#BestofFSCBlog : Resume Writing – How To Build A Crazy Effective #Resume That Gets Top Results. A Must Read ! !

One of the most common questions I receive each month in my career coaching work is about how to build a truly compelling resume that will stand out from all the competition and generate positive responses from the nation’s top organizations.

Today, it’s not nearly as simple and straightforward as it used to be twenty years ago. We have to be very savvy in how we craft our resumes and LinkedIn profiles and in how we talk about ourselves. But we also have to illustrate powerfully our personal brands, and choose carefully the specific words and phrases we use to demonstrate what we do and how we do it, and why that matters.

To gain a better understanding of what you need to know for today’s job search, I was excited to catch up with Austin Belcak, founder of Cultivated Culture, where he helps people land amazing jobs without traditional experience. Austin joined me on my Finding Brave podcast offering powerful advice about how to land a dream job at the salary you deserve and we’ve just recorded a new episode on building the most compelling resume you can. Belcak is now helping professionals get even better results from their resumes through his free resume builder with ATS-friendly templates approved by recruiters from companies like Google, Microsoft, Barclays, and more.

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Here’s what Belcak shares about how to build a truly stand-out resume:

Kathy Caprino: Austin, from your work with so many professionals seeking to land great jobs, what are the biggest changes you’re seeing regarding resumes in today’s job market?

Austin Belcak: The hiring landscape has gone through some remarkable changes over the past 5-10 years.

We’ve seen a rise in robot-driven candidate processing and a huge jump in online applications. While I personally believe we’re moving out of the resume era and into the LinkedIn era, resumes still play a major factor in your ability to get hired.

If your primary focus is applying online, you need to make sure you’re using a proven resume template and that your resume is optimized for keywords that Applicant Tracking Systems (resume scanning robots) are looking for.

But even if you beat the robots, your resume is still going to have to convince a real human if you want to score that interview slot.

I’ve had thousands of resumes come across my desk at Cultivated Culture and the ones that consistently land interviews do two things:

1. They don’t summarize; they focus on selling
2. They’re naturally keyword optimized

Caprino: What is the ONE the biggest mistake people make when writing their resumes?

Belcak: The absolute worst thing you can do on your resume is summarize your experience with vague buzzwords and jargon. I’m talking about bullets like:

• “Results-oriented salesperson with a track record of success”
• “Team-focused collaborator with stellar leadership skills”
• “Proven manager focused on servant-leadership to drive results and exceed goals”

None of those bullets tell us anything specific about the candidate.

What does “results-oriented” even mean? That you orient yourself around results? Does that mean you actually get great results? If so, what are they?

I see a lot of people get frustrated because they don’t hear back from their applications, but you need to put yourself in the recruiter’s shoes. If you received 10 (or 100) resumes that all say “track record of exceeding goals,” how would you be able to differentiate?

If you want to stand out and get noticed, you need to focus on selling and driving tangible value in your bullets. Speak about the specific initiatives you drove, the skills and tools you used to drive them, and the results you achieved.

Instead of, “Managed team of salespeople to generate new business and exceed targets”

Try, “Managed team of salespeople who generated $27M in new business last quarter (117% attainment).”

Caprino: What additional steps can people take to “sell” instead of “summarize” on their resume?

Belcak: If you want your experience to jump off the page, you need to focus on the value you drove.

There’s a field out there called Copywriting which is focused on how written words influence behavior. You come in contact with it daily when you scroll through the news or social media. Those headlines you see have been carefully crafted to grab your attention and earn your click.

With the rise of big data, marketing agencies have been able to put numbers behind the specific tactics and formulas that lead to more clicks and higher engagement.

I’ve spent the past 7 years studying the principles of copywriting and I’ve baked them into a simple, easy to follow Resume Bullet Formula:

If your resume bullet contains a word mix matching that formula, you can bet that it’s going to be much more compelling than the majority of bullets the competition is using to describe their experience.

Let’s look at an example:

Say you’re a marketer who leverages customer data to refine targeting on the company’s digital advertising, increase sales and lower cost-per-lead.

A mediocre bullet describing your experience might look like this:

“Leveraged customer data to run targeted ad campaigns and drive cost- effective leads.”

An awesome bullet leveraging the formula above might look like this:

“Overhauled digital ad targeting based on comprehensive customer data analysis – sales shot up 37% while CPA dropped 18%.”

This bullet is 18 words long and balances out to:

• 17% Action Words (overhauled, comprehensive, shot)
• 39% Uncommon / Industry Related Words (digital, ad, targeting, customer, data, analysis, CPA)
• 33% Common Words (based, on, up, while, dropped, sales)
• 11% Measurable Metrics (37%, 18%)

That’s right in line with our target word mix. See how compelling that is?

Let’s look at another example for a support engineer who helped a company improve its support process to eliminate a ticket backlog.

A mediocre bullet might look like this:

“Helped improve support processes to reduce ticket backlog and better serve customers.”

A strong bullet leveraging our formula might look like this:

“Developed tiered triage system that eliminated 40% of JIRA ticket backlog in less than 8 weeks.”

This bullet is a nice length (16 words) and its word balance comes out to:

• 13% Action Words (developed, eliminated)
• 38% Industry Terms (tiered, triage, system, JIRA, ticket, backlog)
• 38% Common Words (that, of, in, less, than, weeks)
• 11% Measurable Metrics (40%, 8)

Perfect!

Caprino: How can people optimize their resumes’ keywords to get past the robots?

Belcak: When I write resumes, I always work through the advice I mentioned above first. We want to focus on convincing the human that will eventually read our resume before we work on injecting keywords.

Once all of your bullets are focused on driving value and selling your experience, we can shift gears to keyword optimization.

When it comes to finding the right keywords for your resume, there are some paid tools out there but I want to give you a free workaround using a site called Wordclouds.com.

This site will help you identify the major words the resume scanning robots are looking for so you can include them in your resume. Here’s how:

Step 1: Find the job description for the role you want. Highlight and copy the entire job description.

Step 2: Head over to WordClouds.com and click on the “Word List” button at the top. Towards the top of the pop up box, you should see a link for Paste/Type Text. Go ahead and click that.

Step 3: Now paste the entire job description into the box, then hit “Apply.”

WordClouds is going to spit out an image that showcases every word in the job description. The larger words are the ones that appear most frequently (and the ones you want to make sure to include when writing your resume). Here’s an example for a data science role:

You can also get a quantitative view by clicking “Word List” again after creating your cloud. That will show you the number of times each word appeared in the job description:

9 data

6 models

4 experience

4 learning

3 Experience

3 develop

3 team

2 Qualifications

2 statistics

2 techniques

2 libraries

2 preferred

2 research

2 business

When writing your resume, your goal is to include those words at the same frequency as they appear on the job description.

This approach isn’t foolproof but it will help ensure that your resume is generally aligned with what the applicant tracking systems are looking for.

Caprino: Outside of the advice above, what’s one thing you’d recommend everyone do with their resume?

Belcak: Make sure your LinkedIn profile is hyperlinked on your resume.

ResumeGo, a site for hiring resume writers, ran an experiment on the effects of including your LinkedIn profile on your resume. They created 24,570 resumes and bucketed them into three categories:

1. Resumes that did not contain a link to the candidate’s LinkedIn profile
2. Resumes that contained a link to a bare bones LinkedIn profile
3. Resumes that contained a link to a comprehensive LinkedIn profile

ResumeGo then submitted these resumes and aimed to measure the callback rates for each. The results showed that applicants who included a link to a comprehensive LinkedIn profile on their resumes received callbacks at a rate of 13.5%, which is 71% higher than the 7.9% callback rate of candidates who didn’t include their LinkedIn profile at all.

This is a super easy tactic that anyone can do in a few seconds to boost their chances.

Caprino: Any last words on what you’ve found are the top keys to a job-winning resume?

Belcak: Writing resumes can feel like a hopeless task, especially with the low callback rates candidates are seeing from online applications these days.

The main reason most people don’t hear back is because they get caught up in the minutiae of one page vs. two, what font to use, etc. instead of focusing on changes that actually get results.

The tactics in this article aren’t just fluffy suggestions–they’re backed by the results I’ve seen from the thousands of resumes I’ve reviewed at Cultivated Culture. If you take the time to implement them, I promise you’ll see better results.

For more information on creating an awesome resume that gets results, visit CultivatedCulture.com and check out their free resume builder tool.

To improve your networking and interviewing results, work with Kathy Caprino in her Career Breakthrough programs and her Amazing Career Project 16-week course.