Career Warrior Podcast #298) Top 3 Mistakes in Mid-Level Resumes

Episode Transcript

Chris Villanueva 0:00
Try something that would make you unique and something that would make somebody get excited to keep reading your resume, LinkedIn presents and welcome to the Let’s Eat, Grandma Career Warrior Podcast. If your goal is to transition to more meaningful work, achieve better pay or reach that flow state at work. This is your podcast. My name is Chris Villanueva and I’m the Co-founder of Let’s Eat, Grandma, alongside my brother Matt Villanueva, we are a resume service that puts customers first. And today we’re covering the top three mistakes for mid level resumes. Gosh, these mid career resumes are the best, most of them that come through our door at let’s see grandma our mid career. So we’re going to cover some of those resumes. And like really the key patterns and mistakes that I’ve seen over time for these types of mistakes. We’ve also spoken with many hiring managers, analyzed industry trends, and reviewed 1000s of resumes. So rest assured that this will come from a good place from data, as well as some of the qualitative things that jumped out at me that I thought they just really irked me when I see them. So if you’re listening to this podcast, make sure to take notes, because you may be making one of these three mistakes in your resume.

And before we get started, I just wanted to bring two key pieces of breaking news to the table. Number one, we’ve just been featured by the New York Post, yes, the New York Post among their top resume services, this is quite an honor. And you can actually just Google best resume services. And this New York Post article will be one of the first hits that comes up. So we’re really honored by being listed among their best resume services. And this is just something that absolutely made my week. So a big shout out to the New York Post team. And thank you so much for featuring us, we promise we will do your article justice and continue to deliver the best services we can for job seekers. The second piece of breaking news is our amazing audio editor, AJ, and he has been with us for three years now. So thank you so much, AJ, you are amazing. And go ahead and cue the music, cue some music and some clapping here. Because this is for you, buddy. I’m really, really, really grateful to have you as an audio editor for our company here, you’ve made my life so much easier. And you continue to provide amazing edits to keep these episodes as short as possible, but also impactful.

Alright, so let’s set the stage a little bit here. Before going into these three critiques. I’ve been looking at a lot of resumes lately, I have gotten my hands dirty, so to speak, and popped in our resume critiques inbox and have been looking over and providing some reviews for job seekers. So my eyes have been on a lot of resumes. And I really tried to give as much tailored feedback and advice as I possibly can. And I do I look closely at the typically the types of positions that I would guess somebody’s applying for, as well as look at their experiences. But I’ve been surprised by how common these mistakes are. That is, these mistakes that I’m going to be going over right now are oftentimes made by job seekers over and over again. So I’ve identified really three common patterns in a lot of these mid career resumes that I am seeing, I felt like if the people that sent those resumes through, if they can just listen to this podcast episode, they’d find that they’d be able to improve the resume by like 2x 3x event, because this is really where I’ve seen a lot of the room for improvement in these resumes.

Now, that doesn’t mean that anything that I’m not going to cover in these next few minutes, that’s not going to be something that you shouldn’t consider. But when I say the top mistakes, these really are the more deep types of things that can be done to improve a resume. They’re not really like design, quick, gimmicky, or flashy types of things to improve your resume. But I believe that anyone listening to this episode right now, if they were to look at the resume, and really just give a really serious self reflection, they might see that and an opportunity for them to get more results and better results. That further ado, I’ve been ranting a little bit on over but just because I really want you to pay attention to these next three key things here. But the first top mistake for mid career resumes are illustrating job descriptions and not accomplishments showing job descriptions and not accomplishments in their professional experience. intersection specifically in the resume? Look, I know it’s tough. We have these companies within our professional experience sections. And a lot of the times we don’t know what to include underneath those professional experiences, we might get stopped up. And we might almost feel overwhelmed like, okay, gosh, what did I do for my last position over the last several months or several years, whatever it may be, what can I include in this section aside from the daily responsibilities that I had, I essentially did for this company, it’s really easy to include responsibilities, every job seeker does it.

And I’m telling you from looking at all these resumes, each one has a list of the things that they did on a daily basis for their company, you can go to any HR job posting for a similar position that you’ve been in and almost copy and paste it on over to your resume. You can go to ChadGPT, and you can say, hey, come up with a software developer resume. And it will actually pull data from other software developer resumes and come up with something for you that reads like job descriptions. But those job descriptions aren’t what land interviews and what makes you stand out as a candidate. An example of that is managed company operations on a daily basis in order to secure more sales for an organization. Okay, that’s great. It’s okay to include something like that. But what made you special, and what makes your resume stand out compared to the other sales manager types of positions, and I’m talking metrics, I’m talking accomplishments, and I’m talking about the things that only your resume can have. Because these were the things that you did in the last few years, trust me go through each one of your companies. And I almost guarantee that you will see opportunity for improvement in showcasing those results, making your resume more accomplishment oriented, rather than a, let’s just say vanilla generic type of resume for somebody in your industry. Now, I’m not saying not to include that job descriptions, it’s okay to include a few key sentences talking about what you did. In fact, it’s going to help out with giving people an understanding of what you did, people want to know these things. But go beyond that. And look very closely at the ratio between the job descriptions again, and the accomplishments.

Alright, I’m getting ranty here and going a little bit too long. But I wanted to get pet key point across. So I’ll move on over to the second top mistake that mid career resumes have these days. And that is a weak summary statement, a weak summary. What I mean by a summary statement is it’s that net, say those first few sentences and the very top of your resume that talk about what you do at more of a broad level, it doesn’t really tie itself to a specific company that you worked for. But it does showcase who you are more broadly, or more generally about what you do and who you are. Now, this is a really important section. Most resume services most recruiters hiring managers would argue that there is merit to having a session like this. In fact, I wholeheartedly recommend in 99% of cases to have a strong summary as opposed to having no summary whatsoever, also known as a profile statement. But most of them that I’ve come across, at least in the last several months here, I don’t know what’s been circulating around the world here. But most of them are just too generic, a lot of them just read. Again, riffing off of the last top mistake being too vanilla or being too generic. A lot of them read like the same exact thing. Like again, I could create a really quick ChatGPT resume, not ripping on AI whatsoever, I think it can be used properly. But if I were to go and create a chat, GPT resume or to pull a resume template online, it would give you a very generic vanilla summary at the very top.

But instead, I’m calling on all job seekers listening to this podcast, to reflect more on your brand and understand what makes you unique, what makes you love what you do and what makes again, only the person who is crafting this resume and who has had this outstanding, unique skill set that only you have to offer to the world. How can actually include that at the very top of my resume. And so a quick example of a lot of the resumes that I’ve seen lately has a sentence that sounds something like this. This is a sales type of resume again, going off to that business development manager with experience and account management of businesses across the tech sector. Now I’ll stop right there. And I’ll say that it isn’t a terrible sentence, but it is a very common type of sentence that I would receive The good thing I will say like the one good thing that that sentence did was it captured certain keywords that a recruiter might use to search for a candidate like this. So business development manager was used and that can definitely be searched for, but it doesn’t really show me anything exciting that would want to make me take you are pulling you in for an interview. Instead, try something that would make you unique, and something that would make somebody get excited to keep reading your resume, something along the lines of Ross, industry Business Development Manager with 15 years of results in selling high ticket items to help drive $10 million in company profit. So the number pops out the $10 million, of course, but this shows why a company would want to hire a person like this because companies really need to drive profit. And that’s why they’re looking to hire you in the first place.

So the high ticket items call out as well can be useful, especially if you’re looking to apply for companies that are more on the b2b side, or companies that are selling products or services that are over $1,000. And you’ve had that experience. But again, look to the companies that you’re applying for. And again, ask yourself, What special things have I done in the past that can be connected to whatever targeted position I’m applying for. And then after that, you are more than welcome to keep giving specifics. This doesn’t have to be this long, drawn out summary that is half a page long, I’m not saying to have a huge summary that is crazy long, you can have like three or four accomplishments underneath those sentences that showcase exactly what made you unique. Alright, let’s move on over to the final mistake that I have seen lately in resumes. Cramming too much information. Cramming too much information into the resume is one of the most common mistakes I see for mid career resumes. And I’m not just talking about resumes that are three or four pages long, that should be one or two pages, I’m talking about resumes that have so many words on it that I don’t know where to look. And it’s really hard for me to go from section to section. So it’s not just for the long resumes and talking about, I’m talking about if you’re a mid career professional, you might feel the urgency to include every little thing that you’ve done in the past. But in reality, you need to cut down that sucker to the most relevant stuff. And I’m kind of spitballing here and look at your resume more of a case by case basis. But the resumes that I’ve seen could probably benefit by having 25 to 30% of it cut down to the stuff that is most relevant. So instead of I know a lot of job seekers, when they look to cut their resume, they look for little design related gimmicks, they might look to see like, Oh, can

I make my font point to point smaller, can I make my margins smaller as well to include more information, don’t do that. That’s exactly the opposite of what I’m telling you to do. Maybe save that for the very end. What I would say is, are there actual full on companies from 1998 that you can cut out that are not relevant or bullet points that aren’t going to deliver value for the company that you’re applying for? That is my last key tip there. And I would venture to say that these three things, if you were to focus on just them alone, you would be making some significant headway in your resume. So that wraps it up for today, make sure to check out our resume services at letseatgrandma.com. Again, that’s letseatgrandma.com. We have a free resume review, as well as an opportunity for you to speak with one of our representatives one on one for free, no obligation, no sales tactics or anything like that. And I always love hearing from my fellow career warriors, so please make sure to connect with me on LinkedIn.

I’m Chris Villanueva CPRW and I post lots of extra resume stuff, you’ll see videos of me you’ll see blogs and newsletters and other sort of rich content like that that goes beyond this podcast. So make sure to check that out. I’d love to hear from you. All right, warriors. That wraps it up for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. And I’ll see you next week career warrior podcast and before you go remember, if you’re not seeing the results you want in your job search, our highly trained team of professional resume writers here at Let’s Eat, Grandma can help head on over to letseatgrandma.com/podcast to get a free resume critique and $70 off any one of our resume writing packages. We talk all the time on the show about the importance of being targeted in your job search in with our unique writing process and focus on individual attention. You’ll get a resume cover letter and LinkedIn profile that are highly customized and tailored to your goals to help you get hired faster. Again, head on over to letseatgrandma.com/podcast. Thanks, I’ll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai