Transcripts
1. Course intro: Hey there, I'm Paul Miller and I created this resume course to help people tell their story in a powerful way. I want to help people do more than that to, I want to help people use the resume as a chance to reflect on what you're good at it, tell that story in a powerful way. I spent about ten years in the corporate world working for top companies. And I was able to work for those companies because I figured out how to tell my story and what I was good at and where I wanted to go in a powerful way. This course will help you think about what you're good at and tell your story in a powerful way. And I hope this helps you to demystify what the resume is all about. Use it to get a job you love.
2. What You'll Learn: Welcome to the nailing your story and writing a dream job resume course. I'm going to walk through what you'll be able to do by completing this course. And also the four parts that make up this course from where you're gonna go through. At the end of this course, you'll be able to write a resume that wows recruiters. Be confident about your personal story and be able to craft and Taylor and reflect on it as you progress through your career. Understand the elements of a top 1% resume, truly right, one of the best resumes compared to anyone else you're competing with. And have the tools to compete with the best in the world for your dream job. This course has four main components. First is understanding the basics. We'll explore what are the do's and don'ts of resumes and what are some clear pitfalls to avoid? Second, we're going to reflect on your strengths. We're gonna do an exercise that helps you to assess what you've accomplished in the past and how to articulate that in a resume to communicate what you're good at. Third, we're gonna go into the details of building a resume. I'm going to share with you a formula that helps you think about a way to write a compelling bullet in a reservoir. And fourth, we're going to turn your strengths and your resume and just something that you can use in the real-world. I'm going to walk through an example of a coaching client I've worked with and how we took his strengths and communicated to them in a way to help him make a career change.
3. Empathetic Writer Reflection Exercise: Now before we dive into this course and wants you to go through an exercise, I want you to tap into your empathy, empathy for who? Empathy for the recruiters that have to read your resume. So I want you to put yourself in the shoes of a recruiter. We're gonna walk through a short exercise. And you can either close your eyes, you can keep them open if you want. But just kinda relax. Let your mind wander a little so you can let yourself experience what it feels like to be a recruiter. You're getting into the office at nine AM after staying up late with your friends and IP for catching up over dinner and drinks. A little hung over. You realize you have to finish going through all those resumes today. There are over a 100 waiting for you and your e-mail. Not to mention the 42 other emails sitting in your mailbox, you decide to start looking through the resumes first thing in the morning. You make it through 25 and can't believe how boring the artery. You think to yourself. I wish people knew about the writing and dream job resume course. As you read another bullet, financial analysts saying he manages the reporting process for cashflows, you'd become desperate. How am I ever going to find an all star for my team? By taking this course, I'm going to help you avoid this fate. You're not going to frustrate a recruiter, but instead you're going to stand out. You're gonna tell a compelling story that helps you recruiters say, wow, we need to talk to this person.
4. Understand the Basics: Understanding the basics. In this section, we're going to walk through some basics of writing a resume and some clear do's and don'ts to follow. First, some resume best practices. The key thing with a resume is first impressions. You wanna make it easy to read. You also want to pay attention to detail. If you make simple mistakes, catch quickly, they're gonna get distracted and not want to hire you. Third is consistency. You want to have clear spacing. You want to have the numbers and the formatting the same throughout your document. Fourth tip that many people don't follow is converted to PDF before you send it. Word can often have issues opening on different operating systems and different computers, so control the format, send it in PDF. A question I often get is, can I be creative? The answer is yes. But I think it's important to focus on what you want to be creative about. I think a thing to be creative with is the story you're trying to tell. You want to get across who you are and what makes you stand out. And using creativity to do that, as long as it resonates with your story is really going to work well. This course probably isn't the best fit for creative industries, where you can often show more creativity, use colors, use your photo, different things like that. I think the most important thing to take away is you want to clearly communicate what are your strengths, what are you good at and why somebody should interview you? So what does it mean when I say made the formatting consistent and make it easy to digest. So let's walk through this simple resume I've created. First, as you can see that there's a clear heading, has the address, the contact information, it really stands out at the top. Next, you can quickly scan the resume and see the companies as persons work for you. You can also see the titles of the different jobs they've held. There. You can see the clear breaks between the sections so you can jump. Here's the experience, here's the education to understand what this person's done throughout the past several years of their career. Next, on the right side, it's clearly aligned. You have you have dates and locations that are in chronological order and tell the story of this person. Next, I want to introduce you to a bullet formula around writing compelling bullets that show your strengths. Were gonna go more into this in part four of the course. But I wanted to introduce it here just to get you comfortable with the framework. First, you're gonna wanna talk about what you did. Every bullet should say what did you actually do. It shouldn't read as a role and responsibility or a job description. Second, you're going to want to talk about how you did it. How did you engage with other people? What processes did you use? What approach did you use? What tools to use? Third, often missing in a lot of resumes is the impact. You want to say. What was the actual outcome of the work you did? What was how many people were impacted? How much money was saved, how much time was saved? Next, let's talk about things to avoid. First, you want to make sure your resume doesn't get out of hand by using different fonts. Formatting, spacing. Here you can see the one on the left is all center aligned. Looks a little weird. It's going to distract you from maybe this is an incredible candidate. On the right. This resume is a lot of words. There is no clear formats following and probably isn't doing a great job of telling compelling story of who this person is. There are many mistakes that people make on resumes. I just want to make you aware of these so you can proofread your resume before submitting it so you do not make these mistakes. Mistake number one, always check for spelling errors. I've even made this mistake myself. A good way to get around this is just asking someone else to proofread it, something that you might not even catch because you know your resumes so well, somebody else will easily spot. Mistake number two. Many people early in their career often send me a long resume. There are some arguments for having more than one page resume. But when I see these resumes, what I'm seeing is somebody that really doesn't understand what they're trying to say in their resume, what their strengths are and what their story is. Try to force it down to one resume. And this will help you focus on what you're trying to communicate. Mistake number three, and possibly the biggest mistake is not selling your best self. So many people I've worked with over the years have a resume that does not really tell people what is special about them. It lists roles and responsibilities of the job they have, but doesn't talk about the impact they've had on other people, the impact they've had on the business, and what really makes them stand out. To address this, I recommend, of course, just finished this course. Now you can stop here and download the attached resume template. Also, I've included another document which is just standard tips and tricks that we'll talk through. Here's some things you should think about at different points of your resume.
5. Know Your Strengths: Know your strengths. In part two, we're going to really dive deep into understanding your strengths. I'm gonna recommend a couple of resources. But also this includes an exercise that's going to help in a structured way break down and assess some of the stories and experiences from your past such that you can start thinking about what are the things that have made you successful in your past? And how can you showcase that both in a resume but in interviews for your dream job? A tool I love is gallop strength finder assessment. I recommend taking this exam if you have time, the address is here and you can pause and go take it now if you want, or even take it later. It's $20, but definitely worth it. I've used this with many coaching clients and it's been a really helpful tool to help them think about traits that they wouldn't otherwise think about as strengths. Now, I've included an exercise. This is a three-part exercise that will help you start to make sense of what these strengths are. So I'll give you a second to pause here and you can go download the exercise. Step one of this exercise is really to take a step back. You want to take an inventory of your stories and experiences you have. From work, your personal life, leadership activities you've been involved in, and even volunteering activities or anything else like that. The reason behind doing this is just the start making sense of what you've done. Trying to find similarities in different ways. You've approached problems and see what really comes out for you. To help you complete this, I want to offer you some powerful questions that might help you think deeper about what you've done. Questions like, what is your proudest accomplishment? What were you given the most praise for? What do people come to you for? What was something you were amazing app that you actually didn't get a lot of credit for. How do you interact with people differently? Who do you work with are influenced to drive change? What skills make you stand out? How much money or time was saved? And how many people benefited from your process improvement? These are just some questions, but the key here is just to think a little deeper. People often have a hard time bragging or sharing what they've truly accomplish. But a lot of times people are just scared to oversell And often end up just under selling what they've achieved. So if you haven't completed step one yet, I'll let you pause here and go work on that. Great. So step two, what we wanna do is analyze the stories we have in part one, we want to start grouping these. We want to see what are the themes that stand out? What are some of the similarities? Do you have three different stories where you were coming up with a way to solve a problem. Do you have three different stories where you are giving a compelling presentation or influencing people to change their mind. You wanna start grouping these stories. Now if you're doing this in Word, you can just use a keyword that helps you identify the story from the previous section. In step three, you want to start really honing in on what those themes are for you. These could be things like continuous improvement. You're action-oriented. Here, an obsessive learner. You're a problem solver, collaborator, people leader, analytical skills. It really can be anything and don't be afraid to be creative around what these seams could be. An example I have here, continuously looking for new ways to do things and taking action. This may not seem special, but once you know these themes, you can make sure you're hitting these over and over in your resume. And this can translate to communicating your story in interviews for your dream job.
6. Build Your Resume: Building your resume. In this part, you'll want to pull up that professional template you downloaded at the beginning of the course, we're going to start building your resume. However, before you start writing your resume, reflect back to the exercise at the beginning of the course where you put yourself in the shoes of a recruiter. You wanna make sure that you're reading something that people want to read. Let's recap some do's and don'ts. First, you have to be comfortable bragging about yourself. The people reading your resume are not going to know the impact of what you've accomplished and how you stand out. Unless you are very explicit about what you've done and what you've accomplished. Second, impact, impact, impact. You wanna talk about what was the outcome of your actions, not just what you've done. We'll get more into this as we recap that formula for reading and powerful pullet. Third, you wanna share subtle details of the secret behind your success. Are there ways you can bring alive your personal style? How you relate with people, build relationships are how you influence people. And don't you don't want your resume to sound like the job description you signed up for. These often read like managing reports. This doesn't tell you anything about what you've accomplished, or what your strengths are, or what your unique story is. So let's recap the bullet formula we talked about at the beginning of the course. There are three elements. Every bullet should touch on these three elements. What you did, how you did it, and the impact of those actions. So let's look at a real-life example of a client I worked with. They have this bullet on their resume. It said assist with the build and rollout of program X. I've disguised the name of the REL program to protect the company. What's the problem with this? The problem is it doesn't tell the reader anything about what this person did, whether it was successful or if it had an impact on the company. So under reviewing the resume and digging deeper, I ask them some deeper questions. Here are some questions you might want to challenge yourself with. What was the role on your team? Who did you work with? What was the impact of the new program? In reality, I asked one question that really got more out of the person I was working. I said, what do you actually do? Oh, yes, they said that was a huge project. One of the biggest I was involved in. I helped redesign the system with a number of VPs, created the training materials and lead trading sessions is over 500 people throughout the organization. The new system help reduce the speed of reporting by 50% from four hours and one to two hours a month. Why didn't you write data set? So building off what this person said about what they actually did, we took this bullet and really expanded to show what they did, how they did it, and the impact. So we're going to look at this bullet from the perspective of this bullet formula and go through the three elements and how it played out in this bullet. So let's break this down. First. We then talked about what they did. This was kind of already covered in the initial bullet, developed and manage the implementation of program X. Next, they talked about the how they worked closely with three vice presidents. And they develop the materials and lead trainings with over 500 global employees. This gives you a little more flavor about the person says they've worked with senior management and they're also good at developing materials that are going to be used and probably have to be created a very high-quality level. Next, talked about the impact after three months, this program led to a reduction in the speed of the task by 50% from four hours a month to two hours a month. And they were able to quantify this and came up with the fact that it helped save the company a $100 thousand. So let's look at another bullet. Here's another bullet from that same person trained project team on how to use a new technology and supported rollout to the office. Now this is a slightly better bullet than the other one we started with. But still it's missing that detail. And I'll let you pause here and just read the upgraded bullet on the right using our formula. So you might want to hit pause here and go back to your resume and just look at it with a critical eye. Do address this bullet formula in each of your bullets. Are you talking about the What you did, the how you did it and the impact. It's okay to not hit this formula perfectly in every aspect of your resume. You may not have seen projects to completion, but still it's a good lens to go look at your resume. Once you've done that, you wanna do a sanity check and type back to those themes we've developed in part two of your strengths. Can you call out specific bullets that match those themes? Isn't balanced, isn't telling the right story. You're gonna wanna make sure that these things come together. And you really selling your best self leading with your strengths and showing what you've accomplished in your career.
7. Craft Your Story: Craft your story. This part of the course builds on the other components of the course. It's going to take what you've done in terms of analyzing your strengths and getting down to the nitty-gritty and building that resume. And taking it into something you can actually use in interviews to land your dream job. So let's take a step back. How do you know what your story is? This is not an easy question to answer. If this is the first time you've thought about your story, it's not going to end here. You're going to have to constantly reflect, tweet, refine your story as you evolve your interests, change your strength chains throughout your career. In this course, we're gonna make it tailored to a specific opportunity that you're pursuing. Essentially, what you wanna do is take your strengths and develop an elevator pitch and then work backwards to align it with your resume. If you haven't done so already, you're gonna want to identify a specific opportunity, go to a job search site and identify a job. Or even just broadly accompany that you want to work for. This will help you think deeper about communicating your story. In this section, we're gonna go through three steps. The first part you've already completed, which is identifying your strengths. The next step is to assess that job description you identified and identify the valued skills needed in that role. Sometimes it will be really clear in the job description and communicated. Maybe they're looking for analytical skills. Somebody that has communication abilities. Other times you're gonna have to dig a little deeper and just try to make sense of what you think would, they would want in that role. And another way to do this as talked to people who have worked at that company or read about what people have done in various sources on the internet. Step three is to try to match what your strengths are and communicate them in a similar way that kind of aligns with what this job description is looking for. If it's not even close, this might be a sign that the job is probably not a good fit for you. What will help you is going back to your exercise and identifying the three themes that you identified that make you stand out. You're gonna want to match these two what you think the job description is looking for. Here's an example of a coaching client I've worked with. I worked with somebody who had done teacher America and then worked as a math teacher. He was making a transition, however, to apply for a job as a management consultant. He told me at first these skills are translate. I don't have any relevant experience. However, we started digging deeper and just taking inventory of what his strengths are. He had a lot of strengths in a really difficult job working with sixth grade math students. Some of his strengths included developing lesson plans to teach others, dealing with uncertainty and adjusting the students strengths and weaknesses, being humble and having to continuously learn from mistakes. And we took this a step further and simplified it. We said developing lesson plans from complex topics is adaptable and open. He has a learning orientation. These things have brought enough that they can then be applied to any industry. Next, we started looking at the job requirements. What does it mean to be a consultant? The job requirements are pretty simple. Near the entry level of consulting type rules. You have to be analytical. You want to have deep research skills. You want to be able to develop and communicate to senior level people with presentations and writing. And you've gotta be able to grasp new topics, have a fast-paced learning of new industries and problems. Now we tried to apply his strengths and map them to these job requirements such that he could start communicating his story. Again, his strengths were developing lesson plans for complex topics, being adaptable and open, and having a learning orientation. Let's see how these map to the job requirements. The first one, developing lesson plans for complex topics. If he can explain something to a sixth grade student and teach them math, do you think he's really going to have trouble explaining things to senior partners or consulting firms, being adaptable and open. Now adjusting to the many needs of young students, I think that's going to enable him to handle, to work on the fly, learn things fast and clearly communicate what's going to be needed to senior level people. And third learning orientation, this is going to help him get up to speed and new topics and also go deep on things. When you're explaining things to sixth grade and students in math, you have to be able to go deep and take things that are otherwise complex and communicate them in simple ways. So after going through this exercise, this person realized they're actually work much better match and were able to communicate that both in the resume in an interview that there were qualified candidate. So using what we've gone through in this exercise, you can take this and set yourself up for interviews success. After going through this exercise, I had him right out a story of how those skills translated to the role. And these were going to be stories that he used in interviews. First, if I can explain complex topics to sixth graders, I'll be able to explain complex problems, the CEOs and senior executives. Second, I'm very empathetic to others abilities and working styles and can tailor my approach to achieve the goal. This will useful with clients that have different perspectives. Third, by ability to learn at a fast pace and be humble and challenging environments. Well served me well as I am exposed to new industries and problems. As you can see, this person had a very clear understanding of his strengths and was able to turn the table and articulate his strengths in a way that would make sense to somebody on the other side of the table. This person landed that job. Now use what you've learned in this course and go land your dream job.
Paul Millerd
