Find below the transcript of this episode. Visit http://www.refractivecoaching.com for more info on the Refractive family of services.

Hello. Hello. Good afternoon. This is Johnny G. Welcome to refractive. Today’s episode is about how to elevate your resume. I was an HR director and uh, I spent 16 of my years involved in all aspects of HR from training to recruiting to benefits and compensation. And I have to say I’ve been surprised how mysterious resumes still seem to people. So since this was something that I was an expert in in my last career, I thought I would share with you some tips on how to make your resume friendly to a hiring manager. There are certain types of formatting and content that make a resume difficult to process and when someone is going through a stack of 20 or 30 resumes, anything that makes it less simple to process is going to place you at a disadvantage. So that’s what we’re going to focus on today.  

I do want to warn you upfront, the transitions from topic to topic won’t be very smooth because I did sit down and draft out simply a list of the most important aspects to cover. So we will be hopping from topic to topic and I hope you’ll bear with me as we do that. So let’s dive right in. You know I’m going to quickly glance over some things that might be common sense, but they’re important to underlie. First of all, don’t lie. Um, a lot of hiring managers do check references and it’s important that you don’t lie about your length of employment, your title, your responsibilities, or your achievements as well. I also want to encourage you to stick to the common length guideline of one resume page per 10 years of professional experience. If you want to vary from that, it’s up to you. But again, um, it does, it does get noticed if you have an unusually long resume.  

I also think it’s a good time to point out that there are certain industries that have their own resume guidelines. If that applies to you, you already know what I’m talking about. So take this with a grain of salt. If you work for the federal government, if you are in visual media or some other type of role where resume formatting and content are a little bit special, you know, I feel that brief employment generally doesn’t have much value to add on a resume. If you work somewhere two, three, or four months, it’s probably not worth putting on your resume. You haven’t even finished your training and onboarding yet and you most likely weren’t fully productive yet. So it doesn’t give me as a hiring manager information as to what you’re capable of. What it does is indicate that you might be a flight risk. So I don’t recommend putting brief employment.  

I’ve met some applicants who were hired into very prestigious companies and so they wrongly assumed that even if they work there for three, four or five months, um, it was advantageous to show that they were hired by XYZ company and that is not generally the case. I speak for me, but I do feel that that’s a pretty solid piece of advice. I want to talk as well about parallel structure and when I say parallel structure, I’m talking about consistency in the way your resume is written and in the way your resume looks and is formatted. I’ll go down a few points here that I think will really help you to have a resume that looks pleasing to the eye. You know, you can pick up slight differences in line spacing and also the way your margins look and font size can really make your resume look like a patchwork.  

First of all, if you’re going to write in full sentences, then you need to write in full sentences for your whole resume. If you’re going to write in bullet point format, keep that format through your whole resume without full sentence structure. Personally, there’s only one type of