linkedin live episode 5 - tips and tricks on how to write an effective resume

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What's going on? Happy Tuesday. Happy Tuesday everybody. Tuesday Vav's going on. Nice. We've got viewers. This is awesome. Cool. Sweet. What's going on everybody? Excited to be here. We're going to talk about resume writing today. I'm going to let a few more people trickle in. We're going to go ahead and get started. Good morning. Side of the bee here. Hey y'all, comment in the chat. Where you are turning it from. Love to hear from you. Comment in the chat where you are. Tune it in. City state. Love to hear from you. Again, we're going to start it here just a few more seconds. We're just going to put that in the house, though.

Again, if you are joining right in the chat. We'd love to hear from you. Where are you joining from? Alright. Let's go ahead and get started. Thank you again for tuning to Guy in the Council 2.0. The live edition. We are. I'm going to go ahead and dive into resume writing. So resume writing is something. You know, that. That is highly criticized. Everybody has opinions. Right. They're all like armpits. Everybody has them, but they all smell. Again, don't know how I heard that quote from, but I still use it. And so I want to kind of just talk some highly little bullet points with resume writing.

And kind of tie that into LinkedIn again. I would love to hear from you. Kind of where you're tuning in from. So please drop it in the chat below. And yeah, love to hear from you. So if you have any questions, please, please write. Please chat. Chat it up. This live session is a lot of fun because I'm able to obviously interact with everybody. So the first thing with resume writing. Let's go over. So I want to keep the guidance counselor in the shin. If you aren't guidance counselor watching this, that's. Why my podcast is called guidance counselor 2.0. The live show now, which by the way, I'm kind of doing a little rebrand.

So my podcast guidance counselor 2.0 is not going to be more of the live show. Again, every try to every day 9 a.m. go live for about 15 minutes or so. That's guidance counselor 2.0. And then I really put my efforts into my other podcast unicorn finders. Again, you can check that out on Apple Spotify. Our website is the unicornfinders.com. But that's going to be the podcast. So resume writing is something that is an art. There's a lot of UI you explained it. And we can kind of go into that here in a bit. But first off, your resume should be longer than one page.

Like I want to go ahead and tell you that. You know, if I don't know who needs that encouragement on this Tuesday morning. But you're listening to me. Your resume can be longer than a page and that's okay. Again, guidance counselor 2.0. I want to kick the guidance counselors in the shed. You said that you can't write a longer than one page resume. Now, if you and here's something different, I've been kind of diving into a little bit. If you were junior in your career, right? If you're a junior software developer or your junior account. In my opinion, you should actually write more information. Like I want to know how many times you breathe.

I want to know how many times you get up from your desk. Like it needs to be super green because the thing is though is people who obviously are looking to hire you. Like they need to know if you're a junior career moving up in your career, they need to know everything that you do. Right? I think a lot of times people junior in their career just want to write the bare minimum. Right? To a two or three bullet points. And that's it. Here's a deal. I want to know everything. If you're a young in your career, I want to know everything that you've done.

And so as you progress in your career, you know, it needs to get longer. The resume needs to get longer. I mean, I would say, you know, at most two to three pages. And I would also make it to where that you tailor your resume to where you can obviously get called for the positions you want to get called about. Right? I think one of the biggest issues that I have with people is they're like, oh my gosh, I'm getting called for technology. Again, I'm in the technology space. But, uh, Jared was going on, man. Thank you so much. I love you too. Um, but it people get called people who played me.

I was like, man, I get called for technology 20 years ago. So what do you have in your resume? Yeah. Take it out. Right? Your resume needs to be tailored to the positions that you get called for. Or they want to get called for. So if you were touching cobalt and mainframe 25, 30 years ago, for those of you not in tech, that's a, it's a very old technology. Um, hidden figures. You're seeing that movie that is, that is mainframe. But, um, so you need to tailor your resume for that. I think another thing too that people don't do with their resumes is they don't give project specific information.

Right? They just list like six bullet points to 10 bullet points of what they did. And it's just word vomit. Cut costs by 10%. Higher 20 people. Let a team of six develop this technology, develop this feature with this technology. Right? How are you doing projects? Right? Like, you know, for, you know, for Vaco, you know, we, I, I was not involved in it. But let's say I was. We just hired 200 people for the state of Tennessee. Like call centers help with COVID claims. Right? Like I could write all my resume helped, helped hire people for a COVID. And I'm, I call, call center claims.

Right? And that's all I could put in the lawsuit. That's what most people would put. But then what if I say, what's a part of a three person team collaborated, organized with, with my team to help hire and scale 200 people over three weeks. Right? Which one sounds better to you? Which one? Which, which one if you were the hiring manager, which, like which resume would you pick? You picked the second one because it's quantitative. There's a lot of information around it. And so when writing a resume, I need projects. Now if you're asking me Taylor, I don't really do projects. I do things just, I'm very task oriented in my job.

I both, you know, I, I crush do tasks. That's fine too. But I think another thing you need to do if, if you are not. So if you are trying to jump across industries, right? So here's another thing that I get a lot from junior developers. If you jump across industries for an industry that you're that you are working at, that you don't want to be in any more. You need to give me comparative stats. Right? So for example, right? Like if I was serving tables at a restaurant and I was trying to go into software engineering, right? What are some things that junior developers get hired for?

Right? It's how well do you work with others? Right? Drive, performance, organization. Right? So I always say, I start to tell it was not back to the account. In Columbia, South Carolina, right? Shot at a harvests. Shot at store number 411 4111. Remember that for my dad. Anyways, so all that being said, I hit a thousand dollars in sales a few times in, in my tenure there, right? That wasn't normal. Right now if I just wrote on my resume, serve tables at Outback State House, you know, make sure the guests were happy, etc. Etc. Typical Mumbo Jumbo for what you would put for resume running for serving tables.

You be like, okay, that's, that's fun. What if I said, you know, hit objectives, hit milestones, hit a thousand dollars in sales, which was, you know, which no one really got. I hit that five times. Right? So so so if I'm a hiring manager in software and I see that somebody not in software, it's hit all these milestones and like, oh, okay. This person's pretty driven. This person gets it. Right? And so I'm going to call that person. I think a lot of times people just get just so overwhelmed with details like I got to do all this. I got to do all this. But it's like give comparative stats.

I think comparative stats set yourself out. Right? Another thing to write in your resume. And again, I'm just spit pulling some ideas that are popping my head right now. Another thing that that that you can do is give me quantitative information around either sales. If you're in software, the amount of money you save, maybe you built an app that helps save. this much money. Right. If you're deploying AWS, you save the company thousands of dollars. Right. I want to know that information. Right. If I can sell you to a client and go, hey, listen, this person in his resume, you see it here, but this person saved the company half a million dollars.

Right. Take in a way. They're infrastructure service and throwing them in AWS. That's going to differentiate yourself. And so again, those are some tips and tricks again. Comment. If you have any questions, I don't resume writing is this divisive thing. And everybody likes to comment on it. So I'm interested to hear thoughts. So put in the chat. We'd love to hear from you. I've also gone live on Instagram as well. So definitely Instagram. Ask me questions from a resume running perspective. I think another thing I get a lot to is cover letters, right cover letters versus, you know, resumes. And I tweeted this the other day, cover letters are kind of this decisive thing as well.

Recruiters are your cover letters. In my two cents, recruiters are your cover letters. And so if you're not, you need to have, you need to have a cover letter ready to go. Now, there are different ways to write a cover letter. I am not very skilled in writing a cover letter, but I think it kind of goes back to what I've been talking about with your resume writing. And I think that's, hey, listen, here's how much money I save, get quantitative, show people what you've done in a way where people can understand, right. I can list off a bunch of things from a recruiting aspect that you would have no idea what I'm talking about.

But I think if I describe it and communicate to you in a way, or you can understand what I do without the recruiting mumbo jumbo. I'm not going to tell you twice now. But I think you'll, you'll better understand what I do. And I think that's the point of resume writing. I think font is huge too. People don't talk about font, you don't talk about spacing. Fonts huge, right. Like let your resume breathe for a second. Right. I see these resumes at a one page. I have 12.5 and like you can't read that you can't read the day thing. It's just like this. There's so much information.

Don't know what's going on. And so again, you need to let your resume breathe in that. If you go on to a second page, it's okay. Again, for whoever needs to hear this on the Tuesday morning, it's okay that your resume goes on to a second page. And so for me, like, like if you catch yourself in my opinion, again, this is my opinion, you can go to 10 other recruiters, and I'm going to tell you something different. In my opinion, if you're just anything less than like 11.5, 12.5, like you need to let your resume breathe. Right. Spacing is huge. Right. If you want a resume template, go check out my resume templates, they go.com backslash Taylor.

You can go to a little micro site for me. So you can check out some resume templates and some other videos I have. But again, like, it's spacing. It's font. Right. Like I think fonts really important. Don't bold your resume. Stop the building. Oh my gosh. Like, like, like, if I could have a shirt, that's just to stop the building. I think I need to do that because a lot of y'all like to bold things. Stop it. It's annoying. I can't read it well. Right. I mean, hiring managers recruiters look at when they look at resumes. I mean, it's it's it's it's about 15 seconds.

Right. And if your resume is bolded everywhere and I have to kind of sift through a bunch of technical jargon or industry related jargon because that's what you highlighted. I'm not going to get an idea of what you do. Right. Now again, another thing to your most your most recent positions need to be longer in content. Right. And then trail off. Right. So your first year to your first year, you last two, three years need to be pretty long content. And then you trickle down last five years less content and then 10 years, obviously, even less. Right. Like it needs to trickle down because you need to get clear concise information on your resume.

Those are thoughts I have on resume. So if no one has any, if no one has any questions, we can go ahead and go about me on our day on a Tuesday, Tuesday morning. But again, I just want to rant on resumes. Because it's a resume is incredibly important. People don't put enough effort and emphasis into resume writing. People just kind of throw it together. Also, nothing to just popped into my head. You need to have different resumes for different skill sets. Right. So again, I work in software development. If you are a software developer and you have, you know, you have this once like if you're a dot at developer, but you also have a ton of angular experience.

Not technical people are watching. So like who what the heck is angular. But if you have a ton of angular streets, you know, you're not. I would have a resume and you're open to just angular UI jobs. I would have a second resume outside of your core dot net resume that is tailored for angular specific jobs. That is incredibly important. Because what's going to happen is if you just submit one resume around town, you're not going to get a lot of traction like at all period. You need to have multiple resumes for what you do. So you can differentiate yourself in the market. Again, I can't stress this enough with resume writing right now.

The reason why I can't stress this enough with resume writing is because there are a ton of candidates on the market right now. Right. The good cancer off the market. If you're hiring major watching this like the market's competitive for the good candidates, but there's a lot of not great candidates on the market. Now if you're on the market right now, it doesn't mean you're not great. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is the competition is higher, greater than ever. And it's more important to get your resume written better. Right. It's much more important to have that formatting done. It's much more important to have the spacing, the fonts, the project details, the numbers, the quantitativeness of it.

It's very, very important from a resume perspective to have that in there. Again, have a cover letter. Be comfortable communicating what you do all the time. Right. I think a lot of people from a resume perspective resume writing. resume writing cover letter writing is all about communication. And I think a lot of people trip up an interview because they don't know how to communicate their background properly. So write your resume a ton. Write a cover letter a ton because that's going to get you in practice for being able to communicate off the top of your head. If you cannot recite your background. If you cannot recite your career off the top of your head immediately, you need to practice because if I were to call on you and say, hey, listen, so and so, talk to me about your career.

What have you done recently? What have you done? Where have you focused on and you can't rattle that off immediately. Like, that's a problem. And so the way to improve on that is to work on your resume. So all that being said, that is my rant on resumes. Hope you'll enjoy your Tuesday morning. If you have any questions, shoot me an email, tailor at vaco.com. And we'll see you tomorrow.