How to make a great resume

Resume Series 1: Resume Fundamentals

To write the perfect resume, let’s look at the origins of the ticket to your future job first. This will be the first of many resume focused posts, I hope you enjoy reading it.

Leonardo Da Vinci wrote the first resume around 1482. Fast forward to the 1930’s and resumes are formalities, most of the time they were written on scraps of paper over lunch with employees. Following WW2, resumes included everything from your weight, age, height, marital status, religion, and yes, your work experience. In the 1950’s, resumes are officially required for most jobs. By the time the 1980’s rolls around, consumers were learning the art of crafting the perfect resume through books, seminars, and VHS tapes. The early 90’s brings the internet, career websites like Monster and Career Builder are founded that offer job seekers and recruiters a platform to search and apply to jobs. Now, resumes combined with LinkedIn profiles, play pivotal roles in getting your foot in the door.

The history of the resume has evolved over the past century. Once an abnormality associated with individual records, the resume is now the standard for attaining a job.

But what is it really used for?

I remember when I was an undergraduate in college, I had very little real-world experience. I had a few fancy internships with reputable organizations, but my grades were average and my duties basic. When attending job fairs my senior year, recruiters would quickly glance at my resume, recognize the names of reputable organizations, and say “Good Experience.” I’m pretty sure they didn’t even review my duties outlined below each organization. But because of the names, they quickly felt that I had “good experience.”

For entry level jobs, we can assume that recruiters only really care about the experiences you have acquired and what organizations you have been affiliated with. Specific duties on the job are pushed aside for now. Where and who you work with is incredibly important to landing that first gig.

In our first addition of the resume series, let’s discover how we can best leverage organization affiliation with landing that first job. We will also focus on some of the skills you should be developing in school to accompany the resume.

If you are in college right now and are looking for the most effective way to finding a great via the resume, focus on the following:

• Apply and join organizations with name recognition as an intern

• Leverage resources at your school to get involved in campus wide initiatives and organizations

• Focus on developing soft skills

• Show results and outcomes in your job duties

• Simple resume format

Apply and join organizations with name recognition as an intern:

It doesn’t matter what you major in, every degree program has organizations that serve as focal points. Professors look to them to guide their curriculum. Whether you major in Business, International Relations, Journalism, Psychology, or anything else, there are organizations that students and professors look up too. When you say the organizations name in the hallway, peers give you pause. “That would be cool to work there,” you say to yourself. Put all your focus on acquiring a summer internship at one of these organizations if you can.

It does not matter what you do specifically in terms of day-to-day duties, all that matters is the name on the resume. Yes, these positions will be tough to acquire but cast your net wide. Apply to positions outside your major. Apply to organizations you think you are unqualified for. Perhaps even apply to organizations outside of your field. Who knows, maybe there will be a position there for you.

One common theme you will find in Mr. Career Guide is Apply, Apply, Apply. Do not limit yourself to one or two organizations. During college, you need to cast a wide net to land a job. Aspiring professionals tend to limit themselves to organizations they deem as “dream jobs.” Only to come up short, they are left having to start the job and intern application over again. Use your time in school to apply to as many gigs as possible.

Leverage resources at your school to get involved in campus wide initiatives and organizations:

College is a microcosm of society. There are organizations that represent nearly every facet of your interests (Model United Nations, Diversity & Inclusion Clubs, Young Professionals in Engineering). The sky is the limit and the bigger the school, the more organizations to join. In college, you are often told, it’s not what you know but who you know. I’ve found this to be partly true. It may be more important to dive deep into an organization, gain leadership experience, and grow the group during your time there. This can provide leverage during the career search. It can also serve as a talking point with recruiters.

Focus on Developing Soft Skills

According to the August 2018 LinkedIn Workforce Report, communication skills were the most highly sought after skill by employers today. That’s a surprising fact given the emphasis on STEM degrees and data analytics. Communication skills have been declining due to a reduction in face-to-face communication and heavy reliance on the internet. Even with the acceleration of Artificial Intelligence (AI), communication will be an in-demand skill. If you can talk to people, you will go far.

While in school, focus on emerging skills in the market. Learn to identify skill gaps and take courses emphasizing them. Even in a technical world, don’t underestimate the value of soft-skills. Building relationships with others will take you far in a career. You can learn hard skills on the job, but the soft-skills will set you apart.

I used to work with a client who was intense and intimidating. He was from Eastern Europe and had a no B.S. attitude with our consulting team. Even the senior managers on the project were intimated by him. They did not challenge his assumptions on the system we were implementing and bullied us into agreeing with him. One day I found myself alone in a conference room with the client. I started asking him questions about his personal life. He told me how he studied the Soviet Union in college and found himself working in the tech industry. We discussed foreign policy and his time in Eastern Europe. After nearly twenty minutes he shook my hand and said, “I’ll see you around man, let’s grab lunch sometime to discuss.”

The next day I received an email from the client asking me to go out to lunch. No one else from my team was invited. We sat down and talked more about his time in the Soviet Union and what led him to tech. I asked probing questions and remembered facts he had told me in the previous conversation.

Several weeks later the project was ending. The client continued to intimidate the project leadership and we submitted a contract extension for our work. When the client reviewed the proposal, he responded and asked that “Josh be on the team.” He called me out by name in the response and requested that I lead a workstream of the project.

I bring up this example because it shows the value of soft skills in the workplace. I lacked a lot of the technical skills some of the other consultants had. Digging through excel spreadsheets is not my strength but communication skills are. In college, focus on developing your ability to communicate. Focus on showing empathy and putting yourself in other people’s shoe; remember facts about others and show interest in what they have to say.

On your resume emphasize your communication skills by showing examples in your job/internship duties. Use the time with the recruiter to showcase your communication skills.

Show results and outcomes in your resume

Too often we use resumes to show a list of duties and activities we are responsible for on a job/internship. In bullet points you list that you “coordinated events for the leadership team” or “conducted data analysis” or “researched the technical development of systems.” Most recruiters will not review the duties you conducted on the job especially if they are written without results.

What I mean by results is that instead of writing about duties and activities, write about the results that were achieved from your actions. Remove task-oriented statements. They add little value to the recruiter and take up valuable time and space.

Here are a few examples:

Task, Activity, Duty Driven Statement:

“Develop best practices and standardized tools for the team"

Results Statement:

“Develop best practices and standardized tools for the team which resulted in the successful adoption of new tools for the team.”

Task, Activity, Duty Driven Statement:

“Provide meaningful data that can help the business maximize the return for business”

Results Statement:

“Provide data to maximize the return for business that was used by the leadership team to improve the client relationship for repeat business”

Task, Activity, Duty Driven Statement:

“Conduct research on the political climate of sub-Saharan Africa”

Results Statement

“Conduct research on the migration rate of sub-Saharan Africans that will be used for an Academic publication for global consumption.”

Everything you do in college has a purpose. You need to connect the purpose and the outcome to your resume descriptions. Creating these points is more difficult but Mr. Career Guide can assure you that it will catch a recruiter’s eye.

When taking on a new task, reflect on the accomplishment you hope to achieve out of it. If you are an intern or research assistant at school, the work you are doing has more impact than you think. Even if you are digging though data, coordinating social events, or serving coffee, it all serves a purpose. Tying the purpose into the resume with outcomes/results will give the recruiter confidence that you can describe tasks from an end-to-end perspective.

Simple Resume Format

I’m not going to spend too much time on this section. Let’s just say resume format should be clean and crisp. Leave the fancy format off the resume and do not add a picture! That’s what LinkedIn is for. Your time with the recruiter is limited, their time is finite. The resume should be one page with spacing in-between experiences. No one needs a two-page resume. In later posts I will review how to apply a perfect resume format.