Transcript

This resume for someone with over 20 years of experience is going to get rejected, and I'm gonna tell you exactly why and show you a better version. And I'm sharing this as a former V P. With hiring experience that now helps people get jobs in this rough job market. There are three specific fixes that I'm gonna call out so that you can easily apply it to your resume. The first thing is something that I see a lot for people applying for senior level roles, and that's listing multiple roles at the same company with their own bullet points. Unless the roles are drastically different, it's usually best to just combine the roles, list them with their dates at the top, and then have just one set of bullet points highlighting the most important details and achievements across your titles. And the reason why this works is because you have to remember, recruiters and hiring managers are only reading your resume for a few seconds initially, so you have to make it as easy as possible for them to find the information that they're looking for. And what they're scanning for are three main things. They're trying to understand the level that you operate at, like your seniority, to see if it matches the role, how big your responsibilities were, to also see if it matches the role. And they're looking for your achievements with proof. Now, the next fix is slightly controversial, but it's about the key Achievement section I see a lot of people in more senior roles put a separate key achievement section on their resume near the top, but that approach can actually hurt them. Now, don't get me wrong, your achievements are absolutely critical and they should be on your resume, but separating them from your work experience just creates more work for a recruiter or hiring manager, because now they have to connect the dots and figure out which achievements are relevant to each role. Usually if things are unclear or if there's any confusion, people are moving on to the next candidate. So include your achievements, but put them under the relevant role instead. And that's the exact approach that I take for my clients when I rewrite their resumes. And it's also the structure that I use in my templates, where I include more examples and more details. And the last thing is that the professional summary is just way too long. I see this all the time. Professional summary should be like maybe two to three sentences. It's just to provide a quick overview to show you have relevant experience in the right industry and the right skills. But all the important details go in your work experience section.