– So you're applying for a job. Everything right now is going great. You've entered your
name in the first field and you've even spelled it correctly, but then you come to the next part, which says please upload your resume. Oh no, I don't even have
a resume, you think. And what's worse, you don't even know how to properly write one. Fortunately, at some
point your future self traveled back to the past
and uploaded an entire video about how to write a
resume full of amazing tips and tricks that are nearly guaranteed to help you land that job. This is that video. Thanks, time travel. So in this video, I'm gonna
be sharing some useful tips that you can use
to craft a great resume, and along the way, we're
going to establish the five maybe six, depending on who you are, sections that should be on that resume. Before we go on, though, I do want to mention something important. There is no best way to craft a resume.
Go online looking for
resume tips and you're gonna find 18 billion differing opinions, all from so-called resume experts. Why? Well, think about the purpose of a resume. A resume is a brief
summary of your skills, your achievements, and your experience, and how those relate to the specific job or company that you're applying to, and the job of that resume
is to get your posterior into the chair across the
desk from a hiring manager so you can explain in further detail why you're the best person to hire. So your resume is
essentially an advertisement, and as I'm sure you're well aware, advertisements come in all
sorts of different forms, there's no one perfect way
to craft an advertisement that will work every single time. So keep in mind you're
crafting an advertisement, there are definitely
general best practices that you should follow,
but nothing so specific as never have an objective statement or always hae an objective
statement is going to apply in every single case, and this means that there is no one way to craft a perfect resume.
There's no perfect resume template. All you can do is seek
to make yours great, and to the end, let's get
into the tips and sections that you should have on yours. All right, first and most importantly, you're gonna wanna have
a section that lists your favorite anime, Fullmetal
Alchemist Brotherhood and Space Dandy are great picks, but if you have Naruto as number one, you're probably dead in the water. Wait, I read that wrong,
actually first section is gonna be your name and
contact information. That actually makes more sense. So obviously this section should include your name, and if
you're submitting this resume directly to a company, it should also include your phone
number in case they want to call you directly for an interview, though I will note that if you're going to be posting your resume
online somewhere publicly like on a personal website, I
would leave the phone number off just so you don't get spammed. In addition to all those
basics, you should also include a website and
portfolio if you can. I think this is really really important.
So believe it or not, I've
been running my company for almost 10 years at this point, and I have hired several
people during that time, and every single time I've
set up to hire somebody, the thing I'm most interested
to see on applications is examples of completed work, and I am not alone in this desire, so use the rest of the
tips that we're gonna go through in just a second
to craft your resume and make it shine as best as it can, but also give the hiring manager an option to go look at a portfolio or some examples of the work that you've
done if they so choose. That brings us to the next
section on your resume, which I believe should usually
be your work experience. And the first thing that I have
to say about this section is that you should be putting
your most relevant experience first given the job that
you're applying for, which means that you should
be tailoring your resume to every single position you apply for.
Yeah, it's more work, but it is worth it. Now for the people out there
who already have established careers, and who aren't
jumping into a completely new industry, reverse
chronological order usually achieves this, but this
tip is very relevant for students and for new grads, because you often have
great summer experience, great internships, things like that, but then you have to make
ends meat during the semester, and you flipped burgers and mowed lawns, but if you're applying for a great job at a tech company, and you
had a great tech internship last summer and then
afterwards mowed lawns just to make some extra pocket money, you don't want to put
the lawn mowing first, because if I'm a tech
recruiter, I'm looking at your resume and the first thing I see is lawn mowing experience,
I'm probably gonna move on to the next resume,
I'm not gonna look down further and see that you
have great experience on your second item that's listed.
The most important
thing you can understand about your resume, other than the fact that it is an advertisement, is that recruiters don't
have a whole lot of time to look at it, you might
put a lot of time into it, you might put all your
work into crafting it and making it the best that you can, but when it gets to a recruiter's desk, it's probably in a stack
of hundreds of others, and according to an article put up by the ladders.com a few years ago, the average resume only gets
six seconds of attention before the recruiter makes
a fit or no fit decision. So you want to make
those six seconds count. All right, on to the next main tip. When you're listing out
your job descriptions, highlight achievements rather than duties, and if you can, back up those
achievements with numbers. The reality of the situation
is that hiring managers are not that interested
in what your duties were at your last job, what
you were expected to do. They're a lot more interested
in what you actually accomplished, especially if
there are specifics involved.
So for example, listing
something like organized an introductory program attended
by 3,500 incoming freshman and helped book four professional speakers and workshop leaders, works
a lot better than just responsible for organizing introductory program for new freshman. And I will say for this tip
in particular, you may want to into the description down below after watching the rest of the video, because I'll be linking to my own resume which has some great
examples of using specifics and numbers in that
work experience section. But of course, there is
one elephant in the room for many of you, which is the question, what if I don't have any experience? Well, this is known as
the experience paradox.
Many jobs needs you to have experience before they'll hire you, but
to get experience you need to have a job, right? Now, while the experience
paradox is difficult to overcome, it is not
impossible to overcome, and one thing I want to
note here before I talk about my main tip related to it, is that a lot of companies
offer internships, and when a company builds
an internship program, they're often looking
for promising candidates that show a lot of potential,
but maybe who don't have a whole lot of industry experience, so if that what you're lacking, then show some other qualities and you may get hired in
those kinds of positions, but here's my main tip. For many, many fields out there, nobody has to give you permission for you to go and do work that's
worth showing off on a resume. Want to become a web developer? Well, then spend a few weeks learning how to build a website or a
web app I your own time, build it, post it on the internet, and list that on your
resume as work experience.
My friend Martin actually started working with me as a web developer and I hired him because he had build a
blog in his spare time and I knew that he knew
word press design, PHP, CSS, all the skills that I was looking for in a web developer when I
needed my website rebuilt. That one is easy, though, right? What if you want to compose film scores? Well, get yourself a copy of Reaper, find some cheap or free
virtual instruments and go rescore public domain movies that you can get on archive.org or ask a friend who's a
videographer if you can score their work, post it online, use that to get bigger and bigger gigs. And what if you want to be a doctor? All right, admittedly that is a tough one, and I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that you can get resume experience in literally any profession
just by tinkering on a computer in your bedroom, because, well, you can't. Some professions out there
are just ore gate-kept than others, and many require experience with equipment that you
just cannot get on your own.
But there are still things
that you can do to stand out. For example, my friend Ryan,
back when he was a pre-med, volunteered for an organization called Doctors Without Walls. And due to his experience
with that organization, he was able to put together
a really really impressive med school application,
which got him accepted into several schools,
even though his grades as a pre-med weren't as
good as some of his peers. All right, let's move on
to the education section, which on my resume actually comes after my work experience section, so I guess the first tip I want to talk about here is how to strategically place your education section,
so if you are in college or if you just got out of college it may make sense to put
your education section before your work experience,
especially if you're trying to get into a more established field with bigger and older
companies who may still put a lot of value on
the school you went to and your academic achievements, but as a general rule, solid,
impressive experience is gonna matter to most companies more than the school that you attended, especially for newer companies and companies in fields
like design and technology, so as your experience gets
more and more impressive as you accumulate more of it, think about highlighting
that before your education.
That just leaves us
with the question of GPA or grade point average. Do you include it on your
resume or do you leave it off? Well, here's what I was
told when I was in college. If your GPA is a 3.2 or
above, put that on your resume right alongside your
degree in your school. If not, leave it off. And the reason that I'm
including this in the video is that I generally agree with
this logic, and here's why. Your resume's job is to
get your foot in the door, just like your Tinder profile's job is to get you a date, right? So in general, you're not
gonna go advertising your flaws front and center on your Tinder profile, unless you can find a way to do it that's endearing and funny, and even then, that doesn't apply as
much to the job market as it does to dating, but,
once you're dating somebody, they're naturally going
to learn about your flaws, and if those flaws are
outweighed by the good stuff, then they're probably gonna stay with you, and it's the same with the job market.
Once you get into that
office and have an interview, you get a chance to
explain why your GPA might not be as high as you'd like it to be. Maybe your skills and
experience outweigh it and you realize that putting more effort into other projects was more beneficial than trying to get perfect grades. But again, your resume
only gives a few seconds of attention, so you don't
want to lead with things that are going to throw up red flags. Speaking of red flags, let's
talk about the skill section. First and foremost, do you even need to have a skills section on your resume? Well, the answer is it
depends on who you are. So typically it's useful
to have a skills section if you have specific
certifications or skills that the job is going to be looking for. So if you have a SISCO
networking certification, a CCNA, or you're really
proficient in Adobe After Effects or CAD or you know how
to code and know .JS, it can be really useful
to put those things in a specific skills section. This is especially useful,
since many bigger companies these days use what are called
applicant tracking systems or ATS systems, actually
no that doesn't work, that's like ATM machine,
that's kind of redundant.
Anyway, ATSs basically scan
resumes for specific, key terms that the company's looking
for so they can cut down on the number of resumes an actual human being has to look at. So if you're applying to a
company that you know is looking for a specific skill, you want
to make sure that skill is listed on your resume, provided
you're actually proficient in it, otherwise your
resume might get tossed in the bin before anyone looks at it. All that being said, don't
include a skill section on your resume if all you're
going to include is something like Microsoft office as a general term. And more importantly, do
not list soft skill terms. Don't put hard worker,
don't put good communicator on your resume, do not let me
catch you putting these things because the laziest person in the world can write hard worker on their resume, and because of that, for many
recruiters, it's a red flag.
Why are you putting
down hard worker instead of listing experience that
proves your work ethic? Bottom line, if you have specific skills, if you have specific certifications that you know they're looking
for, definitely include a skills section or at least
make sure they're listed in your work experience section, otherwise a skills section
is probably not needed, but what you do need are
the last two sections that we are going to talk about today: extracurriculars and awards. These sections can bolster
the work experience on your resume by showing the clubs and organizations that you're a part of by listing any leadership
positions you have taken in those clubs, which you
should definitely list and by listing any awards,
honors, scholarships, anything like that that
you've won as well. These sections are
essentially a non-pathetic way of writing hard worker on your resume.
They might not convey specific skills, but they do convey other traits that recruiters are
definitely looking for, a hard work ethic, the
ability to adapt and change, the ability to work independently, and your likelihood to
step into leadership roles, so absolutely make sure that
you have these two sections on your resume as well. Of course, crafting your
resume is just the first step to landing the job that you want, and alone, it is not a very
strong tool for that purpose. It needs to work in tandem with a well-tailored personal brand, a mix of online and offline platforms and methods of communicating and help you to show off your skills and
establish your expertise in your industry, and this includes things like a personal website with a portfolio and your social media platforms, but also the way that
you introduce yourself and the way that you
engage and seek out others. And if you want a good guide on how to start building that brand, I'm gonna recommend Hamza Khan's personal branding course on Skillshare.
His course is short and
won't take up too much of your time, but it's
also pretty comprehensive, and it covers all the important bases including the preliminary
work of figuring out how to tell your story and present yourself, along with the specifics
of channel selection, building a website, and more. And getting access to
that course means you'll also have unlimited access
to the more than 28000 other courses that are also on Skillshare, and that can boost your
skills in web development, digital animation, graphic
design, audio production, and lots, lots more. Membership on Skillshare
is super affordable, starting at less than 10 bucks a month, plus once you have that membership, you can go over tot he popular courses of the business section
where you'll find my course on productivity skills as well, and if you want to try
out Skillshare for free, you can actually get a free, two-month, unlimited trial by being
one of the first 500 people to click the link in the
description down below and sign up.
Big thanks as always
goes out to Skillshare for sponsoring this video
and supporting my channel and as always, thank you
guys for watching as well. If you enjoyed this video,
definitely hit that like button, you can also subscribe right there to get new videos when they
come out every single week, plus right there to get a free copy of my book on how to earn
better grades in school. Also I'm gonna need you
to come in on Sunday. We've had to let a few people go recently, and we're gonna have to play catch up, so if you could be here around, oh, nine AM, that'd be great..