From the course: Resume Makeover

Determine crucial messaging for your resume

From the course: Resume Makeover

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Determine crucial messaging for your resume

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- Once you've found a short handful of job descriptions that you feel are representative of the type of role you'd love to land, I recommend that you complete an exercise that I call Analyze 5. This is the same exercise we do with every resume writing client that we work with. Here's what to do. Go through each job description and highlight required skills that you possess and appear across more than one posting. Now, assuming you've narrowed in on a target job or a strong ballpark, you're going to find some obvious patterns across multiple job descriptions. For instance, maybe you discover that most of your selected opportunities call for someone who can build customer relationships and manage multiple projects simultaneously, and you're good at both of these things. You'll be wise then to introduce yourself in the summary section of your new resume, as among other things, someone great with people and one who can multitask like the best of 'em because you know from your Analyze 5 exercise, and feel free to use more than five if you're inspired to, that these are the very things that your next employer is likely looking for as they consider candidates. And this exercise won't just help you with the summary section of your resume. It'll also help you decide what to share in your experience section. If your summary section essentially says, "Hi, I'm great at juggling multiple projects and priorities," then be sure and share some details that demonstrate this in your experience section. I sometimes call this process fair cheating because unless you're targeting a wildly diverse range of jobs, in which case you should have multiple resumes, the answers to the question, how should I present myself on paper, will likely be right there in the job descriptions. Those job descriptions, when you examine them as a collective, will tell you the most crucial themes and messaging that you need to include in your resume. You just got to pay attention to the overlaps and the patterns.

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