Ugh… resumes.
Those 8.5 x 11 inch nightmares.
What are you supposed to put on them? Skills? Something else? And what does a good resume even look like???
Well, you’ve come to the right place.
As a former leader of LinkedIn’s Education Team and a career coach to both MBAs at the University of Michigan and military veterans at Shift.org, I’ve seen more than my share of resumes. And most importantly, I’ve seen exactly what it takes to make a great one.
So read on to get all your questions answered… starting with the big one:
What Is the Purpose of a Resume?
Before I explain how to make a great resume, let me explain why we need them in the first place.
Start by imagining what it’s like to be a recruiter. You might have 30–40 jobs to fill - each with hundreds or thousands of potential applicants.
While it might feel good to have a holistic review process where you get to know each candidate deeply, let’s get real.
The massive nature of the hiring challenge necessitates a massive shortcut.
And what is a resume but a shortcut to get to know potential candidates as quickly as possible?
After all, study after study shows that recruiters can get through a resume in just six seconds - way faster than looking deeply into each candidate’s soul… ;)
So before you freak out about your resume any further, recognize it for what it really is: A helpful tool for recruiters.
And if you can figure out how to help recruiters, I promise they’ll help you in return. Which brings us to our next big question…
What Does a Good Resume Look Like?
Knowing that recruiters need to be able to parse your resume in a matter of seconds, let’s start by understanding what they’re looking for:
1. Can you do the job?
The first screen that recruiters make (and that’s often conducted by the Applicant Tracking Systems recruiters use to collect resumes) is just to figure out whether you can even do the job in the first place.
While that might seem totally obvious, you’d be shocked by how many applications recruiters get that have ZERO connection to the job at hand. For instance, when I’ve hired for marketing roles in the past, I’ve gotten applications from plumbers, architects, and librarians - with no clear sense of transferrable skills or relevant experience.
So the easiest way to screen out unqualified candidates is to quickly scan for the most relevant keywords from the job description.
For example, let’s say you’re applying for a Product Manager job where the job description calls for a “Cross-functional leader with deep experience building out product roadmaps and driving go-to-market planning.” In that case, it’s essential that your resume include many of the key skills (I’ve italicized them to make it more obvious). Otherwise, why should the recruiter even give you a shot?
2. Will you do a good job?
Even after you pass the initial screening stage, you still need to convince the recruiter that offering you an interview will get them promoted - not fired!
So in addition to keywords, it’s essential to also give recruiters the peace of mind that you have a strong track record of success. After all, the best predictor of future success is past success.
Thus, when you build out your resume bullets, be sure to also include powerful outcomes from your past performance. Anything from the business impact (e.g., customers, revenue, cost-savings) to the human side (e.g., promoted ahead of schedule, won Employee of the Month) helps the recruiter feel safe in picking you.
And thus, by following these two simple rules-of-thumb, you’ll be on your way to developing a killer resume - i.e., one that makes it easier for recruiters to pick you!
What to Include in a Resume?
While the above guidelines are a good start, you’re probably still wondering: “OK, but what do I actually put on that blank page? That demonic cursor keeps blinking at me and it’s starting to freak me out…” ;)
Fear not, here’s everything that matters for your resume from top to bottom:
Headline: The very first decision a recruiter is going to make about your resume is whether or not you seem like a relevant candidate (see above re: keywords). So why make them guess? Instead, just flat out lead with your desired job title at top (Product Manager, Accountant, Grand Poobah of Finance, whatever) so that there’s no guessing required and the first impression is a positive one.
Summary: While you don’t strictly need a Summary, think back to that second decision a recruiter needs to make: “Will this person do a good job?” Rather than make them hunt around for evidence of your track record, why not just hit them over the head with it up-top? As in: “Experienced Product Manager with a track record of successful launches including X, Y, Z” - where X, Y, and Z are three of the very best outcomes you’ve ever delivered. Even if you reference those same experiences later on in your bullets, you can be sure they’ll be read if you also include them at the very top.
Experience: Your resume bullets for your work experience can actually cover both decisions the recruiter has to make - “Can you do the job?” and “Will you do it well?” That’s because a great resume bullet is a combination of your skill keywords (e.g., product roadmaps) and your outcomes (e.g., generated $1.5M in revenue). Here’s an easy template to help you apply this pattern to all your bullets: “Used X SKILL to drive Y OUTCOME.” As in “Used A/B testing across multiple campaigns to increase conversion rate by 17%.”
Education: While your Education section is nominally a chance to list the specific degree that the job description requires (e.g., CS major or MBA), recognize it for what it really is: Yet another chance to show off your skills and outcomes. That’s because anything you did in school still counts if it helps the recruiter answer those two big questions. So a bullet like “Led Habitat for Humanity chapter to develop community outreach program, driving $500K in volunteer labor” is absolutely meaningful - even if it occurred in college!
And, of course, there’s one last thing you should consider too…
How to List Skills on a Resume
Because even though we tend to focus on the top and middle of our resumes, the Skills section at the bottom is just as important. That’s because it gives us one last, super easy chance to make up for anything we omitted above.
Say, for instance, you’re applying for an Account Executive job and you look back at your dream job description… only to discover that you’re missing 5 powerful skill keywords.
Are you doomed to go back and rewrite all your resume bullets?
No way.
Just add a Skills section at the very bottom and list those skills as so:
- Lead Generation
- Nurture Streams
- PowerPoint
- Negotiation
- Contract Development
With less than a minute’s worth of work, you now get credit for all the things you’re missing. And no painful bullet rewriting required!
But, of course, there’s just one final consideration…
What Skills Should You Put on a Resume?
All of the above assumes that you’ve got a pretty good handle on the keywords in the job description (JD) you’re aiming for.
And that’s a pretty safe assumption if you’re only applying to a single job. After all, the most important keywords tend to be the ones that pop right off the JD because they’re so specific and relevant to the role - e.g., SQL for Analysts, Photoshop for Designers.
But what if you’re applying to lots of jobs? Does that mean you’ve got to read through every last JD and pull out all the different keywords by hand?
Nope. Try a little Jobscan hack instead.
Jobscan lets you paste in your resume and your desired job description to see which important keywords you’re missing.
But instead of just pasting in one JD, you can paste in 5, 10, or more - all into the same box. And the result is that you can quickly figure out which keywords are most common across all the JDs, so you can optimized a single resume for multiple applications.
Just be sure that the roles are part of a single job family - e.g., Sales, Marketing, etc. Because if you want to apply for roles across different families, it’s best to create separate resume versions for each to really nail the nuances of those categories.
What Should a Resume Look Like?
So there you have it - everything you need to make your resume rock, from top to bottom.
And just remember that a resume doesn’t need to look like any one template or format - but it does need to answer those two critical recruiter questions. And it needs to answer them ASAP!
So do your recruiter friends a favor by keeping it focused on what they need. And they might just do you a big favor in turn… :)
Good luck out there!