Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Greg Langstaff. I'm a resume writer and interview coach with the Career professionals of Canada, and I want to help you write a resume. Now, I've written hundreds of resumes over the years myself for individuals in Canada and the United States, and have also been a recruiter and hiring manager for about six years. So what I want to do is take all my experience from both the applicant and the hiring side of the table and distill it into a nice, step by step guide full of examples. Help you write the perfect resume for you. Now, whether you're starting completely from scratch or you have a resume and you're just looking to fine tune it, this is the place for you. So let's get started.
2. Course Overview: During this course, I'm gonna teach you three critical skills that you need to write the perfect resume tailored to your experience and what your target audience or hiring managers looking for. So let's look at those three skills now. First, we'll talk about research, which is not as daunting as it sounds. We're really here just going to be carefully walking through the job posting to which were applying to pull out all of the hiring managers priorities and the keywords that we might need to use in our resume. Next. Of course, we're gonna talk about writing your resume. This will include how to describe the jobs that you've had, how to include your education and the specific details related to that which might be relevant, and a whole lot of other stuff that can go in your resume to round you out as a candidate. Finally, we'll talk about for Manning. This is really how to arrange the content in your resume and present it so that it looks nice and that the relevant information all is very clear and apparent to anyone reading arrest May. Now it might seem like a lot to learn and to be honest. Resume writing does take some time and attention, but we'll take it slow through this course. I've got lots of examples to show you what to do along the way. By the end, I know you'll feel confident about writing your resume, so let's jump in.
3. The Resume Writing Mindset : now, before we get into the specific skills that you'll need to write the resume, I just want to talk about three important points about the mindset that you'll need while writing your resume first as a job seeker, think of yourself is the product and your resume is your primary marketing tool. So in order to develop a marketing tool, we're gonna need to know what are your key selling points. And also, what is your target market looking for? So we're gonna look back to this in the research section of the course. We'll also touch on it throughout writing and formatting as well. Next, there is no one perfect way to write a resume, which is kind of great, because it means we have a lot of flexibility to make the perfect resume that works for us in any given situation. So throughout this course, I'm gonna give you a few different methods that you may choose to follow. But you can also mix and match the stuff that I show you or alter it if you need to. It's it's completely up to you. So as long as you are thinking carefully about the decisions, you make in your resume on how they apply to the job you're looking at. Then you're gonna be just fine. And finally, let's have some fun with this because I know resume seems all business writing. It does not have to be stressful. Um, sometimes I like to think of it as, ah, professional self portrait made of words s o. We're writing a document. It strategically points out how great you are. Eso I hope you're feeling great as you're writing it.
4. Researching for Your Resume: So in the last section, we talked about thinking about your resume as a marketing document and yourself as a product. I'm sure you're familiar with the term market research, which is just looking into the needs of your target market and betraying your product in a way that will meet those needs. We're going to do the exact same thing with your resume, and the target market is the hiring manager or the employer who's who's looking to hire you . So it might sound a little intimidating to research the employer, but really, all we're going to do is start out by looking at the job posting to which were applying by carefully reading through that. And I'll teach you how to do that. In the next section, you're gonna have a really strong understanding of what skills that they're looking for you to have, what keywords they might be looking for and also keywords that we may need to get through the automated resume scanner that will talk about a little bit later. Yeah, and it really only takes a few minutes. It's ah, it's a very important step, but a lot of people do skip this so I just taking a few minutes and learning how to properly dissect it. Job posting. You have a really strong understanding of what you need to do to get ahead of the other applicants, so let's do it.
5. Quick Research Activity: Okay, So in this first activity, we're gonna work together to dissect a job posting so that you can see what are the key skills that the employer is looking for? And what are some of the key words that we need to include in the resume? So if you go to the your projects tab on, open up the document titled Activity One dissecting the job posting. Um, that's what we'll be using for this activity. So take a second now to do that, if you can download it and print it, great. But it's also very straightforward, so you can recreate it on a piece of paper if you want. It doesn't really matter to me as long as you get to do the activity. So this is the simple worksheet that I use when I'm evaluating any sort of job posting that I need to write a resume for for a client, and I've even used this myself over the years. So what we're looking for as we look through the job posting really is just two things were looking for any job, specific duties or skills that they want us to have, because we know if they go on the job posting there, Obviously a high priority. Solana showcase those. These include simple things like generate reports, create brand strategies, plan large scale events, anything kind of like that. And then in the work behaviours were looking for those more intangible things, like enthusiastic creative team player willing Teoh go the extra mile stuff like that and what we're gonna do next, we'll take a quick look at a job posting that I created. So here we are. Um, let's have a look at this. So the position is coordinator of marketing and communications at a company called Greggs Cookie Shop. Delicious. And we've got our job details here. So they're looking for a creative, enthusiastic marketing professional to join our fast paced team and etcetera, etcetera, let you read that on your own. Most jobs, you'll see a job details or something like this. And then if we're lucky enough, they've also a lot of job postings will list out the duties, um, that they're looking for in the position. So this is a pretty simple one, which I've used just for this example. But a lot of job postings, I'm sure, you know, look something like this. So what we're gonna do now is we'll take a close look at this and try to identify of the job specific skills and job duties that that they're asking about here. So the first thing we do, we'll have a look, and I usually when I'm doing this, I'll literally highlighted if I'm doing it in a word document. So highlight or underline in green. So we got market research. That's a job specific. Duty developed brand strategies. We've got designed digital marketing campaigns, create and curate social media content, assess effectiveness of marketing efforts and, of course, evaluate cookie taste and texture. Delicious. So these are the things that you're going to be doing in this job and during the resume scanning process, the hiring managers looking for people who have done these things. So when we're writing our resume, these are our priorities. Next, I'll take a look at some of those other things those intangibles, the work behaviors so they want someone who's creative, enthusiastic has worked on a fast paced team, self motivated, which is in on just about every job posting team first attitude, willing to go the extra mile eso These are the kind of other things that you know we may have a chance to bring out in a resume. Or maybe this is something we're saving for a cover letter, an interview, Um, and then sometimes you might notice things that don't really fit into those two categories , but just see, like they would be useful to make a note of, like, for example, here I see marketing professionals. So maybe in the resume, we might want to call ourselves a marketing professional at least once on and then cookie industry experience is Ah, plus, uh, so this is kind of what we've done, and I'll do this with just about every job posting and you know them Well, transcribe that into into our 22 columns on the sheet here and now we're ready to go. We know these air. Some of the words that we should be using in our resume, the keywords that the hiring manager is gonna look for and the if we run into a on automated resume scanner, probably. Those are some of the words that they're looking for. Um, yeah, And this And it took. What did that take? Two minutes to do four minutes to explain how to do it. So I mean, that's a great That's a great tool for you to use looking going forward. Now, if you've seen in the activity document, you'll see a second job posting for Greg's Chocolate Milk factory. Also delicious. Um, And if you want to work through that one on your own same worksheet, uh, I encourage you to do that and post your post your job duties and skills that you found post the work behaviors that you found in the project section of this course and I will read through, and I'll give you some feedback.
6. Essential Information on Your Resume: all right. Now that we've dissected a job posting and we have a good idea of what experience is that the hiring manager is looking for, it's time to start writing the resume. So there's a lot of things that go into a resume, some of which are mandatory, like name, contact, information, education, work, experience. And then there's a lot of optional elements, too, like awards, languages, headline, qualification statement. And so what we're gonna do is we walk through and write a resume together is all. I'll use some of the optional stuff, and I'll kind of talk you through where other optional stuff might apply. A ZAY said earlier. There's no one size fits all resume, so feel free to use certain parts of this and through other parts out. The important thing is that it works for you. So since we already dissected a job posting for coordinator of marketing and communications at Greg's Cookie Shop, Young, let's let's make a resume for marketing and communications person. So we'll start off here with a blank document. Um, usually using Microsoft Word and guess what? We're gonna start with dental today. Your name? So for name I usually make it the biggest word used the biggest ponte on the entire document. I traditionally go with size 26 top left corner. I'll usually use a tray. Boucher M s calibri is also find times the room. It is also fine. Like I said, a lot of there's a lot of customization you get to do in your resume. Fonts is just one of them, but keep it simple. Um, got a name here. Gonna throw in a phone number? That's not my real phone number. Hopefully, that's no one's really phone number. Put the address under here. Now, you you don't necessarily need to include your street address anymore. It's very rare that someone is is mailing you something. So a lot of people, if you're if you're not comfortable, including your street address with just Teoh city and province or city and state, we'll throw in our email address here. And if you have a good linked in profile that you're real proud of, you can pop that in there as well. Um, and then this looks a little awkward, as you can see. So what we're gonna do, you just gonna throw a nice line in there now, in terms of color, I usually like to keep it pretty simple. If I'm going to use any color, it's something like this. Like a dark blue and Navy. Um, like I said, just in terms of font size. So the name is 26 I'm using in 11 for the rest of the contact information there. And now we have a contact information in a resume, which is fantastic. Some other stuff that we can include its optional eyes. One thing I love to do if I have Room is headline. So we'll throw in a few things that we found in that, and that's we're dissecting the job posting. So building brand strategy was important. Well, I have experienced building brand strategy, so I'm gonna call myself a brand builder. Um, social media marketing was also important. Well, I've done that. So that's gonna go in here as well, and we see we're kind of giving ourselves ah, label got a few more things, so in a bit more generic, but they wanted team oriented people. So I'm gonna tell them I'm team oriented. Uh, and assessment was important as well. Well, I have a lot of experience, an assessment. So these headlines now we're kind of giving the tale of what's to come if they stood alone or they were up there and they weren't backed up by the experiences that we included later , the kind of useless they may fall flat. But in this case, these are all things that I'm going to talk about later. So it's kind of a thesis for what's to come. Speaking of which one of the other tools I was like to include, it's a qualification summary. If there's room, of course, and this just gives us a chance to show a little bit about our values. What we think is important in terms of our experience. Um, so qualification summary. You know, you can feel it a number of ways. It's a tiny paragraph. I like to use three key sentences in mind. So 1st 1 is, uh, we're gonna call ourselves a marketing professional. We know that was important. They want marketing professionals or marketing professionals, so that's going in there. Accomplished, marketing professional mentioned how many years of experience we have doing a couple of key things that they were looking for. We know they want us to be able to create campaigns. They didn't use the word digital campaign, but it's a synonym because we've already mentioned social media. A marketing up here. Um, yeah, so that's it. That's your first sentence. It's your labeling yourself is the professional that are looking for give your number of years experience, doing a couple of key things that they're gonna need you to do next sentence. We're just going to say we've effectively done again a couple more things that they want us to do. Conducting market research we needed. That was a priority from them from our dissection process. Um, yeah, And then the result will get more into results later, but very generically resolve this established winning marketing strategies. And then finally, I like to throw in a little bit of, ah, quick sentence about making a positive impact about passion. This might be passionate about team success. It might be passionate about something related to the mission statement of the organization . We know Greg's cookie shop I was looking for to make a difference in people's lives, so we're going to say something similar to that here and that that is the introduction. A couple of this is the way I like to usually start resumes with a couple of of useful, kind of from preliminary introductory pieces. Eso Let's move on to talk a little bit about education.
7. Education: so we're just gonna pop our education right here. Under our qualification statement, I use the same size 12 heading as I did for qualification summary. The headings or something will keep consistent throughout the document, and then it's pretty simple. I mean, you include the institution name and then on the right, the location of the institution underneath and embolden. You'll do the the credential. What degree isn't bachelor of commerce and then the specialization after a comma, marketing the bracketed part where you short form the degree totally up to you. If it's something recognizable like an MBA or become, go ahead. If you wrote Bachelor of Arts, I think everyone knows it's a B A, um, but totally up to you. And then we'll just do the graduation date. Now, if you've yet to graduate, you can plug in here June 2020 instead, and we'll know that that's when you're expecting to graduate a couple of other nuances with the education information that will cover here. So let's say we've got a master's degree, master of communication studies and digital engagement that's very relevant to this position. More applying to you, although a quick no on education as it relates to it being relevant to the job you're applying to. In most cases, even if you haven't irrelevant degree, I would say to include it because the important thing we're trying to show there is your capable of completing a university degree, which, uh is a big is a big plus when applying to most jobs for most employers, so include it, regardless, got a graduation date there and then a couple of other things that you can include with education. Um, if you got a master's degree, you might want to throw the thesis that you completed in there If you did that, if you have a particularly good G p A, you can include that as well. I wouldn't recommend including a G P A. If it's lower than average. Certainly no one's looking for a G p A on a resume. But if you have a good one and it shows that you have that you're a high performer, then why not included a couple of other things that I don't have here? That there sometimes included under education, is if you're in a technical program, I might want include a capstone project that you did, or any relevant course materials on. And then I'll show you what to do if you have started a degree that you didn't complete in a minute. And that's another place where we use some of those bullets under the education. If you have more than one degree first off. Congratulations. Secondly, list them in in chronological order. Um, now, this or this is what to do if you have not completed a degree or credential, but you want included on your resume, which I think is still a plus in most cases. So let's say we went toe awesome university. We didn't complete what? What will do differently? Well, last year, three years completed, two years completed. Whatever you've got, we're not going to mention the full name of the credential because that does imply that we have the credential soc studying commerce, specialization of marketing, and then here on the right, we're gonna look at the we're gonna look at the start and end dates just so they can see when we were there. And one thing I like to do when we haven't completed the degree is we want to still validate our learning So what we'll do? We'll list a quick list here of relevant courses that we took just to show, you know, maybe I didn't complete my degree, but I did complete courses in all these things that are related to the work that I'm going to be doing with you. So it's still a plus there, and we definitely still want include the education cause. Three years is a lot of work, and you deserve to have that on your resume. Let's move along.
8. Work Experience - Part 1: Okay, so we've got education covered. Now it's time to show you how to include your job experience, your work experience. So we used the same format for heading here and then to list the jobs of fabricating used the same formatting we did for education just to keep a nice, consistent look. So we're looking a size 12 font here. The company we were with the location on the right. Then we've got our job title and bold and the duration again on the right. Try to use months as best as you can just for accuracy. And then next we're going to do two things. We're going to show our overarching job duties in this position on them, and we're also going to show the accomplishments that we achieved while you're in this role . So we're showing that what we did and how well we did it to show the job duties. I usually like to dio a short paragraph or just even a one long sentence at the top here, which I'll do in italics. So the first part of the sentence is just who was reporting to this kind of shows where you fit within the organization. Um and then we're just gonna list sort of the overarching responsibilities we had in this rule. Um, I've got three year that are fairly related to the job that we're gonna be applying to, which is great, but mostly important, cause it gives an overall picture of what I did while I was in the position. Now moving on to accomplishments, which I'll include underneath year. I don't want you to feel intimidated by the concept of accomplishments because you don't have to have won an award or have increased revenue generation by 50% necessarily to list something is an accomplishment. We just want any sort of account of you're doing your job well, so I'll show you kind of how to do these bullet points after. But for now, I'm just going to show you a couple, so you get the sense of what they look like. So here here's one created and curated content for four major social campaigns per year on Facebook and instagram, etcetera, etcetera, resulting in a 5 to 12% increase in followers. And Paige likes per campaign, so we'll break that down for you in a minute. But I just want to show you a couple so you can kind of get the direction we're going in. Here is the 2nd 1 collaborated with marketing team to develop etcetera, etcetera. Utilized by 40 communications professionals over nine social media platforms, we've got kind of two lines per bullet point here. Another isn't really a limit on how many lines per bullet point. I generally try to keep them to to unless it's a particularly important accomplishment. One is also fine, and there's also really no limit to how many bullet points per job, so long as all the bullet points your listing are relevant. Teoh. Your brand strategy that you're creating for yourself, the relevant to the position they're applying to, and you leave enough space for all the jobs you want to cover. So let's get into the bullet points now quickly, and then we'll do an activity to kind of help. You really understand the bullet points, and you can even get started on creating some of your own. So the three key elements to a bullet point first we have are action verbs, which you saw the beginning like created and curate and such, um, then we have as best as possible. We want include specific and quantifiable detail about what we did and then finally results . What happened as a result of you doing that job? What was the accomplishment? So we're going to do an activity now that will help you to break down a bullet point and see where each of these things are. And then I've got an activity that you can also complete to help you start writing your own bullet points, which we will get to right right now.
9. Bullet Point Activity: Okay, So here's a closer look at the first bullet point on the previous job. Um, take a moment to read it here. And then I'm gonna show you kind of where those three elements come in. The action verbs, the specific and quantifiable detail. And finally, the results. So got a handy dandy underlying kit here. Let's look for the action verbs when this bullet point we've got to, which is great, created and curated. The's air pulled straight from the job posting earlier. Next, we're gonna move into this specific and quantifiable detail. Um, I've got that following right up exactly what we did. So we have four major social campaigns per year on Facebook and instagram. So what did we do? Curated content, being specific and quantifiable and saying quantifiable for major social campaigns. Uh, per year and then specific is on instagram and Facebook results. Now, I'm gonna show you two different types of results to include if you have both. Awesome. But if you don't, that's okay too. So here's one, um, which is not as quantified or it's not quantified at all, But it still shows what came of you. Your actions. So we have showcased unique value propositions the unique showcase, unique value proposition of Magic Kingdom. Sorry, can't read my own words here. So this one, this shows what came of your actions and it doesn't have a number. So if you didn't know this 5 to 12% you could still include something like that. But if you have both, even better. So we can now say resulting in 5 to 12% increase and followers and Paige likes per campaign . So that's a bullet point for you. Now, if you open up activity to into your project section, um, we have Ah, nice created a nice little document that you can fill in piece by piece, the parts of each bullet point your action verbs, your specific, quantifiable detail and results, and then you can put them all together. So what I want you to do now is take some time, work through that document on, right? A solid bullet point for a really accomplishment that you had a real job and then posted in the group and, uh, in this class, and I'm gonna give you some feedback on it. And hopefully between you having the practice, me giving you some feedback, then you'll feel comfortable writing bullet points for all of your jobs to come
10. Work Experience - Part 2: Okay, so we're jumping back here to the to the work experience, and next, I'm just going to throw him one more bullet point. Just so you can kind of see another example. Monthly reports generated our action verb generated. What? Monthly reports on key performance indicators of online engagement to present a senior management. So that's our specific detail. Um and then the results is simply informing statistically supported strategic decision making. So that was the impact of this of this achievement. They were able to make strategic decisions informed by statistics. Simple. Is that and you, like I said, you can run as many bullet points as is relevant to show how well you did this job on how well you will in turn do the job you're applying to. And then I'm just gonna show you what another job posting would look like underneath that just to keep things rolling. Same exact format. We're going for consistency here. We've got our duties, and then just imagine the key accomplishments continue under there now. One other thing I want to show you sorry is, uh if we want to do things a little bit differently, we have a few other options. Like I said, really up to you as we go through how you wanna tailor your resume to make it work for what you're trying to accomplish. So one thing here that I'm going to show you is we can change the heading name a little bit . So it's maybe instead of professional experience, you want to try, um, something specific, like, here's my marketing and communications experience. Now, this is this is nice just to use those keywords a little bit more and really highlight the experience. The problem is, if you're applying online to a position, uh, your resume is probably going to go through some sort of an automated scanner, and in that case, you're gonna want to stick with professional experience, work, experience, experience words like that because the scanners are looking for those. But this is an option. If you do have an alternative way to submit your resume to someone next, let's say maybe this, uh, this Disney job was not so recent. Maybe it was, ah, summer internship a while ago. Our summer experience 2011. Maybe we're not going to take up so much space with it, so a couple of things you can do, you can, you know if it's an older job, cut out the duties sentence there, get rid of that key accomplishments and just slide those bullet points up here. And suddenly, you know, it's an older job. Now. It's not taking up so much space, which is great, because this will probably be at the bottom of your resume. You might be still trying to squeeze another thing, so it's just a just another layout option for you to try out. Let's move on next to volunteer experience.
11. Volunteer Experience: Okay, let's talk fall into your experience quickly. No, In my opinion, there's two types of volunteer experience. There's volunteer experience that shows that you developed the job related skills that you'll need for the position you're applying to you in a position where you weren't being paid. And then there's also volunteer experience that just shows that you are a good person who uses their spare time to help out your community. So if you have volunteer experience, that does showcase job related skills, which is especially valuable if maybe you don't have a ton of paid experience. For example, if you are a student or a recent graduate, we're gonna lay it out exactly how we would job paid job, which is just like this place where we were volunteering location, our position as a volunteer and the dates associate ID. And then, just like we would with a job, we're gonna use bullet points, which list action verbs specific and quantifiable details and results. Um, and just like a job, we're gonna list as many bullet points as we need to showcase all the skills and accomplishments that we had during that volunteer position, and if you are less experienced. There's also no need to necessarily separate this into a volunteer experience section. Eso feel free to include relevant, unpaid work. Um, amongst your your job experience, and we can just title the section relevant experience instead of professional experience, because that doesn't imply that we were paid for everything. Now, if you have a volunteer experience that you'd like to add, would just to show that you are a good person who dedicates their time to helping out the community, then we use the same kind of format. Just like this may be. The title is General Volunteer, and maybe it's just one, one or two small bullet points that just show what it is that you did while you were helping out. So these are two different ways to list fall into your experience. Both are useful. I would say the 1st 1 is a higher priority and the second kind where you just were volunteering out of the good of your heart. That's more something if you can fit it in towards the bottom of the resume. Great. And if you have to cut this just in favour of fitting some other information, that's fine as well
12. Additional Information: Okay, so we have our education. We have our work experience. We have a volunteer experience in our resume. Strong start. Now, there are a few other things that you can include in your resume. Some of them may be optional. Some of them may be mandatory. It depends on the job you're applying to. So some examples we could include certifications and awards. Now, if the job you're applying to calls for certain certifications, then you're definitely gonna want to list those and your resume. Um, same thing goes for technical or computer skills. Maybe, you know, the industry require certain technical skills or the job posting is asking for them. So you want include those as well, then there might be other things. Could be languages You speak hobbies is a bit of a tricky one, but I'll get into that in a moment, So I'm just gonna show you kind of how you could fit these things in. You don't have to limit yourself to any of these items. Could be multiple others. If you have any questions about that, I'm happy to answer them. If you reach out in the comments. Eso Let's say we've got a certification and awards section. Now, if you have multiple certifications or multiple awards, these may call for separate sections. But as we get towards the bottom of the resume, it's okay to kind of combine things if you're if you're strapped for space. So let's take a look at what these might look like. So let's say we want an award will start same exact formatting as we did for jobs, for education, for volunteering, start with the organization, then the location of that organization, the awards that we've won and when we want it and then it can end here. Or if you have some more information that you want to add, I wouldn't mind you, including 11 line for additional details about maybe why you won the award or who granted the award. How many other people were considered for the award? That would be fine. Let's say we've got a some sort of certification. You can plug in the exact same formatting to show the certificate that we have. Uh, and like I said, maybe if it's required, this is something we want to highlight on its own. In a certification section totally up to you. Let's say we have some relevant technical skills that we want a highlight. So for this job that we're working on, we have the marketing and communications requirements. So maybe they didn't ask for it directly in the job posting. But we know these air useful. These useful skills software software is that we should be comfortable with and other programs that we need to be able to use. So I like to just kind of high ladies and used the vertical line to just separate them. It's it's nice. It's a bit of a different look. Um, what's important here is that you're just hitting some key things that they're going to be looking for, and we're saving a bit of space by just listing them, as opposed to working the beautiful sentences or doing a full bulleted list that could take up a bit more space. Um, and then finally, you know if you have some other information than you have room to add it. Languages is always a nice thing. I don't think people are generally going to turn down the opportunity, Teoh take on someone who needs who speaks different languages. If that's needed in an environment. And then, um, I mentioned hobbies earlier. The rule of thumb is the hobby has to be either relevant to the job or or just at least interesting and eye catching. So here's an example. Um, let's say you were, you know, a nationally ranked ranked Darts player, for example. This might be something to include, as as a final bullet point if you have space. I certainly wouldn't leave anything out in favor of adding this, but it's just another thing that you can kind of include if, uh, if necessary.
13. Arranging Your Resume : great. So now that we've got all the writing stuff covered, it's time for the fun part arranging and formatting your resume. Now, when I'm talking about arranging a resume, what I mean is, which order are we gonna put each of those sections in a resume so that the hiring manager and or robot who looks at our resume is gonna quickly see that well qualified for this job ? So when it comes to arranging the sections on a resume, we have a few options. Okay, so the first option, but I'd like to highlight is for the less experienced person we're gonna start with. Obviously, contact information could be our headline, a qualification statement. And then you're gonna jump right in with education, followed by your work experience and your volunteer experience intermingled. Then you add any technical skills, awards and certifications and any other additional information that you want to add. Now, this works well just because you may not have as much work experience so greater to show the education that you have in any volunteer experience tied in with that as well. If you're more experienced, same kind of starting point, contact information, headline qualifications statement. And then we're gonna dive straight into the work experience because when you're on the more experienced and that's gonna be more important than what your education is, Um, now, this is all contact specific, cause if you're applying for a job that, for example, university, then you're still gonna want to include the education at the top because you know that's a top value of the place that you're applying to. So it's all it's all really up to you to decide. But these are just some of the standard arrangements that people use and then and a technical job. This is where you know, maybe you want to highlight our technical skills first, then the work experience, education and certifications kind of working after that. Certifications that are relevant to the position obviously are higher priority. But these it's important to know these are just a few of the options if something makes more sense to you in terms of arranging your resume than do it your way. But this is just These are some options for you, so those are some of the orders in which you could arrange the sections of your resume. There's many combinations you could try, and those are just a few that have worked for me. Now, when we talk about arranging content within each section, I'd almost always recommend going with reverse chronological, which is, you know, putting the most recent thing at the top and working backwards. However, there's one exception that I've used, which I'll show you right now. Now, let's say that the job you're doing right now is not the most relevant to the position you're applying to. We're going to do something a little bit different with our headings. We're gonna call this one relevant professional experience and then we're gonna add in that most relevant experience that we want to highlight. And then because we still want to show our current job, we're going to use another section called Additional Professional experience. And that's where we can put in whatever it is we're doing now. So you see, if you look at the dates we have September to present in this lower position three women's volleyball coach and that kind of shows that we are still working now, but they're going to get to that after they see that we have some very relevant social media marketing experience. So that's just a trick that you can use if you have moved away from a particular line of work and you're looking to get back into it, and you want to make sure that you appear as, ah, as someone who has the relevant skills and experience for the job you're applying to.
14. Formatting Your Resume: so there are a lot of ways to format your resume. I showed you my way that I usually use throughout this course. But of course I want you to have the freedom to deviate from that and for Matt, as you wish. So I'm just going to give you 10 quick formatting tips to keep in mind as your formatting. A resume first page count. Keep it to one or two pages unless you're an executives of some kind. Next page roll over. So this just means as you complete the first page, try to wrap up whatever section you're on if you can, so that the second page starts with a nice new section or new job description. Um, and if you have to roll over, just put a little sub heading at the top of the second page. That says Baba brackets continued just so we know what those hanging bullet points are related to. For Funt, just keep it to a simple font. Calibri times New Roman Toe Homa all great fonts for resumes. I also personally like to use Trey Boucher from my headings. Just cause it's a bit more fun font size. I say put your name in 26 headings and job titles in 11.5 or 12 and then the body text in 10 or 11 avoid short lines of text. I guess what I mean by this is so you're writing your bullet points and you get on to a second or third line and you have maybe 1 to 3 words kind of hanging there. Try to edit it back just so the line ends towards the end of the right margin just to make it look a little cleaner, if you can. For color, stick to black and white. And if you do feel the urge to add color, I sometimes do. I like to add maybe a navy blue or something dark or even a teal for the name and theme section headings. But aside from that, keep it simple. Try to use white space where you can in your resume, so make sure you've got nice spaces between each of the jobs you're describing between each of the sections. Just so the resume doesn't look too crowded. Speaking of which, for margins, I recommend if you can use the standard size margin that Microsoft Word provides. And if you if you do need to alter the margins just to fit in a bit more information, that's an option for you as well. The use of bold text is really up to you. I try to keep it to just the job titles that have had to draw the eye to those and also toothy credentials that I have in my education. You can also choose to highlight the companies that you have worked for the schools you went Teoh. The only real guideline for Boulding is whatever you choose to do, do that consistently and finally save formatting for last. Worry about all the writing that you need to do first, and then once you have all the information, it's a lot easier to tweak it and edit it if you need Teoh for to make it fit in with the formatting that you are going for. So those are my 10 formatting tips. Good luck with formatting. Let's move on
15. Automated Resume Scanners (ATS Systems): So you probably know that most online job postings receive hundreds of applications and that hiring managers don't have time to review every single one. So a lot of bigger companies and frankly, now a lot of the smaller companies are using what's called an applicant tracking system and a T s to sort through your resumes, scan them and store them efficiently, and also tell them which candidates they should review. Which means for us that there's a step between writing our resume and someone actually reading it, which I admit is a bit annoying. But it makes sense on there, and so we have to be prepared. So what steps do we use to make these automated resume scanners happy? I'll show you right now. So first you're gonna want to keep your format simple. Everything that we've talked about today in terms of formatting will work perfectly for a resume scanner. Um, the things to avoid are just using separate columns or big blocks of color to separate your sections. We just want to use words and the occasional underlined. Next. Make sure you're using your keywords that we found while we were dissecting the job posting The trick with keywords is that you want to use them, but you don't want to over use them. So if you find an important key word, use it once. Use it twice, maybe three times. But if you go beyond that, the resume scanner is going to label you as someone who has used keyword stuffing, which it then penalizes you for, so make sure you're not over using those keywords. You can use synonyms where you need to, but that's sort of the guideline. For key words. Avoid graphics and images just because the information will not always get picked up by the resume scanner. If you do have a graphic or image that you really need to include, make sure that information is also included in plain text. I've personally never used any graphics or images for any clients of mine, and it seems to work just fine, so I generally avoid doing that. Next. Stick to a common fund. We talked about this already. Collie breed times, New Roman tahoma, all excellent funds. Next do not justify text. This is, you know, when we're talking about left, justify, right, justify, justify is when we have the text going all the stretched from right to left, so it covers the entire width of the page of the resume. Scanners sometimes have trouble with the spacing that this creates on the page, and it doesn't pick up all the words. So just stick with left justified and within each of your sections, you're gonna want to use reverse chronology, doing everything listening everything from most recent to lease recent Avoid using the header and footer tools in your resume. Just because this resume scanners don't always pick those up. Stick to generic section titles like we talked about earlier. The work experience. Professional experience, relevant experience. However you want to label that. Unfortunately, those more direct section titles like uh, marketing and communication experience that I showed you earlier. Those aren't aren't always going to be picked up by the resume scanners and categorize the same way. So, unfortunately, we can't use those before applying to jobs online like this. Stick to simple colors. Talked about this earlier black and white, maybe a dark blue or something else. If you If you feel like you want to add that And finally, just remember that after the resume scanner approves a resume, a real person is going to read it, so we will still want it to look nice and be readable to the human eye.
16. Resume "No-No's": Okay, so we've covered a lot of useful information up to now, and you're just about ready to go off and write your own awesome resume. There's just a few more things I want to tell you, which I'd be upset with myself if I didn't mention. So let's go over a couple of resume. No nos. First. If they don't ask for a photo of you with your resume and you're not a model or an actor, don't include a photo of yourself in your resume. Next, let's try to keep the language formal. Avoid the use of abbreviations, slang or colloquialisms in your resume. Finally, not finally. Sorry, have five of these. Next, uh, the line references available on request is kind of implied, so don't worry about that. If they ask for references to be attached to your resume. Certainly attached them, but otherwise, I think most hiring managers know that if they ask you for references, you'll be happy to provide them. Fourth, make sure you check your spelling and grammar. This is one very fast way to get your resume thrown out, regardless of how good it is. So be very careful about these items Finally. Please, Please, please do not lie on your resume. This will not get you very far. Even if it makes your resume look more impressive There, There Certainly to find out if you have light on your resume and it will make you look very silly in the interview when you get there and they ask you about those experiences. So please stick to the truth. It is the best way.
17. Good Luck!: All right, We have reached the end of the class. I hope you're feeling ready to go out there and write that perfect resume just for you. Remember, Do those first few critical minutes of research before you start writing your resume. Write yourself some great bullet points. And don't forget that all important formatting. Now, if you're not feeling quite ready, feel free to do the activities. Post them in the course, and I'll give you some feedback or feel free to ask me any other questions you have. Happy to get back to you on those as well. And just remember that a resume is a document about how great you are. So you should feel great while you're writing it black.
Greg Langstaff, Certified Resume Strategist. Fun Guy.
