Enhance your Resume/CV - Career Challenge

The simple steps you can take to make sure your experience shines

Welcome to August’s career challenge log. This month the challenge will be focused on crafting a resume, CV and/or an online professional profile.

Note: I use the words ‘Resume’ and ‘CV’ in this article/log because many people use strictly one word depending on what part of the world they come from when they are talking about a piece of paper which they submit as part of a job application and wanted to ensure that it was clear what was being spoken about.

Last month, the career challenge log was all about Storytelling. If you missed out on that, definitely check it out here. There is a high likelihood that you will develop skills in the storytelling challenge that would make developing your resume or CV way easier and arguably a better one in the long run. This is especially true if you consider the ‘full’ recruitment experience that includes one or more interviews. The goal is to create a consistent experience for a recruiter and a company that showcases you - your skills, your experience and your value to them.

Creating a compelling CV, Resume or an Online Profile that…

a) Gets opened &

b) Gets reviewed for at least 30 seconds

…are some of the outcomes most applicant want when they submit their resume/CV to a job application. Let’s just unpack those two things a moment:

Get’s opened: We hear and read stories about 100s, sometimes 1000s of people applying for a single job. Do you think 1000 resumes even get opened? I doubt it. Most of the time things are automated and companies just don’t have the money and/or the people to be able to review them all. When they do, if a recruiter is involved (most of the time they are) they normally send the application (the resume or CV) to then a hiring manager who needs to open it, and then they send it over to their peers, who also need to open it.

Get’s reviewed for 30 seconds: Going back to the original point that so many people apply for the same job, hiring managers are busy people. The fact they are hiring should already scream to you ‘These people are overburdened’ because most of the time that hiring manager is covering the empty space in the team. Use that empathy and make it your superpower by focusing on making it SO EASY for the hiring manager to say ‘YES I would like to spend my precious time talking to this person about the application they submitted’.

Having been in both positions of a person submitting their CV/Resumes, and somebody reviewing CVs/Resume’s, I understand it is tough to know how to create a compelling narrative in your documentation and profile. This is especially true if you have worked in the same company for a while, and never ‘had’ to do these because you have either not moved position or you have been promoted to a more senior position or other role in that company.

This challenge log is aimed at those:

• Starting from scratch - not updated their Resume in at least 2-3 years (or longer)

• Wanting to refresh their resume/cv - e.g. you may have not updated their Resume in 6-12 months

You are developing skills every single day, month and year. Don’t wait until you apply for a job to update your profile

The skills you develop when focusing on creating a compelling resume/CV will also help you in the later stages of the recruitment process, such as interviews.

Let’s check out the CV/Resume Challenge Log (below). Keep reading to be taken on a short walkthrough.

The Log

Like the storytelling 101 challenge last month, the CV/Resume challenge is also in a specific order, top to bottom, and labeled 1 through to 6, so you begin at 1, and move through to 6 in numerical order before you take on the final project.

The previous mini-challenges could be completed ‘in any order’ before the final project, however with this challenge it was important to create a structure of progression so that you can begin working on specific components within the mini-challenges to contribute to the final project. Once you have completed all 6 mini-challenges and reflected on those outcomes, you can be ready for the final project of the challenge.

These challenges are not meant to be completed in any time period. You can take one week, one month or one year to complete them. (Also please ensure you do read the disclaimer and the notice on the about page - completing these challenges are your choice!)

Log Overview

Now, let’s run through briefly each of the mini-challenges with some additional information:

1. Draft your ‘Story’: This is where the Storytelling 101 log would be helpful because by exploring the principals of storytelling you become familiar with the skill of crafting a narrative that is easy to understand for your audience. To do this for your CV/Resume you need to understand your journey, your motivations, your skills and what value you bring as a combination of those four things to the ‘market’ - the ‘market’ in this context being those companies who could or would potentially hire you.

   Write your 1-2 paragraphs, then write them again, then again and refine this. It is one of the most important things you do, because if you do a great job at this, everything else in this challenge falls into place much easier. If you want some inspiration, go take a look at some popular online LinkedIn profiles (or other professional platform) you already follow and inspire you, and take a look at their descriptions.

2. Consider an Online Platform: You will already likely use social media, and you may already likely use professional social media platforms like LinkedIn. They are distinctly different from purely social platforms because recruiters use professional platforms to find potential hires. Those are the platforms I’m talking about when I say ‘professional’. Online presence is generally important (not absolutely essential) in today’s market because jobs are generally posted on them and it is a great way to be able to showcase your skills and who you are more to potential recruiters or companies who could hire you beyond that of a document or application that they receive. Consider making a simple profile on a professional social media platform if you are comfortable doing so.

3. Display your Headline: Imagine this scenario. A recruiter or hiring manager opens your resume document in their busy day, where they are likely back to back meetings. They wait a split second for it to load and it appears, but a large amount of text appears, all one size with some things bullet pointed and headings in bold, and the recruiter or hiring manager has to look REAL hard to figure out what role this person is and then even after that they are not really sure how the applicant identifies themselves in their career because they have had lots of different roles. How do you think this makes them feel? Like they would hire you?

   One of the biggest improvements to a resume/CV is to put what I call - your ‘career’ headline, right at the top of your profile. Who are you? Are you a software consultant, are you senior, are you a games designer, are you a leadership consultant?

4. Recommend and Recommended: Online profiles like LinkedIn are great for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest is their ability to showcase recommendations from your peers and managers. When you start to get 2-3 recommendations, they paint a great picture of another person’s descriptions of your skills, and they can be insightful for hiring managers and recruiters. The fact you have recommendations is a boon and additionally, you providing someone else a genuine recommendation is a great thing. It is good practice to only seek and give recommendations where you have worked with that person for a sufficient time period to form an opinion on their skills, and your willing for them (and you) to show that on your profile. Another great thing this does is it actually gives YOU some great insight on what OTHERS see in you - does it line up to your narrative and career story?

5. Write an amazing description: Now you have got your story inline, you have recommendations and have recommended, and you have a clear headline. For both paper resumes and online ones, you generally have the space of approx. a paragraph or sometimes longer to include a description about who you are, what you do and your skills. This is your ‘elevator description’ (similar to an elevator pitch) where at a minimum, you’d like a reader to read to. It should aim to captivate and make the reader say ‘YES’ to an interview before they have even reached anything beneath it.

6. Focus on Value: In resumes I often see listed tasks, achievements or items which mean a lot to the application but mean nothing to a reader, because most of the time, they have no idea what it is, and they would be very unlikely to make the connection themselves, at the expense of their own time and effort, to link a sentence to the ‘potential’ value as a result of that action or task. Not to diminish your achievements as this may seem like a harsh statement, but it surely makes sense? That reader of your application isn’t there to make a case for you, you are there to make it easy for the reader to make a case for you and say ‘Yes, this person would be amazing! that value is exactly what we need!’. This task is all about writing 2-3 focus points which again, you want the reader to see under your headline which really showcase your value to the potential company. Be critical when your writing these 2-3 sub-heading points as that should focus on relevant value to the companies who you would work for. Do you focus on sales, billed hours, reducing risk, product satisfaction?

The Final Project!

Final Project: The final project is about putting everything together from the mini-challenges to create or improve your CV/Resume and/or your online profile.

As I said before, the online profile is an optional part, but when the goal is to increase your presence, if your industry or target ‘market’ as we previously described it utilize online professional profiles like LinkedIn, then you should consider what the cost is by not being on them. Other examples of professional online communities and profiles are B-hance profiles for showcasing work and artwork (and even arguably, in some industries a website acts as a person’s online profile).

Another tip for your final project is to consider asking a mentor or peer to review your updated profile and seek constructive feedback to continue to iterate.

Summary

This blog aimed to introduce the Career/Resume CV Career Challenge Log and give readers an introduction on how to begin and improve their current CV/Resume. I mentioned it right up top, that this career challenge goes hand in hand with the Storytelling 101 log, however it is not required. Just like in the storytelling log, hopefully you can begin to see how many of these ‘human’ skills are connected and focusing on building your skill in one area, it has a huge impact in others.

Watch out for the updates to the challenge log in future editions (like steps to help you level up these skills even further) and the paid version of the newsletter which will include printable logs (and iPad optimized pdfs) and additional tools like more blogs and even videos to work through some of these tasks!

Check out the Storytelling 101 Challenge Log below!

Thanks for reading!