For Love Of Money, Part II
And Also Love of Mondays I Guess
A man once told me that if I wanted to be successful I would have to “learn to love weekends and hate Mondays,” which I think was his way of saying give up all hope and become a cog in the corporate machine and also possibly a reference to Garfield? I did not take his advice, because I was already at that time as successful as I was interested in becoming. I don’t mind Mondays. Actually, I love Mondays. I write Shelf Life for you on most Mondays and that’s one of my favorite things to do.
Last Thursday’s article covered how to format your resume to make it eye-catching and also cram way more information onto one sheet of paper than the good Lorde ever intended. Today we will be talking about what text to pour onto that nicely formatted blank page to fill it up.
Let’s creatively write your resume so you can convince some capitalist ghoul to enslave you to their corporation for forty-plus hours a week. I know this situation is not working well for any except the most privileged among us, but some of us—most of us—need jobs to survive while we chip away at the capitalism machine. No, I don’t know what I want instead of the capitalism machine. Longer vacations, maybe, or flexible schedules, or more pockets in my clothing. I argue about it so much I’ve lost track.
We’re going to get through this as quick as possible because there’s a lot to cover.
Personal Information
Your personal details go at the top of your resume. There is no legal obligation to include or exclude anything on your resume. Your resume is marketing material and not a legally binding document. Lying on your resume can result in termination from a job or withdrawal of an offer so do not lie on your resume. That said,
You don’t need to put your full, legal name on your resume. If you go by your married or maiden surname but have a different legal surname that’s fine. If you go by a nickname, it’s fine to use your nickname. You will ultimately have to provide your full legal name for background checks and accepting an offer but you don’t need to put it on your resume.
You don’t need to include every job you’ve ever had or include your last three or whatever. Include the jobs that most effectively showcase your skills and experience. When you fill out an application that requests your “three most recent employers” you have to fill that out accurately. But you do not need to create your resume that way.
You can omit your mailing address if it takes up too much space; or places you more than a 30-minute drive from a job that requires onsite presence; or if you live in a neighborhood that is perceived as home to marginalized communities. You can simply include your city and state or the metropolitan area in which you live or omit entirely.
Do include your website if you have one and it’s professional. Do not include your GeoCities site where you review b-list horror movies if that’s irrelevant to the job you’re applying for. Do include your LinkedIn profile if it has additional information you couldn’t fit on your resume.
Summary
Ditch the objective section. We used to all have these like twenty years ago but they need to be retired. (As all things probably ought to be after twenty years of hard work.)
Listen: The employer knows what your objective is. You’re seeking gainful employment in the field of whatever they do. They know that because you applied for their job. A big theme you will find in this article and probably a future article on drafting cover letters is do not waste precious space telling the employer things they already know. They already know what your objective is and no matter what hot air you fill this space with they’re going to skip right over it because they know, at the end of the day, your objective is “to get this job.” Do not waste your space.
Instead, include a brief summary or “about me” section that gives a treetop overview of your skillset, which will be supported in the experience section. Pack this section with as many action verbs and keywords from the job ad as you can. Keep this really brief, like one or two sentences. Scour it for auxiliary verbs and replace them with good verbs.
NO: I am self-motivated and results oriented. I have a proven track record of improving workflow processes, managing events, and building social media profiles.
YES: Self-motivated, results-oriented process revolutionizer, consensus builder, event director, and social media wiz.
Whatever the main responsibilities of the job are, your summary should confirm that you have those.
Experience
This is the place where you put three jobs. Three jobs! You do not need to list every job you’ve ever had. You do not need to list only paid jobs. You do not need to list your most recent three jobs. Put your three most relevant jobs here.
For each job, you would normally list the job title, the name of the employer, the employer’s location, and the dates of your employment there. Sometimes that takes up too much space, but as I mentioned last week you can use hyperlinks to get around some of it (hyperlink the company’s website and you may not need to identify the location).
This is the real meat of today’s article, I think, because this is where I see a lot of resumes not maximizing their space. Underneath each job, put bullet points. You want this section to describe your experience but you also get advice that this section should list your accomplishments, and some people end up with a ton of bullets because they’re describing their responsibilities and their accomplishments. You do not need to do that.
List accomplishments such that the accomplishments themselves describe your skills. For instance, there is no need to tell an employer that you used your technical expertise to design widgets every day and then later tell them about the superwidget you designed for a major client’s special order. Just mention the special order superwidget. The fact that you know how to design widgets is made clear by the fact that you designed a superwidget.
Here’s a practical example: I do not need to say that I supervised eight reports (a responsibility) and then also say that I grew the program from one with 5 percent titles in full color to 15 percent of titles in full color over two years (an accomplishment), when I could say that I deployed my team of eight reports to achieve the growth. If a big accomplishment required the skills that are part and parcel of your daily responsibilities, combine both things into one bullet.
When listing your accomplishments, use good verbs. Weed out all your auxiliary verbs. After your first pass, try to replace every lackluster verb with a better one. “Served as liaison” is better as “interfaced.” Look for weak verbs and constructions like “served as,” “provided,” “worked on” or “worked closely with.” Replace them with words like “collaborated,” “executed,” “streamlined,” “implemented.”
To write in the past tense or the present tense? My strategy is to treat bullets related to my current role or roles in the present tense and all past experience in the past tense. It would also be fine to go all present tense or all past tense. Be careful that you’re not switching back and forth in verb tenses from bullet to bullet.
If you are in a field that requires a lot of different specialized skills, you do not need to support all of them in your experience section with a job at which you used the specific skill. For instance, I’ve used CMS, APA, AMA, and GPO at various full-time jobs over the last decade but I don’t need to list all those jobs to prove it. If it’s critical to the job I’m applying for that I know how to use a style manual, I want to support that in my experience for sure. But then in my key skills section I can list all the style manuals I know. This is a good solution for folks in project management who may be expected to know a number of specific PM software suites because different shops use different ones; and for folks in tech who need to show facility with many languages or architectures.
What if you’ve held several different job titles all at one organization? Depends. Let’s say you have three different organizations you want to list, and at one of them you held three jobs at increasing responsibility levels. In that case, I suggest listing two organizations with one job title each and a third organization with three job titles—you can separate them with commas or slashes or whatever looks best to you, but place the most responsible one (recently held) first and then the other two in descending order.
If you wish to list three jobs total in your experience section and they’re all with the same organization, you can list them as separate jobs. Just ensure that the job responsibilities are actually distinct—there is no reason to have three jobs listed with overlapping responsibilities. A good strategy to show increasing responsibility over time is to include the basic responsibilities under the lowest-responsibility or most-junior position, and then under the higher-level positions include only those responsibilities that were new (and frame them in terms of accomplishments).
Finally, what about the opposite scenario where you’ve had a string of similar jobs at a bunch of different places? If you’ve held continuous employment doing one thing for a solid period of time but moved from employer to employer, you can list that as one job as long as you are transparent that you are not passing this off as a period of continuous employment with one company. For instance, if you were a bank teller for five years, first with SunTrust and then with Bank of America and then with Chase, it’s fine to list Bank Teller as one job you held from 2005 to 2010, and then list the three organizations for which you did that job. You are doing this to save vertical space—not to trick anyone into thinking you stayed at one job for five years.
Education
Include your degree if you have one. If you are concerned that the institution you went to was not a prestigious one, you can leave it off: “BA, English Language and Literature, 2000 to 2004.” If you’re concerned that your graduation year shows your age, you can leave it off: “Bowie State University, Bowie, MD: BA, English Language and Literature.” If you’re worried because it took you six years to do your bachelor’s, just put the graduation year. If you’re trying for your first post-college job, include more information like your GPA and any honors you received, since you have less experience to showcase (and therefore more room for education).
If you’re fresh out of school and you don’t have a lot of professional experience to put on your resume, you can think about swapping the prominence of the education and experience sections. That said, try to come up with some things you’ve done in a paid or unpaid capacity that you gained valuable experience from. If you know how to use Microsoft Office, add pages to a Confluence wiki, build a database, design a website—think about where you picked up those skills. Volunteer experience, helping out a family member, friend, or neighbor with a small or home-based business, or projects you undertook for organizations at your school can all count as experience.
Include any professional certifications you have in your education section, any additional courses or continuing education you’ve done, and any prominent industry conferences you’ve attended lately if you need some filler. Save space by using hyperlinks where you can.
Key Skills
This is where I list industry-specific software I know; adjacent-industry software I think of as nice-to-have bonuses; and skills I didn’t call out in the summary or experience sections. Maybe “style manual development” didn’t rise to the level of its own bullet anywhere in my work experience but I know how to do it—this is a fine place to put it. If you have unexpected but handy skills for someone in your field, include those. If you know there is software out there that you’ll be asked about and you don’t already know it, go do a Coursera guided project. Yay, now you know Jira.
Extracurriculars
If you have other professional or volunteer activities outside of your paid job that you want to include, this is the place. Think about all the stuff you do that relates to your career but isn’t directly your work: Are you on any task forces or coalitions? Do you organize industry events or conferences? Do you mentor junior members of your field? Have you spoken on any panels or presented at conferences?
This is also where I let a bit of my personality show: One bullet mentions a hobby of mine. If your hobby is reading books or watching TV or taking naps, you should skip over your hobby. If you have an unusual or interesting hobby—urban beekeeping, tallship sailing, competitive breakdancing—I think it’s fine to include. Use your judgment based on the tone of the ad you saw and the information about company culture you can glean from reviewing the company’s website. When I do this, I’m trying to telegraph to prospective employers that I enjoy active, challenging hobbies and I’m a fun person to make small talk with around the office because I went geocaching last weekend or whatever. If you’re responding to a very formal ad or an institution or organization that you suspect to be very buttoned-up, then you would be wise to delete this bullet.
References
Are your references available on request? Yes they are. You do not need to tell recruiters and hiring managers that you can provide references if requested. I had this on my resume for a long time until someone questioned it fairly recently—what’s the wisdom of including this?—and they were totally right. Employers know you’ll cough up references if they ask. You don’t need to tell them.
The only thing more fun than writing a resume is writing a custom cover letter for each job you apply for. I’ll cover cover letters at some point, but for now you have plenty to be getting on with to revamp your resume. I’ll leave you with a redacted copy of a resume I made recently. Word and Canva have tons of resume templates if you have access to those programs (that’s where most of mine come from) and if you don’t, you can find free templates for Google Docs all over the web.
I will be back on Thursday with more mildly interesting expository writing, even though Thursday is a holiday of great importance, because heroes don’t take days off.
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