One of the coaching inquiries I get is people who want help with their job interviews. They say, “I land interviews, but I don’t move past the first stage. I need interview coaching.”
Sometimes they are right, and in 1-3 coaching sessions and a mock interview, we develop those skills. But, I want to be totally candid about this …that’s okay, right?
So, here’s the truth: It’s usually a resume issue. Your resume doesn’t sound like you. Hiring people are surprised when you show up & seem nothing like what you appeared on your resume.
What happens is that you create your resume like this:
- you simply copy and paste your job description into your resume and update a few words & accomplishments
- you see a pretty resume template online and you copy a bit from one, a bit from another and a line from the job ad (you want to hit those keywords right?)
- you hire the cheapest resume writer you can find (anything under $800 is cheap for resumes…this is a document that can earn you anywhere from $48k+ to $300k+, so it’s worth hiring someone awesome)
- you don’t write any words that you use in real life because you’re trying to position yourself as an expert.
And I get it, writing a resume isn’t fun. And they make you question everything.
You have to back up everything in your resume at the job interview. Not just the dates you worked, but what you accomplished at every job.
Imagine you were hiring for a new employee to lead your change management training program and their resume said this:
“Customized the change methodolgy curriculum and delivered training to managers”
You’d call them, right? It sounds like they customized a program for a company and can train internal managers on it. Perfect.
So you call them, excited you found the right person and you ask “can you tell me about a time you customized a program for internal use?” and they say:
“Oh for sure. There was this outdated change program at the office, so I found a template online and I changed it up for own company, added in a logo, and then asked the managers if they had any questions. We had a few changes that were coming down the pipeline and needed to be on the same page about it. It was a decent starting point and gave us something to work with before we could bring a change management expert in.”
If this person is going to talk this way at their interview, a better way to write the resume would be:
“Researched and found a change methodology curriculum to use internally. Changed up the content and shared it with management for feedback”
If the person had this on their resume, the answer given above is not disappointing to the hiring person. It’s a match.
How do you write a resume to sound more like yourself?
- Gather your career stories.
- You get over yourself. I created a class on how to get over yourself, so you can grow your career without self-sabotaging.
- Know your ideal work environment. If your ideal work environment is corporate and you speak corporate all the time, then write your resume with that tone. If you are into a more casual or creative environment, write with that tone.
- Join me for resuMAY. In May, I am leading workshops and live writing sessions to ease the resume writing process. If you know you need to update your resume but are not sure how join us.
Before you send out another resume, the best question to ask is: does this sound like me? And if it doesn’t, weave some of you back in there.
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