Today's episode continues the Job Search Strategy series, this time with a focus on the resume. This is a Masterclass on resume writing for career returners. Grab a pen and paper - you're going to want to take notes!
I share insights and examples on the following .....
And finally, I'm offering listeners a customizable resume template designed for stay at home moms returning to the paid workforce.
Grab a Free Resume Template for Stay at Home Moms.
Interested in my 1:1 Career Comeback Coaching program? Let's chat!
Send me an email ---> christina@hernextchapters.com
Connect with me on LinkedIn ---> www.linkedin.com/in/kohlchristina
Today's episode continues the Job Search Strategy series, this time with a focus on the resume. This is a Masterclass on resume writing for career returners. Grab a pen and paper - you're going to want to take notes!
I share insights and examples on the following .....
And finally, I'm offering listeners a customizable resume template designed for stay at home moms returning to the paid workforce.
Grab a Free Resume Template for Stay at Home Moms.
Interested in my 1:1 Career Comeback Coaching program? Let's chat!
Send me an email ---> christina@hernextchapters.com
Connect with me on LinkedIn ---> www.linkedin.com/in/kohlchristina
Hi, friends, and welcome back to this week's episode. We are focusing on job search tips, and last time, if you listened in, it was all about getting clarity about where you're headed and what your job target is. And if you haven't listened to that one already, I encourage you to go back and listen to that one, because really that's the foundation of everything we're going to talk about next today, which is the resume. So everyone wants to. When they started job search, they want to start out like, oh, I got to update my resume, got to dust it off and get it up to date and get it current, and there's value in that, absolutely. However, without knowing exactly where you're going, it's kind of pointless, right. So you really have to have that clarity piece first, and so if you're listening to this one maybe you're listening now and you don't quite have clarity that's still okay, you'll still be helpful. But truly, in creating, when you sit down to write and update your resume, you really do need to have that focus of what it is you're aiming for. And yes, to answer the question, you can have multiple resumes. In fact, I encourage it because you're going to customize each resume to the position that you're applying for, and if you don't know exactly which position, you know, like I want to be like one client I'm working with, and she'll probably be hearing this she wants to be a healthcare navigator. So when you're creating the resume, what you would do is go look at job postings for healthcare navigators and go see what it is they're looking for. So that's your destination, and maybe even you pull two or three job postings together to create your ideal job. Don't worry about the practicalness of it In this case. Maybe there's a job posting and it's in Florida and you live in California and you're not going to move, so that's okay.
Speaker 1:At this point in time, you're just looking for job posting that include pieces of your dream job. If you were to create your own job, and maybe you find three or four, blend them all together, but take the best parts of each, put them all together, cut and paste into one document so that you have a job description that matches what you want to do in your ideal world, and then that is your destination. Okay, so you're going to write your resume to point directly to everything on that job description and then, when you do so, you get your resume on this and polished and we're going to talk a lot more. But when you get your resume polished towards that job description, your resume's ready for that. And then you find another job that is similar. Maybe it's like 70 to 80% similar to what you crafted together for yourself. You mix in little tweaks and adjust your resume template before that specific job that is a real job that you're going to apply for Makes sense.
Speaker 1:All right, so let's get into, my goodness, the first question that I hear from anybody who's been out of the workforce for a long time has had a career break. The first question and I remember feeling so nervous about this myself how do I address my career break in the job search? How do I address it in my resume, in particular, linkedin conversations? How do I talk about this? And the answer is address it directly on your resume, in the middle of your job history. And this depends on what everything else is going on and you're going to hear more from me, but in general, what I recommend is you include it in the resume. Don't try to hide it, just be upfront. Include it with your chronological experience.
Speaker 1:Okay, so this is what mine says. It says career break as a job title, and then I have the years off to the side, just like I would for a job. And then it reads like this Elected to take a career break to raise my family, maintain professional skills through substantial volunteer work and independently obtain SPHR certification to prepare for career reentry. Okay, so not only saying I took time off, I'm saying I did stuff when I wasn't actively in the workforce. I have skills through volunteer work and I got my SPHR certification, which is a senior professional in human resources certification. I did that while I was job searching, in preparation for my job search, because I knew I wanted to go back to HR, the other really common question that I get. So the first one is how do I address my career break? We're going to put it straight on the resume. That's how.
Speaker 1:The second question is how do I get past the applicant tracking system, the ATS? How do I get past that? So I want to like try to put your mind at ease. These are just computer software and they're programmed by people. People are using them, people are reading them. They are used to screen hundreds, if not thousands, of resumes and as a recruiter, as an HR professional, I have used ATS and they are a wonderful tool, in fact and this might even be outdated by now but 90% plus of employers use them, so they're not going away. It is a tool. 75% of applicants are rejected through the ATS.
Speaker 1:But again, this is not a machine rejecting you. It's the programming that a person is put in. So one example I can give I was recruiting for an accounting manager. They needed to have a CPA licensure. They need to be a current CPA for our job and that was one of our we called it a knockout question. So do you have a current CPA, yes or no? And if the answer is no, they did get an automatic rejection through the system that I programmed as a person. So again, a machine's not doing it, it's the programming that I've told the machine to do. If there are certain minimum criteria requirements and you don't have them, the machine is going to be able to do that automatic rejection. And then it allows me as a recruiter, even as a hiring manager, to search for keywords. So if I'm looking for again that CPA, I'm looking for someone who maybe has audit experience and has worked for one of the big accounting firms. So I'd be looking for keywords based on what I'm looking for. So that means for us when we are creating our resumes.
Speaker 1:We need to make sure to include keywords in our resumes that point to the job that we just applied for. And it's really important for you to match your resume to the requirements of the job, because that's what the applicant tracking system is designed to do is to look for matches, and so you want to do that in your application and not just assume. Well, they can see everything, it's all there. All they have to do is look at it Again. Recruiters are getting slammed with hundreds of applications, hundreds of resumes, especially those little quick, easy, apply up, applied and the machine helps sort those and bring them, bring the ones to the top that have the most matches.
Speaker 1:The other thing with applicant tracking systems is to make sure to keep your formatting simple. Your fonts, if you want to be standard fonts, nothing fancy, you don't want italics or underlying, and it gets harder for the machine to read it and it comes through all jumbled and then it makes it hard for for a human eyes looking at it to to be able to read it. So just keep your. You want to keep your formatting simple because it is going through, most likely, an ATS system. So if you listened to last week's episode where I had you write down, like all the different things you've done in all your different jobs and roles volunteer, paid or not writing all that down. What I encourage people to do when they are working on their resume is to have an accomplishment bank, and this is a different document than your resume. The accomplishment bank is just a bulleted list of accomplishments from your varied experiences and you want to you know, obviously quantify them whenever possible, put numbers to it timeframes, dollars, saved, percentages, number of people served all those outcome type statements and then you pull from those that your accomplishment bank to customize a resume for a particular job posting. So we're going to have some examples here in a moment.
Speaker 1:And then also, you want to make sure to make the slight changes to the language to match the job posting. So, for example, in the world of human resources, recruiting is also a lot of times lately called talent acquisition. So if I am putting down everything really heavily and all my recruiting experience, but I'm never using the words talent acquisition, I might be overlooked. So you want to make sure it's the same. It means the same thing, but use the language that the job posting is using. Another example is, again in the HR world benefits. So am I managing a health plan or medical plan? If they talk about health plans, then I need to make sure I'm talking about health plans. When I managed a plan that was $7.5 million and saved this much money on it, I need to talk about saving it on the health plan if that's what the job posting talks about. So just make sure that you're matching their language and you're not making stuff up. You're just using the language that your audience is using.
Speaker 1:Let's see types of resumes Very fundamental. Let's go there. There's a chronological is probably the one that you are most familiar with. It's like it says chronological. You start with your most recent job at the top and talk about what you've done there, give your dates, give your location, the job title, and then you work your way on down. So the next job is going to be a little bit older, and then older, older, older, and that's the traditional resume of chronological. And then there's a functional resume, and that one is pulled out purely by function. So if it's customer service this is what I've done in the area of customer service and you've got all of your accomplishment bank things right Pulled over into the things that you've done in that topic, and maybe there's patient care, navigating and all the things that you've done in that realm and those the things you should putting in that bucket are from different jobs, different experiences, but they're all coming together. Like, for myself, if some of my resumes when I was going after benefit roles I put, everything was heavy, everything on that resume pointed to benefits and so I had a whole section around around that piece.
Speaker 1:And then there's third type of resumes. We have chronological, time-based, functional, function-based and combination. Combination is going to be guess, a combination of the two. So you're going to use functional and chronological and this is the style that I recommend for people who are returning after a career gap, because it allows you to highlight your skills and not get so stuck on the the chronological. If you do chronological only, then it's a little harder because you've got this huge gap right.
Speaker 1:But on the front page of the resume, what I like to do is have like a skill, a summary that says like here's where I'm going, here's my map, here's what I'm aiming for. So you have your job title at the top, like you're heading, that's who you are and what you want, and then you've got a little summary that kind of describes like the why and putting the pieces together. You're basically telling a story. This is a marketing document and you are marketing you. You were the product right, you were the solution to the problem they're trying to solve. So on that first page you've got your summary. You've got a list of your skills that are relevant to the job, real skills that you have that you can back up and tell stories about my stories I mean real life stories that happened, things you can back up, skills that are listed on the front just in bullet form, a couple columns with perhaps, and then underneath that some function.
Speaker 1:So you, interpreting the job description that's, you know, 70, 80% match to your ideal, perfect world, because it's hard to get that 100%, but you can. You're going to want to interpret from that what the biggest themes are and then you're going to put your accomplishments and skills, experience, you're going to put those under those themes in those buckets, you pulling them from your accomplishment bank, dropping them in as they make sense. And then page two provides the chronological. That's where you give the context for where all this experience came from. But by then you've already wowed them with oh my gosh. They have all this experience and all these things that we need to have done here. And page two is giving the context of where you got that experience from and includes your period of unemployment, which is your career break, with a little description about it. Right, it's on the resume.
Speaker 1:While we're talking about experience, I want to call out that all experience is experience. It doesn't matter whether it's paid. Unpaid experience is experience, and this is true for things you've done in support of your family and volunteer roles in the community. And as to including your volunteer experience on your resume, there are two approaches to this I want you to consider. So if the role and their related accomplishments are directly related to your target role, then include the volunteer role in the experience section and list it just like you would a job. So the title, the location, the dates, your accomplishments, all of that you're going to have. Make sure that this heading says experience. Now, if the role kept you busy and shows you involvement in the community, but it doesn't directly relate to your target role, the job you're going after, I would still encourage you to list these in a volunteer section at the bottom of page two.
Speaker 1:So, after your experience after your education and just have a volunteer section. That kind of summarizes the different things you've done and the reason I like to do this one. It shows your involvement in your busy. You know how you've been busy and active in the community and also, you never know when a commonality like Scouts or maybe as being a swim team coordinator or working at an animal shelter as a volunteer, you never know how that might help make a connection with a recruiter or hiring manager. So maybe they have a son that's an Eagle Scout, or maybe their daughter's been on swim team for years and they were a coordinator, or maybe they got their dog from an animal shelter. So you just any way that you can make that human connection I think is only going to be helpful. So even though walking the dogs and bathing them maybe that didn't have anything to do with the job that you want to do now in marketing, but it was still something that you did it kind of like I said it could make that connection with someone, with another human who's going to be reading this resume on the other side of that ATS.
Speaker 1:The last thing on the combination resume after experience is going to be your education and for most of us that have had any sort of career break, our education might seem a little dated, so there's no need to put the years of when you graduated or your GPA to relevant at this point. Leave those old dates off so you can include Colorado State University, a bachelor's in business management and psychology, and leave it. You don't have to put the dates. Do include any professional certifications you might have or any relevant coursework that you've taken, especially recent ones. Make sure that those are on there. If it's something really recent that you've just taken, go ahead and throw a date on there. You know, completed in 2024. And that just shows that it is current. So I have a resume template that I would be happy to share with listeners of the podcast. To get the template, to shoot me an email it's Christina at hernextchapterscom and I'll send that resume template over to you so that you can use that to start building out your own resume Again.
Speaker 1:Make sure you've got that accomplishment bank, know where you are headed, what your target role is. Oh, the other thing I wanted to share when we're talking about chronological experience, you do not need to list every job you've ever had, nor do you need to list every accomplishment that you've ever had or every experience job responsibility you've ever had. Remember, you are aiming towards a certain goal and so everything on your resume should aim towards that goal. And ageism is real. We'll talk about that for a minute here. It is real, it happens. You want to give yourself the best opportunity, so you don't need dates on your education, unless it's really recent education, so that'll help. You don't need to have jobs listed from the beginning of time.
Speaker 1:Okay, if there's a job that you did in your you know, early, very, very early career that was like, oh my gosh, I'd love to do that job again, then yes, you need to include it so that you have that context. But you're going to put it on your front page right With all that relevant. You know the functional stuff. I'm like, oh, I've done marketing for the fashion industry and put on events of fashion shows. I want to do that again and I did it 20 years ago, 30 years ago maybe Then yes, you'll want to include that. But if those other jobs like you know, if you're working at 7-Eleven you're the help desk and on the college campus you worked at Banana Republic, those other jobs that aren't they just kind of paid the bills. They weren't necessarily career jobs. They don't need to be included.
Speaker 1:I remember, when I was returning to work, the advice I was getting and this is in 2016, that I should not include any work experience before the year 2000. Problem is, I left the workforce when my daughter was two in 2002. So my 10 years of experience most of that was in the 1900s. I am aging myself here and that's the reality. Most of my professional experience when I returned to work was older. I was out for 13 years and these days I have current experience. Right, I've been back in the workforce for several years, so I don't have to include my old experience if I were to go job searching again.
Speaker 1:So, depending on your situation, how old and how relevant your job experience is we're looking at those two things. If it's relevant to your target and where you're going on that GPS, if it's relevant, then you need to include it and know that. That's okay. It's a risk you're going to have to take. It is one of the extra hurdles as returners have Now. With that being said, if an older job history is not relevant, leave it off. Okay. It does not need to go in your resume if it's not pointing in the direction of the job that you want to have, leave it off.
Speaker 1:One thing you could do if you have some relevant experience that is older and it's taking up a lot of space in your resume, because you really don't want to go over two pages. First page is your summary, which includes your skills and some of the functional things. If you have some old work history that you feel is relevant, you can just kind of put a category at the bottom that says early work history and maybe just put some job titles or put a couple you know. So just kind of put some things in there that kind of summarize the early work history. We don't need to go back all the way to 1990 or 1980s. I would leave that part off, just early work history as a kind of a header, and then a little bit about what you did and that way you're acknowledging it that you have the experience. But you're not like putting a clock on it saying, you know, trying to give away more of your age, okay, and the other thing, and we're not going to get into this today in the podcast, but the cover letter is also going to allow you to tell your story. You're going to include your career break and you're going to draw the lines, connect the dots. That's what I'm trying to say. You're going to connect the dots for the reader about your journey and how everything that you've done up until now points to the job that you are going for. Okay, so you're going to fill in all those blanks for them and do that if through the cover letter. The resume will do a lot of it, but the cover letter is really some extra storytelling that you can do.
Speaker 1:Okay, this is where I say any questions. So, truly, if you do have questions, a really good place to find me is on LinkedIn. I would encourage you, even if you don't have an account yet, just start an account and you can friend me. I'll be your first connection. Totally fine, I will accept your request and then, even without us being connected, just send me a direct message and just say I would like somewhere help on this. Or I've actually have on there a place where you can schedule a strategy call and 20 minutes just kind of like talk about what's going on with your job search, where you're at, and just kind of give you some pointers directly to you and help you get started. So I'm happy to offer that to all the listeners on the podcast. I'm excited for you and excited to hear the stories of how your next chapters and your next careers get started. All right, well, thanks so much for listening in. We'll talk to you next week.