resume triage w/alishah novin

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Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at t s and t d e s s e y n. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. Yeah, so here's how we're going to do. We've got a mural board up here. Real quick, the way that Taylor and I are going to go through this is just like how a hiring manager would if they've just posted the job on indeed LinkedIn, whatever it might be.

You know, you usually get an influx of resumes, you have a short time to try to get through them all because you want to get to calling people quickly. And so you really have to lump people into buckets as quickly as possible. And so making that first impression is so key. And that's why we call it call maybe no. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to go through each one. We're going to quickly give our first impressions just like we would if we were reviewing the stack and then we'll probably scribble on screen a little bit to just kind of give some thoughts on how we can improve it.

How many resumes do you think you've looked at in your tenure? I think I'm probably over 10,000. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I wish I could. I'm just throwing out numbers. I think 10 years in the industry, that's a thousand resumes a year. I think that's pretty, I think that's pretty fair. That's that's yeah, I'd say that's probably yeah, that's a good number. I mean, I've seen. Yeah, let's talk about that for a while. We've reviewed 20,000 resumes between the two of us. So there you go. Yeah. All right, so let's go into it. Here we go. Let's go. Let's go. Boop, boop, boop.

All right, so Taylor, you want to kick us off? Give your first impressions. Yeah, can you zoom in a little bit by chance? There you go. All right. There you go. That's perfect. So I believe we did Aang's last time for the record. But I like this. So this will be a call and here is why. I love that it's very simple and straight to the point. The summary of the profile, I see exactly what the main skill sets are. C-sharp, Python, JavaScript, MySQL, I see the projects listed, I look for tech stacks all the time, I scroll down, I see that there's specific tech within the experience, depending on obviously the position I'm going for, but regardless, this resume is a call for sure.

Yeah. I would agree. I think that I just think there's some changes that I would suggest making to help it stand out more. Scribble on it buddy. There you go. I put this at the top. I don't need to see this stuff. It's good, it's helpful, but keep that for the interview. The tech stack should be at the top too, because I'm gonna wanna see that first when I look at the project. But the fact is- See, that's fine. I like it visually at the last bullet point. Okay. That's cool. But the fact that there's technical experience already, that should be above projects. Because if you have technical experience, that's going to be so much more valuable than the projects.

Not to say the projects aren't there, but I would just reorder it to kind of go in terms of that type of what a hiring manager wants you first. Sure. That makes sense. Cool. All right. So let's move on to the next one. This is fun doing this way. All right. I'll go first. So this is for a data scientist role. So I'm going to look at starting at the top. So this is great because I'm seeing all the technical tools. That's usually what I want to see. The next thing I'm going to try to see is just get a sense of like level seniority type of thing.

So I'm going to look at the years of experience or projects. And so the years of experience, I'm I'm seeing what is it now? It's doing the math here just a little over a year. But then in terms of a data scientist, less than that. So about six months or so. Can you zoom in on that on this? Yeah, yeah. There you go. Cool. And then education profiles. So I would say that this is like, depending on what type of role and level I need, I would put this into maybe to a call, Because I think it's really strong. I think it shows a lot of good stuff here.

I mean probably more on the call side I'm being unfair to say maybe I think Just just resume a lot. Oh man call it. Don't be half baked I'm gonna yeah, then I'll be a call. Yeah, I mean I think call to again I love so we always talk about all the time that hiring majors and recruiters look at stuff for like I I don't know. We say six seconds, eight seconds, 10 seconds. That real real fast. Right. At the end of the day, we look at resume real fast. So again, where do my eyes go when I'm reviewing this resume? The very top technical skills.

Like for me, when I read that resume, I want to know where your strengths are and what you've done immediately. So when I open this resume, Aaron's resume, where do I go? Skill set, technical skills, Python, all right. And then I see a bunch of data stuff, SQL, All that stuff. So my great. This person is a Python data developer. Then what I do is I go down look at skill set, right? And then or tenure. And then I look through that. I would probably like, again, assuming a little bit Alicia, but I do, I would want a little bit more meat on the bones, right?

So annotated PDFs for NLP models. I don't know what that means. What does that mean? Like, like, like what project was it like, collaborated with senior data scientists on a model development and performance with what? Like what did you collaborate on? Like give me the, so I think the format is fantastic. I think there needs to be more meat on the bones. I'm gonna say maybe. I'm actually gonna say maybe. And it's because I don't really have a lot of meat on the bones in regards to what that person has done. Yeah. And that's fair. And I think the thing that to take note of is I'm looking at this as this is, you know, a six month person with six months of experience.

So I'm not going to expect a whole lot of stuff there, but I'm seeing enough things in here. Like the fact that you're saying ETL, the fact that you're saying, like you know, you know, I know. I know, I get that. I'm playing a little devil's advocate here. Just to show people like, you know, here zoom in real quick and then we move on. So again, right. So like utilize the SAP for inventory management. How did you utilize it? Collaborate it with colleagues daily. How did you collaborate? Communicate technical information to non-technical audience. How? Like what did you communicate? Assisted in data collection, distribution to facilitate efficient, contact with multiple parties.

For what? Every single bullet point on this list means nothing to me. Yeah. It means nothing. I literally just don't know what you did. I know you're in data. I know you do Python. So I'm probably going to call you probably not yes, but a maybe. But yeah, again, what's the impact? What's the impact real quick here? Um, Stephanie comes in. Should we include months for the positions? Yes. Yeah. Actually, I really, really liked the way what's, what's this guy? What's this guy? Aaron or who's this guy? I really, Aaron, I really liked the way he actually wrote his positions. He says there were moat and then he includes the dates.

I love that. I love the way this is written. Always include month and dates. Yeah, always. And the simple reason why is if I don't see the months, I'm going to think you're hiding something honestly. Exactly. It's just, it sucks to say it, but it's true. Yeah. Yeah. Um, the other thing I'll just quickly highlight, I like I'm seeing a little personality, not something that's so distracting. But this in an interview, I'd be like, Hey, explain casual chemistry to me. So I like to see those things. I wouldn't make your entire resume screaming personality and kind of like distractions and all that stuff. But this is enough there.

So that's kind of cool. So I do want to highlight this real quick. Hobbies, have them on your resume. I actually, I kind of like the idea. I used to say no, but I kind of like even just have like a hobbies crossfit. Like for me, it's ice hockey, ice coffee, wine, and fitness. So like, I think just having a simple like one line of your hobbies, I think is actually, I think could be a good conversation starter. What are your thoughts on that? As long as it doesn't pull away from the main stuff, we have like bottom of the page, one line. That's it.

And real quick, if there's like, because I saw Rant, I think it was Rant, yeah, Rant will comment and tag someone. If there's someone that you think would benefit, and you don't wanna be the one to give them the tough feedback, tag them, get them on this right now so that they can kind of join us and see what we're all about here. Exactly. All right. All right. Your turn on this one, man. My turn. Okay. So first off, where do my eyes go to? My eyes go to career summary, right? So I see, first off software developer for self. So that immediately dings your that immediately dings you whether it's true or not, it just dings me.

Why? Because no real world experience, which is fine. But maybe take that out, languages. All right, this guy's a JavaScript Python react node. I love it. Move down to projects. I would really like to see, okay, there he goes, technologies react rest, okay, that's good. Like that, like that. I would like to see the dates or how many hours a week you were putting in. So like a bullet point of like three hours a week, one hour a week. I like that just to give me a little bit more context. And then the professional experience, I like it. You know, here's, so I'm gonna let you on a little recruiting secret.

When you have the name self-employed, we say this person does not have a job and has not had any real world experience. So what I like to do is especially for people who have been freelancing side projects, I'm fine putting self-employed, but write out the projects. Community Church. I developed a WordPress plugin to help with a payment processing using Stripe and an API. Nashville's veterinarian clinic, I developed a website using blog. You see what I'm saying? Like list the client list the project. Don't just say self employed in this. I'm gonna be honest with you. I probably would not call this person. Cool. I, let's see.

But maybe, yeah, I think so. Well, here's where I'm at. I like this part. This is awesome. I do too. That's great. But they lose, it starts to lose me as you go down the resume. Yeah. I think I think I'd probably, even though there's not like technically professional in the sense of, you know, self-employed. We're still that to the top. Yeah, I'd still put that there because I think there's enough there. I mean, again, I'm going to tailor my view based off how many years experience and what I'm seeing. But the key is I'm not going to knock someone for being self-employed. I think there's a lot of opportunity out there to be a freelancer and all that.

For sure. But I mean your specifics though. Exactly. Yeah. That's where I was going with that. I think contributing to open source projects, well, that's not being self-employed. That's just doing... Right. awesome to see. I like people who collaborate on these projects, but that's not employed in the sense of that word. I'd like to see how many projects, how many clients, things like that that let me get engaged for the volume and impact of your work. And this is like, I'm just quickly also reading the comments on the side here. So I think it might be good time to come over. Yeah, real quick. So Stephanie, yes, you need to include your months and dates for every position because it gets fishy if you don't.

Yeah. Um, what about really long time? Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, I know I was going to say with that comment, if it's really a long time ago, like it depends on whether it's relevant or not. If you have like, I mean, for example, if you were to look at my resume, I don't have any of my junior career stuff. It was all coding and all that and I'm proud of it. But I just have a one single line that says from this year to this year, I was a junior too. Yeah, that's what I would do. It's like it's like title company Year start and end and no description and it's like literally just line line line line like tab down one and there's no That's that's what I would do.

That's what I would do Philip when trying to balance resume length versus depth impact on projects which side you tend absolutely death and impact Just I would rather you have a three page resume if you can articulately give me three pages worth of data that I can coherently read without a lot of buzzwords. Fantastic. Yeah. But the issue is, is nobody does that. Yeah. But yeah. Exactly. If you, I mean, I prefer one pages because it shows that if you can get yourself down one page, you focused on what matters. And I mean, I like, again, my own resume is one page. And I think I've done a good job at focusing on what matters.

I I think there are cases where you might need to bleed into two pages and that's a very career consultant. It needs to be pretty in-depth. Right. Yeah. But I think the thing to hit on is like, even though what we're saying might sound formulaic, it's not. Like we're giving our opinions about what things should be there, what should be there. But the whole point is that as the hiring manager is the person who's going to make this higher, what we want to really see is something about you and how you've impacted things. It doesn't have to look a certain way. It doesn't have to be structured in a certain way.

There are ways that are better than others, absolutely. But at the end of the day, you want to give enough stuff to the person who's going to review the resume to say, yeah, I want to call this person. You don't want to give them everything though, because that's just going to overwhelm them. Yeah. Also, too, Philip, looking forward to hanging with you next week. I'm meeting with to work on some zappier integration, such to be fun. Brian, how specific do we need to get when talking about projects? I mean, pretty specific. I need to know, so my four bullet points are describe your project to super high level like you described to somebody in your family.

So like I built a mobile app that keeps track of straight cats in my area. The second and third bullet point depend on how big the projects are, or the fourth bullet point need to be the main tech you use to solve why problem because of the Z. And then the last bullet point is listing all your, your technologies you use and tooling in the project. So I think if you follow by that framework per project within a company, I think, I think it's going to get pretty granular, which is good. Yeah. Let me just add on to that one thing, which is remember, uh, Steve Jobs, right?

I think it's a thousand, a thousand songs in your pocket. He didn't say iPod square hard drive thing with a wheel thing, blah, blah, you know, coded in this language. He just said a thousand songs in your pocket So if you can frame your project in one bullet like that before giving me the technologies I love that is like that is a hire for me almost immediately I mean obviously other things have to be in place, but when I see someone thinking in that way I followed love so quickly. I love that you to get Alicia to fall in love with you talk like Steve Jobs Alex I have a section for my open source contributions that could be yeah Yeah, I mean, yeah, and I'm fine with that.

Love that. Dan, David comes in and goes, what if you don't have room for one page to list out each client separately, but you just include what you did without breaking it out to client? Yeah, sure. Summarize it. Sure, I'm fine with that. I would like to see clients, especially if you're freelance, but yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, there's no like, let's go to the next one. Yeah, there's no magic thing here. It's just go with what makes sense, represent as best as you can. If you need the room, try to see if you can summarize it more. Yeah. Oh, wow. A non-tech resume, a recruiter resume.

So you're, I'm gonna lean on you to figure this one out. I love it. I love it. All right. So non-technical resumes are a little different, but I will tell you that that it's still the same. So responsible for full cycle recruiting, exactly. So here's the deal with recruiting. This applies to serving tables, sorry, this threw me off. So I'm trying to recalibrate my brain. I already know what a recruiter does. Everybody does. Everybody knows what a server does. Everybody knows what a barista does. Give me information. give me information that I would not know outside of like your direct job, right? So like for recruiting, so if you look at my resume, it has my accomplishments.

It doesn't have what I do daily. Yeah. And that's what I would say, especially for my not, and that could apply to actually a technical resume too. Give me accomplishments. Don't say I coded, like the whole entire resume doesn't need to be, I coded this to do that, I coded this to do that. It needs to be, I coded this to do that, and then I accomplished this, right? And so same thing with recruits like right now, like this entire recruiting resume is complete fluff. Complete fluff. I would call because at the end of the day, I see this with the recruiting resumes all the time, so I want to get to know the person.

But if I was being completely, completely open and honest, I would not call this person because it just shows me like that it's, there's just not a lot of tension to detail. Now I do like the branch manager hiring onboarded 55 hires with the 94 retention rate. I like that, but what I would say is give me comparators. I don't know what that means. That sounds good, but what's the average? Is it 30? Is it 20? Is it 54 and you hit 55? Right? So like give me, especially with like non-tech stuff, like comparative stats also works really well. So I'm interested to hear your thoughts because I got a reply to a Slack message I mean, I like, I don't think I'm in the spot where I could say call maybe or hire or no, but I feel like, I mean, I'd probably, if I were, I have hired for non-tech roles.

I think I'm seeing enough here that I'd be in a maybe, but I'd probably need to do a lot more comparison against other ones. things that I like, I like this one less because it has less in it. I mean, for example, I would cut out all of this and I would just focus on this and then quantify it. That's the most important part of that bullet. This, I feel like, I feel like that's part of the regular responsibility. So I would cut that out. This is cool. Worked with the CEO. So that's cool. I would just add on more to that. So I kind of like look at what's the real, real meat of each bullet and focus on this.

Down here, I'm seeing good stuff. And I like this one a lot more, like Taylor said, this one's really impactful. This one, the more you can provide comparison and context, the better. This is huge, like $65 million. I mean, I almost care less about what it compares to because that's just a big number. And I would put that way up here. Just because whenever you can relate something to dollars, you know, at the end of the day, that's how the business world works. Yeah. Let a team of 16 employees to perform over 50,000. I mean, that's cool. That this is again, this is awesome. So it's almost like the stuff that's happening down here needs to happen up here.

I'd put months there. Some of this stuff here, I'd kind of like, I mean, this, this, I don't really see the value. And I don't know, but Taylor, maybe you're better. Like maybe scheduling does matter. But I'd say that no, scheduling is whatever recruiter does. Like that's just pointless. Yeah. Sorry, but like there's just a lot of like you literally are a recruiter and you put recruiting as a skill No shit Language I'm spicy. Yeah, I think I think there's a lot of like here But here's what I'm seeing and this is this is kind of the positive in it I see a lot of like really valuable stuff that that would be intriguing and that's why I'd say like I'd be in a maybe be possibly called just based on this stuff.

I mean, I may be too, because I would eventually call this person regardless, because I know recruiter resumes aren't the best. Yeah. But I would like to say, well, I said, isn't that the irony? No, seriously, most resumes for recruiters are really bad because they don't know what to say. Like, because again, it's, we preach it all the time, but when we have to put it into practice, it's a little bit more difficult. Yeah. So focus on actual skills that, I mean, focus on the skills that drove these types of things, put that in there, right? The things that drove $65 million, that's worth something.

So I don't want to know. Here's what I would say. So like from recruiter stuff. So like, for example, my thing is, I talk about hitting our sales rewards trip, right? I'm a seven time trip qualifier for Vaco, Right. I would say, you know, the typical average is not that, you know, I would have to do a little more digging, but I would say, you know, the typical, the typical step this, you know, typically two or you know, two or three times, right. So I have to exit, right. I would talk about accomplishments of big hiring feats, right, place 15 staff level engineers at a series C company, right.

So what What does that show? Well, Taylor's got some pretty good technical acumen dealing with staff engineers, right? So again, it's talking about the job and specifics that other people would not know. Yeah. It's like serving tables. Don't talk about how you serve food to people. We already know that. You're a server. Give me more behind the scenes. This is my Oscars. I'm playing you off. I know, I appreciate that. Yeah, Alberts is spicy, spicy Fridays. Yeah, spicy Tay. I just get so annoyed sometimes. I'm sorry. All right. OK, so this is a two-pager. Let me zoom in a little bit. OK, so I think there's some just anonymization here.

So this is probably normally filled with actual things. The Slack thing is interesting. I've never seen that before. Never seen that. Yeah. Never seen Slack username, I guess. OK, so I'll go first on this one. So OK, so let me hit something real quick, which I see often and I think it's worth calling out. Like if I didn't see this Scrum Master there, I would have a very hard time knowing what type of role this person's pursuing. I would think the person's relatively technical, like just by. Yeah. For sure. But it's more like a matter of, okay, I see Scrum Master there, I see Project Manager, I see Product Specialist.

And so I'm kind of like, okay, well, what role are you pursuing, right? And obviously I might have the job posting and it might say Scrum Master So that's what you've applied to. But immediately, if I don't like, I like the fact, what I'm getting at is I like the fact that this is called out here, because this gives me a sense and I'm starting looking at it in that view. So I don't mean don't include it. I mean include it if you, if your role or your titles have changed and shifted a lot. But anyway, so experience, Scrum Master, 10 years, 1000 plus coaching sessions, cool.

A lot of certifications, which is cool. This is important for a role like a Scrum Master, so that's valuable. People ask me all the time if certs matter. I think of the dev space, the only thing that matters in my experience is still cloud, because it's still kind of a vast network. So if you have the cloud certs, it carries a long way. But I know definitely the project manager, Scrum Master, non-technical space certs actually do carry a lot of way. Yeah, yeah. I will say something, this is very, as someone who likes to congratulate himself on a lot of things, I would say that this is very self-congratulatory, so don't put it in there.

I would even see that teamwork gratitude, making desserts, bringing donuts and pies to them. I mean, maybe try to include that in the bottom of your resume, somehow funny, but yeah, don't put that at the top. Yeah. I love you, Nick. I don't know who you are, but I think that this is a little, I would just get rid of this and die. I do. Lead two teams, little thousand users. I think this would be, this would probably fall into a call for me. If I was a little person, can you zoom in, can you zoom in for me? Yeah. Yeah. Lead two teams, eight and five people love the quantitativeness of that.

Love that. Um, improve commitment by helping them become self managed through sprint playing and sprint execution. That's a little vague, but it's fine. Contribute to communication by carefully building psychological safety, which was, which raised openness. I'm actually curious about that. I would define that. Like how did you do that? was there to get buy-in from HR, did you work with HR to implement a program, you know, company two, lead multiple teams, tell them 150 people, love the quantitative again, implement and teach project management tools. So which ones, implement and teach project management tools, which ones, which implement and transparency, 50 percent, what were you judging though, improve transparency and communication by 50 percent?

Like, how did you get that number? It seems a little vague, brought in more than 150k in business revenue within six months, How right so again, I would say I do like the format of this resume. I do Like how this looks I would call but again You listen listen this isn't rocket science. They're consistent themes in every single resume. There's just not enough information There's not a Few questions that come in here Robert for career switchers How do you balance previous experience versus bootcamp projects and personal projects is it worth mentioning experience in a different industry and devoting? bullet points to those jobs if you're struggling to fit details.

So again, this is the length. If you have enough boot camp projects and personal projects on your resume that it fills up a page with really good information, I'm fine with your barista serving tables, working at UPS to go on the second page. I'm fine with that. But again, the thing is, is that for the most part, most junior devs don't write a very clean and concise resume. Yeah, I would say if you have previous jobs, different career path, I'm not I mean, I'm obviously it's going to answer a question. So there's like if you excluded it, it'll look weird, right? I'd wonder what you did before or what you've been doing for a while, that kind of thing.

So it helps give context. And I would just then try to see how can you generalize it and how can you like what are the things that I can extract from it? Oh, you manage people. That's awesome. A manager at a pizza shop is going to be just as good as a manager in a dev shop. Some of the skills are going to be different, but if you're a people person, that's going to be the biggest driver for that. So I would focus on those transferable skills. Absolutely. Before you go on to the next comment, though, Taylor, I'm going to call out something on this resume that I just caught.

Oh, sure. This. I'm pretty sure that should read the air table. And I've never been one to necessarily ding people. It doesn't bother me, but it also is a sign of attention to detail. And, and here's the thing that I didn't know. So when I did, if you've not seen my, the results of the survey I did earlier this year with a bunch of hiring managers, you should go check it out. It's on my LinkedIn profile. I surveyed a bunch of people. And I said, how much are you going to ding someone for typos or just grammatical errors. I was shocked at how many people would just immediately throw your resume in the room.

Yeah, out of town. Yeah, I mean, I need to see that. I didn't know you did that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll send it to you, but it's kind of like surprising. Now, maybe some people are just, you know, maybe that's not entirely accurate, but they've misrepresented it, but or maybe they were looking for egregious mistakes, but I would say that while it wouldn't necessarily bother me, the fact that I've seen other people state that it would, I would really go through the fine-tune stuff, especially when it comes to the tech. I mean, listen, the argument is, we're not hiring English teachers, but again, I think it's attention to detail, and that's people's thoughts.

I wanna get to hear what if you are changing careers, non-tech, and you list previous jobs that are not relevant, but you can add bullet points that will showcase how you should you include that. Again, we go back to the, does it need to fit on the one page? The reason why my, the reason why my morning show is called guidance counselor 2.0 is because I want to kick the guidance counselor in the shin who's been telling y'all to write one page resumes. Listen, if you're a non tech career switcher and you can write good content in your resume for both your technical and non technical, it's fine to go, I'm going to say it again, it is fine to go over one page.

content has got to be there. Yeah, right. So again, if you are a barista, right? Don't give me, I made coffee. No shit, right? Give me more stuff, right? I, you know, one employee of the, I want employee of the month six times when the next closest was two times, right? Stuff like that. Yeah. I'll say, because I have said it, I prefer one page resumes. I'm not going to reject someone if they have two or three pages. I've hired plenty who, who have more than one page, it's a matter of how you condense your information or what you focus on. So I've also rejected people with one page resumes because they didn't have not enough, they just focused on the wrong thing.

So they said stuff that, here's the way that I like to think of it, take your name off your resume. And if I can't tell without having your name on the resume that that is you, right, like that is who you are as a person, if it can be a generic resume that anyone else can slap their name on it, that's a bad resume. But if I can say, oh, this person did this accomplishment and they are the only person who could do that accomplishment or they, they're the only ones who have the skills to do that. That stands out. Whether it's one page, two pages or three pages, that doesn't necessarily matter.

It's a lot more about that resume length. It matters about the content you put in it. Bingo. Yeah. David includes certs always. I'm Phillip knowing the KPIs that drive the business regardless of the industry. So key keeping a log of my individual impact. So I love this. We were talking about this. I think Alicia last live one or maybe it was one of my guidance counselor 2.0 lives, but basically how somebody I know does a journal or notion template of like their weekly accomplishment, a monthly accomplishment, and then like a yearly accomplishment just so they can keep up with stuff, you know, within the resume, which is huge.

Yeah. So and I just want to echo the that that comment of it, knowing the KPIs that drive the business. Like one of the things that I've always tattered about myself, just because I'm proud of it is the fact that, you know, I won't come out and say like, I'm a great manager because I really treat my people well, blah, blah. That's the self-congratulatory thing. But the thing I will call out is, look, the industry average for people staying at a job is 18 to 24 months. The main reason why people leave a job is because of a terrible manager. My personal average was 36 plus months and I'm proud of that.

And that's something that I can measure, that's something that I can't really. It's not easy to prove because you'd have to go pull a bunch of people, but it's something that I was measuring myself against because if I could retain them for longer than the average, I was doing something right. It wasn't always baking the pies. You want to move on? Yeah. Cool. All right. I think it's your turn. Yeah, scroll in. I really like the format. I think it's like a collegiate resume. I don't know what it is about collegiate resumes, the template they use. I think it's like the size 10 times new Roman font and the breakups.

I think this is a very pretty resume for me. I love the skills at the top. I love how this person. So I talk all the time that I think the summary portion at the very top of your resume, especially if you've been at it for any amount of time, needs to be like two plus years of this, two plus years of that, one plus year of this, because that really, if you have a really good summary portion, I'm gonna call you immediately. So I would call this person immediately, because I know they have two plus years of Python, machine learning, like literally, that's all I need to know.

That's it, that's it. So I would call this person immediately, I love the next thing is there BSC and data science, I love that, and then scroll down, surveying over 100,000 scientific pre-prints to analyze your relationship. that's very quantitative. Yeah, love this. Definitely call it a great resume. Yeah, I would say, I mean, honestly, like echoing Taylor, like I would probably start putting, you know, they say they make your first impression of the first seven seconds to meet someone. I would already have this person in the call list. By the time I get down here, if I wanna be nitpicky, and if I wanna really kind of like tweak this to make it a little bit stronger, because I'm seeing a lot of stuff, it just gets lost in the words.

Sure, it wasn't a little word heavy. It's a little word heavy. And I'm seeing stuff that is really, really worth like highlighting, but you just kind of need to figure out. And sometimes here's the thing that I forced upon myself and I think it takes a lot of humility to do this. No, I'm not congratulating myself. My humility started out sounding weird. What I'm trying to say is some, you have to like be comfortable with getting rid of some things that you're proud of. Yes. don't need to list everything. Yeah, I agree. And if it means that your resume is a lot more readable, and it's a lot more presentable, but it means that you have to cut some things out, save it for the interview, right?

You can call it out later. It doesn't, all you need to do is just get the phone call. After that, your resume is almost not gonna be looked at. I would, I, Alicia, I'm so glad you brought this up, and this is why I'm so glad to do this with you. is just kind of a, just a wealth of knowledge and different, different opinion. I think what Elise just said is amazing. I think you really need to sit down before you write your resume and think of like the top five accomplishments you wanna highlight. This individual's resume is amazing, but it's very word dense. Like the extracted the data from the Google Scholar and the demographics over a thousand, like that to me seems pretty badass, but it's like the fourth bullet point down.

It's like Sam Witch, right? So it's like, for me, it's like, so again, the human eye reads left to right, top to bottom. So if you really do that, the top left corner is the most applicable thing, which is why I like it to be the summary. And then you typically are gonna read the first one or two bullet points with each position, right? Top to bottom, right? So your first one, two or three bullet points need to be your most heavy, proud accomplishments, and then it trails down. Yeah. And the order of the words too, as weird as it sounds, right? Yeah. Serving over 100,000, that's awesome.

But then this one, extracting data from goo, blah, blah. Yeah, I'm very, I as you're getting tired by the time I get here. I would have done extracted data from a thousand different resource, you know, like give me, give me it's, listen, I will tell you this, to get, you know how to write a good resume, go read on how to write really good marketing copy. Mm hmm. Because it's the exact same thing. Like literally, I forgot what I was talking to me. I was at least, at least you and I talk all the time. But not as much as I want, but I do love talking to him.

And one of the things I realized is that if I went back to school again, I would have just gotten a writing degree. It's so important. It's so important. Yeah. All right. Let's call for me. Was it, what was it called for you? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Look at this one. Your people block out stuff. Mine don't. I was just like here, roast me live. Okay. So it's my turn. So, so here's an honest truth. I like this is, This is the template that I have. So I mean, I like it because of how it presents the information. So I'm going to be biased on this just because it's tailored to someone like me, tailored, tailored.

I don't know if anyone caught the pun there, but Taylor. Anyways, so I like the career summary. This is a junior web developer front end software engineer, so this is good. So again, looking at, okay, so about what, eight, nine months? Oh no, that's terrible math, seven months of experience. So that's good. I mean, it's for a junior role, but this is like, I'm seeing a lot of like things that a junior like are a little bit above what a lot of juniors and entry level type roles. So this is really solid and I like seeing this. So I put this person in the call.

I'd see I think this is pretty cool Keep can you zoom in a little bit? Yeah, there you go. Oh, yeah Yeah It's it's great that this is listed right 200 projects at the Disney Company. I mean that's that's impressive. Yeah Yeah, anything on your end so Again first impression is the formatting I just love a good format of resume at like a formatted resume is like so I'm gonna try to explain this and again This is this is just me. It doesn't mean it doesn't mean it's just me's true. It's just it's me Whenever I look at a resume. So when I start looking at resumes, I already I Already get in a I hate to say this but in a defensive mode Like I don't really want to do it like looking at resumes is tedious I'm already kind of like this a little bit like gripping and just like oh I don't want to do this There are things that make me Relax and tear down my walls the one thing to do that is a well formatted Resume so I see the format alright ah breath alright what I look for next Summary part, okay.

I like this. I know exactly what this person does I can tell by the tech Okay, and let's go to the next then let's go to the first job Ah, web technologies, I love it. I can see what that person does. Okay, there's some bullet points that say some things. I love it. That is literally how my mind works. And the first thing always is a well formatted resume. So I would call. You just really gave my template a lot of credit. I like your template. I like your template. I need to update mine cause I like yours a little bit better than mine. Well, let me also just state, like I'm not the only hiring manager out there who has a template.

I'm probably one of the rare ones were so passionate about resumes, but I'm passionate because I've seen a lot of really bad ones. But if I was in a role and someone applied with my template, I think it'd be kind of funny. But I wouldn't, I'd be careful about the bias that it would put on me, but it would help me to understand who they are quickly. And I'd make it a talking point in the interview. How did you find it? Why did you use it? And I'd kind of try to get a sense for what they saw in the value of it. But it gives me a different thing to kind of talk about.

All right, let's keep going. Uh, your turn. Let me just call out. I know Alex. I love Alex. He was my old college roommate. So that's too funny. Uh, zoom in. Yeah. All right. So again, format. I like next thing. Objective. I hate objectives. I like education at top. That's fine. Training. OK. Like I should note, I screenshot at this from Word. And so Canadians and Canadian schools will spell it with a U. So don't think for the type of. So scroll down. So again, so it looks like a non-tech resume. Yeah. So five years teaching weekly classes for adults and women detention facility on Rikers Island, two years as a liaison.

So again, I don't know what a prison education teacher does. Right? So for me, it's like five years teaching weekly classes. Okay, how big were the weekly classes for adults at the women detention facility on Rikers Island? Okay. Two years, like what did you do? Right? Coordinated, coordinated development media and coordination community facilitate group meetings. Like, like what specifically with media? What specifically with the groups? How big? Right? It's like, again, it's, it's just, it doesn't tell me a story. And so, again, now, this is completely out of my industry. So I may be a little harsh here, especially because I know he's your friend, so I'm trying to be nice.

But again, I would just say like again, like going to the Fortune Society, tracked all program data. Like what type of data? How much data? Was it like multiple? Did you do pivot tables? Did you do Vee? Look at like, again, I don't think there's just enough of a story being told here. I would probably say no, but again, this is not my industry and I understand. And this may be a well-written resume with this industry, but for me, it just doesn't really say anything. Yeah, I would agree. So I know a lot about Alex. I feel weird. I feel bad. No, no, you're fine.

You're fine, because Alex, Alex, Alex, I love you. I don't know who you are, but I love you, please. If you knew him, you'd love him. He's easy to love. I don't even know if he's watching right now. But anyway, the only thing that I would say, knowing everything that I know about Alex, is the one thing that I think is missing is this, which is it's hard for me to see what the next step is, right? It doesn't show the trajectory to me. It doesn't show, like I know he's big in the NGO world. I know he like, he does a lot of like really positive things for the world and that's why I love him.

But I just, like if it was a, I'm gonna put my resume to go and get this next thing. There's like the resume that is the, I'm gonna send this out there for a lot of different types of jobs and whichever one sticks, That's the one I'll go do. And then there's the resumes that are hyperspecific. This is the role that I want. It's at this type of company. And if it's that, like this is not that kind of resume. This is not focused in that side of the way. I don't know enough about the area to say whether it needs to be or not, just like you.

So I can't comment beyond that. But again, if you want it to be a more generalized, like here's the ways in which I am like, you know, publications and done like Peace Corps, all this stuff, Like there's so much value in here and maybe that speaks to those more generic types of places where it's okay This is a group that's focused on Syria so they want to do this type of thing and this would speak to them But if it's not and that's where Alex would have to like use his expertise of the domain If he does need to be more focused then I would try to just connect the narrative from here to here to here to here to there And then ask How does this impact this stuff here?

Is it just having it that's important if it's great? the training, does that need to be here? Like if it's more academic, should publications be up here, right? Just hovering in the right kind of line. Yeah, in storytelling. I know I said I got broken record of storytelling. Yeah. And I mean, I also, I was like, yes, maybe no, call maybe no. Oh man, I would always call Alex. That's not, you can't do that. That's not how we do things Alicia. Yeah, I mean, okay. So if it was, if I was hiring for a role where I needed, like it was a more general role, business analyst, let's say, then this kind of resume could work.

So I put like into the maybe to call, if it was a specialized role, like what you and I were talking about earlier, product ownership, scrum master, I'd be more on the maybe to know, probably more on the know of as much as I love Alex, because it just doesn't speak to those types of, even if it like there's nothing technical on this one, but I'm just saying if the role that I was looking at was a lot more specialized in terms of what skills, this is almost too general for me to make an assessment. So I'm seeing a lot of really good stuff in here.

That's a challenge. So you just said, son, I popped into my brain. So what I would do, so if Alex was trying to break an attack, right, because it seems that we have a lot of people watching this and rightfully so, people changing careers. And so what I would do if I was Alex, if I was trying to transition into tech, and let's say I was trying to transition to a business analyst role, what I would do if I were Alex, I would, I would love to, I would get Alex, I would tell him to Google 10 job descriptions for business analysts, right down the most common requirements that a business analyst job description wants and see if you have done that in your career in some way, shape, or form it and craft your resume around those 10 bullet points Because at the end of the day, a lot of like, like to be honest with you, I could write a recruiter resume.

I'm not joking. I could write a recruiter resume that could be a product owner because we do a lot of product owner manager things. I could write a resume as a recruiter to become a business analyst. We're actually pretty, we're actually really closely aligned because really what is a recruiter? It's an intermediary between the hiring manager and the candidate or what's a business analyst intermediary from the end user to the, to the, to the users, whatever, um, to the, to the business. So, but again, I would need to know what a business analyst does and be like, okay, a business analyst in their world calls it this, but it makes sense.

But I do this as well. Yeah. So cool. Love you out. But no for me. Go ahead. He could tell some stories about me. So I've known we got to be nice. I would love to hear old Alicia stories. I bet. I don't know. Those are fun. They're, they're, they're good. Okay. that first impressions on this one I'm gonna be harsh on this one. Relax. There's let your resume breathe people. Holy smokes. There's there is a lot happening here. Look at the page. Man, it's black. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like six bunt. It uses a use a lot of ink. Holy smokes. Here's here's like here's where I mean.

This is why I would be a no. And it's only because I'm like, I'm not even read this resume. Can't read it. But if I have a ton of other resumes that are so much faster for me to consume, this is just going to be like, I'll get to this one after I've gotten through the other ones because I can get through them faster. That's where the suffers, right? It's there, there might be a lot of impactful statements. There might be a lot of quantified statements, but I'd be a lot of really, really good stuff. But I'm just kind of like, oh, let me just put that aside for now and I'll come back to it because if there's one that's just going to shine, then that's just going to make my life easier.

And people are lazy. I hate to say it. I wish I could just say like, let's go for the best person all the time. But the best person all the time is probably going to be able to quantify and show that all that much better consumed way. So I just think, Tanya, like, you're not, you're not doing yourself favors with this type of resume. And some of the things I'll call out as why. There's a description here and then there's bullets here. So there's two things in there. There's quantified statements here. I'm just I'm not even like it's too much for me to read really quickly.

But I'm seeing quantified statements here like I would just go with one of them. But the problem is that these bullets are also very long sentences. So they're not really bulleted statements. They're full sentences that are almost paragraphs. And so you kind of just got a whole lot of stuff happening here. And then up here, big summary, bullets. I mean, just why not just over 12 years in leading organizations? You know, like, I mean, there's probably more that you can add to that, but like you don't need the as a leader I have that's way too many words. Think like it's should be like Twitter, you know, be very, very careful about how many care I'm telling you Twitter, listen, I don't care which thing about Twitter right now.

I still think Twitter is an amazing platform to figure out how to write. Yeah, it focuses you. You have to be so like, if you try to write full words and not abbreviate, you really have to like Word Smith, how, how you get your point across. But then here's the, here's the crazy part. Like areas of expertise include all the stuff. And then in mice type, almost like it's a legal ease. It's like these things down here, which, you know, if they're not so valuable, then just remove it. if they are valuable because I think this is an HR type of resume. So maybe it's hard to say, but like if this if this is not going to be so valuable then just remove it.

Don't use up the space with that kind of thing. Anyway, okay, I'm going on my rant now. So Taylor, you go. No, I mean, I I agree. It just like literally like Tonya, I don't know you. I love you though. Like I really do. I want to give you a hug. But if I open up the resume, I would close it immediately. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think there's a lot of value and good stuff in here. Like I mean this right here. And I have huge admiration for anyone who has a master's degree in anything, but in business that's often very, very valuable. But it gets so like the likelihood of me working my way through here to see that oh, they have an MBA, even though it's listed here, I've forgotten it.

I mean, I genuinely forgot it. So I just think like this is where ask yourself how much cognitive load am I putting on the hiring manager who is going to be trying to go through these as quickly as possible. Yeah, absolutely. 100%. All right. So we're wrapping up here. We got five minutes left and then your boys got to go get some lunch. But yeah, let's kind of crush through these real quick. So no. Yeah. I'm a quick no. Like for one, this is on a gray background, which means that printing it is gonna be a nightmare. I don't understand what these are for. I'm not a big fan of putting any kind of image in there.

So I would just do that. This is just, what's that? No images. And why is it gray? Like why is it document gray? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it was a formatting thing and what the person didn't intend for it to be gray, but at least for me it was gray. So I would fix that. But this is just not a resume. This is like too many words, too many words. And here, this, I have to, let me go on a quick rant. Executive summary, and then it's a lot of words, right? Like if you're an executive, and I think it even continues on here, an executive summary, not use a lot of words.

Executives don't wanna spend time reading. They just wanna know, like, they want the decision laid out. And like an executive summary would be, you should hire me. That's an executive summary, because if the decision is laid out and they don't have to do the thinking work, but then they can say, okay, well, let me see the reasons why. And then they started going into the actual details, but this is not a summary. So I'm sorry, I hate to be so, it's not easy for me to be so direct on these types of things, but you can do a lot better, I think. All right, oh, I know David.

So you go on this one. I'll put zoom in. Let me draw my heart first. Why is a .NET developer? Okay, so that's his summary. It's a little weirdly. I thought it was a job, but that's fine. Kind of hard to read, they have spacing, bullet points. It's a sandwich. I do like he has senior .NET Angular. That's kind of what I preach. I know I get a lot of flack from engineers like, well, I'm not a .NET Angular developer. I'm a software engineer and I'm like, yeah, yeah, I get that, but you still do.net and angler so that needs to be on your resume.

But, um, or you can put software engineer principalis angler slash.net. But no, I mean, I think it's good. I think it needs to let it breathe a little bit into formatting. It looks a little weird. I would maybe call David because I see enough technical stuff in there, right? So I see the technical highlights. I see he's been a lead. I see he's been doing it for a bit. I would say get a better summary at the top to not make it look like it's a job. Like that stumped me for a second. Like again, I spent four seconds trying to figure that out. I got eight seconds to do.

So I spent four seconds trying to figure out if the top part of your resume was a job or a summary. Yeah. Let me just say this. So David actually reported to me a long time ago and knowing everything that David can do, knowing all the stuff, this is exactly the type of resume. I love him. I think, I mean, I would probably call him just based on this resume alone, but this is an example of someone who was selling themselves short. Knowing what I know about David, it's just like I'm not seeing the stuff that I witnessed firsthand. And it's like, I know David, I know you could do so much better than this.

Like this is like, just there's so much more that you did here. And this is like, maybe I'm saying too much by saying that that's the wrong, that's when you reported to me. But David, like you're selling yourself short. There's so much more that you can show here in highlights. So let's talk about that offline. Yeah. All right, last resume, last resume. I think I might just have one more after this. So we might be able to, okay, a couple more. But anyways, yeah, go. Yeah, so let's end here. For those of you, obviously, you said, I have a lot of resumes of inbox. We will do this once a month.

Next month, we will start with my list. So again, for those of you who sent me a resume, we did not get to it today. I do apologize. But again, we will get to it. we will try to get to it every single week or every single month. So, all right, Jonathan, what I love about Jonathan, first and foremost, CTO, VP of engineering, very top boom. I know what this guy does. Next part, technology, scroll, scroll in a little bit or zoom in a little bit. Love that. 12. Okay. This is, this is beautiful. Jonathan, I could kiss you if I would. So 12 plus years of managing teams with 25 plus members across 30 products with an ARR 50 million beautiful, like literally beautiful, right?

10 plus years. I love that. languages because I need to know still as a CTO and VP of engineering, we still get clients that want them to have Experience within a certain tech stack. So you need to include that in there even if you do not code It says end on he says ha ha and on me. I don't know if this is Jonathan or not but So pixel Titan again. I love the way he wrote this platform 200 line code base, etc, etc Lead development and marketing technology love that snapshot interactive. Ah, this guy's Nashville. I love it. Yeah, so VP of digital again And this is great.

I would call, I would really call after his first bullet. I feel like you're going to call him right now anyway. Yeah. Jonathan, Jonathan, let's just sync up anyways, man. Yeah. Now I like obviously again, so this is, this is my template. I've Jonathan, I have chatted offline on LinkedIn. And I'm so glad that I'm not that he used my template, but going from what he had to, to this structure, It's just it shows the thinking I was kind of like I could see in the I think it was about a three-page resume What what he first had that there was a lot there, but it just didn't have the direction and this this is so much more It is me indeed.

He says numbers at the top. I love it Jonathan. We're hanging man Mount Julie I'm just know I will meet you at the stake and shake him out in Juliet and we can just have a ball There you go. All right. All right. So that was awesome Thank you all again for hanging out with us today. We appreciate it. Hopefully you learned something. Share this. Everybody should share this. Not for me and Alicia to be discovered on the internet and become famous. It's not that. It is, it's not that. The reason why we tell you to share it is we, Alicia and I truly believe in helping people.

And we truly believe there are people, even myself that charge for the service. Mm hmm. This is completely free from two people who do this who look at resumes who hire all the time So share this with a friend And I hope you'll have a great weekend least you got anything else to add as we wrap up Yeah, just instead of saying thank you to us Just pay it forward by sharing and getting out of the help because I there's so many people right now especially right now the economy Layoffs all these things are like bad news and we're trying to be the the spot of sunshine that people need Absolutely.

All right, y'all. We'll be good when taking easy. Peace. Thanks. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode and I am very grateful because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finish an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others and the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it. please, like right now. Unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again.

If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com, or at Tdastin on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.