Following the previous segment of the presentation now is the best tips and advices to optimize your resume with examples of keywords and phrases. The following is from the presentation I did with careerusa.org and careerdfw.org on my book, “Yikes! I’ve Got to Get a Job”. You can find the full session on my channel as well here:

Using Resume Keywords to Optimize your CV as the Best for the job:

Step two- the resume. Super important. I put a lot of emphasis on this. You’ve probably heard it before, but if you haven’t, you only have about six to 12 seconds to have the reader of the resume say, “Hey, I got to call this person.” It, therefore, must be tailored to the job description. That’s keywords. It’s shocking how many people that I help don’t understand that the job descriptions are peppered with keywords. And if your resume isn’t aligned, in other words, if they call the customer a customer and you’re talking about you work with clients, you won’t get through the applicant tracking software filters on an application. There’s a chance your resume would never actually be read by anybody. You do all this time keying in the resume, creating a profile, applying at a company, and if it’s not optimized with keywords, and now I’m hearing key phrases.

I’ve had one of my buddies, Pat Flaing up in Ohio, says you ought to embed phrases from the job description in the resume, if you can legitimately claim that, to make the HR people make it abundantly obvious to the HR people that you fit what the job description is looking for. Other couple things, resume should never be more than two pages. You never use the word “I” in it. I like the chronological resume. I also stress when I help people write their resumes, it’s got to be impactful. You got to use numbers, percentages, and dollars to give size and scale to your story!

And the older I get, as I said in my mid-60s, I’m starting to work with more people now that are director level and C-suite people, and I get really crappy resumes from these people! They’re just not tailored to opportunities. They don’t use numbers, percentages, and dollars. So if your resume is a little devoid of that, don’t feel bad. Just take action to correct that, and it’s just hugely important!

Overall Look:

I want you to look at the overall look of this document. This is a professionally laid-out resume. You’ll see there’s a lot of white space. You’ll see it’s got a professional summary. It happens to be three sentences high. We recommend that they’re no taller than four sentences high. Again, you have to write that professional summary, tailor it to the job description that you’re applying for. Definitely got to take the time to rewrite this every time you apply.

Professional Summary:

You want to kind of stand out from the crowd. I try to encourage that in the professional summary and some kind of a little turn of a phrase or something that you’re comfortable with that might separate you from the crowd. This particular one, I like the way this one ends with, “Strives to pull sales through distributors by solving technical or commercial problems that create accountable value.” That’s all about creating accountable value. And again, no more than four sentences tall.

Competencies:

Competencies table, for this particular person, they were experts in these industries. And when you’re doing consultative technical selling, active listening is a big deal. Asking a lot of open-ended questions, selling through distribution, that’s a big deal for a lot of companies looking for technical sales or applications engineers.

Experience:

The experience table, lo and behold, with all the work I did trying to make things look good for the book, I actually have the registration of their service there. The 12-2, 2018, to 9-22 is out of registration. I looked at it this morning when I saw this. It jumped out at me. It’s like, “Son of a brick.” The 071 should have been pushed over a little further, the one down on the line below. But I will tell you that applicant tracking software, if you write like July 2013 or December, it could choke on that. The people that I’ve talked to about this, they like to see numbers, 07-13 to 12-28, that kind of stuff.

Education:

And be honest, if you have gaps, so be it. They’re going to do a background check, and they’ll see disconnected service in your background. So just be honest, be able to explain why there might be a gap if you have a gap in the career. But again, some dollars here to give size and scale to this person’s background. And the education, a little kind of the caboose on that, but again, it’s super critical that if they’re looking for a certain type of degree, if you don’t have it, there’s a good chance you’ll get filtered out on that. Now that said, if you’re networking in and someone is going to give you a personal reference and they’re going to vouch for you that you have the skill set and the experiences and the interest, but you don’t have the degree, in that instance, I would let that person tell your story for you.

Example 2:

Another one, this one’s a little, again, it’s a bit of an eye chart, another variant on the theme. This is actually an individual that I work with. He reached out to me to try to join Timken about five years ago, and I worked with him, and we created this resume, and he ended up getting picked up by a machine tool manufacturer.

Marketing Briefer:

The other thing, there’s something called a marketing briefer, a one-pager. It’s a different animal, and this thing isn’t really necessarily tailored to an opportunity per se, but this is often some people call it a networking document. It’s a one-pager. This is an example of it, a friend of mine that I helped.