Build a resume that's as fabulous as you 💁🏻‍♀️

You are so smart and talented, bestie. Let's make sure your resume reflects that.

TL;DR: Your resume should tell the story of your career—not be a laundry list of everything you’ve ever done. Share content about your interests to SEO yourself.

Contents:

• Format

• Recommendations

• Don’ts

• FAQ

According to HRDive, recruiters take 7 seconds to scan your resume when they’re sorting through candidates. That article is definitely worth a read, by the way. 

Everyone has a story to tell, and your resume should tell the story of your career. It should be engaging, easy  to read, consistent, and easy to decipher where one section ends and the other begins. 

Here are some steps you can take to ensure your resume is readable and is picked up by ATS software.

Resume sections:

1. Summary: This is the place where you can add in your personality and maybe a little flair. You do not need to sound like a robot! Talk about what you’re looking for. I think there is a lot of fear around the “I just need a paycheck” narrative, and trust me, I get it, but you should be trying to attract companies that are aligned with you. Because when you get into stage 5 of the interview process, they’re going to sniff out the things that aren’t aligned like bloodhounds, and you’ll have wasted your valuable time talking to people who you don’t even like. (Oof I think I just hurt my own feelings with that one.)
   
   If you have achieved anything big like an MBA, I’d mention it here, as well as in your education section. You can use ChatGPT too, but make sure you create your summary yourself first, and go back and edit whatever ChatGPT suggests.
   

2. Professional experience: This experience should be relevant to the jobs you are applying for. If you don't have a ton of experience, make it look relevant. Your professional experience should look like a story that makes sense from bottom to top.

   
   I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: retail workers, the service/hospitality industry, and teachers have so many transferable skills, so if you’re early in your career, keep that experience. Customer Success and Sales teams are always looking for similar skills.
   
   You do not need to include every task you have ever completed, you want it to read like a story from the bottom up. Connect those dots for the recruiter to have a high-level understanding of your career trajectory. If you know what  you want to do, look at job descriptions and incorporate words and phrases that are commonly used.
   
   Each bullet point should be as follows:
   “I did this thing, that led to this metric, and resulted in this milestone.”
   “Increased engineering headcount by 75% in 6 months meeting a tight deadline and talent acquisition benchmarks.”
   

3. Skills: Instead of having a long dense list of the skills, bucket your skills into similar columns. I  have soft and hard skills on my resume, but it might look different for you. You might have a column of design skills, or analytics skills. The objective is to make it easy on the eyes of the person reviewing it.

   
   Format example:

   

   Now, take that table and make it white:

   

   Isn’t that easier to read? You can even have 3 columns if you can group your skills. Do what works best for you.
   

4. Education: This is pretty straightforward, but make sure to include that Udemy course you completed, as well as any certifications and continued education. Oh wow, you are so smart.

Other stuff:

1. Incorporate metrics even if you don’t know the specifics. The objective of the resume is to get you an interview. Once you have the interview you can tell the story of how you improved productivity by 75% or reduce churn by 25%. No one is calling your manager to make sure your numbers are exact. 

2. Using colors on your resume to help break up the sections is widely accepted these days, and it gives you that designed look without wasting valuable space. It also has no impact on ATS.

3. Create video content, a portfolio, or a newsletter/blog where you discuss your profession, thoughts, and who you are. Link that content to your resume and/or LinkedIn. Include SEO (use ChatGPT for SEO) and when that employer Googles you, you will be in control of what they’re finding. My resume now has a LinkTree link that includes all of the work I want them to see.

4. Watch a YouTube video on design principles. You don’t need to be an expert, but it’ll give you some insight on how people absorb content and how design plays a role.

My big don’ts:

1. Don’t include your photo and/or age. We all know that you’re gorgeous and anyone would be LUCKY to have a beauty like you working on their team, but this can be discriminatory. If they want to see your face, they can click on your LinkedIn profile, which means they will be spending more than 7 seconds on your resume… which is a win as far as I’m concerned.

2. Don’t soften your experience with words like “supported”, “assisted”, or “helped”. If you work for a company, it’s implied you’re supporting it. What did you lead? How did you make an impact? And men never talk about supporting anyone else.

3. Don’t list every minor piece of software and task. In your skills section you can bucket your skills, but all the other tasks you’re going to explain during your interview. Be prepared with anecdotes and examples of all of the things on your resume.

4. Don’t include icons, emojis, or other characters that aren’t picked up by ATS. Just don’t.

5. Don’t waste space with design. You want to try to fit your resume on one page. While it’s more widely accepted to have more than one page (2 pages max!) since younger professionals don’t stay at the same company for more than a few years, you still want any white space to serve the purpose of giving the reader’s eyes a break.

6. Don’t use a font smaller than 10pt. If someone is printing  your resume, they will not be able to read it, which defeats the entire purpose.

7. Don’t use Arial as your font. This is a personal preference, but there are so many more modern fonts that look better. Here are a few: Lato Light, Comfortaa, Noto Sans. Go to Google Fonts and the whole typeface world will open up.

FAQs:

What if I have gaps in my employment? 

Everyone has gaps in their employment at this point, or at least the vast majority do. I had a 2 year gap, and was still landing interviews. I’ve told interviewers about my cross-country road trip, time spent with my parents who live far away, classes I’ve taken that improve me professionally and that speak to my interests. There is room for conversation here, and ultimately, people want to work with someone they can have a conversation with.

I’m trying to pivot my career from teaching/service/retail/etc. what are my transferable skills?

Look at descriptions of jobs you like and see what the required skills and competencies are. Can you do those things? If so, why? Tell the story about your career, incorporating the skills that are in the job description. 

For example, did you ever have to sell a menu item at work? Or encourage people to open a credit card for your retail store? That’s sales, baby.

What if I don’t know any metrics?

I’m mentioning this again, because I cannot stress this enough: you must have metrics on your resume. People respond to data. The thing is, if you don’t work in sales or data analysis, you usually don’t know what your metrics are, so make them up. Just know that you’ll have to talk about those metrics when the interview comes.

What’s a ghost job listing?

A job that they have no intention of hiring for. Companies need to look like they’re growing and they want to have a pool of applicants just in case any of their employees suddenly leave. There are all sorts of shady reasons companies have ghost jobs listed ranging from lying to investors to laziness.

What should I create content about?

Your interests! You’re a human, so talk about your human things. Don’t you want a job where people are going to care that you’re a full, multifaceted human being? Yeah, I thought so. When you start creating, you suddenly have a portfolio of your work.

If you were to tell me a year ago that I’d abandon tech and have a fully functioning Substack with over 100 subscribers and 10 posts, I would have called you crazy.

Topics to create content about:

• Books

• Gaming

• Pop culture

• Food/recipes

• Makeup

• Tech

Do you love video games? Wouldn’t it be cool to apply to Rockstar Games with a portfolio of your original content talking about the latest and greatest video games?

Do you love makeup? Wouldn’t it be cool to apply to Fenty Beauty having a whole YouTube channel using their products and discussing the latest makeup trends?

Can you help me with my resume?

Yes! Email me at comfortablechaos333@gmail.com.