Despite the bleak news and knock-on effects of the omicron variant, one bright spot for Americans entering 2022 is that the labor market remains tight and companies across the board are looking to hire in a favorable job market for those seeking new positions.
Whether you’re looking to change roles within a company, searching for a new job or reentering the (official) workforce after a pandemic-related pause, at some point you will need to deal with your résumé. We spoke to recruiters, human resources executives and leadership coaches about how women in particular can benefit from giving their résumés a makeover.
Reframe how you view a résumé as a story instead of a list of bullet points
A résumé isn’t the be-all and end-all in the job search, experts say, but it’s one of the most important things you can control. The thought of updating it, though, can fill many with dread.
“It takes us forever to do, and then we never want to redo it,” said Ellen Snee, an executive coach and author of “Lead: How Women in Charge Claim Their Authority.”
But in reality, a résumé is a conversation starter: Think of it as a story or narrative you want to tell about yourself, rather than a list of bullet points and job descriptions.
“For women, it’s actually naming and claiming who you are, what you bring and why that’s a value,” Snee said. “Women can write proposals for other things or other people much more easily than they can write a résumé, which is really a proposal for yourself. Have confidence in your competence. Capture that and write it out.”
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Jessica Lee, senior vice president of global talent development at Marriott International, said she is looking for the story of a career arc and a full picture of a person when she’s reading résumés.
Rather than defaulting to bullet points of jobs and duties, “tell a story in terms of your career progression or how you navigated from a certain job to a certain job or from company to company,” she said. Make sure you lay out the impact and results of being in that role or organization in a very succinct way.
How you approach your résumé also makes an impression on how you might perform the job. For example, Lee is hiring a vice president on her own team at Marriott.
“You need to be able to write a great executive summary, tell a story and sell ideas. And if you’re not able to do it through a résumé, I think that’s a bit challenging,” she said.
But what should a résumé actually look like?
The conventional wisdom that a résumé should be limited to one page is changing. For people with less than 10 years of work experience, that holds true, said Kate Brummett, founder of Drive Recruiting Group, which hires for tech companies. But if you’ve been working longer, it can extend to two pages.
Obviously, highlight your recent experiences, and unless you recently graduated from college, you don’t need to go into too much detail about that first job out of school, she said.
Grace Gibson, people and culture manager at the fitness gear start-up Bala, said she doesn’t care about GPA, either.
“I’ll skim right by that, because I’m looking for the titles of the roles you’ve held and if that’s relevant,” she said. “My first glance is to see if you have the background I’m looking for. Have similar or interesting titles? I’m now going to dive more deeply into the bullets and experience you outlined for each.”
Brummett said it’s important to focus on not only your recent work, but also your recent accomplishments. The biggest mistake she sees is résumés without metrics: What did you make better? What did you improve? If you worked on an application, how many users did you grow from? How much revenue increased? Did you improve efficiencies?
“We are talking about ballpark numbers, right? I think a lot of times women get hung up because they don’t want to be wrong. They don’t want to estimate. A lot of this is guesstimating,” Brummett said. “The FDA is not going to come after you and say, well, your efficiencies really only improved 32 percent. Don’t be afraid to round up. Give yourself the win, because I guarantee you men do. This is a uniquely female issue.”
Snee, who worked in leadership training and consulted for Fortune 500 companies, agreed, noting that men tend to exaggerate their accomplishments while women tend to downplay them.
What to do if you’re worried about a gap on your résumé
“No one — absolutely no one — is going to quibble with whatever’s on your résumé for 2020 to 2022,” Snee said.
Millions of women, particularly those with small children, left the workforce during the pandemic because of a lack of child care or to manage online school or other caretaking responsibilities. And now “the Great Resignation” is seeing Americans leave the workforce in record numbers.
For those who stopped working because of domestic responsibilities, Snee said to be transparent. Creating a job title such as “Covid Chief Operations Officer” and detailing the leadership or organizational and project management skills could show both personality and an honest reckoning of the time spent and skills gained.
Katie Cowden, human resources director at Sylvain, a strategy and design consulting firm, also encouraged being transparent about a sabbatical, be it because of caretaking responsibilities or burnout.
“I want people to feel amazing about the decision to take an opportunity. We hired someone in the last year who, in the interview process, was explicit about being very choice-ful about what her next opportunity would be. And she’s been a fantastic employee,” Cowden said. “If anything, it just makes me all the more convinced that sometimes that means you’ll get better alignment.”
Marriott’s Lee said it’s important to be authentic about who you are. If coming up with a clever title and résumé entry to describe the time fits with your personality and how you approach situations, do it. If not, it’s okay to just be transparent about a break.
Brummett recommended being very upfront about a sabbatical and leaving it at that, “because it’s really nobody’s business.” She did caution that going into details about your own situation may alienate a hiring manager who may, say, have wanted the time off but couldn’t afford to take it.
Use your résumé to stand out, but be smart about it
Rather than using photos, brightly colored paper or eye-catching designs to make your résumé stand out, showcase your personality, experts say.
Sylvain’s Cowden said the company likes to encourage hobbies and side hustles, so it’s good to showcase those on a résumé.
Gibson also noted that including a passion or side hustle — say as a fitness instructor, or as a nonprofit volunteer — could show a connection with the company’s values.
Take an inventory of how you spend your time, even in ways you think may not have traditionally been thought of as job-related.
“As a working mom, I think that there’s a wealth of things that we do in our personal lives that are highly transferrable. And I don’t know that we’re always talking about it in that way,” Lee said, such as planning, project management, leadership, teaching and community building. “All those things are super transferrable and relevant from a workplace perspective.”
Lee herself is a Girl Scout troop leader. At the onset of cookie season, she said, she has to plan sales.
“Talking about those things in the workplace also makes the difference for people to see, oh, wait a minute, I’m not giving myself enough credit, or I’m not highlighting these things that I’m doing outside of work,” she said “I think they matter. They’re really, really rich for building those skills that ultimately do work in the workplace.”
