Friday, November 25, 2005
Resumes
Even before the first semester of MBA School even started, the career center at BYU was giving us resume advice. We had speakers, seminars, and 2nd year students all assigned to help us craft the perfect message. Many MBA programs require applicants to submit a resume, so I’ve decided to list some resume pointers that may be helpful to applicants to BYU’s MBA program.
1 page
I thought everyone in the world knew this, but I still see resumes from people who, either don’t know about this rule, or don’t think it applies to them. Unless you have over 10 years of significant work experience you have no justification in making your resume longer than one page. Doing so puts everything you have at risk. People will usually just look at your resume really fast, and if it interests them they’ll read on. But, if they pick up a really long and wordy document, they are very likely to be put off by it. In reality, if you can’t communicate the essence of who you are in the first few lines, then you are failing at communication.
It isn’t your job to list everything you’ve ever done and let the reader thoughtfully draw the conclusions for you – they won’t give your resume that much attention. You need to make it very clear for them the type of person you are. However, on the other hand you can’t just come out and say things like “hardworking, committed” – that isn’t going to fly. There’s no evidence for it and lacks credibility. You want your readers to draw their own conclusions, but you want to make it very easy for them to do. You want them to think in their minds “this person is hardworking and committed.” Here’s how you do it.
The “CAR” method
C.A.R. stands for Context, Action, and Result. In your brief sentences you should try to tell your audience the context of the situation, the action you took to solve it, and the result that you achieved (with quantifiable numbers whenever possible). Here are a couple of examples:
Eliminated major source of customer complaints and team turn-over by spear-heading automatic testing that reduced team’s record defect count to 0
Here the context was customer complaints, attrition, and a record defect count. The action was leading a testing strategy. The result was a zero defect count. It’s hard to pack sentences to tell the whole story, but is worth doing. I wasn’t able to include the result on attrition and customer complaints – but I did include another bullet point as follows:
Reversed team exodus by recruiting and interviewing dozens of potential new-hires through networking, cold-calls, and career fairs (team grew from 2 to 7)
In this example the context was, again attrition. The action was recruiting, and the result was that our team grew – with quantifiable results. Again, whenever you can have numbers here or percentages the better. One someone reads this they draw their own positive conclusions about being smart, hardworking, resourceful, or whatever. This also invites them in an interview setting to ask you more questions since they only got a brief glimpse of the full story.
Leading with strong verbs
In the examples above I led the sentence with “Eliminated” and “Reversed” to start the sentence. It’s a good idea to use verbs such as led, initiated, created et cetera and don’t worry about pronouns, articles (such as “a” or “the”), or even punctuation that may interfere. For instance, never start out a bullet point with the word “I”. It’s implied with every sentence so you don’t need it; in fact it will appear a bit ego-centric if they read the word “I” throughout (same things for essays and letters, try to avoid it). In the above examples I used the past tense. If you’re still doing your present job you can use gerund “ing” tense of each verb.
Another advantage of leading with verbs is that your bullets will be parallel. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here, but it’s very important. You shouldn’t, for instance, have one line that says “I created a new product concept” followed by a line saying “It was my responsibility to”. The two sentences should have the same basic format – they should be parallel. By starting off with strong verbs sort, parallelism just comes naturally.
Your focus should be on clarity and simplicity. Typically, when you are writing numbers you spell them out if they are equal two or less than ten, and write the number format if they are greater (but be consistent within the same sentence). However, when writing for a resume, you should typically always use the number format – for instance say “5” instead of “five” because it jumps out more, is quicker to read and noticeable at quick glances. Also, you probably don’t need to worry about periods – just use punctuation where it adds clarity and makes it easier to read.
The Golden Triangle
On your resume, image an imaginary triangle that extends from the top left corner to the top right corner and down a few inches back to the left side of the paper. This is the “golden triangle” – the place your readers will spend most of their time. Try to pack everything you really want to say in this area. Your reader’s eyes will naturally stay in this space. For this reason many people choose to have an Executive Summary section at the very top with four bullets or so that gives the most important points from the resume. If the job you are applying for has listed requirements A, B, C, and D, then use this section to hit those points in that exact order. Make it really, really obvious that you are the right fit for the position. If I were looking for a position of managing computer programmers, for instance, I would include this in my Executive Summary:
MBA with strong quantitative skills and 10 years of computer programming experience
Presentation
In terms of how your resume looks, make it a work of art, but don’t make it artistic. For business professionals, is important that you don’t make it look fancy or trendy. Stay within 10-12 point font and leave plenty of inviting white space. If your presentation is lacking, or you have misspelled words or other major errors, your reader will likely assume you are even more sloppy about your day-to-day work when even less is at stake. I recommend that if you are using Microsoft Word you use a table to a make sure things stay in the correct location when sent to other who may have a different version of Word or different display settings. However, if you use a table, be sure and set its border color to be white. Otherwise, they’ll see a soft gray line when looking at a digital copy. One other pointer about Word – it saves info about the document you may not want your readers to see. For instance, I looked at someone’s resume for a job by clicking “File”, then “Properties” and noticed that they originally made the resume up for an entirely different company than the one they were currently applying for. It’s not a huge deal, but be careful what other information you may be sending along unknowingly.
International Resumes
The rules for resumes vary widely by country. The ideas mentioned here are just some things I’ve learned when applying to US schools or companies. Sometimes international applicants make the mistake of including such things as their picture, marital status, religion, age, or sex on their resume. This may be OK, or even expected in some countries, but it is not appropriate in the US.
1 page
I thought everyone in the world knew this, but I still see resumes from people who, either don’t know about this rule, or don’t think it applies to them. Unless you have over 10 years of significant work experience you have no justification in making your resume longer than one page. Doing so puts everything you have at risk. People will usually just look at your resume really fast, and if it interests them they’ll read on. But, if they pick up a really long and wordy document, they are very likely to be put off by it. In reality, if you can’t communicate the essence of who you are in the first few lines, then you are failing at communication.
It isn’t your job to list everything you’ve ever done and let the reader thoughtfully draw the conclusions for you – they won’t give your resume that much attention. You need to make it very clear for them the type of person you are. However, on the other hand you can’t just come out and say things like “hardworking, committed” – that isn’t going to fly. There’s no evidence for it and lacks credibility. You want your readers to draw their own conclusions, but you want to make it very easy for them to do. You want them to think in their minds “this person is hardworking and committed.” Here’s how you do it.
The “CAR” method
C.A.R. stands for Context, Action, and Result. In your brief sentences you should try to tell your audience the context of the situation, the action you took to solve it, and the result that you achieved (with quantifiable numbers whenever possible). Here are a couple of examples:
Eliminated major source of customer complaints and team turn-over by spear-heading automatic testing that reduced team’s record defect count to 0
Here the context was customer complaints, attrition, and a record defect count. The action was leading a testing strategy. The result was a zero defect count. It’s hard to pack sentences to tell the whole story, but is worth doing. I wasn’t able to include the result on attrition and customer complaints – but I did include another bullet point as follows:
Reversed team exodus by recruiting and interviewing dozens of potential new-hires through networking, cold-calls, and career fairs (team grew from 2 to 7)
In this example the context was, again attrition. The action was recruiting, and the result was that our team grew – with quantifiable results. Again, whenever you can have numbers here or percentages the better. One someone reads this they draw their own positive conclusions about being smart, hardworking, resourceful, or whatever. This also invites them in an interview setting to ask you more questions since they only got a brief glimpse of the full story.
Leading with strong verbs
In the examples above I led the sentence with “Eliminated” and “Reversed” to start the sentence. It’s a good idea to use verbs such as led, initiated, created et cetera and don’t worry about pronouns, articles (such as “a” or “the”), or even punctuation that may interfere. For instance, never start out a bullet point with the word “I”. It’s implied with every sentence so you don’t need it; in fact it will appear a bit ego-centric if they read the word “I” throughout (same things for essays and letters, try to avoid it). In the above examples I used the past tense. If you’re still doing your present job you can use gerund “ing” tense of each verb.
Another advantage of leading with verbs is that your bullets will be parallel. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here, but it’s very important. You shouldn’t, for instance, have one line that says “I created a new product concept” followed by a line saying “It was my responsibility to”. The two sentences should have the same basic format – they should be parallel. By starting off with strong verbs sort, parallelism just comes naturally.
Your focus should be on clarity and simplicity. Typically, when you are writing numbers you spell them out if they are equal two or less than ten, and write the number format if they are greater (but be consistent within the same sentence). However, when writing for a resume, you should typically always use the number format – for instance say “5” instead of “five” because it jumps out more, is quicker to read and noticeable at quick glances. Also, you probably don’t need to worry about periods – just use punctuation where it adds clarity and makes it easier to read.
The Golden Triangle
On your resume, image an imaginary triangle that extends from the top left corner to the top right corner and down a few inches back to the left side of the paper. This is the “golden triangle” – the place your readers will spend most of their time. Try to pack everything you really want to say in this area. Your reader’s eyes will naturally stay in this space. For this reason many people choose to have an Executive Summary section at the very top with four bullets or so that gives the most important points from the resume. If the job you are applying for has listed requirements A, B, C, and D, then use this section to hit those points in that exact order. Make it really, really obvious that you are the right fit for the position. If I were looking for a position of managing computer programmers, for instance, I would include this in my Executive Summary:
MBA with strong quantitative skills and 10 years of computer programming experience
Presentation
In terms of how your resume looks, make it a work of art, but don’t make it artistic. For business professionals, is important that you don’t make it look fancy or trendy. Stay within 10-12 point font and leave plenty of inviting white space. If your presentation is lacking, or you have misspelled words or other major errors, your reader will likely assume you are even more sloppy about your day-to-day work when even less is at stake. I recommend that if you are using Microsoft Word you use a table to a make sure things stay in the correct location when sent to other who may have a different version of Word or different display settings. However, if you use a table, be sure and set its border color to be white. Otherwise, they’ll see a soft gray line when looking at a digital copy. One other pointer about Word – it saves info about the document you may not want your readers to see. For instance, I looked at someone’s resume for a job by clicking “File”, then “Properties” and noticed that they originally made the resume up for an entirely different company than the one they were currently applying for. It’s not a huge deal, but be careful what other information you may be sending along unknowingly.
International Resumes
The rules for resumes vary widely by country. The ideas mentioned here are just some things I’ve learned when applying to US schools or companies. Sometimes international applicants make the mistake of including such things as their picture, marital status, religion, age, or sex on their resume. This may be OK, or even expected in some countries, but it is not appropriate in the US.
