A Short, Practical Guide to Resumes and LinkedIn Profiles
This is a short, practical guide to CVs and LinkedIn profiles from the perspective of someone who has been on the other side of the hiring process for a while. Each company will be different: so a grain of salt may be required.
However, I can talk about what has worked for me, and I hope that it helps you too.
On LinkedIn.
A tremendous lot of recruitment happens via LinkedIn — so if you’re looking for a job, it’s worth putting some work into making sure that you’re visible and pop up in aggregate searches. Here’s a couple of ways that could help.
Headline and Roles.
LinkedIn searches are heavily indexed against your headlines and role sections. It helps if you put in your expertise, skills, and things you’re generally passionate about: this helps you pop up at the top searches, but also provides a general idea of what you’re about to recruiters: information that is consumable at a glance.
Keywords.
Keywords and skills are useful to pepper around your About section: both for SEO purposes, and to inform people of what you’ve accomplished, and what you know. It’s also more interesting to read than having a “Core Skills” bullet point list. Oh, and brevity is always good.
It might also be useful to do some recon — what pops up on your searches when you search for an area or role? What do people put in their profile that make them stand out?
On CVs.
While a lot of job placements happen through referrals, there may come times when you have to go in blind to a job, location, or area where referrals are unavailable. So you may need to have a punt and throw your CV in — among many others looking for the same role.
How long should it be?
Brevity is great: mainly due to the fact that if I’m looking at a stack of resumes, most of my attention will focused on people’s first pages. As with headlines, you want to give an idea of what you’re about at first glance. If you can get away with having a single-pager, that’s always neat.
I’ve always liked Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo resume.
Who are you as a person or professional?
A bit of personality goes a long way towards making you stand out. To put it into context: I think of hiring as the unfortunate fact that we have to form a good idea of what a person is like based on so few data points. If those data points can be concise and can help us form a well-rounded idea of not just what you’re good at, but what you value and what you’re like to work with, that definitely helps.
On General Information Layout.
In which order do I…?
Information order is important: as people consume a written resource, they are more likely to check out or skip things the further along it is. In written journalism, this is managed through the inverted pyramid:
You want the most important and compelling information at the top — perhaps even the headline. Translated in a professional context, it roughly maps as follows:
Retranslated into information layouts, it can look like this:
At least, that what I look for. Again, different people may look at different things:
How much detail?
If you’ve spent some time in the industry, roles and responsibilities sections become redundant: implicit assumptions about the roles you’ve held and what you’ve been responsible for start to form, and people get more curious about what you’ve accomplished.
To put this into practical terms: Business Analysts are almost always involved in stakeholder management and requirements gathering — we’re more curious about the scope and complexities of the problem spaces you’ve been in. For example:
Compared to:
Which is more compelling? What gives us a better idea of you?
Closing
I hope this is mildly helpful. Finding a role in these times can be tough.
Resumes and profiles are mechanisms by which we try to get a better idea of you — what you’re like as a professional, what you’re good at, and what you care about. And a well-structured one helps us with that.
[Sidenote: I’m also happy to provide feedback for your CVs and LinkedIn profiles. Just DM me at: twitter.com/JohnContad]
