Hey Cultivator! Welcome back to
my channel. In today's video,
I'm excited to share with you the exact
template that I give to so many of my
job searching students and clients who
are really trying to figure out how do I
beat this applicant tracking system.
So in this video you want to stick around
to the very end to figure out how to
download that. But in
this video specifically,
you're going to walk
away with a eye-catching,
effective and ATS friendly resume that's
going to help you stand out from the
rest of the pile. In this video,
I'm going to walk you specifically through
five key sections on the resume that
I see so many people struggle with.
I'm going to teach you exactly what I'm
looking for from a recruiters lens and
most importantly, how you can
customize this to your own.
So without further ado, let's dive in.
[inaudible] [inaudible]
alright, so in tip number one, we're
going to talk about the headline.
This is a section that is often
missing from a lot of resumes,
but it's a great way to not only one,
get a point for the keyword matching,
but two to just capture your reader's
attention and that six seconds or less
that they decide to start
skimming to say, wow,
this person has a similar title.
Let's go ahead and read the
rest of what they have to say.
So this section here goes actually below
the contact information and it's in
this heading right here.
Let's imagine for a moment that I'm
applying to a social media director
position,
I may just as simply write down the title
that matches here and then think about
two other components or strengths or
skills that are super important to
highlight based on this particular job
description. For instance, if this job,
we're really asking for a creative
strategy and team leadership skills,
I would put that here right off the bat.
This is the first part that people will
glance at and I'm essentially stating,
Hey, I'm a social media
director just like you asked.
And here's two other main components
that I identify as that also matches what
you're looking for. When you can
capture their attention like this,
I guarantee you they will read on
to the rest of your resume. Alright,
now let's move on to tip number two,
which is to create a professional summary
and or a profile summary where you
feel a lot of people get
this wrong is that one,
they either leave this
off entirely or two,
they have something that's considered
more of an objective statement,
meaning they're telling the employer what
they're looking for versus what it is
that they can offer.
So a professional summary is
really a high level overview of,
before I even read on
the rest of your resume,
I should know at a glance what it is
that you do that's relevant to what I'm
looking as a recruiter
and or hiring manager.
So this is your chance to really
summarize your background at again,
a 10,000 foot bird's eye level view of
here's the things that I've done that
should really position me well for this
position. And so that you can know,
I can immediately contribute
from day one. With that said,
let's hop on over to my computer and
we'll go through what this looks like.
Here's an example of the
professional summary.
Now this could also be
written in a paragraph form.
Ideally you want it to be anywhere
from three to five sentences,
just a high level overview.
Here's what you need to know about me
that gets you excited and again enough to
capture their attention,
to read onto the rest of your professional
experience and your education.
So in this example here as
a social media director,
perhaps they want to just emphasize the
fact that I have 10 years of experience
designing and executing the social media
strategy for fortune 500 organizations,
which have resulted in viral videos and
posts generating millions of followers.
And perhaps as I was writing this,
I had in mind that this is what the
employer is really looking for in this new
position that they have posted, right?
So I'm really drawing upon the parallels.
Another important factor of this job
description is perhaps that you have to
manage direct reports. And you
have to manage a marketing budget.
I've included here perhaps at the
peak of my career in terms of a career
highlight.
This is the most I've managed in terms
of people and of financial budgets.
As you can see from this example,
I'm really focused on highlighting what's
really important and integral to the
job that I'm applying for
and I'm connecting the dots
for my reader so that they
can see, hey, I am qualified,
I have the expertise and the skill sets
that you are looking for and here's
where I'm connecting the dots for you.
Remember, this is just a marketing tool.
This isn't a tell all of everything that
I've done throughout my career history.
This is just the main
bullet points or again,
sentences of what is
most important to them.
How can I bring that to the forefront?
Okay, so moving on to tip number three,
we're going to move into the skills or
the core competencies or the areas of
expertise section. You can
name it whatever you want,
but essentially what you're going to do
here is pull out anywhere from nine to
12 skillsets that you feel
are important to highlight.
Now the key trick here is to make sure
that for the applicant tracking system,
you're checking off as
many matches as possible.
So this section actually is really easy
once you identify the strengths of what
you can do and the job description.
If you need some help here,
be sure to check out how to do a
SWOT analysis on the job description.
Once you have an understanding of the
main skills that they really need in this
particular job, your job is to
now put that into the section.
So we're going to go through an
example here. In this section,
you're going to highlight all of the
keywords that match the job description.
For instance, as you can see,
I wrote staff management perhaps in the
job description they mentioned something
along the lines of previous staff
management experience required.
Now if they had written team
management experience required,
you would want to put team management
instead of staff management because you
really want to capture the most
matches in the job description.
This section here is a really quick and
easy way to customize your resume moving
forward and making sure that you're
highlighting as many of the buzz words or
keywords listed and that
job description. All right,
now it's time to move
onto tip number four,
which is going to be about
the experience section itself.
This is going to be the
meat of your resume,
but now that you've done all
of the three steps before this,
your resume is already looking rock solid,
so now it's time to take it one step
further and what we're going to do here is
focus on both your responsibilities
and your accomplishments.
Where I see a lot of job seekers make
the mistake is that they more or less are
just painting a picture of their
roles and responsibilities or duties.
Let me remind you that
from your title alone,
I more or less probably know
what it is that you're doing.
What I really want to know as a recruiter
are what are the accomplishments?
Really paint me a picture of the results
of what your main responsibilities and
duties led to.
So let's go over to my computer and
I'll walk you through an example. Okay,
so in this example,
let's say that my professional experience
starts with my social media director
position at gap in this first paragraph
here I'm just going to write a couple of
lines on what it is that I was hired to
do and really paint the picture as much
as possible of what I was overseeing
as the social media director.
So for instance, I can write,
"hire to oversee entire social media
strategy to build brand awareness and year
round product releases and develop
brand loyalty amongst global consumers.
Manage the entire content calendar for
five social media platforms for organic
and paid reach,
conceptualize and manage all ad campaigns
for six global markets." As you can
see, I've quantified as much as possible.
I'm not just stating that I was hired
to oversee the entire social media
strategy. That's pretty
obvious from my title alone.
But what I'm really sharing with my
reader is that I was responsible for all
social media platforms.
I focused on organic and paid reach
and I also managed six global markets,
right?
That might not be so apparent or obvious
from just seeing that I'm a social
media director at this stage.
Once we have painted a picture of what
it is that we are primarily responsible
for, it's time to move on to the
accomplishments. In this section here,
I really recommend anywhere
from three to five bullets.
If you have a lot more, because you've
been with the company for many, many,
many years, you can write a bit more
to that, but for the most part, again,
we're focused on accomplishments here,
not to the essential tasks or duties or
things that you would see just in the
job description alone. As you
can see from my accomplishments,
I'm adding a dollar sign
anywhere that I can.
I'm also putting in percentages
anywhere that I can as well as numbers.
Numbers are really important.
Anytime you can quantify that really
helps boost your resume and please note
that we understand not every
achievement is measurable,
so you want to still be able to paint a
picture with a really strong power verb
of what was the ultimate result.
Even if you can't measure
it in terms of numbers,
what did that ultimately
yield or result in?
And as you can see from
these last three examples,
this is exactly what we've done here.
We've shared the result or the impact
that was made just based off of these
specific actions and tasks that
we did throughout this job here.
In the experienced section. It's
really important to ask yourself,
where have I made the company any
money? Where have I saved the company,
any money? And or where have I
improved any of the processes?
And what did that ultimately yield into?
If you can really highlight
those three objectives,
those are the key objectives
to any business. All right,
let's move on now to the fifth
and the final tip I have for you,
which is all about your credibility. So
this can be in the form of education,
volunteer work, professional organizations
that you're a part of, certificates,
bootcamps, ongoing presentations,
lectures, research publications,
whatever it may be in order to
stand out from your competition.
What is it that you're doing that
really shows and demonstrates you're
continuing to be at the top of your game?
This can look different for
each and every one of you,
but if you don't have
anything listed here,
I really want to challenge you to find
a way to get connected with your people.
Where are the people in your industry
or your niche or your department hanging
out in? Because there's so many ways to
continuously evolve and learn and grow.
You don't need to be the president of
an organization like it says on this
resume here. You could just be an
active member or a volunteer, right?
Or You could be continuously educating
yourself on Coursera or lynda.com or
anything out there that is allowing you
to learn more about the skills that you
really want to cultivate that are
again, important to this very position.
So I'm going to bring you into my
computer again just to give you a sense of
what this might look like.
In This example here,
I bolded the main titles and or
certifications that are received and it's
followed by the organization and
the location of that organization.
And here you just put in the dates
and then this should all be put in
chronological order and there
you have it. Congratulations.
You now have an ATS friendly,
easily customizable resume that's also
effective. If you enjoyed this video,
please like it,
comment down below and let me know
what you found the most helpful.
Be sure to subscribe and
smash that notification
button to be notified of a new
career advice video I release
every Thursday and next
week I'm actually going to
be talking about how to create
an effective linkedin profile,
so don't miss out on that. If you want
the template that I went over today,
you'll just want to go down into the
description box and sign up for the free
resource library. It's in there with a
bunch of other free resources, workbooks,
worksheets, and goodies. So check
that out. And until next time,
continue to cultivate
your life and career.
[inaudible].
