Writing outstanding job applications - Part 3
This is the last article in the series on how to write outstanding job applications.
In the first article, we covered what to do if your applications are still far away and how to prep ahead of time.
Last week, we talked about creating a job application system that will save you time in the long run and improve the quality of your applications.
This week, we will tie all this together and build a tailored and recruiter-friendly resume.
This is important for two reasons.
One, tailored applications help the recruiter see how your experiences will fit into the context of their business and show that you actually care about the job and will go through that tiny bit of extra effort to tailor the application to their company.
Two, a recruiter-friendly resume takes into account the context in which your resume will be read. And the context is that recruiters have piles of resumes to sift through and spend little time on each one, scanning for the information they are looking for. There was a study that showed recruiters spend only 7.4 seconds on each resume (Ladders, 2018) and it is your job to make sure that the crucial pieces pop out of the page and can be easily spotted within seconds.
In the following three steps, we will go through how to tailor your resume and make it recruiter-friendly.
1) Select experiences
First, we need to select the experiences for your resume.
I suggest taking the job posting as a starting point and building your resume around it. This will help ensure that your resume exhaustively covers the required skills but doesn't include redundant information.
Let's take an example - here is a consulting job posting generated by ChatGPT. I highlighted the skills that we are going to build our resume around:
We will need to pick examples from our prior experience for each of these skills.
This is where the list we have created in the previous article will come in handy because it gives us an exhaustive overview of what we have done, which we can use to select the experiences that are the most suitable and impactful.
Let's say your experience list looks something like this (it's illustrative and non-exhaustive - in reality, you would probably have more activities per experience and potentially more spins per activity).
First, let's select which activities are relevant to the job posting. Taking the dataset analysis as an example, we see that analytical skills are relevant because they are explicitly mentioned in the job posting. Technical skills - not relevant because they weren't mentioned in the posting and may or may not be useful in the job. Time management is relevant because you are required to manage multiple tasks and deadlines simultaneously.
Okay, now we have two things that we can highlight in our data analysis experience. Then, repeat the process for the remaining experiences, activities and spins.
Next, let's decide which activities are the most impactful. For example, we displayed problem-solving skills in both our research assistant and sales manager roles. If you have the space, you can, of course, include both to make your point of being a problem solver stronger, but if you are limited, you will need to choose the better one. In this case, the sales manager's problem-solving experience is more relevant and impactful because you can quantify your impact and because it illustrates your problem-solving skills in a context that is closer to the nature of the job (consulting) than fixing troubleshooting technical thermocycler issues during a PCR.
By the end of this step, we should have a clear outline of what we want to include in the resume.
2) Phrase it
Next, we need to describe each skill in a convincing way.
At UCL, I've been told that one of the most effective ways to do that is to show, don't tell. Of course, you're not going to be able to run a data analysis to show your skills to the recruiter, but you can describe your experiences in enough detail so they can picture what exactly you have done, at what scale and what you achieved as a result.
By now, this should only be a formality because we have all the details fleshed out in our experience list. Now, it is about formulating them into a one to two-line sentence, quantifying if you can to make your resume more tangible.
Using the dataset analysis as an example, you could say: analysed a patient dataset of 500 samples using SPSS, with 98% accuracy.
Then, plug it into the resume template you have created and repeat the process with the remaining activities you have selected.
3) Keep the audience in mind
So far, we have selected relevant and impactful pieces of information and formulated them with a lot of detail to show, don't tell.
The problem is, though, that it might be challenging for the recruiter to extract what they need to know with so many details floating around the page. They would need to scan for the words they are looking for, which will require a lot of focus and runs a risk of missing some critical bits.
We need to make it easier for them to do their job.
One way to do that and to show recruiters you are the candidate they are looking for at a glance is to add titles to the detailed description of each activity.
Building on the data analysis example we used above, the title to that line would be analytical skills. The reader can then immediately spot which skills you bring and if they are curious about the details, they can read on to learn how exactly you have demonstrated those skills and with what impact.
To make this effective, use the exact wording of the job posting. If they are referring to an ability to manage multiple tasks and deadlines, don't rephrase it to organisation skills because it adds one extra step for the recruiter to translate what you wrote to what they are looking for. They will likely use the job posting as a guide to selecting resumes that match the listed requirements, so you might as well reflect those requirements to the dot.
By calling out the requirements word for word and illustrating with a detailed example, you make it extremely easy for the recruiter to do their job and select you for interviews.
Conclusion
With this, we are closing off a series on how to write outstanding resumes.
To sum up, we covered:
- what to do months ahead of your application to make sure you know what you are getting yourself into and how to prepare for that
- how to create a job application system that will help you save time in the long run and write better applications
- how to bring all this together into one coherent and recruiter-friendly resume tailored to the specific job
As far as resume writing goes, there isn't much more you can do to stack the deck in your favour. If you decide to follow some of the steps from the series, let me know how it went.
Speak soon xx