Resume Writing Archives - Page 2 of 16 - Palladian Career Resources

Resume Without Job Titles

Most jobs have well established titles and easy to understand responsibilities. Some, though, are unique. What do you do if you work in a role that has little or no equivalent at other companies? Do you list your job title, change the title to something more commonly used, or skip it entirely? The resume I read today struggled with this dilemma.

Most jobs have well established titles and easy to understand responsibilities. Some, though, are unique. What do you do if you work in a role that has little or no equivalence to jobs at other companies? Do you list your job title, change the title to something more commonly used, or skip it entirely? The resume I read today struggled with this dilemma.

The resume was from a manager who had worked as a strategic planning analyst and then as an operations manager. Those are my titles – the closest I can come up with for the positions after reading the resume closely. The job seeker decided to take a short cut. He didn’t list any job titles, just the functional areas of his jobs, operations and strategic planning.

Omitting the job titles was a mistake. It makes it very difficult to understand the background of a person quickly without some indicator of the type of role. The only way to understand the positions is to read the job descriptions closely. The job seeker was thorough. He described every aspect of his employment, from core responsibilities to minor details.

The thoroughness of the job seeker’s job description had an effect opposite to what he intended. By listing anything and everything he did, it’s very difficult to understand what role he had. The job seeker left out any description of the scope of his responsibilities or some statement as to what was typical. This puts the minor aspects of his role, tasks he might work on only a few times a year, on equal footing with the core of his job. It’s impossible to know what this guy really did.

Every job will eventually touch on every aspect of a company. If you have been somewhere for ten years or more, you can talk about any functional area in your resume. For example, a staff accountant might work closely with someone in marketing or sales on a specific project for a few days. This can be good experience and may show the versatility of your skills. What you don’t want to do is include this as some vague description. For example, “supported marketing with development of new product pricing.” This description may be completely accurate, but would not be representative of a lengthy career if you only did this for a few days.

The resume I received listed so many functions and never described what the core responsibility was. It’s a guess as to whether this individual was really an operations manager and strategic planning analyst. I could be completely wrong.

As a recruiter, what do I do with a resume like this? I receive a lot of resumes. I don’t have time to spend a significant amount of time on each. I have to make a quick assessment if I can place the person and move on if I can’t. To make this decision, I look for something showing how a person stands out in their field – why they are better than their competition. If I can’t find something with some “wow factor,” I’m likely to move on. The key to this is assessing the candidate’s capability quickly and comparing them to other candidates in the field I have assessed. If I can’t determine what field the candidate is in, I can’t even start this process.

After reviewing the resume for a minute, I don’t know what job the candidate has held. I can’t assess his performance relative to his peers, because I don’t know who his peers are. I can’t even tell if he’s been successful because I have no basis for determining the scope of his role. My final assessment is to move on to the next candidate. I will be able to screen several other candidates in the time it would take me to pick up the phone, call this candidate and ask the basic questions like “what job did you hold at your last employer?”

What Should You Do?

There are a lot of job seekers who create overly vague and confusing descriptions of their experience. This forces a hiring manager or recruiter to spend a lot more time figuring out what the person is capable of doing. Every second increases the odds the resume will be discarded. To avoid this, you need a quick to read, easy to understand and impressive description of your background and potential.

Print out your resume and sit it in front of you. Take a highlighter and highlight the phrases that best summarize your experience and accomplishments. Don’t highlight more than 50 words. I’m sure there is a lot of important info on your resume and 50 words won’t capture everything. Stick with only the most important 50 words.

Where on your resume are there 50 words? They need to be at the top if want them to be read. If they are buried deep in the resume, there is a good chance you will be rejected before they are read.

Are your most important two or three skills clearly presented in these fifty words? You probably possess dozens or hundreds of different skills. They are not all equal. There are a couple that will land you a job and the rest are supporting information. Make sure the essential skills stand out.

Do you show how you were successful? It is easy to write that you are highly successful. In fact, putting “highly successful” and a job title as the first few words in at the top of a resume are a common way to start. Anyone can write this. It is nothing but hype. What matters is what comes next. You need examples of your success that are clear and impressive. Without specific accomplishments, you will not measure up to your peers who list accomplishments on their resume. Even if you were successful, you are likely to be rejected before you get a chance to tell your story in an interview.

What is your specialty? Make sure you show a clear specialization on your resume. A non-descript generalist, with no specialization will appear very unimpressive. You need something that will differentiate you and specialization is critical. Make sure your fifty words show this specialization clearly.

If you complete this exercise and focus your resume to make your potential stand out in the first fifty words, you will dramatically improve your odds of getting an interview.

Functional Resume Without Accomplishments

The functional resume I read today makes a common resume writing mistake. The resume failed to include any quantified accomplishments. We’ve found in our resume benchmarking studies roughly half of all resumes do not provide any accomplishments.

Every resume makes claims about the job seeker’s skills and abilities. For a hiring manager, there is no way to validate the claims on the resume alone. This forces hiring managers to be very skeptical when reviewing resumes for the first time. The first step to assess the job seeker’s true capability is to assess specific examples the person’s past performance. Without providing success stories, your resume will look like everyone else’s, and the hiring manager will have to assume you don’t have a successful track record. Otherwise, if you didn’t have numerous examples of accomplishment, you would have listed them.

The resume I read today had the following structure:

Summary of Qualifications
Experience
Responsibilities
Accomplishments
Education

This structure seems like it would be a chronological resume format, but the job seeker used it in a functional format. What made this a functional format was the content of the sections. The Experience section was just a job listing, with the employer, job title and dates for each position. There was nothing describing the jobs.

The Responsibilities section has one paragraph describing some of the roles the job seeker held, but it is so vague there no way to really understand what each job was. Between the job titles and the responsibilities description, we can make a guess what the scope of responsibility of the job seeker was, but it is only a guess – not something most hiring managers are going to get excited about.

The Accomplishments section should provide the core sales pitch for the job seeker. Unfortunately, this section doesn’t include any real accomplishments. The bullets are just descriptions of responsibilities. Below are a few examples of the bullets from the Accomplishments sections:

Ability to read blueprints and use standard measuring equipment.
Experience and operation of a Semi Automatic Gundrill (limited).
Specialized in component marking and packaging.
Attended courses in JIT and SPC, as well as courses for Supervisory Training.

To make a strong impression, you need to show what you did, not just what you were responsible for doing. There are lots of candidates who have had similar experiences. The job seeker who will get the job is the one who shows what they did with their responsibility and provides specific details of contributions made.

In a functional resume, it can be tempting to focus on the responsibilities and experiences in different functional areas. Your experience is important, but this is just the starting point. If you choose a functional structure, despite the warnings of my previous two articles, make sure you provide specific accomplishments. These need to show your role, scope of responsibility, actions you took and the specific, quantified results you delivered. Without all of this detail, the accomplishment will not be as impressive as it could be.

Often a smaller accomplishment that you can describe briefly while supplying clear detail of the situation is more impressive on a resume than a vague accomplishment with a greater overall impact. This is usually because the big accomplishments are difficult to explain in sufficient detail for the reader to understand what really happened. They are better suited to an interview where you can take two or three minutes to describe the accomplishment in detail.

Functional Resume Example

On Monday, I reviewed five reasons to avoid a functional resume structure. Today, let’s look at a real example of a functional resume I received recently.

The job seeker who sent me this resume worked for the federal government for more than twenty years and has worked for a couple big consulting firms for the last five years. The titles listed in the employment history section include, Consultant, Program Manager, Senior Business Analyst and Team Leader. These titles are commonly used, but are not very specific. With the functional format, there is nothing in the resume that shows what the job seeker did in each job.

The content of the resume is grouped in four functional sections:

Leadership Skills
Performance Improvement
Communications
Project Management

In addition to the functional sections, the job seeker also has sections for education and employment history.

Under each functional section is a series of bullet points designed to demonstrate the job seeker’s skill and record of accomplishments. The problem with this structure is the lack of context for any of the information. There is no way to tell what the candidate’s role was. For example, one of the bullets under leadership skills is:

Demonstrated excellent leadership skills by implementing a new strategic business model which improved efficiency by over 90% which resulted in year on year savings of $15 million

Your first reaction might be to think this is a pretty good accomplishment. Saving $15 million is usually a good accomplishment. Unfortunately, there’s nothing that shows what the job seeker did. He says he implemented a new business model. There’s nothing about developing the business model or whether the savings achieved were in department he managed. If anything, this looks like a slam dunk accomplishment anyone could do. The job seeker was given new business processes and told to roll them out to his team. The person that designed the business model and sold the organization’s leadership on adopting it is the person who really generated the savings.

A bullet under Performance Improvement also provides some nice numbers but don’t show enough detail to know what happened:

Effectively Introduced and implemented benchmark standards to a national service for the public. The outcome was an increase in customer satisfaction of over 85% within 3 months

Improving customer satisfaction by 85% is a great accomplishment. There’s a lot we don’t know about this, though. First, who were the customers? Second, what was the role of the job seeker? Third, who developed the benchmarks? Fourth, how many customers were involved in this service?

These questions are important but the bottom line question is “what did the job seeker do that was exceptional?” If all he did was rollout a set of standards to his team that were being adopt across the organization, it’s not much of an accomplishment. From the resume, we can’t tell if he did this with a very small team of only a couple people or if he was directing a department with hundreds or thousands of people under his leadership.

The key element that is missing from the resume is something to clearly show what the job seeker did. Your resume should help a hiring manager picture you doing a job. To do that, you need to describe very clearly what you did in the past. This requires being specific about what you did and what the direct results of your actions were.

Top Five Reasons to Avoid a Functional Resume

A functional resume can be effective in a few rare situations, but more often, this structure will hurt your job search chances. Job seekers like the functional format because it allows them much greater flexibility in highlighting the information they think is important. Unfortunately, using a functional resume can cause a hiring manager to eliminate you from consideration before they understand your potential.

The basic structure of a functional resume separates a job seeker’s experience from their work history. In a chronological resume, experiences and accomplishments are grouped under each job. Functional resumes break this pattern. Experiences and accomplishments are grouped under functional areas, mixing experiences from different jobs. The job seeker’s work history is then presented as a list jobs.

The functional structure makes it easy to tailor a resume to the key elements of a job. It also emphasizes significant experiences and accomplishments. This makes it a tempting choice. If you are thinking of using a functional structure, consider these five reasons to avoid a functional resume first:

1. No Context for Accomplishments

Accomplishments establish your performance track record and provide the best selling point for your potential. A job seeker who shows a clear, easy to understand and significant accomplishment in the past will help show a hiring manager what they can accomplish in the future. This makes presenting your accomplishments a critical element of your resume.

For an accomplishment to be impressive, the context of the accomplishment must be clear. This requires showing the job seeker’s role, scope of responsibility, the actions the job seeker took and the specific results delivered to the organization.

In a chronological resume, listing an accomplishment under a job provides some of this context. The job description provides the scope of responsibility and can imply some of the actions that would ordinarily be taken. A functional resume detaches the accomplishment from the job, making the scope impossible to determine.

2. Job Responsibilities Are Unclear

Understanding the job seeker’s scope of responsibilities throughout their career is important for a hiring manager to understand their performance. A functional resume often omits this information. The experience and accomplishments of the job seeker are listed throughout the functional areas. They are not tied to the jobs. The job listing is just a list of employers, job titles and dates. If the job title doesn’t make the scope of responsibilities clear, there’s no way to know what the job seeker did. Most job titles are ambiguous. Even commonly used job titles vary in their scope from company to company, and some job titles are unique to a single company. You cannot rely on a job listing to show what you did.

3. Mismatches Hiring Manager Goals

Hiring managers review resumes with specific goals in mind. The hiring manager will look for key data points – skills, details of past jobs and accomplishments. The hiring manager will also have a priority for each element. For example, the first time a resume is reviewed may only involve a simple check for the number of years of experience in a role, the education and the years of experience with a key skill. In this situation, the hiring manager is likely to read the first few lines of the resume, and then skip to the employment and education section. Because these sections are just a listing of names and dates, they won’t do much to sell the job seeker.

You want to present information in the order that a hiring manager wants to read it. This requires focusing on the hiring manager’s goals – not yours. Functional resumes turn this upside down. It encourages a job seeker to focus on what they want to promote, and can make it more difficult for the hiring manager to find the information they want to see first.

4. Implies You Are Hiding Something

Hiring managers are naturally very skeptical. They know a resume is the best sales pitch a job seeker can write, and a resume emphasizes the positives and de-emphasizes the negatives. This can lead to mistrust and doubt any time a job seeker presents information in a way that makes it difficult to decipher. Using a functional structure to obscure an element of your background will usually backfire. The uncertainty in a key detail of your experience leads to the hiring manager to assume the worst. Instead of improving your odds, you have now created a situation where the hiring manager has a significant doubt.

5. The Least Common Resume Format

Chronological resumes are the most common format used. In our resume benchmarking surveys, we found roughly two thirds of all resumes are chronological. Functional resumes are rare and offer a vastly different presentation from the typical chronological resume. Being unusual has drawbacks (implying you are hiding something), but there is an even greater problem. Hiring managers are much more familiar with assessing chronological resumes. They will feel more comfortable with a chronological resume and will assess chronological resumes more efficiently. This can lead to a hiring manager missing a key detail in your resume because they don’t know where to look. It would be great if every hiring manager read every word of every resume but this is never going to happen. Hiring managers skim resumes quickly. If they don’t know where to look for key information and skip over it as a result, they will assume you don’t have the experience or skill they want. You then get rejected. Using a chronological resume makes this process easier for the hiring manager.

When writing a resume, job seekers want to “stand out” from the competition. The key is differentiating yourself for the right reasons. Innovative, unusual or creative designs obscure the substance of a resume. It is this substance that will get you an interview and ultimately hired.

Provide a clear presentation of your experience and skills. Including several significant accomplishments demonstrating your track record of success. Package this information in a clear, easy to read structure. Although following functional structure should usually be avoided, strictly following a chronological format is not required. There are numerous hybrid variations that incorporate functional elements into a chronological resume. This can often offer the best of both structures.

ASCII Resumes

Making a resume look pretty can be important. Unfortunately, one format will not work in every situation. You will need an ASCII version in addition to your MS Word version.

An ASCII file is a pure text file with virtually no formatting. You can’t bold, italicize, change fonts or font sizes, center or justify the test, or do anything else common in word processing programs. Think of an ASCII file as a text file similar to what an old typewriter could do. The only characters you can put in an ASCII file are the upper and lower case letters, numbers, punctuation and a limited number of symbols – generally, only the characters you can see on a standard keyboard.

ASCII files are important because there are a number of computer systems that can only read ASCII files. You are most likely to run into these when you fill out an online form. The form will have text boxes that do not allow any formatting. Making your resume look good in a text box like this is tough, but it can be done.

The first thing you need to do is use extra lines to space things out. You can’t use indents, changes in font size or bolding to identify new sections. This requires using a new line to add space. Your resume will get longer, but this is a small concession to make it readable.

The next formatting trick you need to use is bulleted lists. You have to manually create bullets in an ASCII file. To do this, you should select a symbol or combination of symbols for your bullets. A few options to consider are: *, @, #, >, ->, –>, =>, and ==>. I’m not a big fan of the @ or #, but I do see these on a lot of resumes. My favorite is a single equals sign and a greater than symbol: =>. This stands out in a resume and really calls attention to a line without being overwhelming.

You can also add some underlining by using dashes, underscores or equal signs. Be cautious when using them. The lines will draw the reader’s attention. If your resume has a bunch of them, the lines will be distracting and make it difficult to read.

An ASCII resume will never be a pretty as a resume formatted in a word processing program. You would not submit an ASCII resume if you didn’t have to. Despite this, there will be times when you will have to have a plain text resume. Below is a sample of how you can format an ASCII version of your resume:

Work Experience
—————

Job Title, Company Name, Start to End Dates
City, State

Text describing the positions with a summary of your responsibilities. Keep this to two or three lines max.

=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment
=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment
=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment

Job Title, Company Name, Start to End Dates
City, State

Text describing the positions with a summary of your responsibilities. Keep this to two or three lines max.

=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment
=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment
=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment

Job Title, Company Name, Start to End Dates
City, State

Text describing the positions with a summary of your responsibilities. Keep this to two or three lines max.

=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment
=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment
=> Bullet point demonstrating an accomplishment

Education
———

Degree, School
Major

Skills
——

=> Skill
=> Skill
=> Skill
=> Skill
=> Skill
=> Skill

Provide Context for Common Acronyms

I read a resume today with a lot of acronyms. I’ve written about the problems of using acronyms in the past – they confuse the reader and can make a resume impossible to decipher. This should be simple to understand, but what if the acronym is used much more frequently than the term?

This was the case with the resume I received. The resume was from a person who sold displays using LED lights. The acronym I had trouble with was LED. The term light emitting diode is rarely used – it’s almost always writen as LED. The reason I had trouble with this abbreviation is the resume provided no context for the term. It was only after I reviewed the resume in detail that I figured out that the reference to LED was likely to be a reference to light emitting diodes. There are a lot of other terms that use the abbreviation LED. In fact, a search of website listing common abbreviations yielded 169 results for LED. These ranged from the airport code for the St. Petersburg airport in Russia, to organization terms such as Law Enforcement Division and Library Education Division, to medical conditions such as Lupus Erythematosus Disseminatus, and a wide range of other terms.

Light emitting diode is one the most common meanings for the term. The reason the resume is confusing is it provides no context for the term. There was nothing at the start of the resume that would implied light emitting diodes were the technology being referenced. Some readers would instantly think of this meaning and “get it.” Others would think of some other meaning or context and be completely lost.

This could have been made clearer by adding a single word. The salesperson sold LED signs. Adding the word signs makes the context of the acronym clear.

After you write your resume, look closely at the terms you use. Make sure terms specific to your industry are clearly explained. In your job search, you cannot expect the reader of your resume to know the meaning and context of technical terms you use. Providing a simple explanation of your career and of each individual job can make your resume much easier to comprehend.

An Unimpressive Accomplishment for Your Resume

Your resume needs to show specific accomplishments demonstrating your abilities, experience and potential. You will compete against others who have the same experience and skills. In fact, some of your competition is likely to be higher qualified than you. To land an interview and to get hired, you need to show why you are better. A good accomplishment can to this. A weak, unimpressive accomplishment will not help, and can actually hurt the overall impression of your resume.

The resume I read today came from a training manager for a large corporation. It lists a number of training programs the candidate had managed. One of the bullets listed was:

Conceptualized and led the design of a leadership and management strategy and curriculum for all support divisions. Implemented and facilitated management training and best practices sessions. Results included a 60% participation rate in manager best practice sessions.

It’s important to understand that numbers stand out on a resume. A lot of hiring managers will scan a resume, looking for the number and read bullets with quantified results first. Additionally, for many people, numbers stand out from the rest of the text and will naturally draw their attention, even if they aren’t specifically looking for quantified results. This makes it much more likely your bullets with numbers will be read before the bullets without.

In this resume example, the bullet might draw extra attention because it lists “60%.” This figure may have been good, but on a resume, without any context to place this in, it seems very unimpressive. In fact, some may interpret it as a failure.

Imagine an executive struggling to cut costs, drive revenues and stay profitable in this economy. The exec decides he needs to upgrade the skills set of his workforce and needs a top notch trainer to design the training. His concern is driving specific results – profits – in the short term. This requires a training who can make an impact quickly and understands how to focus on elements that will make the company more productive right now.

The job seeker designed a management and leadership program for a major company – an organization everyone knows. This is a good responsibility. The only result given for the program was a 60% participation rate. I really can’t assess whether this was good or bad. If the program was very time consuming, voluntary for managers to participate and not supported well by upper management, a 60% participation rate might have been great. In the eyes of the hypothetical hiring manager I described, this result probably looks like a failure.

The hiring manager needs to maximize the value he gets for the cost of the training manager. Knowing he might only get a 60% participation rate, will make the training far less effective. Another candidate, showing a consistent pattern of running programs with very high participation rates is likely to have an edge, even though we haven’t assessed the quality of the training or the impact on the performance of the company.

Ideally, the job seeker wouldn’t emphasize participation rates. A better approach would be to emphasize the impact of the training. With 60% participation, showing how the group that completed the training improved their performance while the non-participants didn’t improve would be extremely impressive. If the job seeker can’t show a benefit like this, it is likely they will lose out to another job seeker than can.

Describe Your Work Experience So a Child Can Understand It

One of the most common mistakes job seekers make is over complicating their background. Unless you are seeking the same job from a similar company, it unlikely the hiring manager will understand all the details of the job. This problem is magnified if the hiring manager is an individual outside your functional area.

It is common for a team of people to assess candidates. At least one will be in your functional area, but the others could be from completely different departments. They may understand the basics of the job being filled, but are unlikely to be experts in the career field you are pursuing.

Most people assessing your resume and interviewing you will not understand what you have done if you don’t explain it clearly. Surprisingly, some of the most confusing and difficult to comprehend resumes are also some of the longest resumes. The problem comes from the detail. Providing a ton of details, staying in the weeds so to speak, will make it difficult for a reader to understand your experience.

The solution is to keep it simple. Explain each role you have had in a sentence or two simple enough that a person with no familiarity with your career field could understand. How would you explain your job to a child in middle or high school? If you can explain your background very briefly in a way that is easy to understand, your resume will be much more effective.

Making your resume easy to digest for anyone requires you to explain very technical terms and to use few if any acronyms. Use terminology most people will understand and your resume will be easier to read.

Keeping your resume simple doesn’t mean you discard every technical detail. If you need to provide technical details of what you have done, explain them a little. If you provide a simple general explanation of what you did and then provide the technical details, most people will be able to understand the significance of what you wrote, even if they don’t understand every detail.

Bottom line: If you don’t write about it on your resume, it never happened, and if you write about it a complicated, confusing way that is difficult for most people to understand, it never happened. Make your resume accessible to as wide an audience as possible. If it can only be understood by the primary hiring manager, it is unlikely it will ever make it into that person’s hands. Resume screeners are likely to delete it before it ever gets to the person that can understand it.

Maintenance Tech Resume

A resume I read from a medical equipment technician. The resume illustrates a few of the common mistakes many job seekers make.

First, the job seeker failed to list his skills. Every job seeker needs to highlight their strongest skills on their resume. For equipment technicians, this is even more important. With technical positions, the technical skill of the job seeker is a major factor, and often is the most important assessment criteria. Omitting this information will hurt the candidate’s chances.

The job seeker could correct this by adding a skills section showing the specific types of equipment and technologies he has proficiency with. Adding some of the training classes he has taken would also help. In 25 years of operating and maintaining high tech medical equipment, the job seeker doesn’t show a single training class where he updated his skills.

The second change the job seeker needs to make relates to the responsibilities he has had. His resume has nothing more than a list of responsibilities. There are no accomplishments listed. Most hiring managers will assume he has either been unsuccessful or minimally successful in his career as a result. Below is are the bullets from his most recent position:

Maintain and troubleshoot anesthesia equipment and other medical electronics in the hospital
Provide clinical assessments during surgical procedures for anesthesia staff and residents when needed
Perform in-service training for anesthesia students on a variety of electronics equipment
Develop equipment maintenance procedures for department

For an equipment tech, it’s difficult to imagine someone else in the same role not having essentially the same responsibilities. The job seeker has succeeded in making himself a commodity no different from anyone else. This will not help him get hired.

I expect there are a number of accomplishments the job seeker could list. For example, he could expand on how he developed maintenance procedures. Giving a specific example of this, including the type of equipment, the scope of the procedures he developed and some measure of how change contributed to the organization would make a great impression.

A few questions this job seeker could answer that would lead to the type of impressive content that would get a hiring manager excited are:

When have you developed or changed a maintenance procedure resulting in lower overall maintenance costs?
When have you improved the performance of equipment you were maintaining?
When have you improved the reliability of the equipment you were maintaining?
When have you developed a faster process for maintaining equipment?
When have you modified equipment to better suit the needs of medical personnel using the equipment?

As it stands, a hiring manager who is concerned about some of these questions (cutting costs, improving performance and reliability, etc.) will assume the answer to each question is “never.” That’s not the impression this job seeker wants to make. Fortunately, the solution is easy. Add a couple bullets points showing the contribution the job seeker made.

Turn Your Resume Into a Billboard

One advertising media that can teach an important lesson about resume writing is a billboard on an interstate. Billboards can be effective because they are seen by a huge number of people who have little else to read. They also pose a significant challenge. Drivers only have a second or two to read the billboard.

A resume is an advertisement for you. It needs to contain some specific information about your background, but at its core, a resume is designed to make a sales pitch. Focusing on this aspect of resume writing can greatly improve the effectiveness of the document you produce.

Imagine designing a billboard version of your resume. You would have to shorten the content to a few words. Adding too much will hurt the overall effectiveness, even if the added content is important and impressive. The reason for this is simple. A driver may only have time to read five or ten words. You can’t count on them starting at the beginning of the message. This means that any content beyond the most important five or ten words will reduce the chance the most important content will be read.

Your resume faces a similar challenge. A hiring manager will only look at a resume for a short time. Often, it will only get a 15 to 30 second look initially. This prevents the hiring manager from reading more than few a sentences. If they read content that is of little importance, the odds your resume will be rejected go way up.

To write the best resume, you should not assess the value of each piece of content in isolation. This will lead to a resume that is too long. You need to assess the relative value of the content and delete the elements that may be valuable but distract the reader from the most important elements.

One of the biggest challenges in this process is detaching the emotional ties to specific experiences. Deleting something from your resume does not reduce the significance of the experience. It only reflects the lower importance of the element to a specific audience. For example, billboards for restaurants, hotels and other destinations always list the exit number. The exit number is a very minor detail in assessing the quality and value of a restaurant in every situation except for a passing driver who doesn’t know where the location is. In this case, details about the quality of the food, the selection, the cost and the overall attractiveness of the restaurant are less important details and are usually omitted from the billboard.

Approach your resume from the same perspective of the billboard designer. Imagine a hiring manager speeding past resumes, only getting a quick glance at the content and deciding in an instant, whether they are going to get off the exit and take a long look, or keep driving. If you catch their attention quickly, you will greatly improve your odds of getting an interview.