WEEK 2 WRITE A RESUME ALIGNED WITH YOUR BRAND

WEEK 2 WRITE A RESUME ALIGNED WITH YOUR BRAND

I. Skills And Engineering Techniques Resumes are important for multiple reasons Presenting yourself truly and powerfully on a resume when it gets to the right person When you put this resume on applicant tracking systems (ATS) your resume is going to be analyze so it needs to be powerful and have those keywords, so you come up in the right categories Your resume should be based on 6 core skills, the top 3 are related to your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)/competitive advantage and what others had to say about your strengths, uniqueness and how you made them feel. Most people look at a resume for 6 seconds before they decide to put on the pile of interested or in the garbage can. Most professional are busy and short on time. Research shows companies report they get about 280 applicants for every job opening that they have and that their eyes tend to gravitate towards below areas of the page:

These are the areas where you must show relevant skills To identify your 6 relevant skills: Go on LinkedIn and search for the job title you desire

Pull up a few job descriptions In the desire qualifications or ideal candidate section, it will show skills desired by the organization o The skills that are listed higher on the job descriptions are higher priority skills for those organizations Consider which ones of those skills are worth to put on your resume (should be aligned with your USP or competitive advantage) under both your executive summary section and professional skills and interests section The best mix is to list the skills that are listed on those job descriptions with your natural talents already identified By blending the required skills with your natural talents, the person scanning the resume is going to see you have the skills that are needed for this role. It s like a system, if you have the skills required for the job, then you will likely get an interview

II. Transferrable skills Candidates usually have a hard time explaining their transferrable skills or finding evidence that they have the skills required for a particular job. And in reality this is something that is really easy to do. Most candidates are like icebergs, they only show or think they have a certain very small percentage of skills and in reality they have so many more skills that they even know. The way you do this is through the concept of framing. Framining consists of thinking about your own professional, academic and volunteering history and then learning how to select the right experiences that you can then extract. And then surround those experiences with the right language and words. For example: Sara wants to make a transition from the hotel industry into the non-profit industry. She knows she needs to be able to show that she has skills in fundraising and strategic event management. She will then reflect on her professional, academic and volunteering history and think, when have I ever done anything like fundraising or strategic event management or managed parties in my history. Well, I worked at hotels and used to handle conventions all the time. Once she finds the experiences she will extract those experiences out and surround them with the right words. For example: strategic event management, trade fairs, conventions and meetings, catering and event planning, fundraising, etc. 42

That is how you use framing to explain your transferrable skills. So that your target audience, recruiters and HR Managers, understand that you have skills that are relevant for their organization. Recruiters and HR needs to make sure that you have the skills that their organization needs to go where they are going. 43

III. Keyword Optimization Of Your Resume Large organizations have software programs that take resumes, split them up and part them out. Then they scan them for keywords and rank applicants based on the presence of the keywords in the resume. Keyword Optimization is very important if you are targeting very large organizations. This is because very large organizations receive sometimes millions of applications a years. Google and Procter & Gamble receive about a million applications a year. I suggest you: 1. Find matching language Open a job description and a job position on LinkedIn for the position you want and look at the language that they use, look for some keywords (for example: experience in change and communications, data analytics, survey analysis, etc.). Make sure those keywords also appear on your resume 2. Find buzzwords Go to the website of the organization you want to work for, and look for buzzwords that they use in the copy on their website and then make sure that this is included in your resume on the executive summary section. 44

3. Use the right titles The next thing to do is make sure that the resume uses solid, standard and recognizable titles by the robots, for examples: Analyst (Internship) 4. Make sure you have relevant software experience Make sure you list some relevant software in your resume that is applicable to the industry and application at hand. Go to Google search engine and put in software for accounting Deloitte and you will see some software come up. If you are familiar with any of these make sure the name of the software are included in the other relevant information or tech section of your resume. For example MS Dynamics (Intermediate User), JMP (Intermediate User). One of the hacks you can do is do some tutorials, if you know you will need a software for some particular position, just take a few tutorials on it, then include them on your technical section in your resume and say (basic) and then defend that in an interview by stating you ve taken tutorials as I know that it is important for this particular role, so I wanted to learn about it. 5. Take or keyword an Audit For this highlight your resume, copy the text, go then on Google on http://tagcrowd.com, paste your resume on the box (word cloud of your resume) and you will see that the words that are bigger, appear more frequently or more powerfully in your resume. So this is what those robots or algorithms are going to see. This will help you engineer our resume in a way that makes the more sense and gives you the most power when targeting really large organizations. 45

IV. Using The Power Language Tool To Design Content You want to be associated on your resume with success, trust and action. When you talk to a friend you may say yeah I interviewed these Brazilians to figure out how they liked to be sold new films. However on his resume you would say something like this: Successfully arranged 1-1 interviews with members of the target demographic which lead to the discovery of key insights that were ultimately integrated into the promotion strategy for the release of a new film. To help you with, use appendix A attached for a list of 160 power words. For example, if you are a product manager for an organic food company, you want to make sure you do in your summary or executive section is highlighting your product manager and sales expertise in bold words product management expert. Take this opportunity to also need to make sure you put in some matching word language and buzz words too.

V. Integrating Brands, Details and Quantities This section addresses the body content of your resume: 1. Organizational descriptions 2. Position descriptions 3. Bullet points and Volunteering or projects section 47 The three strategies we are going to talk about here are reading

brands into your resume that people know, quantifying whenever you can because people trust numbers, and working details in because they help the invisible become visible, which helps you build trust. Start with the organizational description and include the number of employees and the revenue or funding of the organization whenever possible. Then think of the journalistic questions Who (were their customers, partners, suppliers)? What? Why? Where (did they operate)? When? And How? Incorporate those thoughts into the organizational description in your resume to help make the invisible visible. Then move into the job description and cover briefly the responsibilities of the role When you get into the body bullets part of your resume, it is important that you show all 6 of the6 skills throughout your resume and give priority to the top priority skills whenever possible. To create a great bullet point, start by the skill chosen and then supercharge it with brands, quantities and details. VI. Writing A Powerful Executive Summary This section addresses the summary section of your resume, which is kind of like your album cover because it is the very first impression that you will send to your audience. You want this section to align with your 6 skills and with the kind of role that you are targeting. If you are applying for a larger company, make sure you leverage the matching language and buzz word techniques from the section related to scanning software and hacks with the ARP system.

Start by highlighting your skills expertise in bold words for first impression. And then, add some matching language and buzz words 49

VII. Write Your Winning Resume #1: Write in Your Name and Contact Info Start by opening one of the general use templates provided in your preferred word processing software (MS Word, Pages Mac-, GoogleDocs, will all work). The only common file translation issues are placement of lines and spacing issues, which should be easy to fix. Write in your name, credentials, and contact information. If you have a customized LinkedIn profile address, include that too. We suggest that you use the template without your physical address unless your phone number doesn t indicate that you re a local candidate. #2: Build Your 6 skills Step 1: Write in Your Name and Contact Info Search for job descriptions for the kind of work you re seeking and identify 4-6 skills that are desired for these kind of roles. Remember that skills listed higher in the job description are higher priority skills. Blend those desired skills with your personal specialties and/or interests to create your 6 skills. You can modify the phrasing of these skills later. #3: Enter in Your Job Titles, Dates, and Organization Names If you were promoted within the same organization or if you have a cluster of consulting / temporary roles, group those under one header. #4: Describe Each Organization Focus on including the size of the organization (in terms of employees and/or revenues or funding), major brands (e.g. partners, customers, or suppliers), and details that will help the reader visualize what the organization does. One trick is to reflect on the journalistic questions (e.g. who what where etc.). If you need to make estimates, that s okay. Use tilde (~) to indicate approximations (for example, ~2500 employees). #5: Describe Each Job Role Generally Very generally describe what your responsibilities or functions were in each role. If possible, use it as an opportunity to show that you were performing duties that will help you do the target job better. If you need ideas, search for job descriptions of each job title and see how organizations tend to describe that role. Save the high-impact details for the body bullet points.

#6: Integrate Powerful Body Bullet Points Remember, you build trust with brands, quantities, and details. Build 1-3 bullet points for each role (if you were at one position for a very long time then additional bullet points are okay). Base each bullet point on one of your 6 skills and prioritize higher-priority bullet points under each position. Ideally, you want to use each one of the 6 skills in some place on your resume, but if you can t then that s okay. You definitely need to show the highest priority of the 6 skills somewhere on your resume, so use the videos on finding transferable skills to help you with that if examples don t immediately come to mind. Polish up the bullet points by using the Appendix A Language Tool #7: Build in Education and Extras Step Decide whether you feel that your volunteerism history or your history of doing relevant projects is a good thing to support your case as a candidate. If they re not relevant to the job to which you re applying, we d suggest you leave those sections out. Then decide what to include under the Other Relevant Information section. Make sure you focus on keeping this section relevant to the position you re targeting. Remember your resume isn t a place to tell your life story. It s a tool that you re creating to help you unlock doors to your future. #8: Write a Smart Summary Use the structure provided to build your summary. The Skills Summation words should be very general words that get your reader s brain ready to understand how you re a good candidate for the position. For example financial professional or fundraising expert are the kinds of phrases you want to include here. Follow the rest of the schematic provided in the templates and integrate keywords into your summary if you re applying to a large organization. #9: Proofread and Polish Make sure there are ZERO mistakes in your resume. Hiring managers are likely to hold punctuation and grammatical errors against you, so take time to proofread carefully. Also make sure that your contact info is professional. Set up a job search email address if you need to. Finally, use http://tagcrowd.com to optimize your resume if you re 51 applying to a large organization.

Contact me for any additional specific resume samples. I will look for a profile that looks kind of similar to your professional profile so you can pull some language from it. A survey shows that about 66% or 2/3 of north American companies, now use Applicant Tracking System (ATS), so when you send your resume into these organizations, they are going to put your resume into that ATS. Many of these systems have a hard time working with PDF files. So save your resume in.doc or Microsoft Word format.