Make your resume ROCK!

True story:

Yesterday, a consulting opportunity came out with a client in town that was potentially a very good fit for many consultants we work with at Tech-Pro. In under an hour, the client had closed off the requisition to new submittals. They received 50 resumes in under an hour from the sounds of things. In the few years I’ve recruited I’ve never seen anything like this – but I imagine it may not be all that uncommon a happening over the next few weeks.

That led me to think it would be a good time to write about just HOW important it is to make sure that, in a time when a hiring manager can potentially get dozens of resumes in such a short window of time, you have to make darn sure your resume is going to WOW that person in a matter of seconds so much so that they decide you could be the right person for the role.

There have been a lot of articles around resume writing best practices lately – this is one of the best ones I’ve seen: http://www.usnews.com/articles/business/careers/2009/01/22/5-rsum-mistakes-youre-probably-making.html While I personally wouldn’t necessarily highlight every point here, the first two are ABSOLUTELY spot-on in my opinion.

At Tech-Pro, the resume is possibly the most important part of our marketing efforts in working with clients. We have one of the best sales teams in the market and a great staff that handles our company marketing, but if our resumes do not show our clients that “this person is absolutely the right person for your opportunity” then we probably lose. Needless to say, we spend a lot of time putting strategy behind the resumes we put together.

Here are some best practices I’ve seen that I’d like to share. Keep in mind, this is merely opinion and other recruiters might argue these all day, but they seem to work for me at least:

1. Start with a summary that is going to show why bringing you on board is going to benefit the company. Too often, resumes are written with an “objective” section that focuses on what you as a job seeker wants. “I seek this” or “I am looking for this”, etc. In today’s market, it is CRITICAL for that initial summary to show how your existence at the company is going to benefit them, no t you (sad to say). Keep one simple rule in mind: “I” should never, not once, show up on your resume. Always write in the third person. It looks much less “what you can do for me." Then, talk about the impact your years of experience and specific success stories that will allow you to have a similar impact at this company right away in this summary.

2. Numbers, Numbers, Numbers. Along with the above point and as highlighted in the US News article, you want to get in the habit of making your resume results-oriented, and not just action-based. Too often resumes look like a job description, where you write about your day-to-day duties, and not enough about the successes those duties resulted in. Most often, those successes can be measured in numbers. The $ amount of the budget you managed, or the project budget you were an analyst on. The number of people on your team. The amount of time your project took (or more impressively, the amount of time you saved from what was originally scoped out). The number of end users you trained. The human eye is drawn to a number when included amongst a sea of words – take advantage of that by loading your resume up with numbers that make a strong case for you!

3. Include a “synopsis” section. What we do at Tech-Pro is have an initial “summary” that we’d pretty much use for any resume that we’d send to any client, and then underneath that we use a “synopsis” section that is custom-tailored to a particular role we are submitting to. What you will want to do here: take the job description that you are applying for, and MATCH it, bullet by bullet if you can, to your own experience. We typically use only bullet points in this section, not paragraph form, to make it easier for a hiring manager to quickly see how your experience matches what they are looking for.

4. Do not CRAM your resume into an arbitrary number of pages. This is where many recruiters and I differ. There are those out there who feel a resume has to be two pages or even ONE page long. I personally don’t agree with that. Granted, I would never say to add “fluff” to get it past two pages – but I do think you need to be careful not to take something out of a resume that might allow you to look like the right candidate. If your relevant experience and success stories of your career can’t be fit into less than 6 pages, then you should have a 6 page resume. If you only have enough to fit into two pages, then your resume should be two pages long. The most important thing is to share all successes that could win you a position.

5. Write in the past tense. By the time your resume is being read by someone, everything you’ve done is in the past. You’ll want to write it as such. And then double check for errors. I have seen a number of resumes that switch from past to present tense from section to section – it’s a very simple thing to correct. Also, be sure to watch out for the most misspelled word on a resume: “led” (as in, “’Led’ a $2.2 Million dollar project”, not “’Lead’ a $2.2 Million dollar project.”)

6. Add as many keywords and buzzwords as you can – as long as you can back it up. The past several years have seen many advancements in search engines that allow recruiters to find candidates based on very specific skill sets. It’s a great idea to include, explicitly, any technologies, platforms, methodologies, etc. that you’ve worked with (or even been exposed to) so you make it through an initial round of filtering, and get “found” by these search engines and recruiters. But, and this may go without saying, do NOT include any of the above if you don’t have a fair enough understanding – no better way to hurt your credibility when you do get called, and that can do harm for other opportunities down the road.

7. Add recommendations from LinkedIn or other sources. This is something that I’ve seen a couple times recently that I really think is a neat idea. LinkedIn allows you to include personal recommendations right on your profile. Why shouldn’t your resume do the same? You can even take the ones written for you on LinkedIn and copy them right to your resume! Or, just ask others to come up with a brief (one or two sentence) recommendation that you can include. In all cases, it’s always best to get the person’s permission for doing so. I’ve seen two ways to include them: one is to have them all grouped together at the end of a resume, the other is to include a recommendation for a particular position you’ve held right with that particular section of your resume. Either way is fine depending on how you’d want your resume to flow. I think the personal recommendation does allow for a bit more personal touch and a definite third-party account of your success with a particular role.

Those are just a few best practices that I like to really spice up your resume and make it “sing” in the eyes of a hiring manager. With the market as competitive as it is, having a resume that “rocks” is the easiest way to connect with the individual that is going to want to meet you and bring you on to their team!