Let's talk about resumes.
At some point in your life, probably sooner than you think,
you're gonna have to write one of these things.
And whether you're applying for a job or an internship,
or in some cases even a scholarship,
your resume is likely going to be the first thing
that the decision maker sees, when they're evaluating you.
Which means they're important.
Now, because these things are so important,
then any recruiter or hiring manager
is obviously gonna give every one they receive
the utmost care and attention, right?
Wrong.
In reality, most resumes are never actually seen by
a human recruiter.
And of those that actually do make it to a recruiters desk,
most are unceremoniously thrown in the trash
after just a few seconds.
And this is just a numbers game.
In fact, Google alone gets over 1 million resumes per year.
And that breaks down to over 2,700 a day.
Now, those numbers seem daunting
and they can be a little bit intimidating,
but there is some good news.
Because a lot of people make some really common mistakes
on their resumes that could put them out of the running.
And if you could learn to avoid those mistakes,
you're gonna have a huge leg-up on the competition.
So, today we are going over five of
the worst resume mistakes you can make,
and we're gonna talk about how you can avoid them
so that you get that dream job that you are going for.
The first big mistake we're gonna go over
is the tendency for people to write their experience section
in a way that lists their job duties
rather than their jobs accomplishments.
But the thing is, employers do no care about
what you were expected to do at your last job.
They care about what you can do for them,
and they wanna see concrete examples
from your past experience that point to that.
And since most of them are not Albus Dumbledore
and they don't have a pensieve sitting in a corner,
they can't just peer into the past and watch you at work.
Which means it's your responsibility to clearly
and succinctly show what you accomplished
in that little amount of space you have.
Here's an example from my own resume.
During my senior year,
I had a job on campus at a research department.
And I got hired as a web developer
and I did maintain the website, I did make changes to it.
But at one point, I also had a small, probably three hour
project where I created an automation script
that ended up saving the company about 240 hours of work.
And since people there were getting paid about nice bucks
an hour, you can do the math on how much money that saved.
Now even though that project only took me a few hours to do,
in the eyes of a hiring manager,
it would have been by far the best indication
of my creative problem solving abilities
and my ability to save their company money in the future,
out of anything I did there.
Now, you might be thinking to yourself right now,
"I don't have a story like this,
"I haven't saved a company a ton of hours
"or thousands of dollars yet."
But what you do have,
is the ability to make your achievements as concrete
and as specific as possible, and to quantify them.
To look at another example from my resume.
During my junior year,
I was a resident advisor at my university.
And I could've just said,
"Helped to smoothly run a community of students,"
but I put 62 students because that gives a more concrete
and quantified example of how many students I was managing.
Big mistake number two is, believe it or not,
typos and grammatical errors.
And you might be thinking,
"This is the most obvious boring tip that could ever
"be on a video like this."
But it needs to be said
because I, myself, have fallen victim to it.
During the summer before my sophomore year,
I was getting ready for the career fair
and I created what I thought was the perfect resume.
I had a ton of experiences, tons of clubs,
tons of part time jobs that I could show off.
I was thinking, "I'm gonna go into that career fair,
"and I am going to crush all the competition."
But, to check off all the boxes,
I decided to get a resume review
from my career counselor first.
So, I go into her office, I sit down,
and I'm thinking this is going to be
a five minute meeting.
She's going to give me a gold star and say,
"Thomas, this was the best resume I've ever reviewed!"
But instead, she pulls out a red pen
and starts marking stuff up.
And as she's marking things,
I start to see that she's marking out typos.
Things that I did not catch myself.
And I thought my resume was perfect.
So, if you can,
get your resume reviewed by your career counselor.
And if you can't,
at least have somebody that you trust, who isn't you,
run over it before you start handing it out.
Because we are always more scrutinizing
and more careful when we're proofreading someone else's work
than our own.
The third big mistake is listing all of your experience
in purely chronological order instead of it's relevancy
to the position you're applying to.
A lot of people think they're actually supposed
to list their experience in chronological order.
But this is something that you shouldn't do
because you really don't have a whole lot of time
to catch the recruiters eye.
So you wanna put the most relevant thing first.
In fact, according to a study done by theladders.com,
recruiters spend an average of just 6 seconds
looking at a resume before throwing it into the trash
and going to to the next one.
So, if you're a computer science major applying for a job,
and last summer you did an internship
in software development where you literally built
and shipped software, but then after that you just, like,
worked at Burger King during the year.
You definitely want to put
that software development internship at the top
because a recruiter at a computer science company
is not going to care so much about Burger King.
Now you can definitely go to far here,
which means that there is a balance that has to be struck.
In fact, I got an email from somebody
in their mid 20s recently who asked me if it would be
a good idea to put a mission trip they did when they
were 11 years old on their resume.
And as I was trying to answer that persons question,
I imagined myself as the hiring director looking
at that persons resume.
And all I could think of was that
something like that on a resume is gonna look like
just grasping at straws.
I'm gonna think, "Why isn't there anything else you've done
"in the intervening 15 years, that deserves to kick
"that thing off the resume."
Now, maybe this doesn't apply to people
who have already had long and illustrious careers,
who have 20 page CVs and tons of awards
on their shelf in their office.
But if you are just looking for an entry-level position,
or you're just a few years into your career,
then recency does matter.
The fourth big mistake that is really common to students
especially, is placing to much emphasis on paid work.
A lot of students think that if they didn't get paid for it,
it doesn't really count and it doesn't belong
in that experience section.
But here's the thing,
employers don't actually look at it that way.
Maybe you're like Ron Swanson.
You've been working in the quarry
since you were 12 years old and you have tons
of part time jobs that you were paid for
that you can put on your resume.
But most students don't have that kind of experience.
For the most part,
when students are looking for their first entry-level job,
they don't have a whole lot of paid work under their belt.
And when they do, it's often stuff like working at Subway,
or flipping burgers, or working as a cashier.
Honorable work to be sure,
but it often doesn't exemplify the traits
that recruiters are looking for in more technical positions.
But many times those same students
have volunteer experiences, extracurriculars,
and clubs where they did gain experience in what
the recruiters are looking for.
And if that's you,
you should definitely put those experiences
right at the top of your experience section.
Don't hide them away in a clubs and volunteering section.
And that brings us to our final big mistake on the list,
which is using the same resume
to apply for every single position you go for.
This is a huge mistake.
Because again, you've got just six seconds
to catch your recruiters eye.
So make sure you're tailoring your resume
to every single position that you're applying for.
If you're an active student,
then it's more than likely you have
a diverse set of experiences and skills.
So when you're going for a position, ask yourself,
what are the exact skills that are gonna look the best
to a recruiter hiring for this position?
And make sure you tailor your resume
to show those things first.
If you have both freelance writing experience
and coding experience, then a writing job
is gonna take a different resume than a coding job.
And the other important thing to note here, to be honest,
is that using the same resume
to apply for every single job is downright lazy.
And it shows, which is bad,
because honestly one of the top qualities
that recruiters across every single industry is looking for,
is a clear indication that this candidate
is going to go above and beyond.
And I can kinda weigh in here myself at this point,
because I actually have eight people on my team now.
And when I'm looking to hire somebody,
the top qualities in my mind are clear work ethic,
a clear ability to solve problems independently,
and culture fit.
If somebody doesn't check those three boxes,
then their technical skills don't really matter to me.
And, on the flip side, if they do check those boxes
and they have a slight deficiency in the technical skills,
that often doesn't matter because I know as long as they're
a quick learner and can solve problems,
I can train them in those technical areas.
Now, when it comes to your resume,
the best way you're going to demonstrate these qualities
is by letting your past accomplishments speak for themselves
by making sure that experience section
shows off accomplishments in a very clear and specific way.
But, tailoring your resume to the company
and showing that you put effort into the application process
goes a long way as well.
Now, that being said,
when it comes to showing off those more intrinsic qualities,
your resume is not the best tool for the job.
Honestly, those are probably gonna come out most
in the interview when you have real face-to-face interaction
with that hiring manager.
But before the interview happens,
another great tool for showing those qualities
is having a website.
If you have your own website,
then you can build a portfolio that shows off your work
in the way that it was meant to be seen.
You can show it off in all its details
and you can also show the process that you used,
which shows your work ethic
and your problem solving abilities.
It also just gives you a much more customized
and vibrant way to present yourself,
as you can see from my website here,
which is why I think that every ambitious student
should have their own website.
Now, if you're in high school or you're early on in college
and you're not ready to build
a website for yourself just yet,
I do think that you should, at the very least,
go and secure your domain name.
I was born just a bit too late to get thomasfrank.com,
but I was able to get my hands on thomasjfrank.com,
which is pretty good.
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