Resumes & Cover Letters

There's No 'I' in Team and No 'We' in Resume

There's No 'I' in Team and No 'We' in Resume

Repeat after me, “I am allowed to speak exclusively about my achievements on my resume, even if I work in a heavily team-oriented environment.” (Repeat 3x for good measure or as often as needed ;-)

I want you to give yourself permission and freedom to focus on you within a sales document that is meant to sell only one thing, YOU. I’m starting here because I know how challenging it can feel to be self-focused for many professionals, especially those in environments where the team is clearly prioritized over the individual. The factors of humility, accuracy, & truthfulness are often at the core of my clients’ hesitation and concern in highlighting their individual contributions within their resumes. Know that these feelings and values are both valid and normal.

While it’s good & noble to desire to reflect that your achievements took place in a team setting, here’s the challenge -- your next employer can’t hire your whole team, they can only hire YOU. For this reason, it does you no good to be overly concerned about sharing team-based accomplishments that don’t highlight your individual contribution, as they don’t make the case for why you deserve the job.

How to Find the Thread in Your Non-Linear Career Path

How to Find the Thread in Your Non-Linear Career Path

Career development is a funny thing. If you’d told me in the summer of 2010 that I was going to be a career coach 9 years later and have my own business, I simply wouldn’t have believed you. Where I am today wasn’t on my radar then. It wasn’t even on my radar in January 2019 before I had to unexpectedly resign from my full-time job and then launch this business to support my family. From the start of my career to this day, no two jobs I’ve held have been within the same industry, let alone the same function, however, everything I have done has prepared me to be the professional I am today because of the unique path I’ve traveled. If you don’t read another word of this article, I want you to know that you have the ability to find the thread in your non-linear career path, own your story, & build your brand around it.

Let me illustrate...

I had a client who is a very talented writer/content creator/storyteller. Across the span of her 15+ year career, she had worked for around 6+ different employers in 5 industries, held 6 different titles, and worked in 2 countries. Even though she was a storyteller by nature and function, she came to me neither able to identify nor articulate the whole created by the sum of those disparate parts. If you feel the same way, know that you’re not alone.

How Context Can Make or Break Your Resume (Revised)

How Context Can Make or Break Your Resume (Revised)

“What you just told me sounds amazing! Why isn’t that in your resume?”

There is a major chasm between how job seekers relate their accomplishment stories verbally and what gets recorded in their resumes. I can't tell you how many times I've exclaimed the quote above after uncovering the bigger story behind an achievement while interviewing my clients. Something in their recounting routinely gets lost in translation from verbal to written storytelling, leading to resumes that undersell their accomplishments. Experience has taught me that the bridge between these radically different narratives often boils down to one key element -- context.

New Year. New Job. Here's How.

New Year. New Job. Here's How.

2020 feels big and it hasn’t even started yet. For many, the new year is often an inflection point at which they look for opportunities to advance their careers by landing a new job. The good news is that January and February are considered by experts to be the top months for hiring. A CNBC report shows up to a 30% increase in hiring in January. The bad news is that you are not the only person making the “new job in the new year” resolution, which means increased competition. So, how do you stand out in a crowded field? Start by laying your groundwork now while other job seekers are easing their foot off the gas for the holidays.

How to Land a New Job in the New Year

Identify Your Target Companies

When goal-setting, it’s often beneficial to start with the end in mind. In this case, having clearly identified your target companies can set the tone for your entire job search.

Relevancy + Recency + Tenure: 3 Guidelines to Structure Your Resume Content

Relevancy + Recency + Tenure: 3 Guidelines to Structure Your Resume Content

“How many years of experience should I include on my resume?”
“How long should my resume be?
“How much space should I allocate for each role?”

These are just a few of the many questions clients have about the mechanics of crafting their resumes. Writing or updating a resume can be a challenging exercise when looking back across your career and trying to select the best highlights to fit into a limited amount of space. It’s not an easy process both from a storytelling and structural standpoint. I fielded all the questions above and many more as a Career Advisor at a company supporting mid to senior-level executives with their job search and career development. Over 5 years and 6,000+ calls spent critiquing resumes in that role, I realized that all these questions surrounding how to structure your resume content were best summarized by the same three guidelines, in this specific order:

  1. Relevancy

  2. Recency

  3. Tenure

How to Take the Pain Out of Tailoring Your Resume

How to Take the Pain Out of Tailoring Your Resume

Product marketers invest a lot of time and effort in researching the needs and desires of their target audience. Their goal being to learn the most effective ways to make their product appealing to said audience and convert them into buyers. They also segment their audience into groups and create targeted/customized advertisements that will better connect to their specific needs and sensibilities. In the case of the job hunt, you as the job seeker pull double duty playing the role of both the product and marketer. In an ideal job search, you have done the work to identify your target audience (companies), conducted thorough research (online + informational interviews), and you are now ready to create tailored ads (your resume) to get them to buy what you’re selling -- right? The challenge with this last step is the tedium that comes with customizing your resume for every application. Too many job seekers skip this step or do it minimally -- to their own detriment. So...how can it be done, and done less painfully?

3 Steps to Get the Best ROI from Your Professional Resume Rewrite

3 Steps to Get the Best ROI from Your Professional Resume Rewrite

I am not clairvoyant. Perhaps this is an obvious, rhetorical statement, but as a career coach/resume writer, I sometimes wish I was since this gifting is projected upon me often enough by some prospects and clients. In today’s ‘Amazon Prime Now’ world, we have all become accustomed to, and even somewhat expectant of near-instant service delivery. Advancements in technology and logistics now allow us to push a digital button and anything from our most basic needs (groceries) to our most frivolous wants (fancy gadget/clothing item X) are delivered to our doorstep (within hours) -- all by lifting one finger -- literally. Though resumes are now almost exclusively a digital product (LinkedIn profiles included), the process to generate one is still rather analog and it’s important to make this connection. 

There's No Reading Between the Lines on Your Resume - Here's Why

There's No Reading Between the Lines on Your Resume - Here's Why

I recently watched a great job search webinar delivered by my fellow coach and friend, Anish Majumdar. While he was sharing tips about crafting an effective resume, he said a few lines that I just couldn’t shake:

“Don’t expect any employer to read between the lines on your resume…”

“They don’t know you!”

“You have to tell them!”

I’m paraphrasing slightly, but the essence and power of these three statements is clear. One of the mistakes I have seen clients repeatedly make when discussing their resumes is assuming knowledge on the part of their audience. As they distill their stories into concise bullet points (no easy feat), the complete, first-hand narrative they have in their head is somehow assumed to be accessible to their readers who, “should just understand what I mean.” The simple question I respond with is, “how?”

Unless you possess powers of telepathy and/or your target audience has ESP, there is no transmission network yet in existence to share your thoughts/memories/knowledge with another human that ultimately doesn’t rely on speech or the written word. Until we develop the ability to directly beam our thoughts via WiFi or Bluetooth, we have to make the implicit, explicit -- and tell our audience exactly what we mean.

3 Simple Questions that Can Radically Transform Your Resume

3 Simple Questions that Can Radically Transform Your Resume

For many job seekers, writing a resume can often feel like a difficult or awkward exercise in professional self-reflection. Though they say that “hindsight is 20/20,” why is it that visualizing one’s professional past can appear so hazy? Well, depending on the length of your career and/or tenure in your roles, you are often digging through the layers of many years of experience in order to surface the gems that should appear on your resume. Since writing a resume is not something that you do often, your excavation tools may not be as sharp as needed for the task. In this case, your digging tools are the questions that will help you uncover the achievement stories that will effectively position you for your target audience.

In a previous post, I wrote about how to adopt a journalistic approach to help you build context in your resume. Here I want to share three specific questions that will help you select rich achievement content for your resume and help you drill down to why it matters.

How Context Can Make or Break Your Resume

How Context Can Make or Break Your Resume

“What you just told me sounds amazing! Why isn’t that in your resume?” 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve exclaimed this when speaking with clients after uncovering the bigger story behind an achievement they have listed on their resume. I have frequently observed a major chasm between how clients relate their stories verbally, compared to what appears on paper. Aside from simply underselling an accomplishment, experience has taught me that the bridge between these radically different narratives often boils down to one key element -- context.