Episode Transcript

Chris Villanueva 00:04
This is the Career Warrior Podcast. My name is Chris Villanueva. I’m the founder and CEO of Let’s Eat, Grandma. Yes, that’s what they comma, we don’t want to eat our grandmothers. We are a resume writing service. We help mid to senior level professionals land their dream job here, more interviews, job opportunities, and more fulfilling careers. That is our focus here.

Chris Villanueva 00:28
We’re going to be taking questions from you this episode. We started doing that this year because this was a way to, I think, serve the job seekers as much as possible. Here. Some of these questions are oddly specific, but I actually picked them out because there was a wider theme in something that I believe you as the listener can take away to learn from boost your resume.

Chris Villanueva 00:50
So the first question here comes from Lucille. Lucille is from Kabankalan, AJ, you’re actually from the Philippines here, so can you tell us how to pronounce that name? Kabankalan. Okay. So Lucille says, can I cite publications made? This is a really good question because not all sections deserve to be in the resume. The resume should really, it should really be your marketing piece. So if there is a section that does not serve you, including publications made, you don’t have to include it. However, in academia and in CVS and scientific positions, oftentimes publications made or publications is a section that you should include because oftentimes people are looking for those things.

Chris Villanueva 01:35
If you are sending out your CV and you are a professor, of course you want publications to be in that cv. However, for profit positions, oftentimes this is something that people are not going to be looking for. If publications is something that’s impressive to you, it’s going to be impressive to the hiring manager. Perhaps. If you are applying for those for-profit positions, I would consider including that in a summary, just in a quick one-liner with a few impressive publications or a list of publications that people can reference. Otherwise, I wouldn’t recommend necessarily putting this on page one for those types of positions.

Chris Villanueva 02:15
Again, I know CVS are different than resumes, but I thought I would make that distinction here for most people to hear. Alright, the next question comes from Jonathan, who is from New York. Shout out to my second home, New York City as somebody with a degree in tech. Jonathan says, I entered the financial servicing industry post-grad and recently made a career switch to UX design and content creation. I struggle with encapsulating my entire work and academic experiences to effectively tell my story and qualifications for jobs, target jobs I’m applying to.

Chris Villanueva 02:49
Alright, this is a common thing. In fact, I know somebody who went through almost the same exact thing that you did, and there are plenty of people who say they went into something post-grad myself that I didn’t want to do for the rest of my career, and then they made that switch soon after. The most important thing here in this case is to make sure to highlight at the top of the resume those UX design and content creation things. So you had that degree in tech management information systems, so I’m sure there are some things that you can pull from that. You are a recent graduate, so this is something that you might even want to bring to the top of the resume just depending on when you graduated.

Chris Villanueva 03:33
Let’s see when that is. I can pull up your resume right now. So 2020, I would say recent enough to where somebody could make an exception, but you have some pretty darn impressive things already by way of experience, you have your self-employed experience where you have a digital content creator and personal branding strategist title. You also have ux, UI designer and researcher, this internship you held in Florida. So those things are pretty darn relevant. So what I would say is maybe take that position and downplay it a bit more. You have account manager for that other position and I would say keep those things relevant, but I would even sort of shrink that section down and allow for more room to come through within content creation and UX UI here, because I think you can go harder in your summary. You just left one to two sentences.

Chris Villanueva 04:26
Actually, it’s really like two short sentences in your summary, but I think you can get a little bit more attention grabbing there, and I think you can go longer. I think you can also get more specific to the job you’re applying for by changing, swapping out the words professional summary for a headline statement. That’s a theme that I’ve been hammering home in the podcast is that the top of your resume is so darn important for these hiring managers, and if you were going to increase the font size of something, it would be perhaps a headline or the type of position you’re applying for.

Chris Villanueva 05:00
So I hope that helps keep struggling and striving through because you’re going to get that dream job eventually. I know it, but just keep your head up there. All right, Lisa from New Jersey asks, I’m applying for client relations sales roles and getting quick rejection letters. I would love your feedback. So the implicit question being not why am I getting these rejection letters and how can I improve my resume?

Chris Villanueva 05:26
So client relations and sales roles. These can look like two different types of positions. So I know that there are client success managers, there are account executive positions. The thing that I would beg every person who applies for more than one type of role is to have more than one type of resume. Don’t roll your eyes if you’ve heard that me say that before, because that is a principle worth repeating. If you have only one generic resume and you’re applying for different types of roles, you are going to sabotage your success here.

Chris Villanueva 06:00
So Lisa, when I look at your resume, I’ll tell you, you have a pretty clean a TS friendly resume. It’s easy for me to pop in and look at this document, and I think it looks nice from that perspective. You also have a couple of really cool things going for you. It says client relations and office manager, and then you have sales and client relations representative. So it looks like you held a stable position and you even moved on up in 2012. I think that looks great, but the thing that I would tell you to do is I would get more accomplishment oriented and more specific in your language there. So you have this client relations and office manager position. Again, maybe there’s some ways that we could partition this to two different versions of the resume.

Chris Villanueva 06:45
Again, I’d recommend that, but it’s a little bit light on the numbers and you talk mainly about responsibilities here. So these are things that typically every other job seeker who’s applying for these types of roles, they’re also going to have on the resume. I see you expanding your client base by 25%. I see you driving client satisfaction by a certain number, but I would think about some things that can set you apart in that professional experience section, and it was for a while. Now you had that position for more than 10 years.

Chris Villanueva 07:17
So certainly some opportunity there, and I think you have that going as an advantage for you. So let that be an advantage and let that experience stand out. So also the other thing that you do is you open with accomplished client relations and office manager position. You talk about customer service and client management, client relationships, et cetera, et cetera. But again, if you’re applying for sales positions, those keywords aren’t really coming up at all on this resume. So that might be something for you to explore. Maybe swapping out the words client relations with sales and talking a little bit more about that sales background. I think that that could help you.

Chris Villanueva 07:55
Again, people are putting summary on their resume, but why not experiment with certain keywords that can target you for roles? I would do the same as a recommended in the last question. All right, Krista from New York, again, another New Yorker. Shout out. Krista says, I’m struggling to articulate my experience and find the appropriate roles to apply for my transition back into the for-profit private sector. What do I do? This is a common thing. Not only do folks apply outside of their general position, title, scope, sometimes they apply for different types of industries and sometimes they apply for different sectors here.

Chris Villanueva 08:35
So Krista in this case is going from nonprofit to for-profit and there are some differences. There are some things that nonprofit hiring managers will look for and some things that for-profit hiring managers will look for that are different here. So Krista, it looks like you have a pretty solid looking resume at first glance. In fact, I looked at this resume a few times. I think the design is solid. You have good phrasing and it’s impressive the numbers you’ve included throughout especially your last position within that nonprofit position.

Chris Villanueva 09:08
What I would say is yes, it might be a little bit harder to get into a different sector. So a keep pressing on. Sometimes it’s going to take a little bit more fuel and juice to get there, but I would just nudge you in a direction here. Again, the resume isn’t bad, but I would try a few things to push you a little bit closer to those for profit positions here. So the very beginning of your resume opens up talking about your profile. So you talk about being an entrepreneurial leader with proven track record of success and operations management, project management, event management, team development and culture creation. Maybe pair that down a bit to get specific towards one type of role. That does seem like a lot of things and a lot of areas of focus.

Chris Villanueva 09:54
So as you are applying for those for-profit roles, what are they specifically looking for? Are they looking for somebody to overhaul their operations to improve efficiency? Are they looking for somebody to reduce costs? So maybe honing in on those two specific things, you have very impressive career highlights, which fall underneath your areas of expertise section here. So what I might do is I might actually consolidate that with that top section there because you give a lot of, and I’m going to use the word fluff for lack of a better word. It’s not a bad summary, but I actually would like to see you go a bit harder there and maybe condense some of that language.

Chris Villanueva 10:37
Again, get more specific to what the company is looking for and then take some of those career highlights and put that with the summary. That’s something for you to try because I think that you saving a hundred K in training budget is darn impressive. I see you working with logistics with a huge summit. Again, very impressive. I see you increasing sales by 16%. That is the hard stuff that these for-profit companies are going to be looking for, especially as you apply for those senior level positions. And I want you to find a way to get those highlights to stand out more in your document. Heck, you might even want consider bolding some of those things, and this is a common theme you might want to consider including a headline and some sub headline as well to target those specific roles.

Chris Villanueva 11:26
Your actual professional experience itself does look transferable for those profit positions. What I would say is you lead in with the bullet point appointed as acting chief of staff responsible for X, Y, Z. That bullet point, just reading it out a little bit more, looks more, I think like a nonprofit type of responsibility there. I wouldn’t said swap that with something that is more transferable. Lead that first bullet point with something that is going to be most applicable and most, I think, exciting for a hiring manager in that space.

Chris Villanueva 12:02
Typically, we have longer conversations to decide these things, but I do like your ability to improve stakeholder engagement and to increase year over year giving by 20%. So maybe talk with us. I think that there are some good opportunities to get those professional experience sections more transferable. Alright, so this was audience q and A. These are going to get better and better because we’re going to get even more questions for you, and I’m really glad that this kicked off the way that it did. I again, want to thank the folks who submitted their resume for review and said yes. Use me for the podcast.

Chris Villanueva 12:39
Again, if you’re listening right now and have a specific question yourself, head on over to letseatgrandma.com and submit your resume for a free review. 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 and 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, and I’ll see you next time.