All right Sandra, Here we go! I have almost 20 years of work experience
what if my first job was the most relatable can i give more detailed
bullets on this one just like how i would do with my most
current jobs on top so great that's a phenomenal question uh
the one really sweet thing is there's a couple of ways to cover that
so let's i always like to do this let's bring the
question back because there are some of you
that uh maybe like sandra or you might you might have 20 years
of experience and a lot of it is relevant but say the first half was in
health care and the second half was in financial services
but you want to get back to health care you're all dealing with the same
kinds of things because your most recent experience might not be in exact
alignment with where you want to go so the sweet thing about the way i like
to lay the resume out is in the career profile
you could highlight more of that so up top remember that's the first thing
they're going to see after your name so bring forward
the as you aggregate your work experience bring
forward the stuff that you did early right you can talk about that in general
terms so so bring that to the top then when
you get into the highlights section which is next
pull forward you put i don't care if you pull
two of your your highlights forward now it would be
nice i don't know your exact um like the sequence of all your jobs but
it would be nice if early experience was a chunk not like
two years and then 18 but like maybe five or seven
and then you can pull a couple of those highlights forward and then
and then what you might do i don't love it but you can have four highlights
instead of three and then you know kind of mix them up
and then maybe you can put them in reverse chronological order remember the
highlights can be sequenced however you want so you
know you take your early experience you pull highlights out of that
you pop them up maybe that's your first two highlights and then you take a
couple more highlights to make your resume look balanced and
then you go into reverse chronological order where you are right now
so that is a-okay and if you want to have say
four bullets in you know down at the bottom and the others have
three or maybe you even have five i don't love that i like
threes i love threes now don't don't say well andy said i only
can't have three bullets it's it's not what i said i said i like threes
i i don't love when i get a resume and there's
there's 10 bullets i'm not reading them all they're not all created
equal and if you got 10 bullets that means you probably didn't package up
what you're what you're explaining and sharing in
its most marketable format and you're not doing yourself any any
good by having that many because i'm actually not going to read that i'm
going to glance and i'm going to move on to the next one
and i'm going to pick and choose what i want to see at your next job and so on
so it's not like we we read a resume from top to bottom left to right and we
read it all and then we spend all of our time on the
first page right we spend the most time in the top
center up top top half then i start scroll
zipping down then i want to get a sense of what you
did and then i want to get a sense of your evolution and i want to get a sense
of what you did at each company but i won't
read it all no one will it's not personal to me or you
it so they're skimming but if you got 10 bullets what's going to happen is i'm
going to read it i'm going to read your you know your who where you worked kind
of what you did up at the top and then i'm going to go
and i'm going to sweep down to the bottom
so remember that as well that within the sections it's important that the most
powerful points are up at the top so if i see this person was the customer
service manager and manage 50 people in in this
area focusing on these things that gives me a
lot of insight okay now i just want to know that what
you were doing was impactful oh yeah there were improvements there great i'm
going to come back to that and i'm going to the next did this
person go up the chain that way so just just just keep that in mind
that's really important that not all the resume real estate
is created the same there's actually some things on the second page
that get more weight than things on the first page so think about that
right we're looking at the top half i'm looking to see if there's evidence of
the fact then i want to see where you work then i want to kind of see what you
did i'm not going to read a whole lot toward
the bottom of the first page i'm going to zip to the second page does it have
kind of what i need is their education or do they have a
robust volunteer section or whatever and now now i'm
reading and i'm bouncing up and down on the second page it's it's
wacky but this is what's happening and then i'm looking at at the different
companies and then what did you do at each company not reading in full
but getting a sense of oh that person was a developer
then the person was an analyst then the person was a designer okay i'm
getting the evolution cool i don't really care what you did in the
beginning so you know you have to you have to keep
that in mind so if your early experience is is the
most relevant pull it way up to the top give me the
goods up top and then i'll i'll find it i will so i
hope that helped i hope that gives you some
you know really good perspective um it's it's it's it's really kind of weird
how we do this but it is it is the way it is