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What you leave out of your resume may be as important as what you put in. Executive coach Irina Cozma suggests you steer clear of:
- Including irrelevant work experience: Younger people, for example, may be inclined to include jobs from the past like babysitting or being a cashier at a retail store. Your past work experiences are important and make you who you are, but not all of them need to be on your resume. Focus on what is relevant to the job.
- Wasting time customizing your resume: As long as the jobs you’re applying for fall into the same category, you probably don’t need to rewrite your entire resume for every application.
- Overdesigning your resume: “When I was a recruiter for high-volume jobs, I scanned each resume in a few seconds, looking for the words that matched my job opening. If the resume had an ingenious design, it took me a few extra seconds to situate myself on the page, and most often, I did not have those extra seconds. An unusual layout can also disrupt applications submitted through a tracking system,” she writes in Harvard Business Review.
- Coming off as unprofessional: An odd e-mail address – nickname or strange numbers in it – can raise suspicions. It doesn’t take much effort to get a professional-sounding e-mail address for job searching.
Something else to shed, according to recruiting specialist John Sullivan, is the belief that a resume must be contained to one page. As screening by artificial intelligence becomes widespread, what counts is getting information into the resume that will satisfy the bots, which don’t obsess over pages.
But after the bots comes human beings and you must sparkle for them. Over the years he has asked recruiters to identify the memorable elements that make an individual resume initially stand out and then be remembered days later. Here are some of the resume power factors he shared on his blog:
- Emphasize your accomplishments: Hiring managers prioritize accomplishments that generate bottom-line business results – and AI will be programmed to look for them as well. Instead of the traditional resume approach where it’s essentially a work history listing your job duties and skills, turn it into “an accomplishment sheet.” Each accomplishment gets its own bullet point and a name, with a description and the impact in dollars. Each job will have some or many of these accomplishments under it. “You should also highlight the accomplishments during your volunteer work and your education,” he adds.
- Quantify your results: Numbers and dollars are often used in tandem – we sold 12 packages, at a total value of $1.6-million – but dollars have the most impact. In some cases, you won’t have an actual number but definitely offer an estimate. Make sure to include a benchmark comparison number so the reader can see the improvement you had.
- Include measures of the quality of your work: “Applicants who want to stand out must include quantified measures of both their work volume and quality. Quality is often measured by Six Sigma, customer satisfaction, return rates and new features,” he writes.
- Show your work is always completed on time: For jobs or industries where completing work on time is critical, such as transportation delivery and retail service, periodically include on-time metrics, showing that the most important work was completed on or before its deadline.
- Reveal the quality of the organizations you have worked for: When you have worked at an organization that wasn’t well-known, educate the reader about the quality or exceptional work being done at it. After you list the employer’s name, put a dash and provide a sentence with a description of its quality.
- Show that you have worked with key internal people and well-known customers: If a project involved working closely with the CEO or marketing chief, say so, and similarly name top companies or people you worked with externally.
- Show that you have used technology: In recent jobs, explain how you have continuously learned about, embraced or used the latest current and emerging technologies.
Resumes are your marketing message for a job. Use them wisely.
Quick hits
- AI skills are increasingly being mentioned in resumes. The special sauce, according to Deepali Vyas, global head of the FinTech, Crypto and Payments practice at Korn Ferry, is to make that AI knowledge directly relevant to the job: How you have used AI tools to do this particular job better and more productively.
- For getting things done at work, exercising and other goals, Winnipeg entrepreneur David Cain advises when you do it can be critical. Find the best conditions – the best when – for worthwhile things. He only started exercising consistently, for example, when he switched to mid-day.
- “Never outsource what you enjoy,” says Atomic Habits author James Clear.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.