3 Simple Resume Hacks To Stand Out From The Crowd

Episode Transcript

Hello! My name is Julianna Yau Yorgan and I’m a career coach who helps introverts succeed in the workplace by unleashing their introvert superpowers

Today, I’m going to share my top 3 resume hacks to get your resume in a hiring managers “I want to interview this person” pile.

I chose this topic because there’s a lot of discussion on optimising resumes for ATS and new AI screening

But even if you pass those steps, it’s ultimately the hiring manager who decides if they’ll spend their limited time to interview you.

And often times the hiring manager will tell the recruiter if they think they should even bother with the screening interview.

So these 3 hacks I’m sharing are meant to help you get past the most important gate: the hiring manager.

With the number of applicants to each role increasing,

And attention spans of hiring managers decreasing,

These hacks are meant to grab and keep the hiring manager’s attention.

Alright, we’ll start with a really easy one.

Hack number one is to write to be understood, not to impress.

This might sound weird, because your ultimate goal IS to impress the hiring manager.

But you should be doing this by highlighting your accomplishments, which I’ll talk about in a little bit.

In terms of word choice and writing style, you want to be clear and simple.

This is mostly applicable to that first paragraph summarising your experience,

And the 2-3 sentences explaining your core responsibilities in a role.

So, as an example, instead of saying “I have the responsibility of overseeing a talented and dynamic team of 25 people in 3 countries”, you can just say “I manage an international team of 25”.

Another example is instead of saying “I orchestrated the successful ideation, strategization and implementation of a revolutionary new platform to enable customer success”, you can just say “I managed a project to implement a new customer service tool”.

The reason you want to do this is you want to make it as easy as possible for the hiring manager to understand what you’re saying.

If they need to spend brain power trying to figure out what you’re saying, you’ll probably lose them pretty quickly.

No more trying to use fancy words to sound impressive.

Just stay focused on the facts of what you did, and write it as simply as you can.

So that’s resume hack number one: write to be understood.

Resume hack number two is to impress by quantifying your accomplishments.

Now this might feel uncomfortable because it’s so close to bragging,

but remember we’re going to stay totally factual and focused on the benefit to the hiring manager.

While the first resume hack works well for your summaries, you can give a huge impact to your resume with 2 to 3 bullets per role that highlight the tangible benefits, improvements or outcomes you did in that role.

For example, you can say that you increased paying subscribers by 80% with a marketing campaign.

Or reduced a process from 7 days to 4 days with a process improvement.

Or increased accuracy by 25% by providing the team training on a particular topic.

These are all simple statements that will leave the manager thinking “wow, I want this person to do this for me!”.

And you don’t need to include all the details of how you accomplished these things. Save that for the interview!

You just want to include enough to show what you’re capable of so they want to get you to the interview and find out more.

So write simply for your summaries, and quantify your accomplishments.

And finally, resume hack number three is to remove anything that is not relevant to the role.

Yes, you heard it right here–more is not more!

You should be proud of any volunteer work you do, but unless you can draw a parallel between the work in that volunteer role and the role you’re applying for, leave it out.

Otherwise, the hiring manager will be left wondering why you’re telling them about it.

Same thing goes for language proficiencies.

Unless they specifically require a language you’re fluent in, you can leave those off your resume.

Things like your volunteer work, language proficiencies and interests can stay on your LinkedIn page for any managers who like to get to know you better.

So that’s it, my dear introverts!

By writing to be understood instead of to impress,

Quantifying your accomplishments,

And keeping irrelevant extras in your LinkedIn profile instead of your resume,

You can create a high impact resume that’s easy to read, focused and relevant.

And that’s all a hiring manager really wants out of a resume!

Okay, that’s it for now. Next week, I’m going to share with you my 3 reflections I make every year.

You’ll find the link to my newsletter signup in the show notes.

Alright, I’ll see you next time!