This month I will celebrate my 10-year anniversary with my current employer, or seven plus covid as I prefer to describe it. It is the longest I have worked at any company and the time seems to have flown past. Working in 3 cities across two countries and taking on a variety of roles in that time has ensured it never felt stale. I may not have known where the next opportunity was going to come from, but it always felt possible that a new opportunity would emerge. So truthfully, I have never seriously looked outside for different work and the handful of times I was approached I have politely declined. Does this disqualify me from talking about resumés? It certainly disqualifies me from talking knowledgeably about my own as it is out-of-date. But I have interviewed and employed a number of people over the last 10 years (and more again in previous jobs), and this gives me an insight into what an employer is looking for. I remember 10+ years ago updating my last resumé and the feeling of confidence and accomplishment that I felt when I had recalled my achievements at work. I would offer this advice; writing your resumé is an opportunity to reflect on how far you have come and what work really interests you. Even if you are not in the market for a new job, it can be a good exercise if you need a confidence boost.
Many of my posts include mistakes from my past, so why not start with one here. If you have been reading this blog from the beginning, you may recall the biggest career mistake I made in the post “The one type of job you shouldn’t accept”. In summary I took a badly defined promotion and ended up nearly being made redundant a couple of months later when the economy crashed in 2008. When that happened, I quickly drafted a new version of my resumé. At this time, I had a problem because it was difficult to explain why I was leaving a role I had only recently started and the examples of work I had done in this new role were limited. It needed some creative thought to make it look logical and clear and I was stretching examples further than I would advise anyone to do. In the end I wasn’t made redundant and was offered a different role. I found the whole experience reasonably bruising on an emotional level and still had one eye on the exit. About a year later I was approached by a recruitment consultant about a new role. I redrafted my resumé and was able to shrink down the section on the badly defined promotion and focus attention on more recent work. All was good in the world, or at least it should have been. When I turned up for the interview things went wrong quickly. As I gave examples of my work, the interviewer looked confused. He stopped me mid-flow and asked why none of what I was saying matched my resumé. I asked him politely if I could see the resumé he was holding and found to my horror that the recruitment consultant had sent the previous version from the year before. From that point on the interview was effectively finished. He had planned and written questions on the old resumé and rightly felt uncomfortable receiving answers orally for which he had no documented support. We went through the motions for a painful 30 minutes and the end couldn’t come quick enough for both of us. In that moment it was crystal clear that the resumé is still a vital document and has a role to play. In contrast, the recruitment consultant had no further role to play in my life.
The resumé is vital, it gets you through the door and forms a key part of first round interviews. It is usually your first impression and a sales document telling a potential employer what they can expect based on previous experiences. There are some key features that I think you should include that will do some of the heavy lifting for you. Before I say what should be on there, let me quickly cover what you can leave off. Specifically, you should leave off any non-essential details that an employer has no right to know during interview. This is a big change to when I started work. Your age (or date of birth), your address, your marital status and your sex should be removed. This removes any sub-conscious bias in interview selection based on demographics. Many companies with internal recruitment staff are considering cutting off names and, in some cases, where you went to school and college to further level the playing-field. I wouldn’t suggest you do this unless asked, as it is very hard to be called for an interview if you don’t give your name.
Aside from your name, your email address and potentially your LinkedIn profile, at the top of your resumé you should include your educational qualifications and other relevant achievements. I know I said not to include your age, but if a job requires a certain level of post-qualification work experience (PQE), then you should state it upfront. It is also worth stating your citizenship and if this is not the country you are applying to work in, what your visa situation is. In America if you have a green card, this is a boost and makes you an easier hire for potential employers. If you don’t, then you need to decide if it is worth letting an employer know up front that you require a visa to work. Holding back this information until you receive a job offer is infuriating to employers trying to manage their resources, but potential employers should ask the question during the interview process. This advice will differ by country and in some countries the process to apply for visas for key talent is easy and accepted.
The idea of putting all this information up top is that the first pass is usually made by an internal recruitment team who quickly need to make sure your resumé matches the requirements of the role. If you package your resumé correctly it should go straight into the interview pile. If you are applying for something a little tangential from your current work, then you are probably hoping to get in either the maybe pile or the interview pile. In all cases we want to avoid the discard pile as that is a poor return on effort.
In America I believe it is common to include a personal statement near the top of the resumé explaining who you are. Whether you want to include one depends on whether you think it serves a purpose. If your recent work experience is completely aligned with the requirements of the role, I question what value the personal statement adds other than taking up valuable real estate. I also don’t think many employers read the personal statement as it is usually a collection of platitudes. There is one major exception to this and that is when you want to alert people to something that isn’t on the first page of your resumé. This could be an independent work-related award or prize that you received for a previous role. Alternatively, I once used a personal statement on my UK resumé (which is not common practice) because my expertise and career goals did not match my existing role. At the time I was working in a Treasury role, and I wanted to return to a Forecasting and Planning role. I’m not sure the personal statement would have worked, but I considered it the best way to quickly communicate my eligibility for the roles I was applying for with internal recruiters.
In the body of your resumé is your work experience. The advice I was given years ago was to lead with a brief description of your employer, and their size in revenue and profit. It is wrong to assume that the interviewer will know the entity you work for, so why not make their life easier and give them the information. The next piece of advice is to use figures to illustrate your work. If you have secured a deal or renegotiated a supplier contract, approximately how much were they worth? There are numbers to illustrate everything, it can be time saved, revenue generated, costs reduced or the size of investments. Always remember to order the experiences by priority and impact and not chronologically.
The not-so-secret sauce is to return to the job spec for the role you are applying for and start underlining key phrases in the requirements. You are looking for specific words that jump out because they are either obviously critical or are repeated frequently and therefore likely critical. The good enough response is to make sure your most recent work experience demonstrates some of the main requirements of the work or at least skills that would transfer easily to that role. The above average response is to re-use some of the specific language from the job spec in your resumé. The familiarity, provided it is backed up by solid experience, should be sufficient to get you to the very top of the interview list.
Your resumé should be a sweet-spot in terms of length, which will get longer as your career progresses. For me four to five pages is probably about right. The older career experience should be re-edited to summarize and shorten it. I prefer to see honesty regarding career breaks and periods of unemployment. In my opinion, the volatility of the economy from 2008 onwards has removed any stigma towards periods spent out of work. There is usually an interesting story attached to these events and that can often be the most memorable part of the discussion and reveals more about the candidate’s resilience. At the end of the resumé throw in your other interests or hobbies. They don’t need to be current, but they should be something you were once passionate about even if family commitments or workload now make them impossible. These help to round you out as an individual. Some additional value can be gleaned if these hobbies or interests are shared with the interviewer or pique the interest of the interviewer. If I find out a candidate loves photography, I will spend the first five minutes breaking the ice on that subject in the hope that the interview is more open and conversational. Even if we don’t share the same interests, getting a stranger to talk about their passions often positively changes the dynamic of an interview.
Before I finish, I wanted to share with you the craziest resumé I ever received. This resumé was so unique that I saved a copy of it with the heading “best job application ever”. The candidate decided to draft their resumé in the style of an internal newsletter called “World of Management”. They had grabbed our business logo and the mock newsletter announced them as our chosen candidate with details of their career history and interests used as the justification for our decision. You must give credit where credit is due, it was a very bold move. Unfortunately, the resumé was not strong enough to warrant an interview. It did grab my attention and made my day, but I wouldn’t advise anyone to replicate this. The candidate included his LinkedIn profile, and I looked him up last week. To give us all closure, they appear to be doing well. In their defense (not that they need it), if you are applying for something that may be a stretch, sometimes it is good to throw caution to the wind and try something different. If it doesn’t work, you haven’t lost anything.
If you find yourself dusting off your resumé anytime soon, I hope this post will be useful for making it stand-out from the crowd and help you score that first round interview. Next week I am going to return to the topic of working abroad. In follow-up to my first post on this topic, I was asked for any advice on making friends by a former colleague who has just relocated overseas. I gave them a few answers and they mentioned that it would be good content for the blog. Given that the purpose of this blog is to share information freely with as many people as possible I agreed.