If you want to get interviews, you need a recruiter to call you back. In this webinar we discuss what you need to do to align your resume with the jobs you are pursuing using a keyword matching tools. In this case we discuss how to use Jobscan to optimize your resume for specific types of jobs. Transcript provided under the video.
TRANSCRIPT:
Paige 0:00
Thank you everybody for joining and welcome to The No Fear job search webinar series. My name is Paige Lawanna, and I’m a Senior Marketing Specialist here at jobscan. If you’re unfamiliar with us at jobscan, we’re dedicated to building the best online tools for job seekers. This is our second year doing the know if your job search webinar series and our second year welcoming this presenter today, we have Tim Thomas presenting on how to create a resume that stands out. Before I hand it off to Tim, I just want to go over a few general rules. First, we recommend that everyone have their view set to active speaker mode in zoom, that’ll just make sure you can see which one of us is talking. Also just to ensure that everyone has a really good experience free of distraction, you’ll notice that we’re muting you and keeping your video off for the duration of the session. But having said that, we still want to engage with you. So please take note of the Zoom chat off to the right of your screen, where you can submit questions or comments throughout the webinar, myself and my colleague, Linda will be monitoring that chat. And we’ll pass any questions off to Tim, who will get to those at the q&a portion at the end. So we do just ask that your questions are kept to a general nature that are related to today’s topic, which is resumes. And also please save any networking or link sharing until the end of the webinar. So we can make sure we reserve that chat for questions. And lastly, all of these sessions will be recorded, you’ll be able to find them on our YouTube channel. Just give us a week or two to get those all edited and uploaded there. Finally, we’re offering 20% off jobscan premium for new free members for new and free members. And you can find that promo link in the presentation today. With that I’m excited to turn it over to today’s presenter Tim Thomas. Tim, thank you for taking the time to present take it away.
Tim Thomas 1:56
Yeah, thank you. Thanks, everybody, for being part of this. It’s an honor to be back here for a second year. When we did the no fear, job, search activity. Last time around, everyone was just scrambling to fill in, you know, we didn’t know what COVID was going to bring us. And now we’ve got had a full year of it or more 18 months really. And we’ve kind of figured out what the current normal is going to be. And so here’s something that you should know during that time between the first time we did this webinar, and today, I’ve worked with dozens and dozens of people, the things I’m going to share with you today is no holds barred exactly how I work on resumes using jobscan as tool and it has helped people get jobs all throughout the pandemic. There was very little slow and and actually inactivity. So the things I’m sharing today are things you can take home, you’ll be able to apply them yourself. And when we get to the end, if you are with me at the end of the webinar, we can talk about how we might work together if that’s what you choose to do. But here’s what we’re going to work on today how to create a resume that stands out, and jobs can the products right at the center of this. So first of all, who am I? Well, here’s a picture of me with my cat Mulder, I have two cats Scully and Mulder, their sister cats. Mulder is tiny Scalia’s not and moulders my buddy. So there she is right now my shoulder with my messed up here. And here’s a little bit about my background. I’m 52 years old been working in tech since the early 90s. I graduated from college with a degree in communications by choice what I thought I wanted to be doing professionally. When I got into the market in the early 90s. Though, I’m also pretty good at predicting future trends. And I didn’t like the direction that media was going. And I didn’t think I could make a career out of it the way that I wanted to, especially if I lived in Seattle. And through some incredibly good luck, a management consultant and coach worked with me and helped get me started on my career, which began with a tech startup doing interactive voice response. Just a little bit before the web was a thing. That startup did not succeed. But they showed me the World Wide Web and how to do some computer programming while I was there. And I was able to parlay that into a job at Wizards of the Coast, the gaming company. So I joined Wizards of the Coast as the 50th employee at wizards. We had a really good time with Magic the Gathering. And then eventually they acquired Dungeons and Dragons, you’ll all remember Pokemon. So very exciting, fun time to be working on the web in a company that was really going places. spent a decade there. It’s been a couple of years as a consultant working in a consulting firm. I went through major life change and became a sole caregiver parent, which really affected my career quite a bit kept me from being in tech and consulting jobs. I really couldn’t do the hours. So it just wasn’t a daycare in the world open long enough for me to work the hours someone expected me to work and also be a parent. And what’s your second startup? That didn’t make it through the economic collapse in 2008. And so I decided that I would work for myself because I figured my odds were better if I had if I spread out my risk. So I worked I’m in a nonprofit that was doing low, providing federal aid to low income. interesting time to be doing that, right when the economic crisis was hitting, we helped modernize that nonprofit, I also worked at a high brightness led testing lab that was bootstrap startup with the founders. And out of that work, is when I decided that I’d really like to become a coach. So I moved from being a consultant into my coach training in 2016. And transitioned my practice away from consulting over into coaching. And the first gig that I got, when I got done with my coach training was working at a company that was doing career transition for large organizations that had big riffs, reduction in force. So I really got to have trial by fire, I worked with tons and tons of people coming out of big major companies that were experiencing layoffs during 2016 2017. And one of the things that stood out was I was getting really distinct results with my clients. And so I decided I’d start my own business instead. So I exited that company after two years and find a coaching Technology Group, which is my current company. And since then, from 2016, and 20, mid 2016, I guess until now I’ve worked with more than 300 people in their job seeking these techniques I’m sharing with you, they they really work there is practical tactical stuff you can do today, when we’re done. We’re not going to do any assessments or any looking at your value stack or anything like that. There’s just I want to get a job. And here’s how you get it handled.
Okay, so if you if you were on a phone call with me, and we were talking about what goes on inside career transition, in my practice, I’d say the part that we care about the most is what I call the practical tactical piece. And the practical tactical piece has three main elements to it, the resume, which is what we’re going to talk about today, your LinkedIn and how it works together with your resume and who you are as a person, and then how you do your job search. Like literally, how do you figure these things out. And so in the past, and, you know, we’ve talked about job scan, as being a way to get past an applicant tracking system. And I agree that that’s part of the mission, the other mission is to make sure that your resume is actually optimized for the human recruiter that will inevitably read your resume. So although you do have to have sometimes the right keywords to get through, you really have to have the right message, which is you have to be the right person for the job. And you have to be able to speak to that inside of your resume. And so that’s what we’re going to be talking about. So why optimize your resume? Well, some people are like, Hey, Pete, I paid $1,000 to a designer, and have a beautiful resume. The difficulty with these kinds of artifacts or documents is that they don’t, they’re not adjustable to what’s being asked of you. So you know, if you you, we all like to eat food, but we go to different restaurants, and you have to order the food that’s on the menu at the restaurant. And this is kind of the way I think about resumes as well is the job description is is asking for is like the person who’s ordering and the resume is supposed to be what it is that they ordered. So if you can’t get those two things together, it’s not going to be a match. And so, first thing we worry about is applicant tracking system limbo. If your resume doesn’t speak to the job at all, if it’s just a resume that you hope someone will use some imagination to understand you’re good, it will sit in limbo, no one will touch it. So we want to get through that. We want a human recruiter to read the resume and go, Oh, that person’s a good fit for the job. And then all we’re trying to do is spark that initial phone screen or interview. So if the, if the recruiters here, we’re working on our materials to get close enough for the recruiter and recognize that we’re there and say, Hey, let’s let’s talk. If you’re not where the recruiter is, nothing’s going to happen. So a lot of people are like, well, that’s great. What do I focus on? Okay, well, here’s what we’re going to focus on. You want to get your resume into an easy to visually scan template, most recruiters are only going to spend six to 10 seconds, quickly reviewing your resume against a job criteria that they have. If you don’t know what they’re really looking for, or it’s not in your resume, they won’t speak to you it’s not personal. The other thing is you need to know the job titles that you’re pursuing almost all effective job search that goes on today, at least out of my practice, we drill down on the job titles first, and then we work on what the resume should have in it second, so if you’re still seeking, there’s a whole nother area of coaching, I call it career trajectory coaching. And the whole idea is to figure out where you’re at currently in your career, what are your transferable skills, and then how do we get those into job titles in the areas where you want to work? Most of the folks I work with want to enter tech, and they’re either in tech and they want to find a job at another company or they’re trying to transition from one some industry into technology as an industry. And once you know your job titles, then you can go window shopping for those job titles. And then we use that to figure out what is the language of the job. And then we use job scan to make sure we don’t miss a thing. So here’s some questions everybody asks, we’ll just get right to them. So first is file formats. Microsoft Word docx, or PDF. don’t submit any other type of format. Please don’t tell me that you read that some other formats a better format somewhere. This is these are the only two formats that anybody wants to see. And actually Word doc is, is the best PDF means no one will, you know, mess with your resume. But once you’ve submitted, they’re not going to mess with your resume anyway. Okay, fonts, the most basic fonts are the best fonts. So Calabria and Cambria and our Arial in Word, okay, which are sans serif, that means you don’t have any funny things on them, or Times New Roman, which is the serif font that has little things on the Saris on the end of the letters, but you should understand the serif fonts are usually considered pretty stodgy The Scream mid 90s to an employer. And unless you’re applying in the finance industry, where it has a little bit of cachet for some reason, it’s probably not worth it, I’d say stick to super basic fonts.
And then something I do call the applicant tracking system test your resume, you should be able to do a select all on it, copy it, paste it into a text only editor and have nothing be missing. A lot of people make resumes and they design them using word like text boxes, or using headers and footers. That information does not transfer into an applicant tracking system. So you could end up submitting a resume that doesn’t have it, they have no way of means of contacting you, if you put all of your stuff in the header of your of your file, or in the footer, then it does not come through, you can test this with the cut and paste test to see what’s missing. If you have blocks of text in word that you’re moving around for design, those will not come through. So that’s that? If you have a question, put it into the chat. And we’ll we’ll advocate the questions there. Okay, other questions, everyone else? How many pages would my resume be? Well, if you’re a recent graduate, and you don’t have much work experience, or you live in the San Francisco Bay area, one page, most of the people, if you’re not in, if you’re not in the Bay Area, then it’s two pages. So that’s basically anybody from three to 20 years of experience. And then three pages are really for academics, highly strategic leaders with a lot that they have to share. People are in the C suite with a lot of accomplishments. And I didn’t put this on here, because I don’t want to confuse too much for people who have jobs in international development or something like that, where they’re actually expected to provide a curriculum vitae, which is more of a career narrative document, not to be confused the resume separate things. Okay. She went lists my graduation years only if it’s very recent, don’t put your don’t put your college graduation years on. And then hobbies and outside interests only list items that are immediately relevant to your job performance, and probably none of your outside interests are likely irrelevant. No, I mean, unless you like started a Bicycle Club that you’re still currently leading or some kind of like large, like something that shows leadership or managerial strength. I wouldn’t put it in there. And the main reason is, people get they get confused about where you’re focusing your time. And if it looks like you have too interesting hobby, they get concerned whether or not you’re going to care about your work. I know it sounds irrational, but humans are humans. Do the years of experience matter in a job description? Yes, it’s a key criteria for hiring. So don’t apply for jobs that ask for more experience. And you’ve got and if you apply for jobs that have less experience, and you’ve got you may be told you’re overqualified. That’s just one of the criteria. If they ask for specific tool knowledge, how to use say Salesforce or something like that, it might be a key criteria you might need to know. And then if they ask for specific programming knowledge, is that essential? Yeah, if you don’t do those languages don’t apply. So what are we focusing on here? The recruiter is your audience. Nobody else, the recruiter or the hiring manager who’s serving in a role as recruiter. So what do we need to do if the recruiter is the audience? One, we need to communicate everything that the recruiter cares about. In the first two thirds of the first page of your resume. We need to surface all the things that are key criteria in the job. Recruiters have a vested interest in hiring a qualified candidate, but you have to get where they are. They don’t they’re under a lot of pressure to fill roles. And the more vague your resume is, or the less specific the questions the answers to their questions are are, the harder it is for them to figure out, if you’re the right person to hire, they don’t have the time to waste. So this work is really trying to help the recruiter to see you as a person who could do the job that he or she is really trying to fill right now. And these are the tools to do it. So hiring managers actually get mad at recruiters who send them these maybe candidates, which are well, you know, I talked to them on the phone and they seem qualified and the hiring managers like, Well, where is it on the resume like that they can do the things. So I’m gonna tell you a real life recruiter story, I’ve done a few tech recruiting gigs. And they’re challenging. Again, believe it or not, I think coaching is easier than doing recruiting. So this particular story I was, I was hired to work with a small business that wanted a technical project manager. And they had set the salary range from 85k to 110, at the top, and they were insistent that they have a Salesforce development experience, either hands on actually coding and Salesforce, or working as a project manager with people who could code in Salesforce.
So I worked with the employer, we put together a job description and a request, we specifically requested a cover letter, along with the resume and the job description. We put it on indeed. Because of the nature of the job, I don’t usually recommend looking on Indeed, but in this case, we decided to use it. We got 100 applicants in a week. Of those 100 applicants, only eight of them had relevant experience that match the job description eight, okay, and only three of those had relevant specific Salesforce skills three, okay. So if you’re competing for a job you’re hardly qualified for I want you to see this as encouragement. People are applying for jobs, you might be on LinkedIn and say, well, 165 people apply for this job. Just look at this number 3% of the people who applied were qualified for this job. Out of those 100 applicants, one person sent a generic cover letter they sent to every application because they didn’t understand what a cover letter was really for. The other one wrote a specific cover letter, the woman who wrote the specific cover letter stayed in the running and stayed in the top eight. Because she had actually followed the instructions. As a recruiter, I want to share this with you, I asked for a cover letter, and almost no one gave it to me. I’m irritated by that. So if you see that a cover letter is requested, please do a cover letter. If you’re not sure what should be in a cover letter, I’m sure I’ll be doing a webinar sometime in the next six months about that. And we can talk about it. Okay. And then most people wanted more than stated salary range, but they said, you know, if the job was good, they’d be willing to accept less money. And so here’s what the client, the client gotten mad at me. Because I sent the client five people, only three of them had the Salesforce experience of the five, and only two of them were willing to accept the salary range that the company wanted to pay. So they asked me, where’s all the Salesforce experience you’re supposed to bring it? And then they asked, why are we talking to people who will be unhappy with their pay, they’ll just keep looking. So even the people who said they’d set a salary range higher than the amount but said they’d work with the employer, the employer was skeptical, they didn’t want to, they didn’t want to do it, they didn’t want to be sitting in a room in a year going, the person wants, you know, $15,000 Raise. So here’s the lesson for you guys. The key criteria that the recruiter holds, has to be matched for you to get a job. So here’s where jobscan comes in. Okay, so jobscan has a thing called the match rate. I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with the tool. Alrighty, we’re gonna, we’re gonna just look at some snapshots of the tool today in this talk. And then you can apply some of these ideas for yourself, okay, I view it as a barometer. And that helps catch important parts of the job. So you can speak to those things. Okay? So jobs can is, you know, they only know jobs can help you figure out what you didn’t speak to in your resume based on job descriptions, and I’ll show you how we figure out how to not miss anything. Okay, remember, the recruiter only knows what you tell him or her in your resume. So if you’re missing something, it’s just missing. They’re not psychic, they’re looking at hundreds of resumes. They just don’t know if you know it or not. And they’ve got a story similar to the one I just shared with you. They’re really trying to fill some key criteria. And if your resume doesn’t speak to it, it’s not personal. You’re just not You’re not making a case that you’re a good fit for the job. Okay, so I’ve done this approach that I’m about to share with you, from everyone from executives, all the way down to individual contributors, lots of different industries. tech industry, finance industry, consumer packaged goods, aerospace, okay, just engineering mechanical engineering, chemical engineer. Hearing this, this approach is useful for everybody. Okay, even CEOs. Okay, so I’m going to get demonstrate jobscan. And we’re going to work on something I call the gold master. The gold master resume is a resume that you’ve tuned up based on the jobs that you’re pursuing, such that you get a good match rate on job scan, higher than 40%, for any job that you’re looking for, which gives you the opportunity to improve your resume, so that you can get to the minimum criteria that I see work for people all the time, you know, through just lots of anecdotal evidence, okay? What do we really want here, we just want you to meet all the key criteria, so that you can get into that initial phone call or that phone screen, you don’t need a resume that’s going to prove you can do the entire job, you just need a resume, that’s good enough to get someone to talk to you about what the job requires to see if you’ve got the temperament for it.
So I can’t stress this enough. You have to know the job titles of the jobs that you want to pursue. If you’re not sure about that, based on your professional experience so far, then do more research or bring somebody in find a coach or somebody to help you figure out what are those job titles you should be pursuing. Okay, and so for today, I’m going to assume, for our purposes, that you figured it out, and the job title we’re going to be focusing on is product designer, also a UX product designer. And the reason I’m doing this is because I just was I just recently worked with someone in this area. And we did this process. So I had lots of good examples for how the process works. So alright, so I’m going to, I have a couple questions here. Yeah, so someone’s like, how do you know what the key criteria are? key criteria are the number of years in the job, this specific experience are asking for you to have already had any specific software tools that they use in their work. And anything specific in the background. If you’re hoping that they’ll just take that, you know, they’ll look past what you don’t have. So that they’ll talk to you, the odds are that they will not. So that’s how you just have to ask yourself, Am I really meeting this criteria, if you’re not, then you need to change your job title focus. So if you’re aiming for senior jobs, but you’re not making the you’re not making it, but you feel inside, you could do a senior job, that’s fine, you need to go down to jobs that don’t have senior in front of them. If you don’t meet the criteria for a middle level job in the title that you’re looking for, then you need to go down a title and look for either junior level jobs or coordinator jobs, Supervisory jobs, things like that. That’s where you’ll get hired, you can aim higher, because you don’t want to necessarily work at that tier, but also it makes sense to enter a company where you are good. And you can work on getting promoted. So okay, so we’re going to talk about I’ll talk about all the numbers here, guys, so just hang on. Okay, so where to window shop? I think you should window shop for jobs based on job title only in two areas. One is LinkedIn. And the other is Google. Yeah, just regular old Google. You go to Google, you put in a job title, you put in the word jobs, and you put in the city that you’re targeting. And you will get a an interface of all the jobs at Google is crawled from all of the job boards with the exception of Indeed, indeed blocks Google from crawling their, their stuff for good reason. Because they have their own ecosystem. So if you want to say hey, what’s really out there, not every job is on LinkedIn, some jobs are on zip recruiter, some jobs are on other job boards. If you do this search, you’ll uncover hundreds of jobs usually in your area that you may not have seen waiting on LinkedIn, there’s a reason it costs money to be on LinkedIn to advertise your job. Some companies don’t want to pay the fee to LinkedIn to have their job listed there. So they may not be on LinkedIn, Google’s agnostic and crawling everybody. Also, you’re looking for a remote job. Don’t put a city in there, put in the word remote, and then it’ll say the city is anywhere. That’s a remote job. So some of you are probably already like, oh my god, I can’t believe I never thought of this. I figured this out by accident when I was working with someone who wanted to work remotely about six years ago. Since then, it’s now it’s a thing, right? Okay, so what do we do we go and find the jobs in the specific area that we like, and we put them in a spreadsheet for accountability and include the links to the jobs because you’re going to need them. Okay, so go find three to five jobs with similar titles and responsibilities. Put them in your spreadsheet. Okay, so here’s an example spreadsheet So I asked my clients to prioritize the jobs one through five with one being the job they want the most. They go, and then we keep a status if they’ve applied or not who the company is, what’s the job title, where’s the location, and then a link to the job. And then if they have comments, and then we actually track their job scan, match percentage, when we first look at the job than we do a bunch of work, like I’m going to show you how to do here in a minute. And then we are aiming to get a higher score. So yeah, so good. Yeah. So Will Google satisfy every other board except LinkedIn? Indeed?
Yeah, so no, they. So there’s some stuff about Indeed, indeed has fees to sponsor that you can list for free on Indeed, but they have an ecosystem. So the Indeed ecosystem is that you sign up and then they send you emails six times a day. And I don’t know how many of you have used indeed, but I did an experiment with it to see if they had any executive coach jobs. And I got a lot of jobs for middle school girls softball coach, because I had coach in it. And I got a lot of jobs for executive chef because it had the word executive in it. And I was opening six or seven emails a day, looking for a needle in a haystack. Now you can, you might surmise, that indeed goes and tells her advertisers, they have a very high open rate on their emails, there’s a reason for that. There’s a bunch of stuff in there that has nothing to do with you what I found with clients who relied on details, they just start getting depressed, because they couldn’t find a job. And then they’d open up these emails, they’d scroll through, there was nothing for them. Or they’d scroll through while they were, you know, in their car or something, then they’re like, Oh, my God, I have to apply right away, and they weren’t in a place where they can apply. So you may be fine with the indeed, experience, I haven’t found it to be too great for folks. Okay, so Okay, so here we go. So job tracking sheet, create a job tracking sheet, it can look something like this, it doesn’t have to be super fancy. And then, I talked a little bit earlier about the easy to visually scan template. Okay, so you need to address all the key criteria in the first two thirds of your resume, which is years of experience, the job tell you’re going for matches the job titles you’ve had in the past, or you have a cover letter or something explains how to get to mentally get there. And that you have the specific skills that come from the job description. Here is an example of a resume template that I use all the time in my practice, I don’t do a lot of special resumes. Sometimes someone gets mad, they think I should be a special resume designer, there’s nothing to gain from having a very special resume design, you should have an easy to read design that matches the things that recruiter is looking for, they should be able to figure out who you are, where you live, how to get in touch with you, and where to look and where to find your LinkedIn. Okay. And then unlike resumes of the past, where we said something kind of oblique, like objective, my objective is to work in middle management at this leading, we don’t know, the recruiters don’t care about that anymore. They really want you just put the job title you’re going for right at the top. So they can say oh, great, this guy or this gal, this. They I can get in touch with them. And this is the job thereafter. And then I usually put four or five bullets there immediately dig in. Yes. I meet the your criteria. Yes, I do. I have worked with these kinds of companies. Yeah, here’s, here’s some stuff that I work with. So, okay, yeah, there’s Yeah, we’ll talk about embedded tables in a minute. Okay. Not not the big deal everyone makes out of it, if you understand what the real problem is, okay, so here’s a table, tools, expertise and a link to their portfolio. This is for somebody who’s a product designer, UX designer, okay. Then I went through and I changed it to the company from office space, any tech, okay, and then what they did there. So you can see all the tools are right up front, if they say must know how to do Microsoft Excel, guess what goes in your tool section, not Microsoft Office Suite, literally put Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Office, Word, Excel, PowerPoint in parenthesis, Google Suite who put that there, Adobe Creative Cloud, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Premier, whatever the tools are, that you can do. Your expertise is things that they’re asking for in the job description. If you have a job that needs a portfolio, then make sure you have a link for the portfolio. Sometimes, if I have a client who’s multilingual, I’ll put another section up there and put with their with their flow in 10 or what their conversational in so that it’s up near the top. The recruiter is very unlikely to get to the tail end of your resume unless you intrigue them in the first part. In the resume, they’re not going to worry about your education are not going to worry about your older experience. They just want to know what have you been doing recently? And do you have the skills that they’re looking for? So, when we get to q&a, I’ll go through all these these questions here, when we get to q&a.
So what do I do in Job scan? Now when if when you guys get your own versions of job scan, I recommend that you do I ask all my clients to do it, you’ll be able to upload your resume, and then use a lot of their really cool WYSIWYG tools from for making changes in your resume and everything like that. For the example I’m doing today, I use the dashboard view, which is sort of classic job scan, I take the resume, I do a select all on the resume. And then I paste it in to make sure that nothing got dropped in the cut and paste. This is the embedded tables thing that you got so many guys are talking about. If you have a table inside of a table, like you’re using Apple Pages, for example, Apple Pages, do not submit a resume in pages. It has like an an over arching container. And it’s got tables inside of tables and a lobby blank. If you do the cut and paste test, there’ll be nothing inside of there. So that’s why I do this cut and paste test. Okay, and then I take the job description from the job I paste it in, and then I do a few things with it. Okay, so this first pass through with this resume that I was showing you for the guy who worked at any tech, looking for that job at Google. So I took the job description from Google from their site, I pasted it in, and we ran the first pass, and it was a 56% match. From my point of view, that’s great. So for those of you are asking, what are the percentages, Tim, in my experience 55% or higher, with a with a resume that doesn’t have any gaps in it about what they’re asking for, will likely net you a phone call, some of you are using jobscan. And you’re working hard to get a score of 80%. And you’re turning, you’re creating Robo resume, or it looks really overworked worked over? Because it is okay. So 80% is amazing. And you can feel really confident if you hit a natural 80% match rate. But if you can get to 55% using this technique, you’ll be in the running. Okay, so we go down through job scan, and we’re looking for what’s missing. Okay, so in this particular case, the job description out for things like strategy, they asked for something called HCI, which stands for Human Computer Interaction. For us. That makes a lot of sense, right? We talked about mobile in the resume, but we didn’t specifically say iOS or Android. And for some reason, we didn’t use the word technical ever. So what are we trying to figure out? Well, what’s the context that they’re talking about in the job? Oh, here’s some more things. We didn’t talk about product strategy, even though the person’s a product designer, computer science industry experienced business requirements, and then in the soft skills, which are somewhat less important from a recruiter point of view, the words collaborate, innovative and problem solving. So we went in, I’m not demonstrating this, but if we were doing this live, I’d take that list, I’d be going over to our person’s resume, looking for opportunities to put those words into the resume to improve it. So I went through and I grabbed and I take that language from that first job, and I put it inside and I see how it’s doing. So I got up to 64%. And then, once I looked at what I hadn’t gotten that I’d missed, okay, like, there were some thematic things in there. When I changed around some of the bullets in the jobs and I added some criteria to the expertise. Eventually I got this client up to 70% match in Job scan. I could have stopped the 56% and been comfortable. Now, how did I get the 78%? Well, I cut and paste the job description and then I added the job description. Okay, so I actually read it, I recommend that you do the same thing. You read the job description. And then anything that has to do with the company’s overarching aim is not about the job itself. And it’s not about the responsibilities to criteria, the preferred qualifications, the actual required qualifications, anything like that you should pull out of the resume, you don’t need to know about Google’s back history.
You know, you don’t need to know what teams you’ll be working with. Because if you’re trying to wedge in team names that have nothing to do with the job, you’ll end up creating a Franken resume, it’s really important to contextualize the ask to what you put inside of your resume. Okay, sometimes it says will accept a design degree and architecture degree Human Interaction Design to degree go through and those kinds of things, they might show up inside a job scan to take those things out. And you can use a tool in Job scan also to look at what they what the tool chose to highlight. And that will help you figure out what, where jobs can pulled up some of these things, so that you’re not just shooting in the dark, you can figure out if it’s actually a context or not. Okay, so that’s why I say the match rates more like a barometer. Because there’s going to be some information in there that you don’t need to match. If you’re trying to work from us to get a score or a match score, you you’ll make yourself pretty frustrated. Okay, bottom line, aim for a 55% match or better without what I call striving, okay, so you’re not trying to trick someone to hiring you. And you’re not making up anything, that’s not true. You want an authentic resume that’s truthful. And you want to use the language they’re using. So if you get something from jobscan, that where they’re talking about metrics, and you have the word reporting in there, ask yourself, can I swap out the word reporting for the word metrics, you should not to get a high score, just to match the language of the employer. Okay, recruiters can tell they want, this is really important. The recruiters just want a great match, they expect you to bring your own personality to work, you’re not a robot, they want to know you’ll bring something new to the mix, not just exactly what they’re asking for. So if you work on a resume trying to make it perfect, they’re going to be skeptical. Naturally, just like you’d be skeptical of someone giving you an offer. That seems too good to be true. They can tell when a resume is overworked, they’re normal human beings. Okay, so remember, you’re just trying to get to the screening call. You’re trying to get the recruiter to say this person’s ID close and close enough to this job description. I should be speaking of that. Okay, barometer, it’s not a scoring game. Remember this, it’s easy to get tied up in trying to get the best possible score inside of jobs scan and miss the point of what the tool is. Okay? So if you find a job, you find your jobs, you have your resume, the first one, you go for the one you want the most you have a very low match rate, they might be under 20%. Okay, use the tools, figure out what’s missing in your resume, ask yourself, can I put those things in my resume? If the answer is yes, either rewrite bullets or put it in an expertise section like I showed you. Okay. And then anytime you get a match, you’re going to improve your score by one to one and a half percent, just kind of depends. Okay, and I’ve done this, and then 1000s and 1000s of jobs scans since 2016. Okay, I’ve been with this product a long time. And hundreds and hundreds of people I’ve worked with, and people get calls on a 57% match. Sometimes people get calls, if they’re really in demand, there was a real big demand for iOS app developers in 2016. That all they had to do was put iOS app developer on their resume, and they get a call, I got a guy who interviewed and got a job 38% match rate on his resume. Why? Because his job was in Super demand. And what he did talk about on his resume was exactly what they were shopping for. Okay, so remember, this is just a way to figure out Did I miss something that I should be talking about with them not to trick anybody or anything like that? Okay, and jobs can is not the final arbiter. So if it was just about getting 100% on job scan, you could do like one guy who really missed the point that I worked with, did he cut and paste the entire resume, put it down to one point type, put it in a white on a white background? And he told me I got 100% and jobscan. I’m like, so what? That’s not what we’re trying to do, right? I mean, obviously, it’s meant to help you measure something, it’s not something to beat and then say, Oh, I beat that level, on job scan. Okay, so
the recruiters ultimate, we’re trying to meet the recruiter, the recruiters out here going, I got people breathing down my neck trying to hire please bring me someone I can hire. And as all these people, and they’re not even when they can hire, they haven’t done anything getting closer to the recruiter. The tools we’re talking about bring you closer to the recruiter, the recruiter can more easily see your person they should be talking to when you get you close enough that there’s some gravity here, and that you can move into the process. If you don’t go to them. You’re you’re not going to be in the process. It’s going to feel essentially random. And you’re going to start went asking yourself what’s really going on here? Is it me? Is this some sort of ism that’s getting in the way. Okay, these are common questions for job seekers who aren’t feeling successful. If you follow these instructions, you will change your job search for sure. Okay, now, here’s how we get to the gold master. Repeat this process over those three to five jobs, get at least 55% On the first job, then use that resume for job one and compare it to job two on your list, you should score relatively high already make small changes to the next iteration of your resume to get at least 55% or higher. For the second job, do the same thing on the third job, take resume number two, blood to rule number three, you can do this all the way through five jobs. If you are looking for a similar job titles in a similar industry, and you do this for five jobs, you will have five resumes that you can submit today, if you have cover letters do cover letters, okay. And then you’ll also have a resume that for all the other jobs, you’re looking at there in the same kind of job title, you’re going to be like, Man, I’m a great match for this small tweaks. And the changes you make will only take minutes, you won’t be starting over from scratch. Sometimes when I’m working with clients, when we get to the gold master range, they’re able to get from like a 48% match to maybe like 5450 5354, and then they get stuck. So they’re like, well, I need to have at least 55 that are following the coachee technology group model. So sometimes they’ll send it to me, we’ll do a working session together, those things might end up being 65 60% matches when we’re done. Because having an outside person look at it helps too because they don’t there’s I don’t have I don’t have a sense of self doubt or whether or not I’m being honest or not about the client, I’m just working with the client the way that I know them. So we can sometimes get a higher score that way. And you’ll start getting the emails and the callbacks. And when that happens, if you’ve been on a cold streak for a while, you might find that you need some interview coaching something else we? We do. Okay, so we’re here at the how are we, John? We’re doing good. Okay, great. So we’ve got about 15 minutes, we’re going to do some q&a. And then here’s some ways that you can contact me, you can send me an email, you can go to my website, still do my company website, still under my name that’s going to be changing before the end of the year. You can find me on LinkedIn. And if you go to my website and you decide you want to talk to me about some of the services that we offer here, if you mentioned that your referral that you saw this webinar, then I’ll offer you a 90 day a $90 discount. All I’m asking is that we talk between that you book with me between now and the end of the month, okay, and that we talk sometime in October, either September or October. Okay, so here I am with I’ll leave that up in case you guys need that and then read we’re at the end of my presentation. So now I’m ready for some some q&a.
Paige 42:48
Awesome. Thanks, Tim. We have tons of questions. First one drew ball asked and I think a few other people were asking this, should we use headers and footers in a resume?
Tim Thomas 42:59
No, no. Okay. So you can use, okay, I use a footer. And in the footer, I just put the contact information in the footer. If a human sees and prints out your resume, they’ll see that information and if it’s a two page, or they can connect page one and page two, because the matching footer, it will not come through in an upload. Okay. And a header will not come through and and upload. So you’re sent essentially sending a headless resume, and they have no way to contact you if you do that.
Paige 43:29
Okay. Um, ob asked, and I’ve heard this question before, too. How much can you tweak your job title on a resume to match the job description? Can you tweak past job titles on your resume or on your resume to match the prospective job title?
Tim Thomas 43:47
It depends on who you’ve worked for whether or not the titles are said. I tend to say use the title that you had in the job. You have that the job the way it was described and your previous employer. Here’s why. If they go if a new employer does a background check on you, they have the right to call your previous employer and say, Did Tim Thomas work as an executive producer at Wizards of the Coast? And they will look that up and they will say Yes, Tim Thomas worked here in that job title. If they call up and the job title doesn’t quite match could be an issue mate could maybe not an issue. It’s a roughly equivalent, maybe it’s not such a big deal. It’s it’s a risk you take the reason that I put the job title for the job that you want at the top of the resume design I do is to directly address that to say, Okay, well I’ve put in the title so that they will look at my resume. They’ll see the other job titles are similar. Not similar. You’ll need a cover letter or something to help them understand what’s going on why you think you’re a good candidate. Let’s go on Okay.
Paige 44:57
Um, Okay, Khalida asked, What are your recommendations for putting a physical location on your resume? I know a lot of people right now are concerned about how many companies have gone remote and wondering kind of how to deal with your resume based on physical locations.
Tim Thomas 45:15
Yeah, I just put the city and state. In most resumes, I’ve had some clients pull the city and state out when they were willing to relocate for a job and not expecting a company to pay for the relocation. With all the remote work, you could take your city and state out if you’re applying for a job that is remote, there are a few things to know about remote work, read the job descriptions carefully. If the job description says that you must work in a particular state to work remote in that particular job. They mean it, it has to do with state and local taxes. And whether or not the company has a nexus of business in that state. So there are states that companies want to do business in all 50 states have completely different rules. So there is so if you work in accounting, and you’ve ever had to set up an out of state office for one particular employee or another, it’s an onerous time consuming process. Companies don’t like it. So you may not be able to work from your home state. So it’s, I think, you know, it’s better to put in where you know where you’re applying from, and let them understand that if they rule you out, because they can’t employ you, because you’re living in Colorado, when they’re not allowing remote workers in Colorado, then no one’s time is wasted there.
Paige 46:36
Right. Okay. Um, let’s see, someone else asks, Should a new college grad should they be emphasizing their education more than work experience?
Tim Thomas 46:50
Sometimes, if you did an internship than lead with your internship information, if you’ve not really worked, then lead with your, with your education at the top. It’s been a tough year for graduates. Okay, my son just entered. He’s just a freshman now in university. And I’ve been working with quite a few parents because of my age, right, where their kids have graduated from college, and are trying to get that first job and it sometimes it takes quite a bit of finessing to figure out how to tell the story. I did just work with a recent grad, though, who got a job working as a software developer at a major consulting agency, we did this exact same process, we deprioritize education and amplified his work experience.
Paige 47:39
Okay, interesting. So kind of a case by case situation.
Tim Thomas 47:42
Yeah. So there’s other things you can put in a resume when you are inexperienced with work. So you can put in your projects if you had class project. So let’s say there’s probably some people out here who’ve done a boot camp, put in your boot camp projects, those are more interesting to the employer than the fact you’re working as a long haul trucker, or whatever you were doing before he decided to go to boot camp. Okay, so let’s say that you took advantage of the COVID time and you were able to go back and gain a new skill to break out of some work cycle you were in, let’s say you’re stuck in a restaurant work cycle or something like that. Your restaurant experience may not be that transferable, but your bootcamp projects will be. So think about what is the recruiter really going to care about? They’re going to care about what you’ve done. That has to do with the job they’re trying to hire, not whatever you did.
Paige 48:33
Great. This is sort of a related question. From Alison, she’s asking how many pages are reasonable for somebody that’s transitioning careers? And how far back in their job history should they go? I don’t have as much current industry experience.
Tim Thomas 48:49
Yeah, keep it to two pages. And I’d work on writing a cover letter. I wouldn’t go back i No one cares about experience, really, that’s more than 10 years old. A recruit an average recruiter is going to be in their early 30s. So 15 years in the past, they were high school students. So whatever you were doing 15 years ago, is very boring to them. And it’s gonna seem very antique. So your older experience isn’t that valuable. If you have not been working, you’re trying to re enter the workforce, then there’s some specific tactics. This doesn’t necessarily address things like gaps in your resume or think things of that nature. So I have worked with lots of clients who have gaps in their resume. They just they became they decided to be stay at home parents until their kids were in elementary school age is a common thing. They all have gone back to work. It’s just it’s just very individualized. How do we talk about that?
Paige 49:49
That was someone else’s question is what to do if you have a sizable gap between jobs.
Tim Thomas 49:56
It’s good to explain it in a cover letter. Okay, so you guys might be getting this resumes are great cover letters are essential. If you don’t like writing cover letters, I’m sorry, someone’s going to be writing a cover letter. And they’re going to explain why they’re a good fit for the job. And they’re going to get the callback. Yeah. So there’s a whole I have a whole nother thing here. We’re not talking about today on emotionally resonant cover letters aimed at recruiters. And if that’s something that you’re looking for, I’m open to that conversation. Just that’s not what we’re doing today.
Paige 50:31
Yeah, we did have a presenter last week, Melanie Denny presented on writing a cover letter. So if any of you missed that, that’ll be up on YouTube also, right? Let’s see Acacia has an interesting problem. What happens if you have 15 plus years of experience? And you’re overqualified for many job listings? Do you like dumbed down your resume? Or what do you do in that situation?
Tim Thomas 50:57
Yeah, you know, good question, case by case. I think I would be open in a conversation with a client where that was going on to say what can we do to under promise on your resume so that you can get a job and then over deliver? Tactically, okay, especially if you’ve been in one job, you have a lot a long period of time in a specific job, but you haven’t necessarily pursued a promotion in that job. Okay. So where do people get stuck in mid career, they’ve stayed in one company for too long, okay, or they’ve been there for a long time, and they’ve not changed their responsibilities very much. They just mastered a specific area. That can be hard to hard to transfer. And then also, just, again, sometimes you need if you have something unusual, you need to help explain it to the recruiter in the cover letter, and let them know like why it is you’re pursuing this job. And sometimes in that process, you realize me, maybe I’m overshooting or maybe I just, you know, maybe I need to come in a little lower. Yeah, learn the fundamentals of the job first.
Paige 52:05
Okay. Um, let’s see, Barbara is wondering if you recommend, including the month as well as the year for each work experience,
Tim Thomas 52:17
I do. Recommend month in year jobscan recommends that recruiters I’ve talked to they like that also, they really want to see the amount of time you spent somewhere they may want to ask you Why do you only spend eight months at a company? Sometimes the story is they hired me and then they went broke. So you need to be able to tell the story. Or they hired me and they said the job was one thing and it ended up being another and I saw I immediately went to find another job. It helps. It’s a dialogue with the recruiter, you’re not trying to trick the recruiter, recruiter wants to hire you if you’re the right person. So all these things that we get concerned about, they won’t matter if you’re the right person for the job.
Paige 52:59
Yeah, that’s good advice. I know you touched on this a little bit, but a couple of people asked about those embedded tables, and that they heard that ATS can’t read those. Can you reiterate what you said about embedded tables?
Tim Thomas 53:14
Yeah, sure can. So this is why I told you guys about the ATS test with the cut and paste. So if you take the resume, like the one I showed in the presentation today, if you were to cut and paste that, the select all cut, go to a text field and paste, you’d see that a pay sin as if it was an inline tools with all the tools underneath expertise with only expertise underneath. This is what you’re aiming for tables themselves aren’t a problem. How the tables are put into your document is a problem. And if it doesn’t proceed logically, when you do the cut and paste test, then there’s something wrong with your tables. And that’s why the applicant tracking system can’t read your table, two column tables, where there’s a clear header in column one, and there’s the items and column two on the same line. Those will come through normally never had an issue with that with using these designs, and have had issues with specifically Apple Pages is the worst. And Word docs where people are moving around blobs of text inside of boxes like those do not come through.
Paige 54:24
Interesting. I’m going to try that. A couple of LinkedIn related questions. Richard asks, as someone that tends to stay away from social media, how vital Do you think a LinkedIn profile is to the hiring process?
Tim Thomas 54:40
It’s essential. I’m sorry to say if you don’t have to participate in LinkedIn, you should have a page up on LinkedIn. Yes, it is the world’s biggest resume database. All the recruiters in the world know it. And like I said recruiters are there are more social media natives. And it will be weird if you do not have at least a paid job that represents who you are and explains what you’re looking for and what your work experience is. So the the cost of privacy is you could be missing an essential step in the modern hiring process. And you could argue whether it’s legal or not, it’s happening every day all the time.
Paige 55:23
Yeah. And we do have, we have one more LinkedIn session coming up on Friday, if anybody wants to sign up for that. And that will obviously be up also, on our YouTube channel, we probably have time for one more question Zuly asks, How do I align my resume with my LinkedIn profile? If there are multiple job titles that I’m applying to?
Tim Thomas 55:49
Yeah, so I’m going to go back to the first principle. We’re work in similar job titles, as per your search. If you’re all over the place, then you’re not being focused in your job search. So you have to ask yourself, what do I really want to do? If you use the process, the way I laid it out for you all today, and you stay inside the band of job titles, then it’s easy to take the information from any version of your resume that scored well against the job you want. Take that information and put it into your LinkedIn, it’ll have all the keywords optimized from job scan, and then it’ll help the recruiters that are using the recruiter tools on LinkedIn to find candidates to find you. So you want to be on LinkedIn, because recruiters are looking there. And you can use any version of your resume that’s appropriate for the job. If you are not focused on the job title. And you then you still need to do more work, you need more distinction in your search, or you’ll it’ll take a lot longer to find a role. So I get that some people are like, Well, I’m a generalist, you know, at most people who feel like they’re generalists to come and work with us. And we say, you have general skills, but there’s an area you want to work and we drill down on that area, the type of job, the job title, the industry and all of that. And that’s when they start getting opportunities. If you’re unfocused, you, then your work, you’re basically working at random. And you’ll get random results. Mm hmm.
Paige 57:21
Interesting. Okay, um, I think we’re just about out of time here. I think only one more. There’s one more, we want to do one more. Okay. Let’s see. related to what you said about needing a cover letter. Sue me It says if recruiters only spend six or six to 10 seconds looking at a resume, do you really think they have time to look at cover letters?
Tim Thomas 57:46
Yes, because if they like what they see in those six to 10 seconds, they’ll spend a lot more time with your resume and the read your cover letter. Mm hmm. So they don’t read it first. This is what the recruiter does, the recruiter has five things that gotta figure out if you can do key five key criteria. Usually, they scan the resume for those five criteria. If it’s in the first two thirds of your resume, they’ll be like, I should talk to this person, then they’ll do everything. They’ll read the second page of your resume, if you do a cover letter, and you make the third page of your resume, which I recommend, if they don’t ask for one to do it anyway, and do it that way. Then they will also read your cover letter, the cover letter could be the thing that makes the phone call happened. Because it’s the part where you say, Why me why the company you’re recruiting for and why I’m a good fit for this job. And that helps that helps get us closer to our friend, that recruiter by telling them what they need to know.
Paige 58:44
And that’s where you can explain those things from your resume that you didn’t have written for.
Tim Thomas 58:48
Yeah, like I saw a couple of things about academic people in academia out there. I’ve worked with academics, I understand its complete ecosystem, elementary and high school Ed, one kind of ecosystem, higher ed’s and other ecosystem. We drill into all the project management and program management that you have done in those roles as teachers and professors, and mentoring and all of that we figure out how to bring those things across. And then again, it’s all about the cover letter and explaining why you’re leaving your career as a teacher. Are you leaving your career in academia to go to another job, so you can make the case so the recruiter can understand what you’re up to?
Paige 59:30
Yeah. Great. Thank you, everybody, for joining us today. And thanks again, Tim. I really enjoyed your presentation and I learned a lot personally. Hopefully everybody feels a little bit less anxiety on this subject. Remember, we still have a few webinars coming up this week. And I’m actually presenting next week on how to use job scan. So if you want to get a more in depth demo on how to use job scan, you can sign up for that one next Wednesday. If you want 20% off jobs scan premium, you can go to the promo link on the on this last slide here. I believe Linda is putting it in the chat. That is for new and free users to sign up for jobscan premium. That’s it for today’s presentation. Tim, we’ll leave that leave this last slide up in the chat and we’ll leave the chat box open as people are filing out. Thanks a lot. All right. Thank you
Transcribed by https://otter.ai