A Resume Is an Advertisement
Seppo Helava
Providing comically impactful help for leaders of creative teams pre-product/market fit
A surprisingly straightforward guide to crafting an impactful, personal resume that will make readers desperate to hire you.
This is the first half of a work-in-progress, but I wanted to get it out there for feedback and because I think it'll be useful to folks even in this form. I would greatly appreciate any feedback or suggestions you have.
If you’re reading this, it’s because you’re looking for help with your resume. Before we dive in, let’s get one quick thing out of the way first: This information will help you if you have been sending resumes out, and not getting responses/interviews in return.
If you have been getting interviews, your resume is doing its job, for the most part. While there are some minor ways in which a resume can set you up badly for an interview by misrepresenting your experience, and this information can help you re-frame some of that, it’s unlikely that that’s your biggest problem. There are services that can help you improve your interviewing skills, but this book/pamphlet will not be focused on that, and I’d recommend looking up something that’s focused on helping you hone your interview skills.
The reason I bring this up first, it’s it’s often surprising how many people simply don’t know how a resume is used by the people receiving it, and so that’s where we’re going to start, because knowing how a resume is used by the company getting it is critical to crafting an effective resume for you.
But even before we dive into that, let’s take a second to do a quick overview of what this whole thing is going to be about.
Overview of Part 1:
Overview of Part 2 (in the future):
How a Resume is Used and Who Reads It
Most folks write up a resume by modifying an existing template, then fill in their experience, wordsmith it a bit, and send it out to every company they’re interested in and hope they get a response. Thing is, they don’t have any insight into what happens in between sending it out and getting or not getting a response, and so there’s no feedback loop that tells them what they were doing wrong, or why they didn’t get any response from a company.
When you send in a resume, here’s what happens:
This process varies from place to place - sometimes the percentages are higher, sometimes they’re lower. But it’s very rare that the first person to read your resume is the person hiring for the job unless you’re applying at an early-stage startup or a mom-and-pop shop.
So the first major tip to get your resume past the machines and the HR screeners is this:
Read the job description carefully, and in your resume,?use the same language that they use.
Yes, this means you’ll be making adjustments to your resume for specific applications, because you want the exact wording that they’re using. Not approximately the same. Not different words that mean the same thing. If someone says that they’re looking for a Technical Product Manager, use the phrase Technical Product Manager, even if you’ve heard that position described as Technical Lead or something similar.
Machines will be looking for an exact match, and they’re going to be using language input by some human – usually an HR person and not the hiring manager. An expert may know that a Game Designer I is the same as a Junior Game Designer, but the HR person is getting a set of terms from the expert, and if they’re not making the connection, your terms will not match. So use the exact language used in the job description. It’s the only way to be sure.
Not only will it pass the machine parsers, when a human reads it, whether it’s the HR person or the person hiring for the job, your language will feel familiar to them, because it’s the language that they already use. No ambiguity. Familiarity. These are great things for your resume in any situation.
We’ll dive into more things that’ll increase the chances your resume makes it to the right hands, but for that, we need a bit more understanding about what the reader is looking for, because it’s not always what you think.
What Is a Resume For?
When someone creates a job description, they have a problem. They have too much work, and not enough people. They need expertise that they don’t have. Could be all sorts of things, but those are the two big ones. So when a person writes a job description, you can be relatively sure of two things:
Knowing that the person is overloaded is important in one critical way. It means that if you’re asking them to do work and spend time reading your resume, you are making a mistake. We’ll get back to this, because it’s one of the most important things about crafting an effective resume – so we’ll spend a lot of time on this later.
But the second thing is a little more subtle. Your resume needs to get across that you are equipped to solve their problem in the easiest, best way possible. And that is essentially what a resume is for.
A resume is an advertisement, whose subject is you. Its sole purpose is to get you an interview.
This may sound obvious once you read it, but it is genuinely shocking to me how many people do not understand that this is what a resume is for.
Here’s a list of things a resume is not, and each one of these is based on something that real, thoughtful, intelligent, experienced people thought their resumes should contain:
That last one’s a killer for a lot of people. But the earlier things – like a resume being a “complete history”, and having to contain things you might not be explicitly proud of, like being caught up in a layoff, or at a job for a really short time, or having a gap in your career due to personal stuff – none of that is required in a resume.
A resume is an advertisement.
I have never seen an advertisement for cars that focuses on the number of deaths they cause each year. Or a beer ad that talks about the impact of drunk driving or its impact on your liver.
Advertisements are about telling people what you want them to know.
Advertisements are short, punchy, and to the point.
It is not:
Coke is a carbonated beverage sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup that contains a lot of “empty” calories that can give you a burst of quick energy and? is refreshing when served cold!
It is:
Coke is refreshing!
If there is one idea that sticks with you from all of this, I hope it is this. A resume is an advertisement.?
Everything about it should behave the way an advertisement behaves, and for every detail, you can derive what you should do by looking at and understanding great advertising, and applying those thoughts to your resume.
So now, our next job is to make a great advertisement for you.
Coke is Refreshing: A Strong Thesis
One of the funny things about this whole concept is that I’ve been working professionally for more than 25 years, written dozens of resumes over the years, read hundreds if not thousands of them, and the most important and most significant, and most powerful bit of advice I’m going to give you is something we all learned in grade school writing.
Start with a strong thesis, and everything else in your resume is there to reinforce and validate that thesis.
It sounds super easy, and in many ways, it is. Crafting a strong thesis and spending your whole resume reinforcing it will immediately give readers something to latch onto that they can understand about you, and if the rest of the resume is focused on reinforcing that message, they will leave with a narrative “through line” that most resumes simply don’t have, and you will stand out as a result.
But writing a great thesis is hard, and keeping things focused on reinforcing it is really counter to what a lot of people have learned about writing resumes. But that’s alright. They’re bound by irrelevant conventions. That’s their problem, not yours. You’re going to do things better.
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What makes a great thesis, and how do you write one? Yeah - that’s a great question! Thanks for asking.
There are a few things that make a thesis stand out:
Writing a succinct thesis about what makes you great is hard. You’re great at so much stuff! But you’ve gotta keep it short and to the point, and one of the best ways to do that is to focus on the great stuff you do that is distinctive. Unique.
This can be quite tricky for people who are newer to the working world, because you’ve had less time and experience to develop your worldview. But for folks who have a few years under their belt, there’s likely something about you that you do better than anyone else. Or differently. If you’re one of many software engineers, or retail workers, or what have you – why you? Why should I hire you, and not the person next to you?
Do you work harder? Are you more creative? More focused on customer service? Do you love some element of your job? Do you have a hobby that brings extra flavor to your work?
For me, I was a game designer & entrepreneur for about 15 years. As I worked, I developed certain expertise, and it took years to actually figure out how it all fit together. I consistently worked on cutting-edge products, where no one really knew how things should work. I built teams from scratch to work on that stuff, and developed really specific and unusual processes that were super effective for that specific space. But I also worked in videogames for years, and was used to a culture of constant, intensive mandatory overtime. And I swore when I ever had control, I’d do everything I could do avoid that “crunch”.?
So for me, my thesis would contain things about iteration, speed, unknown, small teams, and sustainability.
What are those things for you?
And how do you take those words and turn them into a thesis?
An Example Thesis: Writing the Sub-heading for This Booklet
One thing that can be helpful is to walk through the process of crafting a strong thesis with someone. But a challenge here is that it’s really detailed and specific, and if I were to just transcribe a dialog with a client, then there’s a lot of subtlety that’d be hard to convey. Instead, I’ll show you how I came up with the sub-heading of this book. As I write this, I have no idea what it will be. You may have already seen it on this book, but that’s because I put the result at the front of the book after I wrote it here. So how did we get there? (...And wow, this paragraph has some strange tense usage)
There are a few things I need to think of:
As you can probably see, these are the same questions you should be asking when writing a strong thesis for your resume. The way I start is by collecting words & phrases that contain the things I want to convey. I’ll group similar words/phrases together as I go:
So now, let’s try to string some of those together in a sentence:
Ooh. That’s close. There are some things that I really like in there. Crafting gets at the thoughtfulness and care required to put together a good resume. It’s not just filling in a template. Effective is the point. But this feels like it could use something more. Personal - great. I think that’s a core of what I’m trying to get at, that this isn’t a resume about arbitrary worker drone B-34, it’s about you and your personal perspective & strengths. “People will want to read” just came to mind as I tried to find something related to “cuts through the noise”, because what I want is to realize that the point of this is to write a resume that people will read because it’s rewarding to read… which will motivate the reader to recommend you for an interview.
…and that’s what’s missing from effective. That’s what effective means. Let’s try:
Well, that reinforces what we want “effective” to mean, but when you read that sentence, aside from the word “personal” and maybe “crafting”, it’s literally what every resume book under the sun will say they’re trying to do. So I’ve lost something. There’s something closer in “people will want to read” than “will get you an interview”.
So things I like: crafting, effective, personal. I feel like I want to include “concise”, but concision isn’t the point, it’s a side-effect of approaching writing an advertisement. Which is something like “maximum impact in minimal time”. That gets at the speed we’re trying to get across. Attention-grabbing.
There’s something here that makes me think, “punching the reader in the face”. That’s sort of the impact we’re looking for. Ooh - “makes you an obvious candidate for the job.” There’s something there in the “obvious”ness.
One thing to point out here: this isn’t a quick process. You’ll often go around in circles. You’ll write a lot of bad theses. But you know what? If I used any of these as the subheading, each of them already conveys more about my book than a lot of resumes manage to get across.
There’s something in “compel” that feels right. It’s a bit too hoity-toity. “Command” is a more straightfoward word, but has a kind of aggression I don’t feel is correct. Maybe more words would work here? There’s also something in “a reader” that feels wrong. It’s gotta be more specific. Hiring manager? Job-opening-provider? Recruiter? None of those are quite right, but I think that specificity is better than “a reader”.
Bleh. Compel actually sounds better.Maybe it’s not “a reader”, but “the reader”.
There’s something there. It’s not perfect, but I’m gonna say “good enough” for now. And when you get to a point where your thesis is “good enough”, what I’d suggest you do is set it down for a bit and take a break.
There’s something in the way our conscious and subconscious minds work that requires inattention. If you just focus on something, you’re only recruiting your conscious mind to do work on the problem. But if you have a great starting place, even if it’s not quite right, taking a break can get your unconscious mind, which is in many ways a lot smarter, to take a swing at the plate.
Sometimes, it’s as simple as walking away for a day, coming back, reading “Crafting an effective, personal resume that will compel the reader to call you,” and then saying, “Ugh, that’s not right at all. But you can’t come to that realization while you’re working on it, you can only realize that when you step away for a bit.
So get to “good enough” and then walk away for a while.
… a day passes.
Interesting. On re-reading the sentence, there are some things I still like. Crafting. Personal. Compel. I find on reading this again after a little time away, “effective” is too bland, and doesn’t get the point across in a way that doesn’t feel generic. Impactful is the word that immediately jumps in to replace it.
That last bit is a bit odd - I don’t think it’s quite right, but I like the idea that a reader sees your resume and their response is “holy shit, I need to call them RIGHT NOW!”, because that’s ultimately what we’re trying to do. But “that will make readers scramble to reach out” isn’t going to resonate with a reader who doesn’t yet understand what resumes actually do, and think that a resume is what gets you a job. I feel like it needs to be more framed around people rushing to get you to work for them. Ooh.
Maybe that’s v2, where we leave it for a little while again. I think this gets the point across better. Your resume must stand out. It must “hit hard” - those things are better conveyed by “impactful”. It’s personal - you’ll see as we go that the point of all this is that your thesis and all the reinforcement tell a personal story about your impact and your perspective. The result is that we want people scrambling over each other in desperation trying to get you to an interview before anyone else sees your resume.
There’s another part to the thesis, which is of course that now that we have one, things need to reinforce that thesis. Does this book reinforce that thesis? Well, yeah - making a thesis impactful and personal is almost entirely what we’ve talked about so far, and that narrative through-line, catching peoples’ attention quickly, and answering the readers’ need - those are things that we’re doing to make your resume stick out instantly. So I think we’re on to something here. For you, you need to think of your resume in the same way. You make the thesis, and then you bolster it, argue for it, and show everyone why your thesis isn’t just true, it’s obviously true.
When I went to insert it under the book title (which I didn’t have yet), I realized that as a sub-heading, it needed a little more:
There are two things - surprising and straightforward, and they both jumped to mind immediately because I’ve been working on this for a while. Surprising, because a lot of people I talk to re: resume stuff find this approach quite unintuitive, and often … surprising. It opens up a lot of possibilities that they weren’t aware of, and this is most often because people just don’t spend a ton of time thinking about what their resume is supposed to do. Like I said before, this isn’t a skill most people need to build - they write a resume, it usually works okay, they get a job, and then never think about it again.
The next bit was “straightforward”, and that’s because I think the information here is, in fact, quite straightforward. Your resume is an ad. It needs a strong thesis. You then need to reinforce that thesis. All this is pretty straightforward. It’s not simple. It’s not easy. It’s not obvious. Which is why that sentence isn’t the only thing in this booklet. But it is … straightforward. Thesis. Reinforcement. It’s an ad. For you to get an interview. If that’s all you remember, you’re already better off.
So that’s the subheading of the book. This is how I came up with it, and hopefully it serves as a roadmap for how you will come up with a thesis for you and your experience.
Now that you've got the tools, go craft yourself a strong thesis. And once you've done that, we'll get to the Experience section & the rest of your resume... next time! If you found this helpful, please feel free to share it, and reach out to me if you have any feedback, questions, or want someone to bounce a thesis off of for feedback.