Hi everyone. Andy LaCivita, founder of milewalk and the
milewalk Academy and awarding winning author of the Hiring Prophecies. Here with this weeks episode, I am so excited
about what we're going to talk about today, which is how to build the ultimate professional
resume. Not only am I happy to share this with you,
but I'm glad I'm now going to have a video to point people to for the hundreds of requests
I get a week to just glance over my resume. I'm really, really thrilled, because I know
this is something a lot of people struggle with. It's very confusing. It's not a fun or natural act. I'm just super excited to do this with you
today. Just to give you an idea, I have looked over
500,000 resumes in my life. As an executive recruiter who matches job
candidates with hiring companies, I see a lot of resumes. I have personal experience. I understand what resonates with me, but I
also see the way that my customers, the hiring companies, react when they look at job candidates
resumes. What I've done is I've stripped it down, I've
looked at many of these resumes, and I've curated and developed what I think is the
ideal professional resume for virtually any job that you have. I think it works in 95% of the cases. Before we get in, I want to talk about a few
little concepts about the resume. The resume itself, the goal, there's only
one goal, the resume has only one goal, which is to entice an employer to speak with you. That's it. That's the sole purpose the resume has. It's not a vehicle to ask for what you want. It's not a vehicle to tell them what you're
going to do if they hire you. You can use emails and cover letters for that
and the job interview itself. It's really just a vehicle to entice them
and to get them excited about you, so that they want to speak with you. Now, before we go any further, this is going
to work a lot better if you actually have a template of the resume that I'm going to
speak about in front of you. There's a download button in the notes. The great thing about video is you can pause
me and download that. I think it'll be easier to follow along. It's the template and there's some instructions
in there, I'm going to refer to it as we go through it. While your doing that, the goal for to day
is really about helping you understand how to think about the resume, what the format
should look like, and give you a template and some instruction as to how to fill it
in. It's not to write the resume for you. I have other training and coaching activities
for that. It's really about just getting you comfortable
with what the resume should look like. If you have any specific questions that's
what the comment sections are for. Let's dive in. As you can see, on the top of the resume,
where your name is, I suggest first and last name only. The less the employer has to digest, the better. You don't need to use 3 names, 4 names or
other symbols or hieroglyphics at the end of your name. If you've got some credentials you want to
put them there, that's fine. I suggest sticking with first and last name. It's cleaner. It's easier for them to remember. You don't want to tax them any more than they
need to be. Underneath that you got your street address,
your city, your state, but there's a couple of items in your contact information that
I want to talk about. Phone numbers, I get all kinds of goofy stuff. People using their home numbers. Google numbers. The best number to use is your cell phone,
so that they can get you directly. You should have a professional voice mail
message on there. You don't want to use your home number where
you've go the kids in the background screaming or the dog's barking. While I may think that's funny, because I
have dogs and I understand what that's like, why risk it. You want to use your cell phone, so they can
actually get you and you want to be mindful of your voice mail. It shouldn't be cheeky and funny, it should
be professional if you're going to be fielding voice mails from employers. You're wondering, I probably spent about a
minute on the phone number, you're going to love what I do with the email address. The email address that you place on the resume
should have a couple characteristics about it. You need to think about, it's not just your
contact email, it's what the employer does with it. I always recommend that it's personal and
polished. I would prefer johnsmith@gmail.com, as opposed
to ilovedogs@gmail.com. Let me tell you why. You want them to keep seeing your name. If they're going to contact you and send you
an email, you want them to be able to go into their system and just type John and have your
email pop up. A lot of these Mac mail and Outlook and Google
mail, they retain that email address. Don't have them hunt for your resume to find
that your email address is ilovedogs. These are things just to think about. As we get into the rest of the resume, now
this is just your contact information and your name, it's the first thing that they're
going to see. You want to think of the resume as a funnel. It starts large and you want to assume that
they're going to read it from top down. You also want to assume that at any moment
they can jump out and stop or they can get interrupted or disinterested. You want to make sure that you start out with
a bang and you give them a full digest of who you are and what you offer, because you
want to entice them. That's the first thing they're going to see. You don't want to ask, it's not, as a I mentioned,
a vehicle to ask them for what you want, so you don't want to put what you're seeking,
what you want, what your preferences are. You want to start planting ideas in the employers
mind as to how they can deploy a great asset, like you, and the value that they're going
to get. I recommend, as you can see, the career profile. This is your Reader's Digest version of who
you are and what you've accomplished and a summary of your skills, that's it, three things. Who you are, what you've accomplished, and
a summary of your skills, so they have an idea. They get a collection of information. It's a snapshot. If I can take 28 years of experience and strip
it down to 26 words, you can certainly take your professional life and put it into 2 paragraphs
just so that they understand who you are. I want to spend a little time on this one,
because I think this is extremely important, because it's the first thing they're going
to see. You do want to get them excited. Let's take a couple of quick examples that
are opposites, I'll try to hit as many people as I can. I know I have a lot of sales people that are
out there, that follow me, that email me, that we recruit. If you're a sales professional, the who you
are, the what you've accomplished, and the skill sets that you've developed might go
a little something like this, "I'm a seasoned sales professional who has, you generate revenue
by securing new customers." That's what it is that you do. If you want to talk about that, it's, "I'm
a seasoned sales professional," or you might want to talk about what it is you sell, hardware,
software, pharmaceutical products, whatever it might be, "Who has generated revenue of
x amount," how many dollars over the course of your life time. Remember you're aggregating here, so these
numbers and these accomplishments should sound bigger, because you're aggregating them. Your adding up all the years of experience
that you've had, even if it's 1 year or 2 years or 10 years. "I'm a seasoned sales professional, who has
sold 'whatever the products are' generating X amount of revenue securing X new customers. I'm proficient in researching, prospecting,
customer relationship development, sales," and so forth. The employer can get all of that in a paragraph
or two. Now they've got a snapshot and a memorable
breadcrumb of you, of who you are. Now, you might say, "Well, I'm not a sales
person," or "I'm not a marketer," or "I'm not something like that." Let's take something just totally different. For all of you hostesses out there, I love
to go to my favorite restaurants. I love people that greet me. Well, if your a 25 year old hostess and you've
been hostessing for 2 years. Think about what you do. You answer the phones. Your organize the tables. You greet the people when they come in. You can say that and you can say, "I'm a hostess,"
or you can think of it in terms of what you're actually contributing to the health of your
restaurant. Let's say you work 5 days a week and every
day that you work your 8 hour shift or 10 hour shift, you work for a great restaurant
who seats a hundred customers a day that you seat. You've been working there for an entire year. That's 5 days a week, that's 100 people a
day, for 50 weeks. That's 25,000 people that you have greeted. Are you a hostess or are you a hostess who
has performed reception duties, who has greeted people, who has handled over 20,000 or 25,000
customers per year for the life that you've been doing this. Think in those terms, you can encapsulate
that. I'm a hostess who works at a 4 star restaurant,
who greets 25,000 a year, your proficient in reception, organization, and customer service. You get the idea. This really can work with whatever your profession
is. You need to think about what it is that your
actually doing. Kind of in the terms of a noun and a verb. That's the career profile. That's just a little Reader's Digest of who
you are. The next section is where you start to build
that excitement. You want to talk about your highlights. This is that 3 to 4 bullets of your major,
major accomplishments in your life. Now, when you think about what employers are
interested in understanding, employers, they're actually very simple. No matter what it is that they do, they want
to generate revenue, they want to save costs, or they want to optimize the foundation or
processes or overall structure, so that their company is healthy and stable. Those are the three home runs. If you can think in terms of building, improving,
optimizing, increasing the overall health of the company, those are the highlights that
they're going to be most interested in. If you don't have that many years of experience
and you haven't done something that has been quantifiable or has as major an impact as
that does, think in terms of what else you've done. Have you coached people? Have you taught your fellow employees? Have you optimized processes? Have you written white papers? Have you done anything that contributes to
the growth and the health of your company that you are personally proud of? That's the highlights section. Now they're really starting to get excited. Here again, thinking in terms of the funnel. Thinking in terms of they can jump out at
any moment, this is what you're leaving them with. Now let's get into, let's actually get into
the body. Now, there's a couple of keys to victory in
the work experience section or professional experience section, whatever it is that you
want to call it. This is a listing of the organizations that
you've worked at in reverse chronological order, that's number 1. Second this is you want to list the companies
on the left side and slightly indent your titles. Reverse chronological order, companies, work
titles, responsibilities, and so forth. I'll take you through that. Now, why do you want to do it that way? People think in terms of time. They think in terms of chronology. They want to look at your track record of
achievement. They want to see your history, the decisions
you've made, your evolution within your companies and across companies. It's very difficult for them to do that if
you start listing your responsibilities and then the companies that you worked at where
you held those responsibilities. It reads like a Rubik's cube, it's very difficult
for them to understand that. You want to stay in reverse chronological
order for those reasons. The second thing is, you want to put your
company on the left side. Some people that I see, they put their title
on the left side. While you might not think this is a big deal,
there are a couple of really key points here. The first is, for me, when I read a resume,
I actually look at your name, I look at your highlights or your career profile, something
to get a good sense of who you are. Then, I race down the left column to look
for the companies that you've worked at. The first thing I'm looking for, are those
good, well known companies? Do they have good pedigree? Is this individual likely going to be coming
from a well cultured organization? That's important. Second thing it tells me is, does this person
consider him or her self a team player? If I see your title, it's almost like you
care more about yourself than you care about the employer. It might sound subtle, but your sending these
messages and you're not there to clarify. They're not there to talk to you yet, they're
just looking at a piece of paper. You want to make sure that these subliminal
messages that you're sending are positive. The other thing that you want to do is you
want to make sure that you show some progression within your titles. It's best if you can show a nice evolution,
if you can't, you can't. That's another thing you want to make sure
that you're doing. Make sure that it's reverse chronological
order, it's companies on the left, it's titles slightly indented. What I like to do, and as you can see this
from the example, not everybody know what companies, the companies that you worked at,
what they've done. What they do. They could be very, very well know companies
in your space, but a future employer might not understand what it is that your organization
does. I recommend, that right underneath the company
name, you put a one sentence description of what that company does, what their goal is,
what their contribution to the world is. Just so that I have a sense. Are they a product company? Are they a service company? What is it that they do? Is in a nonprofit organization? Whatever it might be. Then, as you start to go down into the detail
of your title, what is it that you are, in a sentence, responsible for. Is there a mini collection of highlights or
responsibilities that you can give the person a good perspective without actually having
to read all the bullets. Don't assume that they're going to read all
the detail in your resume. They read it like an outline. That's what most people do, that's what I
do. Are you continually enticing them to read
further? That's another thing you can do. You want to make sure that when you get down
to the bullets and the specific accomplishments, and I stress the word accomplishments. There's activity based resumes, which includes
what you were responsible for. There's accomplishments or benefits based
resumes, as to what your actual contribution and benefit was to your company or it's customers
or the people within the organization, whatever it might be. I have more detail on that in some other articles
that I've written, which I can point you to at the end. As you keep rolling on down, there is the
education. Education, list your school, list the years
that you attended, the location of the school, and list the degrees that you got. If you did not get a degree, you want to note
that. How many credit hours did you actually accumulate. Are you currently in school? When is your expected graduation or completion
date, whether it's for an associate's degree, a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, whatever
that might be. Then just list all the schools. At the end, this is kind of your catch all
section. I call it extracurriculars or volunteer activities
or other notable accomplishments and feats. It could be anything from nonprofit activities,
board activities, mentorship programs, volunteer programs, anything that you do that is germane
for them to know. I generally say stay away from hobbies and
other things, that while important and interesting to you, might not really be germane for the
employer to know. There you have it. You want to start with a career profile, that's
the Reader's Digest of who you are. Then you want to go onto your highlights. What are your major contributions to your
organizations and it's constituents, it's customers and those types of relevant parties. Then, your work experience in reverse chronological
order, listing the companies, your titles, and your responsibilities. Then, your education and then your extracurriculars. I hope you enjoyed this weeks episode. If you'd like more information on resume writing,
if you go to the Tips for work and life blog at andrewlacivita.com and simply search on
the word resume, there' probably a half a dozen articles there that you can see and
get more tips and tricks. I also have an entire book dedicated to job
interviewing. It's called 'Interview Intervention: Communication
That Gets You Hired.' I give that away free, the eBook to anybody
that signs up for the Tips for work and life blog. I also have an entire book experience that
is on the front page of the milewalk academy. If you go to milewalkacademy.com and you see
the Interview Intervention experience, click learn more you can get access to an eBook,
all the audio, I've recorded all the chapters, there's chapter notes and guides, helpful
job interview guides, and other things that are great aides. I hope you download those. Then of course, the ultimate resume template
that is included in this post. I hope you download that. I hope you enjoy it. Lots of luck. See you next week.
