On Resumes, Interviews, and Landing Sweet New Jobs

Resume Tips; Getting the Little Things Right

New jobs are hard to get. As a result, the staffing & recruiting industry is a $150 Billion dollar market. From someone who has seen thousands of resumes for roles that pay minimum wage up to $200k salaries, here is clarification on the point of a resume, and tips on the little things that need to be done correctly.

The point of a resume is to get an interview. Not to get a job. Your resume needs to clearly reflect what you accomplished in previous roles, and be a full, single page long. Here are some things to not get wrong; remember.

• Name, email, phone number and location need to be clearly stated at the top of your resume.
• phone numbers need to be in the 111–111–1111 format, not 111111111
• Have a professional email address that is as close to your name as possible. Everything else looks immature, like you’re a student, or like a typo.
• Formatting needs to be consistent. If using bullet points, align them. One font, no more than three styles and sizes. No typos.
• Talk about specifics; number of calls made, revenue sold per day in a restaurant, other specific metrics, pending your role(s).
• Make it easy to read. Business names, locations and job title should be easy to see.
• Your job title is not your job description. Elaborate; bullet points are easy to read.
• Grammar needs to match.
• Limit the white space.
• References can come later, they do not need to be included. Do have them prepared though.

Finally, it’s important to remember there is no consensus on resumes. Ask 10 people how to build a good one, you’ll get 11 opinions. Getting the little things right, though, is paramount. You’re competing.

How to Respond to, “Tell Me About Yourself” in an Interview

We know ourselves better than anyone else in the world, yet when a hiring manager says, “Tell me about yourself,” many of us freeze. We get foggy and have a hard time stringing together a few sentences about who we are in a succinct manner. Shouldn’t it be obvious who I am? You read my resume! goes through our heads. Unfortunately, no, the interviewer has no idea who you are. So here’s what to focus on.

Focus on your professional background and a few key decisions you made that got you to the interview, and tie it to the role you’re applying for. Leave out your hobbies and favorite ice cream flavors unless it came be made explicitly relevant to the role you’re applying for. The purpose of the question is to understand what someone has done that makes them a fit for the position AND a fit for the company.

Tell a story that is relevant to the career path you’re on and what you like about it. It’s appropriate to touch on a family connection to an industry, but don’t share too many personal details too early. E.g. Grandma teach you how to bake as a child leading to a culinary career is good; my children have a rare illness so I pivoted to Biology is getting into personal matters that shouldn’t be shared.

Use the time to brag about something specific you accomplished. Use your highlight reel. E.g. I improved X metric by Y amount by changing Z. Or, I won X award for being the best at Y. The more specific, the better. Hiring managers can detect what’s fluff and what’s not, so details matter.

The opportunity to tell the hiring team about yourself is an opportunity to impress them. It’s an opportunity to demonstrate your communication and story telling, to share what you are proud of, and build rapport with someone you may share an office with.

Impressing a Hiring Manager: 101

Job interviews are tough. No interview will be identical to another. The questions can be odd and seem irrelevant at times. Anxiety levels are high; after all, you’re being judged on everything. Everything from your walking speed and body language, to your communication, and tone of voice and ability to get a long with others is being scrutinized. None of this is taught in school. If someone in your life is looking for a new role, here is the 101 on nailing a job interview (from someone who interviews dozens of people a week).

Understand the hiring managers motives.

• Impress and be friendly to candidates to create a warm, welcoming environment.
• Learn if a person is capable of the job, how much training they will need, and if they will stick around for the long term.
• Suss out someone’s true nature by asking a myriad of questions. The answers to those questions are a proxy for someone’s ability to do good work.
• Protect the business from hiring someone that will cause more harm than good. Hourly wage workers cost $6,000 on average to hire. Salaried employees cost tens of thousands to hire. Businesses want to know they are hiring someone that will stick around.

Control what you can

• Be 6–10 minutes early for the interview. Plan accordingly.
• Dress appropriately for the job. No hats, sunglasses, ripped or stained clothes, etc. Smelling like smoke is noticeable as well (and not a protected class).
• Bring a resume with, just in case. Indeed, Zip recruiter and other sites change the formatting of all resumes.
• Be respectful. Don’t interrupt someone when they are talking. Put the cell phone on silent and do not engage with it during the interview.

Be prepared

• Practice answering common questions, e.g. “tell me about yourself” and “give me an example of a time you went above and beyond.”
• Focus on building rapport. Eye contact, firm hand shakes, using the hiring managers name, and good body language all contribute to building rapport.
• Anticipate the duties of the job and focus your communication on how you can do the work. If totally unsure, find someone online with the same job title in a similar industry and ask them what they spend their time on.
• Smile. People like to see other people smiling.

Amat Victoria Curam — Victory Loves Preparation.

On Interviewing People

Interviewing people for a job is hard. The primary goal of a job interviewer is to get a candidate to open up, to determine;

1. Does the candidate have the skills and abilities to do the job?
2. Is the candidate someone I would want to spend 40+ hours a week with?
3. Will the candidate stay in the position, or it just a “job?”

To find that out, an interviewer and the team of people involved will observe everything they can about a candidate. Everything from the punctuation in emails, cover letters, and resumes to the way a candidate greets others, to body language, to the actual answers they provide to questions.

Every question asked is a proxy to make a judgement call about the above questions. For example, the way someone answers a question, specifically, what questions they light up to answer, are a big tell to look for. If there is a smile and more energy put into one answer compared to others, that’s a sign they like the topic. Conversely, inability to discuss specifics shows a lack of care for their work. If an accountant can’t recall what software they use, they are likely not very engaged in their work.

Interviewing candidates is about learning enough details from their past to predict what their future potential is. As an interviewer, pay attention to what prompts a candidate grabs onto. Certain questions will open up a candidate more than others and those topics should be explored more deeply. The more a candidate talks, the more one can learn about them. The interviewer should not be doing the majority of the talking.

Using a script or list of questions to interview someone is a great way to organize notes. A script is a bad way to get to know someone, though. The more strictly a script is followed, the more robotic the interview feels. A good interviewer knows when to dive deeper and when to move onto the next topic. So have a guideline document, but maintain the flexibility to go off script and based on the flow of the conversation.

The specific questions asked will depend on the position and responsibilities. Targeted questions, e.g. what programming languages do you use? are great to bake in organically after broad questions, e.g. what projects are you most proud of? Creative questions, e.g. if your life were a movie, what would the title be? can lead to interesting threads that get the candidate to open up. There are countless lists of other questions on the internet to pull ideas from.

As an interviewer, it’s your responsibility to understand what needs to be true for someone to succeed in a role and suss that out. You’re simultaneously looking for reasons someone is capable and reasons they are not a good fit. It’s a tricky line to balance.