Your resume in 2016

Your resume in 2016: While technically not a consumer technology subject, I often get asked to look at someone’s resume. Students, seasoned professionals, and even executives have had me give their resume a once-over or a more extensive fix-up job. Over the years I’ve refined a tight set of tips for how to make your resume sing to that recruiter or potential boss. Without further ado, here’s my top 10 list for the new year:

1. Brevity is King/Queen: No matter how extensive your experience, etc., you almost never want a resume that takes more than 2 pages (that’s one sheet of paper, front and back). And don’t make it fit onto 2 pages by shrinking text with teensy font sizes, ultra-narrow margins and tight-fit, dense blocks of text. A good resume gives just enough information to attract interest – it’s a tease. Save all the details for the interview. When you look at your resume, you should see no fat or fluff – only meat.
2. Skip the Vision: Over the years I’ve seen thousands of resumes (really!), and the single most useless feature is that little blurb at the beginning full of platitudes, corporate-speak and empty statements. This is invariably a waste of space, and on your resume, space is a premium. So save that stuff for the cover letter/email, for the interview, or for your memoirs.
3. Keywords, keywords, keywords: If you’re responding to a job posting, that’s going to tell you what specific knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA’s) are needed for the job. Take your highlighter and mark the specific words or short phrases in the job posting, then make darn sure you have those same words somewhere in your resume (assuming you have those KSA’s!). More and more employers are turning to automated resume scanning to match up candidates with jobs, and even if your resume is looked at by a human, they’re doing the same thing. If possible, don’t make it hard to find those keywords by burying them in a job description sentence. One of my favorite tactics is to have a skills list at the beginning of the resume that lists 6-12 words or phrases – that’s where these critical KSA’s should first appear. And don’t forget to back up that skill list in your experience section.
4. Accomplishments, accomplishments, accomplishments: Resume after resume tells me what the person did in this or that job and nothing else about their experience. Spend no more than 3 sentences telling me about your job responsibilities (backup the keywords on the skills list), and then give me 1-3 bullets that tell me what things you did above and beyond the requirements of the job. Projects you volunteered for, work-related outcomes that you achieved for your organization – stuff that makes you shine. Don’t forget the metrics, be sure to document with facts – improved ROI by xx percentage, completed project ahead of schedule by xx weeks, drove profitability up by xx dollars, cut xx days out of process and procedure, etc.
5. Truth and Validity: Never, ever tell a lie on your resume. It’s ok to make a big deal about a possibly insignificant accomplishment, but don’t exaggerate something that was just doing your job into something above and beyond. These days it seems easier to get away with something, since former employers will almost never give more than “that person worked here from this date to that date” to a prospective employer. But just don’t – sooner or later you’re gonna get caught and it’s never worth the risk. You also want to make sure that you haven’t left unexplained gaps in your resume. Even if you had/have periods of unemployment, fill those in with an entry – a good way to fill them in is to put in a volunteer activity you did during your period of unemployment.
6. Be real, be you: Don’t bother with fancy fonts, cute bullet characters or special paper. Chances are, your resume is going to be looked at online (as a PDF) or sit in a stack with a bunch of others. What makes your resume stand out is going to be the clarity, brevity and professionalism in the words you use to describe yourself on paper. Fight the tendency to make yourself out as the ‘best in the world’, just describe your abilities succinctly and completely, and let your abilities speak for themselves. A real neat trick is to be able to infuse a dry, classic resume with enough of your own personality that the real you shows through. That takes a lot of thinking and trying out. So sure, try out your resume on someone else, see if you can wow them!
7. White space counts: Don’t make things so dense that they look like a wall of characters. You want to have some space to set things apart and highlight the most important things. Sure you can use bolding, italics and underlining, but without a healthy level of white space it’s not gonna matter. Eyes glaze over when looking at a dense block of text, you can probably experience this yourself reading this article 🙂
8. Contact Info: believe it or not, I’ve seen plenty of resumes that didn’t include a phone number, or an email, or a mailing address. Your name plus all of that should be on the top of every page of your resume. For your name, use or include the name you’d like to be called. And give special consideration to what email address you use. An educational address (.edu) is fine, as well as a personalized (aka ‘vanity’) email, or a company. Be careful on that last though, don’t use your current employer’s company email on your resume!
9. Shiny on top: The order you put things in on your resume should reflect you and your situation. For college students, generally the first block (after a skills list) should be Education, while an experienced professional might put their Experience block before the Education block. If you’re a published author, you might want to put your publications near the beginning of the resume. Basically, you put your best foot forward on your resume – the most impressive things about you should be first. And I’ve seen some effective resumes that didn’t even have a separate Accomplishments (or Achievements or Awards) block, they folded such things into the bullets of their experience or education. That works best if you have plenty of space to work with so they can stand out on their own.
10. Correction and spell-check: Don’t depend on auto-correct for spelling or grammar, make sure you eyeball the entire resume very closely and fix any mistakes. Most people are working with the nth version of their resume and they’ve been staring at it so much they often miss little things (writers have this same problem). Be sure to proof-read your resume and make sure it has no errors, not one! Think of this as your interview suit – it should be spotless and perfect because, you know, first impressions count.

I’ve seen some recent trends to make resumes with photos, resumes as infographics, resumes focused on more personal aspects, etc. I think of these as fashion statements – and fashions change. I prefer more of the classic look of resumes which never goes out of style. I recognize that more and more companies are being run by younger, more trendy people who might appreciate a stylish resume, but the truth is that when it comes to hiring people, everybody wants the same thing: finding someone with the right knowledge, skills and abilities to do the job. Perhaps the right candidate doesn’t have all the knowledge or exactly the right skill set, but has the ability to learn (e.g., ability) – and that’s just as important, so let that show. We’ve all seen the job descriptions that appear written so specifically that nobody could qualify who hasn’t already had the exact same job – those are often written because the recruiter already had someone in mind to hire. So long as your resume is focused on showing you off in your best light, you have the best chance at getting a second look.

Remember, your resume is in a stack with dozens to hundreds of other resumes. Assuming a human is looking through that stack, your resume will get 30 seconds at best on an initial pass before going into either a possibles stack or a trash stack. Good recruiters will not just trash the stack of resumes for rejected candidates, but will save them – either for another job later on or at least to send a rejection note back. Sadly, these days many potential employers don’t even do the candidates the courtesy of a rejection note. An unfortunate side-effect of everybody trying to do more with less time.

I remember sitting on my bed with a foot-tall stack of resumes in front of me. I would quickly look at each one, and place it into another stack on my left for another look-see, or on my right for rejection. With that many resumes, I would often spend less than 10 seconds before making a decision on this ‘first cut’. As a critical thinking human, this first cut was more about ways to knock someone out of consideration than looking for a match (that’s a consequence of our education system’s focus on critical thinking). If I saw misspelled words, poorly written phrases, or lack of any relevance to the job, off to the right it would go unless there was something really special about it (that would leap off the page at me). By the end of the first cut, the left-side pile was perhaps a couple inches thick. My next reading (second cut) would be with a highlighter – I’d go through each of the passed resumes and highlight the KSA’s that matched the job. Since I knew the list of KSA’s (both critical and non-critical) I could also move resumes to the right-side pile that were missing critical KSA’s. This usually cuts out at least half from the first cut. So now I’m left with perhaps a couple dozen resumes that have lots of yellow on them. These are the only resumes I’ll actually read through and try to get a sense of whether this person would be right for my organization. So it’s only after the third cut that I’m actually looking at things like personality and attitude. Of course, if the initial stack wasn’t so tall I’d probably spend more time on each resume in the first and second cuts, but this really only counts in small business – large organizations have so many candidates for each position.

Nowadays, resume readers/potential employers are more often looking at a batch of PDFs than paper, but the same methodology applies – just with computer folders instead of stacks of paper. And I’m seeing more and more employers using online application forms instead of taking resumes. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t create a classic resume, just that you’ll use that to fill in the online form (cut and paste can be your friend here).

Lastly, look at your resume as both an iterative and a customized set of documents. You should have and keep an up-to-date, complete and comprehensive master resume. As you apply to jobs, copy the master and edit it to customize it for that particular job. One size does not fit all, and each position to which you apply should have its own version of your master resume. Even if you get rejected, keep the resume as you may be able to use it on another job. And finally, develop a thick skin – rejection is never personal!