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Hi everyone, I’m Isaac. I’m Brian. I’m Elizabeth. And thank you for joining us today
for our resume and CV workshop. Um, so today we’re just going to be talking to you all
about how to construct the perfect — well, probably not perfect, but a strong resume
or CV. Um, so just jumping in to some of the differences between a resume and a CV, I think
there can be some confusion so the easiest way to consider this is that these documents
are typically intended for different audiences. So potential employers reading through a resume
will want to be able to quickly see if you have the skills and qualifications necessary
for a position, whereas hiring committees reading a CV are more interested in your academic
trajectory. Do you have the qualifications and are you someone who has the interests,
pedagogy, and goals that align with a particular program? So as a result CVs will typically
tend to be longer as the goal is to show your entire progression and research as a whole,
whereas resumes will emphasize the skills and experiences that you have because it’s
more focused on, okay, do you meet the qualifications for this job, do you have what they’re looking
for at this company. So next to talk about some of the common errors and issues with
resumes and CVs is Brian. Thanks, Isaac. Uh, so in talking about common errors and issues
with both resumes and CVs, I think it’s important that we talk about what employers
look for in resumes specifically. Some elements that employers will look for in resumes include
keywords, increasingly resumes are not being read by humans, they’re being read by software
specifically app tracking systems which will screen out unqualified candidates, so if you
use simple design and formatting in addition to strong keywords, hitting in on key terms
in your resume, those will be easily identifiable by those applicant tracking systems. You’ll
also want to make sure that you keep your resume neat, uh, with professional presentation.
If your resume appears to lack attention to detail, potential employers will think that
you lack attention to detail as well, so you just want to emulate the, uh, style, your
work style with your resume style. Your resume is one place where it may not make sense to
make a stand on multiple Englishes, so you’ll want to instead use American Standardized
English and more uh, when it comes to grammar and spelling, to stand as a marker for your
professionalism. You’ll also want to include signs of achievement. Employers will want
to see that you have significant accomplishments in your previous jobs, and basically that
you haven’t just been sitting around all day. So you wanna think about key projects
that you’ve been responsible for and make sure that you include those on your resume
under your work experience. In addition employers will be looking to see if you don’t have
the qualifications they are looking for, specifically, you might also want to keep in mind that employers
are looking to see if you’re someone who is trending upward and who they can trust
to stay at their organization and make an impact. When it comes to your job descriptions,
it’s important that you be specific. If you don’t have details it might just seem
like you’re making stuff up or padding your resume, so you wanna make sure that your previous
experience that you include in your resume is relevant towards the job that you’re
applying to and tailor your resume for that job specifically. Hiring committees, when
they take a look at your CV, just a reminder that your CV is focused more on, uh, the wide
scope of your career as opposed to, and your academic pursuits in comparison to a resume.
So if you’re applying for a faculty or a postdoctoral position at universities and
places like that, you wanna make sure that your CVs demonstrate all of these qualities
that we name here. Consistent focus, evidence of disciplinary awareness, emphasis on findings,
and of course emphasis on teaching or mentoring too. These are all parts of your CV that hiring
committees are going to look at, specifically in regards to scholarship, teaching, and service.
In general, research schools or R1 schools are going to place most of the emphasis on
research just like the name implies, but if you’re looking at a smaller liberal arts
college that focus is probably going to be on teaching and service, so you want to make
sure you emphasize either research if you’re applying to an R1 school or teaching and service
if you’re applying to a liberal arts college. You wanna do your research and figure out
what kind of school you’re applying to, and tailor your CV to that particular institution.
It would also be beneficial for you to undertake a certain amount of research as well, reach
out to graduate students and to faculty to learn more about the school as well and also
check out graduate students’ bios or pages on school websites as well as faculty bios
as well because those will sometimes have sample CVs with them and you can sort of model
your CV off of those examples. When it comes to resumes, some common errors include that
students will often make in their drafts— sorry, some mistakes that students often make
in their drafts recur and are more frequent because they don’t transfer all of their
resume content from one Word file to another, so if you’re transferring information from
a specific Word file into a new resume file, make sure that the proper information transfers.
Make sure that when you’re working with different files that you don’t accidentally
leave out important information. You’ll also — people also typically overuse bullet
points when it comes to creating resumes, while a bulleted list is a good idea, make
sure that you don’t go beyond four bullet points. Anything over five bullet points is
not emphasizing information anymore, it’s merely creating the impression of a long list.
It might be helpful for you to think about bullet points as snapshots or just little
pieces of actions you performed on the job, kind of going back to what we talked about
earlier, significant achievements, mentioning those as kind of the cornerstones in each
position, uh, and including those as snapshots of actions you’ve performed on the job.
And then, uh, in contrast or I guess kind of along the same lines some common errors
people make with their CVs, uh, are of course people will often mistake a CV for a resume
and like, leave, like Isaac stated earlier CVs are different from resumes, a CV is a
scholarly narrative that presents you as a candidate over a long period of time. People
often forget to display their research or teaching experience in context of the mission
and values of a university department or a lab when putting their CV together, so you
wanna make sure you do that. I would recommend that you do some preliminary research about
the department or a lab, going back to what I said earlier, and pay attention to newsletters
or recent projects and grants, look at CVs and project descriptions in faculty and grad
student bios like I mentioned, to get a sense of the sort of culture and research mission
of the institution you’re applying to. Another mistake that people often make with CVs is
forgetting to display their research outcomes with accompanying dates to showcase progression
over time, so you wanna hit on that progression since a CV is telling a narrative like I said,
and make sure your outcomes with those dates are included in your CV. To tell you about
how you can improve your resumes and CV, uh, Elizabeth is gonna take over. Alright, so
first things up on content. So content, resumes versus CVs. Resumes usually have sentence
fragments rather than complete sentences. You’ll notice that verb tenses should be
consistent and demonstrate actions that emphasize cause and effect in the job. You can see this
by looking at examples in your field as well, pay attention to descriptions and you’ll
see what I’m talking about. By contrast a CV can either include sentence fragments
or you’ll sometimes notice that complete sentences work as well. And CVs often offer
more detail. The language of a CV emphasizes growth over time and should be a portrait
of yourself as a scholarly candidate. You’ll also wanna emphasize context, so explain your
contribution to the lab, the university, and the larger academic discipline. You should
strive to present as a member of an academic community. Alright, so a common pitfall that
students encounter when they work on their resumes is forgetting to customize their documents.
HR managers can usually see this occurring in the objective statement. A common tendency
is for students to write a generic objective statement that is not customized to the company’s
position and the unique skills and requirements for that position. So just keep in mind that
when you’re talking about your objective statement that it should not only state your
intentions for applying, how much they want the job, that they occasionally forget to
emphasize what needs that they can meet for employers. The content for CVs should include
measurable outcomes for both teaching and research. Also academic CVs don’t typically
include objective statements but usually have profile statements that act as short academic
bios. So, if you take a look at the example CV profile you’ll notice a few features.
The writer has connected his personality traits, so for example enthusiasm and determination,
with certificates and fire engineer skills. He’s explaining his personality in relation
to concrete skills and contributions that provide evidence of his ability. So in other
words it isn’t enough for you to say that you’re hard working or determined. You’ll
need to back up these statements and provide proof about your accomplishments and character.
Alright so now we’re up to the final resume checklist. So to sum things up, the four most
important things for your resume is number one, making sure that you know what the required
qualifications and desired qualifications the company is asking for, and the values
of the organization. Your resume needs to be tailored to your specific audience. So
one of the best ways to do this is to do your research. Look up the company’s info, their
history, see what you can get on, in terms of information on this company and if you’re
not sure, don’t be afraid to ask. Number two, you need to have a readable and clear
design for your resume. Keep in mind that you want something that is readable by both
humans and robots so this goes back to the applicant tracking systems that I believe
Brian mentioned earlier. Number three, pay attention to the details. Clarity, grammar,
spelling, and concision, those all matter. Number four, you need to also keep in mind
how much narrative you’re putting in to the resume. In some ways you can think of
the resume as the bones of your experience and qualifications. The cover letter fits
a nice narrative structure over that and allows the recruiter to see your personality and
qualities that may not come through in the resume. Okay so this is the checklist of things
that you can go through before you submit your resume or as you’re working on revising
it. I would recommend saving this slide or taking a screenshot or whatever works for
you so that you have it for reference later. All this information that we talked about
can kind of be hard to think about as a whole when you’re working on revisions, so this
is a good quick hit checklist for you to kind of have in the back of your head while you’re
working on these things. Hi, so this is Isaac again, here to talk through an activity that
you can work through to solidify some of the things that we’ve been talking about. So
one of the things that we mentioned briefly during the presentation was making sure that
you have strong verbs. Having strong verbs will help emphasize your skills and experience,
especially when you’re thinking through the bullet points you wanna make sure that
you have strong verbs to start off each point, each fragment that you have on your different
experiences. Um, so after this workshop you might wanna take a few minutes to look over
the handout and then work through this activity. So the first step for this handout is to highlight
all of the verbs on your resume or CV. Look over your document and see if you can identify
any repeated or unclear verbs. Then look at the action verb list we provided on the handout
and ask yourself if these verbs need to be classified under one of the categories on
the slide, so which category does a verb fit under? So also just as you’re working through
this too, make note if there are things that you’re having trouble with or you need help
with because that could be something that you bring back when you make an appointment
at the Writing Lab. So after you’ve gone through your resume or CV and highlighted
those verbs and changed it to one of the verbs on the handout we have, read through your
sentences on your document and see if you have included any result-specific language.
Result-specific language includes prepositional phrases: to, for, by, regarding, on, etc.
So again when you’re thinking about constructing your resume or CV you wanna make sure that
you’re showing that this is something I did, but then also it had an outcome. You
wanna show that, like, I have both the skills here and that these skills are producing results
that’s going to benefit the organization you’re applying to or the college or university
you’re applying to. Finally to wrap things up I just wanna thank you so much for watching
the workshop with us and working through some of these things. Please come and visit us
at the Writing Lab if you need more help or would like a real live person to read through
your resume or CV with you. I don’t know where you are right now or if you can make
in-person appointments or, that, if you can actually, or just online, but the information
on how to schedule appointments is on the screen and you can use our software to create
an appointment and talk to a tutor. Thank you so much and have a great day.
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