The Resume Help

What’s the best way to get a job? Most people take this strategy: spend hours sending their resume & cover letter off to dozens of companies. Job hunting and networking websites encourage this, and we’ve all heard of the importance of “getting your resume out there.” That seems to work in a handful of industries. But not across the board.

I’d like to propose an alternate approach: choose one job you think you’re qualified for and you’d love to have. Then spend your time writing, polishing, and perfecting a truly great application package customized just for that one position. In my experience, each truly great application takes about 25 hours to complete.

25 hours on one application. Why so time-consuming?

First, it involves “making friends” with the company. They’ll be more likely to hire a friend than a stranger.

This partly means trying hard to find someone connected to you who works there. Check your LinkedIn and Facebook connections. Ask your friends if they have any friends there. If you hire me or another personal resume adviser, ask us if we know anyone there. Do everything you can to find someone in the company. Then invite them to lunch. Ask them lots of questions. Ask for advice. Take notes on their replies. Make them feel important and get an inside perspective on the company.

“Making friends” with the company also means getting to know the company itself. Spend a few hours (yes, hours) reading the company website so you understand the company’s personality. If you’re responding to a posting, read the job description multiple times so you know exactly what they’re looking for. Read about their founders and company leaders; learn what they value and where they came from. Make a note of anything you have in common with the company or its leaders — things you especially believe in, things you’ve done, etc.

Next, customize your resume for that position. Borrow verbs from the company’s job description. Try to match the personality you portray on your resume with the personality of the company. If the company prides itself on being fun, try to make yourself look fun. If it’s serious, be serious. When you think you’ve got it just right, try to make it even better. Have a friend take a look at your resume. And proofread about two dozen times. This takes hours, but it’s worth your time.

Then, write a custom cover letter. Again, spend hours on it to make it exactly right. And don’t just talk about yourself. Talk about why you like the company, how you can make the company even better, and mention any new friends or acquaintances you have there.

You might want to blast your resume off to lots of companies as well, but never underestimate the value of submitting a thoughtful and truly customized application to just one or two companies.

In my experience, it works like magic.

When it comes to writing a resume (or even writing about writing a resume!), it’s tough to be intriguing. It just is. If you show too much personality, you come across as inappropriately informal. If you don’t show any personality, you look dull. What to do…

Mention that you’re “fun and full of personality”? No. If you have to say you’re fun and full of personality, that’s like conceding that your resume makes you look dull as dirt.

Include a joke in your resume? Something like “I learn real good cuz I studiez lotz”? No. Oh dear, no.

It’s all about choosing the right details. In addition to the serious parts, include a fun tidbit about yourself every now and then. In other words, strive to seem more human. There are zillions of ways to do this, but here are three ideas to get you thinking:

Try to illustrate what you’ve done using descriptive words. Don’t stop at listing the 4 responsibilities you had in your last job. Mention which one made you the proudest, and why. Or which one you spent the most time on. Or list something you learned from that job.

Use numbers whenever you can. People love statistics, and if you can use numbers to illustrate your awesomeness, do it! Something like “One of two hired from hundreds of applicants” or “Solely responsible for payroll management” or “Worked as part of a collaborative team of 12 fraud investigators” can go a long way to help your reader visualize your experience.

Include a line about what you like to do outside of work. Even mention hobbies that you’re not good at, and that you’re not good at them. If you’re applying to be a project manager, you won’t be overlooked because you’re a slow swimmer or a terrible golfer. But loving something you’re not good at could make you look like a more interesting (and humble and likable!) person.

On every line of your resume, you have a choice about how to convey what you’ve done. People are often concerned about conveying information in a way that sounds too impressive. They don’t want to exaggerate their claims.

I believe that there are many, many ways to state the truth without exaggerating. When you write your resume, your job (and mine if you hire me to help you) is to find the most flattering form of accuracy.

Here’s an example. Both of these statements could be true, but which one do you think is most compelling?
* Worked on a report on the company’s quarterly expenditures.
- or -
* Co-authored the company’s Q2 expenditure report, which revealed discrepancies that enabled the company to save $500,000 in Q3.

Another example. Who would you rather hire?
* Strong communications skills in managing relationships with clients.
-or -
* Manage relationships with 5 clients, each generating over $250,000 in yearly revenue.

The most flattering form of accuracy often means using detail to illustrate what you’ve done instead of using broad, vague words to describe your experiences. It sometimes means including numbers to quantify the impact you made on previous employers. And it always means thinking very hard about how your work made an impact on your company, even if you were just one of many contributors who made something good happen.

Never ever lie on your resume. But never settle for an unflattering form of accuracy, either.

How long should your resume be? First let’s consider the risks of choosing the wrong length for your experience, then I’ll talk about how to choose the right length.

Everyone knows that listing too little information is detrimental. But people sometimes wonder: can it hurt to include too much information?

Yes, yes it can. Here’s why. First and most importantly, too much information makes your resume hard for readers to skim quickly. Resumes that are quick to skim get read more often and garner more respect. Second, it’s a strike against you if you’re applying for any position that requires you to prioritize tasks. If your resume doesn’t prioritize your experiences thoughtfully, the reader could infer that you won’t be good at prioritizing tasks on the job, either. Third, it’s respectful to the reader to be concise. No one, including a hiring manager, likes to feel like their time is being wasted. And finally, listing too much information is unflattering. Your resume is expected to include your most important experiences and accomplishments. The reader may think, “If being a middle school Spanish Club member is one of the most important things this person has ever done, then they obviously haven’t done much that’s important.”

What’s the right length for you? If you just finished college and your resume is 2 pages long, then you’re listing too much information. If you’ve been working for 30 years, then it should be challenging for you to fit everything into two pages. Everything in between is a little grey. As a rule of thumb, I recommend shooting for one page if you’ve been working less than 10 years, or two pages if you’ve been working for 10+ years. But there are lots of exceptions to this rule, so use your best judgement. If you’re really struggling to come up with content for a second page, leave it at one.

Most people know what key things matter in job applications: your experiences, your education, your skills, your honors and awards, and so on.

But there’s an important one that gets overlooked: common ground. If you can find common ground with the boss, then you’ve got an immediate leg up. Bosses like to hire applicants who remind them of themselves. And everyone wants to hire themselves.

Common ground with the boss could come from having attended the same obscure college, loving the same sport, having the same hobby, being in the same club, or something else. Have you heard of The Sing-a-Long Sound of Music? Most people haven’t. It’s the Sound of Music, played in a theater with subtitles and props for every audience member to sing along and be silly. Plastic edelweiss anyone? Anyway, I believe I once got a job offer because I mentioned having enjoyed the Sing-a-Long Sound of Music. The boss turned out to be a huge fan. I think she saw herself in me. And bosses like to hire themselves.

What’s this have to do with your resume? It’s worth using one or two lines of your precious resume real estate to mention a few non-work activities that might strike a chord with the boss. Mention your favorite sports team, your favorite food, your bowling league, your passion for rollerblading, or whatever makes you tick. At the very least, listing something less formal makes you more human. It’s worth the space.

However! A few words of warning… doing this right requires some thought. Things to consider:

1) Choose carefully. No one will get mad at you for liking basketball. But some other topics could bring up negative feelings. For instance, mentioning controversial movies, political work, or even fraternities/sororities is risky. Maybe your future boss wanted to be in your sorority but wasn’t invited to join. You might still choose to mention these things, but know that it’s riskier to bring up experiences that could cause offense.

2) No stalking. Nobody likes being followed. Don’t say, “I read everything about you on Google and I know you like boating, and so do I!” That’s just creepy.

Putting all your experiences and accomplishments on paper requires serious thought and a good chunk of time. It isn’t any fun. And to make things even worse, no resume writer can do it for you because you’re the only one who knows what all you’ve done. The only good news is, you only have to do it once!

Here’s what I suggest. You need a list of what you’ve done since high school. So start by writing down everything that might go on your resume. Don’t worry about formatting for now, it’s okay if it looks ugly at this stage. Err on the side of writing too much: there will be time to delete later. Think about…

• What have you been doing?
  • Write a timeline. Start in the year you finished high school and finish today. Fill in your timeline with your experiences, including all companies you’ve worked for and job titles you’ve held. Make sure you include something for every year, even if it’s not very impressive. For example, your timeline may begin:
    • 1982-84: attended college at Washburn University, 3.2 GPA but dropped out to earn money
    • 1984-1990: Retail Clerk job at Macy’s
    • 1991: rode my motorcycle and camped at campsites all over California
• What are you most proud of?
  • List all kinds of experiences, and include at least a few work-related or school-related achievements. Write down 10 to 15 items, and write a few words about what you did that made you proud of each one.

• What else took your time?
  • Write down all other significant activities that you haven’t listed yet, even if they’re not very impressive. This could be college ROTC, weekly poker games with friends, skiing, being a parent, coaching little league, or whatever. If you spent more than 50 hours doing it, list it.
• Anything else?
  • This is your chance to fill in the blanks. Maybe you once won a fancy award, you appeared on Wheel of Fortune, or you know how to create websites in HTML and CSS. If you think it makes you look good and you haven’t written it down yet, list it now.

When you think you’re done, look over your list and try to think of things you’ve left out. The biggest mistake you can make at this stage is to fail to remember something that could win you a job. So think really, really hard.

Once you’re sure you’ve got everything listed… congratulations! The hardest part is over. Now you just need to prioritize, format, and proofread to turn your list into a great resume.

Welcome, Job Seekers! Thanks for visiting.

Ever since I founded Sam Reads Resumes to help people develop perfect resumes, lots of questions have come in. Well, as it turns out, I *love* to give advice. And I have a whole lot of experience evaluating people’s resumes both from the hiring manager’s perspective and from the applicant’s perspective. So I’ve got a lot to say.

My company, Sam Reads Resumes, is a professional resume help service. You can hire us to read your resume, re-write it for you, and send you our notes about how to strengthen it.

But until now, I haven’t had a good way to share generic advice and resume-writing tips that could apply to anyone. And that’s how the The Resume Help blog came to be.

So! I hope this blog will give you some ideas about how you can polish up your resume. And if my words make you smile every so often, that’s even better.