Credibility and Keywords - how to capture both in your Résumé

Branding is so important. We all know this. 15 years ago it was considered ground-breaking to suggest to somebody they tailor their résumé to suit the job advert. Now everybody does this! The number 1 problem with tailoring your résumé each time is that now there are MULTIPLE VERSIONS OF YOU…

Being seen by the SAME PEOPLE. 

In this increasingly digitalised, interconnected society, this is a problem. It undermines credibility when a recruiter sees a version of your résumé for one role, and then another version for a slightly different position. Then they check you out online. And what do they see? Yup, you guessed it, a third version.

Poor hiring managers lose time as they are forced to play a solitary game of Snap, trying to catch all the different versions of you, and then combine all the clues to identify whether you are right for any of the roles.

“There was one guy who had some interesting qualifications, a bit left of field to what the role required, but I thought those additional qualifications would give him a stronger insight and better problem-solving skills,” Sally* a HR consultant I catch up with regularly told me recently. “With his work background, he had held comparable roles, but there wasn’t much detail on his actual responsibilities in these roles. So I put his CV to one side, assuming he wouldn’t be such a good fit.

A day later, I’m browsing through résumés that we had kept on our applicant tracking system, for a similar role we had advertised a few months prior and there’s a man with almost identical work experience, along with much more relevant detail. Yet I didn’t see that he would have the advanced problem-solving skills required. Somehow, something clicked in my memory and I went through the CVs I’d been reading the day before. I found the one I was looking for and sure enough, the two résumés were from the same guy. He probably thought he’d done the right thing by emphasising different skills, but instead he caused me to question the integrity of both versions of his résumé, and not trust him.”

I guess what Sally is saying, is a man with two faces can’t be trusted.

Mismatched information undermines your credibility!

Another hiring manager, Ted* always verifies a promising CV with information of LinkedIn, only to find that LinkedIn profiles invariably have contradictory information. “The frustrating part is that you want to hire someone who genuinely wants the role and has followed the right career path. But when they keep chopping and changing their résumé, you suspect they’ll say whatever they need to say to get any position. It also takes up a lot of my time trying to authenticate career history when there are slightly inconsistent versions.”

Now I often have clients asking me to rewrite their CV for a specific upcoming role. Unless you are at Board level, or applying the NSW Government Framework, I do not agree with this.

Instead I tell my clients that writing an effective résumé is like implementing a software solution. It is all in the requirements gathering.

From what I have come to understand from having written 100’s of résumés for project managers the trick to implementing a software solution is to ASK the system users what they want (commonly called 'requirements gathering').

You don’t just survey one user. You survey lots. You ask questions about what they want, what their needs are, how this relates to the business objectives, and you delve deep when you think you have found a pain point - the thing that really aggravates the user.

You WRITE IT DOWN. Everything. You document it all. So you can capture it and respond to it.

A great system implementation occurs only when the solution meets the business needs, and you can’t guess at pain points by not engaging with the business, by not observing it, and collecting data.

Writing a great résumé is the same as implementing a computer system. It doesn’t start with the creation of the software. That would be like designing a solution, that then has to find and fit an unknown, unquantified problem.

Writing a résumé starts with research, with understanding your audience and their problems.

You need to identify your audience's pain points.

And who the audience actually IS.

Well, if you were my client, and I was writing your résumé, you might think you are the audience. You might think I would be writing to please you. You would be mistaken.

It is not about you. Well it is. But it isn’t.

Your résumé should capture what the adverts are asking for.

Identify and understand your audience by doing research.

Collect job advertisements. Lots of them.

Collect about 15 adverts and make a list of the common requirements for each role.

Now you have an insight into the thought processes of the majority of your potential future employers – you know what they want from you; the context/challenge, actions and results they want to be reading in your résumé. You understand their problems.

You will observe that plenty of the requirements are repeated.

The same words keep popping up.

These commonly repeated words are THE KEYWORDS.

Keywords are what your audience (and their cunning applicant tracking systems), are scanning for to determine who to invite for interview.

Next, group your keywords into a table. 

For eight years now, as well as writing CV's, I have offered a consultation service where I provide expert résumé writing guidance. These sessions are tailored to the individual's needs, giving detailed instruction on how to optimise the résumé and build a strategy to improve career opportunities. Over the course of two appointments one of my clients (she was interested in changing careers, altering her résumé and LinkedIn profile, so her re-positioning was more than we could cover in one session), followed my advice in putting together the above table and kindly said I could share it. Thanks J!

When you have identified and grouped the top 3 to 5 themes from all of your advertisements like J. cleverley has -- it is as clear as a Sydney summers day what points you need to write about.

As employers read left to right, top to bottom, simply change the order of your information depending on the adverts that you are applying to.

One master document. Same content. Always. Pitched to what your audiences are interested in. With differences in the ordering of the information depending on each specific job advertisement. Because, as another client paraphrased back to me, you need to put the items that are 'Top Selling Stock' in a highly visible place.

So where are the highly visible places in your CV?

Well... Glad you asked. Because I see a lot of crazy formats that try to attract attention. And they don't. Distracting formatting just irritates the reader who only wants to see the information quickly and easily.

I use the F pattern to dictate how to lay out information, as this has been shown in eye-tracking studies to be the BEST way to capture readers attention when they are reading multiple documents.

(Z pattern being better for audiences that are not over-burdened with having to read lots of information.)

And make sure your information tallies with your LinkedIn profile, even though they are both structured differently!

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