Recruiting 101: Ramping Up Your Resume For A New Role

Hey everybody! Welcome back to Recruiting 101 with Camille and Kierra. Recruiting 101 is dedicated to helping candidates understand the process from a recruiter’s perspective. In this segment, we’ll be sharing tips and tricks as we experience them. So this week’s topic is how to ramp up your resume for a new role.

And this topic kinda came about because I had a friend reach out to me who is transitioning from a teacher. She wants to go into more of a corporate setting, like a project manager role. And Kierra had some really great tips for her about how to alter your resume and just kind of really change the language.

We’ll get a little more into that through this but that’s just how this came about. So I’m excited to talk about it today. Yeah, me too. I definitely think that a resume is your chance to showcase yourself and all of the professional experience you’ve had, whether it’s with that role or with a different role.

You can always kind of tailor it to a specific job. So I think starting off by looking at job descriptions for a role that you’re really interested in is a great start because you’ll start to see the lingo and the language that they use throughout the job description. And then you can think about your experiences that you’ve had and how you can kind of tie that into your resume.

That’ll also help you stand out when people are looking through your resume for certain skills. So I think that making your resume specific is going to be very useful in your job hunt. Definitely. And there’s a lot of transferable skills, like for being a teacher example.

I know that’s a common job that we bring up. But like time management, organization, planning, all of those things. So I think that can really show that you’d be hard working, you’d be able to manage your time well, organized calendar, all of that good stuff, and goes well into like a project management role.

So I thought that was really interesting that that’s what she was into because I think a lot of the skills are there too. Yeah, that management piece, that relationship piece. A lot of what I would recommend is researching first. So once she researched that role, she probably found a lot of things that were in common with what she was recently doing.

So that’s a really great tip. I also know that different jobs and different roles are going to have different skills that you need to have. So, I would start by focusing on one role and then you can also make resumes that tailor other roles too. But I think really being specific on one role to start is great.

And then once you’ve kind of got that down, you won’t be so overwhelmed with looking at multiple different types of roles. I know that when I was teaching, I had a completely different resume. And when I switched to recruiting into the corporate world, I switched a lot of my words from students to clients and customers, tried to use more corporate language because a teacher’s resume is very different than the corporate world,

so. Yeah, I would’ve never even thought about that, about changing students to customers or clients. So I thought that was a really great tip. I think that’s really helpful. And also just looking for the role, even if it’s something you have experience in, but maybe you’re completely switching industries.

Just be mindful and just really pay attention to like the tools and technologies that they want you to use. And if you do have experience with that, make sure that’s visible on your resume

because that’s really important. Some of the tools are harder to learn, so if you have that experience, that’ll definitely make you stand out as a candidate for sure. Yeah, I agree. And a lot of times we give advice, think about when you’re making your resume, the what, the why and the how. Why is it important?

How did you do that? And why does it matter? Especially for that specific role. I think that really will help you lay out why you’re including it in your resume and get you thinking about if it’s important or if it’s not important. But yeah, just being specific like Camille said, and I also think that the use of metrics can be extremely helpful in any case. It really just displays what you’ve accomplished and those numbers do stand out when a hiring manager is looking over your resume.

Definitely. And I don’t think, well, I’ve seen people lie on their resumes before. But when you include metrics, you include specific examples. It really shows that you know what you’re doing. So even if it really isn’t like too relatable to the role, it just kind of showcasing what you had done in your past role really gives them an understanding of what kind of worker you are, how you work with others

like in a timely manner, how you report things. And even in situations, I think like the most common question that I’ve been asked in an interview is, “If you’re not going to meet a deadline, how do you communicate that to the manager?” So I think by showing metrics and kind of having prompts on your resume to talk through during your interview process are really helpful.

Just kind of gives them more things to ask you about and work through and show like why you would be a good fit for the role. Yeah, because a lot of times they will use your resume to ask you questions throughout your interview, so that’s a great point. I also think that it’s important to keep your bullet points brief.

If they tend to get too long, the hiring manager isn’t going to want to read through every single bullet point. So I think keeping it brief makes it stand out and just shows what you’re trying to highlight. Definitely. And I think it’s important to kind of be mindful about how you format it. So just making sure like you do the job title, the years that you worked there, and then as well as the company.

So I think it’s important that you do like your most relevant experience on top and your most recent experience so that you’re able to work their way down. And if you’re recently out of college or I think like

one, or I guess zero to two years out of college, always kind of put that on the top of your resume. But as you get more experience, you can put that at the bottom of your resume is always a good tip too. So just be mindful of how you format the resume. Make sure recruiter is able to review it pretty quickly, get what they need to get and then kind of move on to next steps.

So if you’re looking at it, maybe ask someone to read, ask them to look at it for maybe 20 seconds and then kind of look away and see what they got from looking at it for a short period of time is always helpful because at least you’ll see, saw you were a recruiter for two years, like saw you coordinator for one year and like if that’s all they got, then like that’s okay as long as they’re getting important parts.

Seeing those job duties listed is really important. Yeah, I do think it’s also important that you’re having it proof read, right? Because if there are mistakes in your resume that’s going to show that you didn’t read over it and that’s going to stand out. An example of this is, I know someone’s email was wrong in their resume and it was hard to get into contact with them.

Good thing they had their phone number on there, but there was still that mistake. So just having someone look over it is a really great piece of advice too, because you don’t want to have a mistake on your resume, be a reason that someone isn’t able to contact you. Mm-hmm. So with that being said, thank you so much for joining us today!

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