Resume Tip – Tell me what you did

I’m starting a little Youtube series on resume tips. Over the past handful of months, I’ve read close to a thousand resumes and there are some things that really make a resume stand out, good and bad, to me. I’ll be covering these in small bite sized chunks. My goal is one a day. Help hold me to that… 🙂

My first tip is about telling me what you did, not what you were responsible for.

I don’t really care what work people assigned you. I care about the work that you drove and the things that you accomplished. That gives me a far more interesting look into your past.

My big caveat with this series is that I’m not in HR, I’m not a professional recruiter, I’m just a manager who has read a bunch of resumes. The tips are my perspective on things.

One thought on “Resume Tip – Tell me what you did”

  1. Hi Josh,

    As a consultant I have to submit my resume lots of times which gives me the opportunity to perform A/B tests while submitting them.

    Below you’ll find a few tips that got me an interview:

    Make your title match the position
    It makes no sense to go for position A when your title is B. Make sure your title matches the position you’re going for.

    Provide an executive summary on first page
    Summarize your career on the first page as recruiters and people in HR don’t have time to read all when selecting candidates. Since you’re one out of many, make sure that the summary sticks out.

    List your skills in a table
    List your skills in a table where your first column reflects the skills for the position, a second column list skills that might be of value and the third should list your personality skills.

    The rest is like you said should reflect what you did, not the projects you worked on.

    Hope you like my findings.

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