Resume Writing Tips

Hey, this is Leo for actualize.org. And in this quick self-help segment, I'm gonna give you some practical resume writing tips. All right, writing a resume. It's actually a really simple and easy process once you get the mindset's correct. And that's exactly what I'm gonna do here. I'm gonna give you some practical ways of thinking about writing your resume. They're really gonna make it a breeze. You're not gonna need to go take something because of an expensive course or spend a lot of time on it. Writing a resume, this is the whole secret. You ready for the secret? It's all about understanding what the employer wants. It's about understanding who you're appealing to and what their needs are. Here's what you gotta understand. And you really understand this when you become an employer yourself, which is what I did. I was first starting off my career and I was an employee like you are right now. And I was really scared about writing a solid resume. I was scared about what do I put in there? What do I leave out? How do I make it appealing? How do I fluff it up so I can compete with everyone else? And so I was coming at it as an employee. And then later in life, I started my own business and then I got the opportunity to hire people and I hired a few people and I was coming at it from the opposite side. And it was like looking through the looking glass and seeing that as an employer, the process looks totally different. And here's how it looks for the employer because once you understand how it looks for the employer and you can empathize with that and put yourself in that frame of mind, then writing your resume is a breeze. And you are, I would say, in the top 3% of all your competitors. 'Cause all your competitors don't understand this, especially if they're applying for jobs that are kind of entry level jobs. I would say a job that has one to two years, one to five years of experience. If they've got more than five years of experience, they probably understand this 'cause they've applied to many jobs. But between one and five years, which is where you're just learning how to write resumes, you're gonna knock them all out of the water. So here's how you wanna think. As an employer, an employer has specific requirements. That means that if I'm running a company, I need somebody to handle a problem for me. And as an employer, I'm doing math 'cause I'm business oriented. And if my business has been in business for more than a year, then it stayed that way because it's profitable. Or at least because somebody was looking out for the bottom line. And the way that that happens is someone is saying, okay, I've got this position. In fact, it's not even a position. It's like, I've got this opportunity in the marketplace to make some money. And I need someone to do this thing for me, or to handle this part of the business, or to do the marketing, or to do the sales, or to do the coding, or whatever is that you do. And I need someone to handle that, and I need someone that's really good, really reliable, really talented, and also affordable. And I need this fast. I need it right now because I've identified that I have this opportunity, or I have this challenge I need to help with. So I need someone to fill that position fast. And I need that person to be honest and straightforward so I can analyze their skills. And of course, I want them to be very competent in what they're doing. And I want them to be specialized. I don't want a generalist, in most cases, with very rare exceptions, what I want is someone who can come in there and fix a specific problem. So for example, if I'm developing a website, right? And I myself am self-employed, and I'm creating a website. And I know a little bit of HTML and a little bit of CSS. And I know basic web design. So I'm creating my site, but then I run into a problem. I need to create a shopping cart. And I need to integrate that shopping cart with the rest of my site that I built to sell my products. But I do not know all the complex programming language that is necessary to implement a shopping cart. I want familiar with shopping carts. It would take me way too many hours to learn how to implement a shopping cart. I'd rather outsource that. So that creates what? An employment opportunity. That's an employment opportunity. That means that I can hire someone. And someone can become my employee for a while for forever, depending on how long I need that work, to handle this problem for me. And this is a specific problem. Now think about it. I'm going to go out there now and plan along with me. I want you to put yourself in my shoes as the employer. So you're the employer. Now think about this. You're going out there and you're looking for someone to create a shopping cart for you. How are you going to find that person? What are you going to look for? First of all, you're going to have a very specific list of criteria that you have. You're going to say that you need this type of shopping cart. You want it to accept Visa and MasterCard, and you want it to do it in such and such a way. And you need maybe a couple of these features. You need to save the user's history and password and username. You want them to track orders. You want a shopping cart. And you want it to sell these types of products. And you want these products in all these different categories. So you have all these specific requirements. And then of course, you want someone to do that for you at the lowest possible price. You don't want to hire a programmer who's going to charge you $100,000 to implement a simple shopping cart. You want to get that at the most affordable price because you're looking out for your bottom line. The reason I'm creating this business and you're creating this website is because you want to sell a product. And if you're selling that product, and that product is your profit margin on each product that you sell is, let's say, $10 on each product that you sell that you earn $10. But then you're going to pay $50,000 to implement a shopping cart. How many products do you have to sell to pay that off? It's going to be a bad bargain. So you're going to want to find someone who might do that shopping cart for maybe $1,000. Then it makes sense because you only need to sell what? 100 products, times 10 to pay off 1,000. So that's a good deal. So understand that as an employer, they're looking at the value, but they're also looking at the skill. So on the one hand, I want a shopping cart programmer here who's going to be fairly affordable. On the other hand, I want him to be as talented as he can be for that price. So what does that mean? That means I want him to be skilled in all the different languages that I need for this cart. And I want him to be reliable. And I want him to probably know not just one language, but two or three languages. I want him to have experience actually doing what I need. Because if he doesn't have the experience that I specifically need, then how can I trust that he's going to be able to do it? It's going to be too risky for me. Think about this. You're hiring a shopping cart programmer. But what if you hire a generalist programmer and said, would you be happy with that? So what if I came to you as a programmer and I said, OK, look, I'm going to make your shopping cart. And you say, OK, how many shopping carts have you made before? And I said, well, look, I've never made a shopping cart before. But what I have done is I've worked on some databases, and I've worked on some other websites, and I programmed a visual basic. And I programmed in my high school class, and I programmed in college. But I've never done a shopping cart. Are you going to want that guy? Probably not. Not if somebody else comes to you and says, hey, I've done 100 shopping carts. I know them back to front. I can do it for you in a week. Easy. Not a problem, right? You're going to hire that guy. So these are some of the mindsets. Now what I want you to do is to take that mindset and flip it around and use it on you. So whatever position you're applying for, think about it this way. What is the employer really want? How can I give it to them without a bunch of garbage? So when you're actually writing your resume-- and this is where the tips part comes in-- is the mindset actually meets the paper in this way. When you're writing a resume, be very clear about what you're offering. Specifically, get rid of all the fancy mission statements, get rid of all the fancy jargony words, trying to fluff yourself up, employ your C through that bullshit really, really fast. In fact, if you ever become an employer, and you look at piles of resumes you get on your desk, you can see people that are trying to fluff themselves up. It's just like it's so, so, so apparent. And they're trying to make themselves out to be more than they are. The best resume is a simple, bulleted list of exactly what you do, what you specialize in, what you're going to provide for this employer, what your skill sets are, how much experience you have in them, and of course some of your personal characteristics that will create success. So that means, are you on time? Are you good working with other people? Are you friendly? Are you sociable? Are you diligent and hard working? Are you reliable? So definitely mention those qualities, because every employer basically needs that in their employees. Otherwise, the employee is not going to work out in the long run. So have those qualities mentioned, but generally focus on the skills that you provide. What can you do? I can implement a shopping cart. I can create a website. I can write some web copy. I can do some marketing. I can do some sales over the phone. Whatever your skills are, list them. And then list them specifically. I know HTML, I know C++, I know this coding language, I know this thing, I know how to check grammar. And then of course, back that up with experience. So list what your experiences are to back up your skills. So for example, if you've done several years of work with HTML, say that, if you've created 10 websites, say that. If you have examples of the kind of work that you created, that's the best. That's basically a portfolio. And if you have a good portfolio, you're done, you're sold, you don't need anything else. In fact, if you have a strong portfolio, I would lead with the portfolio. Because once someone sees your amazing work, That's it. They're sold. They don't need anything else. The rest is words. A resume should not be wordy. It should be very sparse. It should be like a skeleton, just an outline of exactly what you're providing to the employer. Because the employer is very selfish and they don't have time to read through your garbage and your flowery language and your philosophy. Don't care about any of that. All they care about is what are you providing? Are you a good match for exactly what they need? And then of course they're going to be the conversation about money and you want to figure that out and I'll cover that in some other video about negotiation. For salary. But that's basically it. That's resume writing tips for you right there. I'm going to be signing off here. Go ahead, leave me some comments. Tell me what you think about this. I think you'll really find this valuable if you just make that mental shift. It's a mental shift. Put yourself into your employer's shoes. That's the whole secret to resume writing. Once you're in your employer's shoes, you don't need to me to be telling you specific tips. You'll figure that all out. yourself. You'll know what to do. It's actually very, very easy. So leave me your comments. Let me know how this worked out for you. Please go ahead, like this and share it. And then of course visit actualize.org for more advanced personal vote videos where I cover topics about career, life purpose, finding something that you're really passionate in. And psychology, the psychology of success that you are going to need at your new job to really kill it. Go ahead and also subscribe to my newsletter there. It's free.