Chef Mike talks about the importance of creating a resume which selectively highlights your accomplishments, like an appetizer that complements the larger meal.
The larger meal is the interview.
Keep reading for 5 great resume tips make a great appetizer!
Since a recruiter spends 8 seconds on your resume, a full meal will never be eaten.
My resume causes me so much anxiety
We are all proud of what we have accomplished in our professional lives.
Chef Mike, how do you consolidate a lifetime of meals into a menu of 8,000 characters or less?
Chef Mike says you can’t; so please don’t try.
My pain:
- Agonizing over every word, driving myself crazy
- Sweating it out making sure I change the fonts, wording, margins, etc.
- Burning out and still feeling like I had so much more to say
- Losing confidence, thinking that all my accomplishments were missing
Let’s face it, resumes are foolish, but necessary.
Treat your resume as the appetizer
The resume should whet the palate, inviting the interviewer to order the entree, your interview.
No?
- Ever see a baby who hasn’t crawled yet just start to run?
- When was the last time you went on a first date and disclosed your hundreds of hours of psychotherapy?
You need to demonstrate a sample of skills that are targeted for the position you are seeking.
If you can’t summarize yourself on paper, how can you summarize a report for your boss?
Please don’t chunk full your resume with so many details that you lose the beautify of format and crispness of content.
A recruiter spends 8 seconds on a resume. So, instead of cramming your life into two pages:
- Forget the professional summary
- No time to read
- Instead use 5-10 key words like “Marketing and Sales Expert Skilled with Traditional and Digital Media
- The eye catches bold words easily
- Use a bullet and sub-bullet structure, and never have more than 3 bullets in a row without sub-bullets
- Your eye can only handle 3 bullets before it skips whatever comes next
- Don’t list skills separately as bullet points to try to fool the HR screening process
- Skills without context are meaningless and take up important geography
- Get off job boards and network in person and on LinkedIn
- Leave white space when a two-sentence bullet ends in the middle of the second sentence to give the reader’s eye a break
Chef Mike says: plan your meals to get that great job!