If you pitch your resume into Black Hole recruiting sites, you'll be resting your job-search hopes on a keyword-searching algorithm. That's why I don't recommend that approach to job-seekers, no matter how closely a job-seeker's resume matches the posted job spec.
I recommend that you reach out to your hiring manager directly with a Pain Letter and Human-Voiced Resume sent straight to the hiring manager's desk.
Your Pain Letter will speak so directly to your target hiring manager's specific issues that your resume is sure to get a look if the manager opens the envelope at all. That's why we write ultra-targeted Pain Letters versus boring, boilerplate cover letters.
That being said, your resume still has its own heavy lifting to do. In the typical ten-second glance, your resume has to convey at least these five critical points:
Your resume has to convey the fact you know exactly what sort of pain your hiring manager is facing.
You may have written the best Pain Letter in the world, but you still have to get across in your resume the idea that you understand exactly what your next manager needs to have done. Let's say you're going after a Business Development role.
Your Pain Letter makes it crystal clear that you understand the challenges associated with selling a brand-new cloud software application to mid-market businesses. Luckily, that's what you've been doing for the past five years, very successfully. Still, your career history includes a wide range of selling experiences, not just in the software realm and not just for startups.
When your manager flips your Pain Letter to see your Human-Voiced Resume just behind and stapled to it, s/he has to see immediately that you're the kind of Business Development person who can step right into the organization and get the sales pipeline activated.
If your resume isn't customized to talk about opening new accounts for brand-new software releases, you'll need to make that experience clear before sending your resume-Pain Letter package in the mail to the startup VP you've got your eye on. It's very easy to lose sight of the fact that Business Pain is specific.
In our bodies, back pain is different from toothache pain. It's the same way in business. We want to know that you can be effective in the situation we're facing, specifically, so make that connection plain!
Your resume has to make it clear that you're intelligent and business-savvy.
If our second point sounds so obvious that it's not worth mentioning, you may not spend your days reading resumes the way I do. Your resume has to convey your intelligence and sophistication. That means that it can't have one typo, one misspelling or one usage error in it, and the language you choose to describe your background has to convey your maturity and intellectual depth.
This is why I warn job-seekers away from cliches like "Results-oriented business professional with a bottom-line orientation."
When your hiring manager scans your resume, s/he has to think "I want to meet this person," not "This looks like every boring resume I've ever read before."
Your resume has to communicate your story.
Some people use a functional resume format rather than a chronological one, typically because they're nervous about some gap or blemish in their career history and hope that the functional resume style will obscure or minimize it. That's a bad move in my opinion.
The number one thing you want to get across to your next manager is your story. There's nothing wrong with your story, no matter what twists and turns you've taken to get here.
When you can see the soundness and logic in your path, other people will too. Don't hide your story and make your manager hunt for dates and titles and the chronological aspect of your career. That's the part they're most avid to know!
Your resume has to tell Dragon-Slaying Stories.
Your former titles and the dates of your past positions are important to give your hiring manager the broad outline of your career to date. Inside that outline, he or she wants to know what you've left in your wake at each past job. You can make it easy for him or her to do that by telling short Dragon-Slaying Stories in your resume, like this:
- After our acquisition of Angry Chocolates, I led the integration of the two firms' databases for customer, vendor and product information in three weeks without affecting our day-to-day processes on either side.
The reader of your resume wants proof that you know what's up and how to deal with the curve balls life throws at us. You can share that proof in quick Dragon-Slaying Stories that tell us all we need to know to pick up the phone and call you!
Your resume has to prove that you're human.
Apart from their value as 'proof points' for your hiring manager's benefit, there's another big benefit to Dragon-Slaying Stories and the Human-Voiced Resume format in general. The other benefit is that when you write your resume in a human voice, your manager instantly knows that s/he's dealing with a living, breathing person rather than a corporate automaton or an empty suit.
The more personality and spark you can put into your resume, beginning with the Summary at the top of it, the better. If your hiring manager reads your resume and knows immediately that a coffee date or phone call with you is going to be lively and intellectually stimulating, you're going to get a lot more responses.
You might feel like you're taking a risk putting a human voice in your resume, but that's only because we've been trained to write resumes for automated recruiting portals rather than for humans. When you know that you're writing to a person at his desk (or hers), it's much easier and more fun to use a conversational tone.
The reception to your Pain Letter/Human-Voiced Resume combo is going to be more human, too -- and the resulting conversation when the two of you connect will make sparks fly! I'll be rooting for you. Dig your sparkly, behind-the-suit personality out of mothballs and bring it across in your Pain Letter and Human-Voiced Resume. Wait until you see what happens next!
