As some of you are seeking jobs actively and have a resume that may be a bit old, not modern or relevant in today’s environment. Time is the essence and my bandwidth is limited due to life, kids, dog, work, stocks … so I won’t be able to go thru each individual resumes. I have already recommended some of you. Plus preparations to recommend few more next week… therefore, here the tips for resume:
- Make your resume visually striking
- Focus on narrative and your career aspiration vs. past technologies. Technologies will come and go!! Make it clear “How you keep yourself relevant?”. What drives you? Your resume should be able to convey it clearly and stand out with key professional experiences that helped you to ladder up till today!
- Highlight outcomes that you contributed like Transformational Experience, Increased Customer Loyalty, New business Solution that added new $5m revenue, Enhanced Operational Excellence that saved $10m, Modernized legacy platform with cloud architecture that eliminated 5000 servers in DC etc.
- Start your every point/sentence with action or verb… Spearheaded…, Reimagined, Saved $$$, Mentored Product Engineering Teams in India and Malaysia, Architected, Led, Engineered, Increased, Decreased, Maximized, Launched, Delivered etc.
- Avoid useless stuff like Business Requirements, System Testing, System integration etc. or focus on systems and technologies… and internal mumbo jumbo of technologies… don’t highlight much managerial activities… highlight on functional leadership areas!!
- Drive points clearly about business alignment, resiliency, agility, new growth, new revenue, co-creation, innovation, digital intensity, acceleration, iterative POCs, governance, steering, etc.
- Share methods and knowledge that can be easily institutionalized in other environments like frameworks, methodology, growth mindset… such as Design Thinking, SAFe Agile, Human Centric Design, Business Case Modeling, Value Realization Frameworks etc.
- Ensure your resume reflects an aspirational side… and what new you bring in the org, team, passion areas, new blood, new thinking, new culture, entrepreneurship etc.
- Don’t hesitate to put in your resume additional areas that complete you as a person. Example, I put cricket, mountaineering as well as now stocks club (to demonstrate investing mindset and financial expertise). Cricket demonstrate ability to lead community and teams, mountaineering represent my passion, individual goals, differentiation and mental strength.
- Awards, Certifications, Education is good but put more focus managing change, leading change and even your own renewal. Not you earned cert because it was required! Self investment! Big conferences that you join, you as a evangelist, as a speaker and story teller!
Don’t forget to use tools like Word Cloud… feed your resume to see what stands out. Example in few companies, the resume is fed into few analytics tools to evaluate resume alignment with role (as we focus on Digital Transformation)….
Having a solid one pager is key! If you cannot get attention on 1 pager, 10 pager will do nothing! So making sexy and kick ass one pager is the key! That’s where your creativity and time should be invested!
Hope it helps!! 🙏
Good luck!
