What Should Be In A Resume
What should be in your resume? Simply put: the stuff that will convince the hiring manager that you’re the solution to their problem.
And guess what? ONLY that stuff. Nothing else.
Think of it from the hiring manager’s perspective. They have a problem: they have a job opening to fill. You need your resume to convince them that interviewing (and hopefully hiring) you would be the solution to that problem.
Your resume has to be just right. You only want to put in the stuff that will do the convincing. You don’t want to put in everything you’ve ever done. You don’t want to write your whole autobiography. You only want to put in the stuff that is applicable to the specific job you are applying for.
This means your resume will change from time to time. It can change depending on the job you’re applying for. You add things when applying for one position that you would leave out for another.
It will even mean that sometimes you’ll leave out stuff that is super impressive to you and others. Heck, you might even leave out stuff that you feel is the most important work you’ve ever done in your career.
It all depends.
If you’ve been sending out the exact same resume to every job you’ve been applying to (without tweaking it at least a little bit to suit each job) then you’ve been doing it wrong.
In a couple of posts here, we’re going to sit down and begin writing your baseline resume.
But then, when we’re done, and the time comes actually send this resume out to job openings, you’re going to need to always be willing to tweak it to make it most effective for each individual job. This can mean leaving things out, adding things in, emphasizing this thing for one job, but emphasizing that other thing for a different job.
Why are we doing this?
Because as I said at the beginning, you want your resume to convince the hiring manager you’re the solution to their problem. And not just a generic problem either! You’re solution to this one specific problem that they’ve advertised for with their job opening.
So, first things first: