What Do I Drop From My Resume?

If you are over 20 years into your career, I want to help you avoid a common resume development mistake.

I've seen 3-4 page resumes with the summer internship from 1990 - still hanging on at the bottom - just before the Education section.

While this internship may have been a pivotal moment in your career journey, it belongs in your verbal storytelling and not cluttering the bottom of your resume.

Why?

Because the purpose of a resume is to give your target audience a brief overview of Who you are, What you do, and the Results you provide when you do your job.

You'll need to have your target audience in mind when you develop a resume. Who are the key decision-makers who will be instrumental in the recruitment and talent selection process?

Go on. Think about it.

Who are the front-line recruiters? What are they seeking? What words and phrases do they use to find people like you? What do you need to serve up to them to get their attention?

How about the final decision-makers (your hiring manager)? Do they need to see your 1990 internship? Or are they looking to see how you delivered value in the past decade or so? What do you do NOW? Can they see this value through strong, quantifiable bullets in the top half of the first page of your resume?

It can be hard to let go of bright career highlights from many years ago ... and you don't have to! Stories from long ago are great to share once you get those conversations going because they may underpin the Why you do What you do.

If you are struggling with letting go of older accomplishments and experiences, here is a practical way to sort through the clutter that will allow you the opportunity to make strategic decisions about your marketing document:

1. Take 1-2 hours and type out your entire career history, starting with your education. Don't make this more complicated than it has to ... create bullet points and journal it all out. If you are inspired to "write out your story" as a narrative, go back and do that later.
2. Note moments that were catalysts to the decisions you made along the way.
3. Look at your performance reviews from the past 5 - 10 years. Choose the pride points and key results you were rewarded for. This is where you should find quantifiable results that helped your organization succeed.
4. Note the skills, competencies, and leadership skills you developed.
5. Did you add education, certifications, or anything else? Can you show that you are a continuous learner?

This exercise will help you gain perspective by stepping back and getting a birds-eye view of your entire career arc. When I work with executives making a career transition, this is a 2-hour recorded conversation. I usually take eight pages of raw notes (bullet points) and synthesize the narrative into five pages (a story). This becomes the springboard to their "Tell me about yourself" narrative. It is a heavy lift. However, they can explain their career arc in 3-5 minutes when we complete this work.

I just had a man reach out to me this week because he was so excited after writing out his career story for himself in story form. He noted all the twists, turns, and disappointments ... and how he dusted himself off to persevere. He inspired me to write this post and share this method with you.

If you need to develop a resume, I recommend you start from scratch. Blank slate. Do this:

Research ideal job descriptions. Print them out. Use a highlighter to mark off keywords and phrases "skill," "industry," and "function" specific. These are the words that recruiters will use to "search" for candidates that fit those types of job descriptions.

(BTW - my May 2023 #industryexpertmagazine article is about the three common types of recruitment models ... this will help you think more like a recruiter).

If you have many descriptive phrases like "great communicator," remember that searchers are unlikely to use those words to cull down large applicant pools to find the match they need. Your go-tos are the hard skills and industry-specific words.

What I have described here is a valuable time investment. If you plan a career transition, you can start with this exercise. If you need a career planning workbook to create a broader strategic career transition plan, you can find a free video and workbook on my website, www.GinaRileyConsulting.com.

#careers #jobs #management

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? I'm Gina Riley, a leadership & career transition coach who helps leaders and executives with their career transitions using the #careervelocity system.

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