PowerPoint of what I mean. Employers, and I say this a lot in my resume writing programs, it’s not just good enough to show them what you did. Employers want to know what you did, but they really want to know what happened as a result of what you did. What happened as a result of what you … did.
So let me give you an example. I’m going to flip back here to the screen. And let’s leave Jane and John here. So. If you manage the customer service department with 10 employees, I see many resumes that say, ‘I managed the customer service department with 10 employees.’ What doesn’t this tell me? Are you a good manager? Do your people get promoted? Do they love you? Actually, are your customers happier? Have you done anything to streamline those processes? This has some place on the resume. It could be broken up. It could be buried. Up in summaries, but I would rather see a bullet that said something like, ‘I raised customer satisfaction by 33% by designing and implementing processes that reduce the time to answer customer inquiries by half.
I put something in place. I put something in place. That made our customers a lot happier. Because it only takes two minutes to get back to them, or they only have to stay on hold for two minutes, and I can answer the question in two minutes instead of eight. These are the kinds of things that I think are very, very important for you to get onto your resume, whether you’re putting them in the highlights section, which you should be, or putting them in the professional experience section, which you should also be. Should be. So, if you focus on the do’s and don’ts, on making sure that the top center of your resume sings, and gets people excited to read it.
You should lay it out in a clear, chronological format so they can see a nice career evolution. And there’s tons of… ways we can handle all your exceptions. I’ve got a video for every single one of them, so you can find one for whatever your issue is. And the third thing is to make sure you’re focusing on your accomplishments and benefits, as well as your responsibilities. All right, hope you enjoyed that. There was no way I was getting all that in in three and a half minutes or four minutes or whatever my little TV segment was yesterday, but I wanted to bring it to you. My people, because I get to be the executive producer, the talent, the sound engineer, and everything else related to Thursday Live Office Hours with Andy. So if you’re loving this, give me a thumbs up. Give me a thumbs up.
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