Hello, I welcome you on the page of the next article from the Anti-HR cycle (Main article of the cycle: how to successfully complete an interview at work). Here we will talk about how to make a good resume to work. Following the topics of the Anti-HR series, I will talk about the tricks that will make your resume more attractive to a potential employer.
I will explain how to create a resume without experience, how to “draw” this experience for yourself, I’ll talk about what points you can exaggerate, and where you shouldn’t do it and what words are better to use to get the attention of the HR-ra and so that became interested in you and invited you to an interview. I will also touch upon the consideration of typical mistakes when making a resume. In this article I will build on the most common, in my opinion, mistakes in creating a resume and tell you how to avoid them.
What should be a resume?
I will not touch upon the formal aspects of preparing a summary, for example, what should be the font and what should be the paragraphs, so much material on this topic. And within the framework of the Anti-HR cycle, I used to talk about what is not usually concerned with such sensitive questions as, for example, is it possible to lie at an interview. Therefore, I will not delve into the obvious, I will touch upon them only briefly, and I will tell you in more detail about what hardly anyone will tell you about.
Next, I will list a number of formal requirements for resume writing.
Structure
First of all, a resume should meet a specific structure. Everything should be laid out on the shelves, this aspect should be approached with all care. It is necessary that all the main sections are present, such as education, key skills, past jobs, recommendations, etc. Do not be lazy to fill it all: the extra hour spent during the drafting of the resume, more than pay off in the future, because what job you find depends on your resume. Here I will not go deep into the question of the requirements for the structure, since the topic is a bit different, I will only say that your resume should meet these requirements.
In addition, there are now many job search portals and these online services provide you with a ready-made resume form, you just have to fill it out. So everything has become easier.
Concrete
The summary should be specific. It is not necessary to fill it with only general phrases, it must quite definitely answer the questions: what did you do before? What are your achievements? What exactly are they? What are your key skills, etc. Only general phrases can create the impression that you are trying to disguise your lack of experience or practical knowledge.
Job matching
The summary does not have to be true. And why is he to be? It simply must correspond to a specific vacancy: your experience, your skills - everything must meet the requirements of the position that you consider as your new potential job. This is an important point, I’ll stop on this in more detail later.
As for the most general requirements, that's all, then I will give some tips on how to make your resume more attractive to HR
Resume Tips
HR optimize resume
Have you heard about such a term as SEO-optimization? Give a little talk about what it is to build an analogy. Translating this abbreviation into Russian, it means “Optimizing [the website] for search engines”, this is a set of measures aimed at ensuring that your website has the best positions in search engine results for certain queries. For example, you decided to sell Soviet cameras via the Internet. How do people find out about your offer? Differently, maybe from friends, maybe from advertising, but including, they will get on your site by typing in Yandex or Google “Buy Soviet Camera”. And you are interested in the search engine giving the address of your site in response to this request. To do this, you spend some work, which is called SEO.
One aspect of SEO is optimizing your site’s text for key requests. Roughly speaking, you need to use the keyword (for example, “Soviet cameras”) in the text on the site a certain number of times so that the search engine (a search engine program that scans your site, determining its subject matter) “understands” that your web the resource is dedicated to this topic, and not to the search for missing pets, and has determined for it a place in the search results for the corresponding requests of users.
Also resume, try to use in it a certain number of keywords, according to which, HR-ry will understand that you can approach this vacancy! Do you think they read into every resume? A mass of these documents pass through them every day, will they be carefully read by everyone? They can also be "lazy", and they are likely to read it diagonally. Therefore, make their eyes catch on what they are looking for.
I will give an example. You want to get a job “Analyst in stock”, this specialist is required to optimize the work of the warehouse, that is, somewhere there is some kind of warehouse and the company is looking for someone who could organize the processes in this area so that everything goes faster, more efficient and cost less money. What are the keywords? This is "optimization" and "warehouse". HR-rom was given the task of finding such an employee.
It rarely happens that he understands the subject area of the vacancy for which he is looking for a person. In the specific case, he may be unaware that such buzzwords as “the introduction of effective schemes for the work of storekeepers and their distribution among districts” are the optimization of work in the warehouse. So, if you formulate everything in such a way, then the HR-eye will hardly stop at your resume. You have to start from his understanding, or from the description of a vacancy, or from commonly used, professional terms, to understand what words your employer operates on. They must either conform to the description, or comply with generally accepted terminology, understandable to most.
Therefore, we should restate our example as “Optimization of storekeepers’ work in the warehouse and organizing the distribution of warehouse workers to the sites. ”You don’t need to be bold; after all, HR is not a Yandex robot, I did it just for your understanding. It may be clear to you as a professional that the storekeeper is only in stock, but this is not clear to everyone, HR is looking for words like “warehouse” and “optimization”.
But you do not need to clutter up your resume with very frequent use of keywords; you probably have seen such texts on the Internet, where very often the same word occurs. So do not, use them in moderation. And remember that the use of common terminology should not make your text too general and abstract. For example, “optimization of the movement of a material flow through supply points” is very beautiful and scientifically sound, but in general, but you must comply with the requirements for specifics, I wrote about it above. Narrow this wording, describe what you specifically did and implied by this, not forgetting the key word.
Write more about professional merit.
Your achievements are what reflects your professionalism, initiative and diligence, those qualities that employers want to see in you. Do not be lazy to paint in more detail where and what you have done and improved. Here you can exaggerate. I already wrote about this in the article about lying on the interview. I repeat a bit: if you were only a participant in a project, write that you were the initiator and implementer (what’s the problem to tell so, you participated in the project and if it’s not very big, then you know a lot about it and you can tell it).
Assign yourself the achievements of your colleagues (just find out all the accompanying nuances beforehand, they will ask you about them), there is nothing immoral about it, I myself told my former colleagues about my merits so that they could then tell about them as their personal ones. Remember everything your smallest achievements, write about them all, do not be afraid to recruit. This is an important part of the resume! I think that it is read more carefully than others.
Do not overload resume information
A resume should correspond to a specific vacancy, and it should not be difficult for a staff member to find what he is looking for there. Those key skills, experience and achievements that exactly meet the requirements of this position should not be lost in the multitude of side information that, although it shows your experience, does not say anything about whether you are in this position or not.
In short, if you want to get a job as a programmer, you shouldn’t elaborate on the items, how you wrote out the documents on your second job, how you were engaged in sales at the fifth workplace. This does not at all speak about your experience as a programmer, therefore in these aspects limit yourself to a minimum of information and focus on your programming skills, in the description of which you can be quite detailed.
This is a common mistake, which I, too, at one time, could not avoid: many, not knowing how to fill out a resume, begin to write about everything in a row, trying to present themselves as jacks of all trades. You don’t need to do that, even if you really are, unless it is required by a vacancy. In general, focus on those functions, experience and achievements, the description of which will speak of you as a professional in this particular area, of the person the company is looking for.
Speaking differently, the resume should be “sharpened” for a certain type of vacancies, and not to make from it a chaotic list of your skills and achievements, hoping that HR itself will extract the necessary information and understand for what you are most suitable.
Creating multiple resumes
This is a continuation of the previous paragraph.
If you know a lot and know a lot, your experience is not limited to any one sphere: for example, you can work both in direct sales and in work with clients, you have experience in both this and that and you essentially don’t care. of them to work, you will go to work where there will be better conditions, where more will be offered. In this case, it is better to create two summaries: "sales manager" and "customer service manager"; instead of enclosing all your extensive experience in one, it is better to share it. Well and direct the corresponding summary on the corresponding vacancies.
If you are looking for work on the online portal, then you should hide one of them, as companies do not like such "station wagons". And if they see that you have two different resumes, they are unlikely to call you. Let you have one main thing that everyone will see and one or more side ones that no one sees and you selectively send it.
Even in the case when you are looking for only one specific direction in which you plan to work, sometimes you still have to do several resumes. For example, when your profession in different companies is called differently: for some, an employee engaged in some functionality is called a business analyst, while for others the same employee will be called a system analyst, for example.
If HR-ru was told to look for a system analyst, then it is quite possible that we will screen out documents with this very name among many abstracts. You will need to simply compile several documents with different headings, you do not need to make amendments to the content.
Personally, in my practice I did several resumes with different salary levels. Where there are willing to pay more, I send the document, which indicates a higher level of salary. I will not indicate that I demand 30 thousand rubles, where they are willing to pay from 50 thousand, I would rather write 55 thousand. But vice versa, if suddenly somewhere they are not ready to pay that much, but on all other points the work suits me, then I will send there a resume with a lower required salary. You can also take note of this.
How to create a resume without experience
If you have little experience. then it will be hard for you: few people want to train their staff, everyone is waiting for ready-made specialists who were taught by someone else at their own expense. Experience needs to be enhanced. Write then about everything. Have you had an internship at the enterprise? They spat at the ceiling and you just signed a document on the passage of this mandatory item. But anyway, write that you were an assistant there, learned the basics of the profession, and finally, following the results, you suggested some kind of optimization of workflows (well, in the diploma you wrote something on this point, so you can tell).
Helped mom or dad at work with the papers at their work? Write: worked for some time without a work book, was engaged in the organization of workflow. Helped my grandfather in the country weed beds? Joke) But in general, you understand. If you don’t have any experience at all, you can come up with it, based on your knowledge of the profession and any other information about it, just to say that you didn’t work hard.
Any of your experiences one way or another related to the work activity can be a little expanded in its description. Only if you specify pre-diploma practice, side job without a contract, etc. then it should be explained that work at a production plant was a pre-diploma practice (write in parentheses, after the name of the organization and position - “pre-diploma practice”), and your work on organizing the workflow with your dad at the company was just a part-time job without an employment contract.
This should be done in order to not catch the eye of the fact that you changed several jobs in a short period of time, it says that you cannot stay in one place and do not speak in favor of your professionalism. And when you write that this is a practice, everything is immediately clear, everyone has been through it and they understand what it is.
Strengthen your skills
The more professional skills: knowledge of world languages, programming languages, computer programs, passing special courses, the better. Specify everything, if somewhere you once did something: you put on html, spoke broken French a little, passed some modeling methods at the institute that are used in business. Write html - basic level, French - basic knowledge, etc. Even if you do not remember any of this. Let it be and if you are invited to a vacancy where one of these is required, then you will need to simply show your knowledge in general terms.
This is better than demonstrating zero knowledge, since the fact that you at least know something indicates that it is not difficult for you to learn something or to catch up. So do not hesitate and write how much you know, it will not be superfluous information.
If you liked a certain vacancy, you fit its requirements, but do not meet only one point: a specialist in your level is required to have an average knowledge of SQL, this is sometimes necessary in work, but not always. You have never heard of this, it makes sense to google and get a general idea. I think you already guessed why. Right! To write to the summary of SQL - basic knowledge. At the interview, you can say that they used this in practice, just think up how or ask friends who did it.
This of course depends on the skill itself, SQL is not so difficult at the most primitive level, it all comes down to a set of basic commands and queries. It will be harder to come up with something for a programming language, especially when you didn’t do it and all the functionality of this job comes down to writing programs in this language. In short, I think you understand that if we are talking about some side functions that require something simple, such as knowledge of the State Standard Committee, standards, some international rules, there is always a sense to get acquainted with it right on the eve of the interview and indicate this information in summary.
Conclusion
That's all, I wish you good luck in your job search, I advise you not to be content with small things, not to be led by other people's interests and find a job that would suit you the most. Do not hesitate to show your knowledge and skills, do not be afraid to praise yourself: excess modesty need nothing in this matter. Job search begins with a resume, approach it responsibly and do not be lazy to work on it!
