Back to the job search posts this week! If you missed the first several parts of the series start here.
Once your LinkedIn is up to date and ready to roll it’s time to get your resume cleaned up as well. All resumes are not created equal and not all resumes serve the same purpose. The first question I always ask is “What are you doing with this resume?”
Uploading it to a general job board, like Monster, Indeed, or Careerbuilder
Uploading it to an industry specific job board, like Dice, Clearance Jobs, or AngelList
Submitting it through a company HR Site for a specific job
Submitting it to a company HR site for any position
Emailing it directly to a recruiter or manager who has asked for a copy of your resume
A successful resume for each of those situations looks slightly different. I’ll touch on all of them eventually, but to start I’m going to focus on resumes for general job boards. If you’re actively searching for a job and hoping to cast the widest net possible, it’s a solid starting point. BUT! Job board resumes are trickier than resumes you submit for a specific position. You don’t know exactly who will see this resume or what positions they’ll be looking to fill, and you can’t possibly create a resume that speaks to every open position in your desired industry. Job boards also rely heavily on word matching and resume scanning systems that suggest resumes and candidates to the recruiters and companies paying for access.
So, what’s the main point of a general job board resume? You want to be FOUND. Nine times out of 10 you’ll have an opportunity to provide a more specific or detailed resume once you’ve been contacted about a particular position, so this resume isn’t an end all be all, or even probably the one the hiring manager will eventually see. This resume is all about pushing you to the top of the search function in your field. For me job board resumes come down to three main things - Format, Keywords, and Contact Information.
Format - Simple and Straightforward. Resume scanners and job search sites are notorious for rearranging resume formats, even if you’re uploading a PDF. Keeping things simple gives you the best chance of having your resume be seen in the format you intended. It also makes it easy to keep updating and adding information without completely revamping your resume every time. Things that tend to work against simple formatting include:
Icons - like the little images of an envelope or phone, trust me if it ends in gmail.com I know it’s your email address, you don’t need the icon.
Graphs - fun bar graphs and pie charts were all the rage there for a minute. While they might look nice a resume scanner has absolutely no idea how to quantify or qualify them.
Photos - I promise, you don’t need a headshot on your resume.
Unusual fonts - don’t assume the system your resume will be scanned by is the most up to date. I don’t actually have strong preferences about fonts at all, but if you stray too far outside the norm there’s a chance the system won’t recognize it and will convert your resume to the closest matching font it does recognize, which can wreak havoc on your format. If you like the more formal look of a serif font I think Georgia and Cambria are good choices. Calibri and Arial are solid options if you like the cleaner, more modern look of san serif. Those are probably the only four fonts I’ve used on resumes in the last 5 years, don’t overthink it!
Page Length - If I’m being honest, I don’t look past the first page of a candidate’s resume very often. That is NOT to say you need to limit yourself to one page, but just realize that the first page is really all you have to make a strong impression that says “read further”.
Keywords and the search function: Every site works differently, but in general they’re designed to allow recruiters to submit a job description, and the site returns candidates that most closely match that description. So, your chances of being seen have much more to do with how closely the words on your resume match a description than how good that resume looks or how creatively written it is. Just like with your LinkedIn profile, a good way to get a sense of the words you should be including is by reading job postings. You also want to generalize your resume as much as possible. For example, I worked for a company that called all of their account managers “Training Advisors”. It’s a perfectly fine title, but it was used only by that company and would make it hard for those people to pop up in a search. You also want to think about job titles that are used interchangeably - while there are differences between Software Developers and Software Engineers a lot of companies use the same title for both. Even if your title was Software Developer you’d be smart to incorporate the words “Software Engineer” and “Software Engineering” somewhere on your resume.
Contact information is key. At a minimum, the top section of your resume should include your full name, phone number, email address, and (maybe) city. Whatever you do, your essential information should NOT be in the header section of the page. Headers frequently get cut off by resume scanners or website uploads, and it’s just better to be safe than sorry. I say maybe about the city because it depends where you’re searching. If you’re definitely staying in the city you’re currently located in, seeing a city on your resume confirms for the recruiter that you’re already local (no issues in scheduling interviews or with relocation down the line). I do however always recommend using the most general version of your location (Washington, DC, not Bethesda, Arlington, Reston, etc). Commute bias is real and a lot of recruiters won’t reach out to candidates who aren’t in their immediate area.
For an example of this kind of resume you can see a mock job board resume with my notes and key points here. It’ll download a zip file to your computer, so check your downloads! If you’d rather listen we did a quick video rundown of the same resume on loom.