Randall had a very fun resume for us to work on at RezScore. Randall is very successful in both the public and private sectors, looking to make a career jump. In his own words:
Experienced nonprofit and corporate management professional and successful entrepreneur. Raised 10s of millions of dollars for nonprofit and political causes and organizations. Adept at relationship management and partnership development. Focused on customer service, performance metrics, budgeting, operations, fundraising, personnel motivation and management, and fiscal management.
Good stuff! Our first thought was that we should be recruiting him to run our company, not to improve his resume so his talents go to some other company. But we love fixing resumes, and he had room for improvement:
We recommend you download the full version while reading this piece, it will help to follow. Even from the screenshot though, you can see there’s work to be done. We sent it to the super-recruiter Charles Jo for critique, and he wrote back: “Looks unappealing to read.” Fortunately we were able to turn it around.
Even the difficult to please Charles Jo praised the new version as “inviting.” We made many changes, but for this post we’ll focus on how we fixed up his Structure and Formatting.
Structure
Most of the problems with Randall’s resume stem from structure. In particular, it can be improved by keeping a couple of principles in mind.
Frontloading
The reader has already made up their mind in the first third of the first page of your resume. Just like when you meet people in real life, readers immediately make a split second unconscious judgement about the subject and later fill in reasons to justify their decision. Notice how the above screenshots only contained a short amount of the resume, but enough for you to make a judgement.
We strongly recommend frontloading all your best achievements into the 1st third of the 1st page. If this part doesn’t peak their interest, it’s unlikely the rest of the resume will change their mind. If they’re interested, they will keep reading to see if they can find any disqualifying red flags. A professional headline is a great technique to help you. Adjust your headline to match the job, and they will interpret the rest of your resume through this lens.
Randall’s resume has one only one “wow” factor in the screenshot we posted above. Raising tens of millions of dollars stands out, but the remainder is less distinguishable from other applicants. Did you know he built the largest nonprofit donor database in nation? This was hidden below the fold. Did you know he served as a city councilman for 8 years? Not unless you read through to page 4. In our redraft we took the highlights that were relevant to his target position and pushed them above the fold.
Brevity
We’re preparing an in-depth blog post on the importance of brevity in your resume, but we’ll give you some highlights here.
The typical resume is between 386 and 896 words long, with a median of 578. Many people drone on for longer than this. When we ask experts to evaluate these resumes, the longer resumes get lower marks.
It’s a slight dropoff, and some long resumes get high marks. But the data suggest you’re best off keeping it under 800 words.
There are some possible reasons for this. It could be that hiring managers have short attention spans, and roll their eyes when forced to read longer resumes.
Another explanation is a phenomenon well known in the sales community called “selling past the close.” Once you’ve closed a sale, there’s no additional value in continuing to talk, all you can do is the customer out of the deal. Your resume is similarly a heavily scrutinized document, with hirers looking for any excuse to reject you. A 1500 word resume has twice as many reasons to reject you as a 750 word resume.
Randall’s resume chalked in at a whopping 5 pages. We cut this down to two pages for him. An amazing thing happens when you cut your resume in half — the weakest 50% disappears, and your resume gets correspondingly stronger.
Formatting
Good formatting is somewhat the eye of the beholder, so it’s never possible to achieve perfection. Additionally, about half the time your resume may be stripped of formatting by an ATS, so nobody will ever see it.
Nonetheless, we’ve done a lot of studies on formatting, and some good formatting makes a significant difference in the perception of the reader. For these studies, we sent equivalent resumes as plaintext and formatted versions to friendly hiring managers and asked them to score the resume, and they consistently scored the formatted versions better.
Diving deeper into formatting, it often doesn’t take much, but keep a few incontrovertible principles can help you with your formatting.
Most People Don’t Read Paragraphs
When you are scanning through hundreds of resumes, your eyes glaze over when you see a paragraph. People are not reading your resume from the same frame of mind that they would approach a thrilling novel, it’s closer to skimming a newspaper. They want to quickly scan and hunt for facts. Studies show that people read newspapers by darting around the headlines and then jumping into the articles they find relevant. You should keep this same approach in mind.
Anytime you have large chunks of text on your resume, as Randall does at the very top, you can break these into bullet points to help guide the reader. Anecdotally, three bullet points per job position seems to be the preferred amount, with each of these bullet points taking up a full line or two. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, but you can’t go wrong adhering to it.
Use Negative Space
Since at least the 1920’s Gestalt school of thought, people have understood the aesthetic value of “negative space”, or white space, in design. Which is more inviting to read?
People with a lot of experience often try to cram their resume full of their achievements, but this can have the effect of pre-suading the reader to dislike your resume before they even start reading it.
We have not yet found any objective study on the quantifiably best percentage of whitespace to include in your resume — we’re holding off on doing it ourselves to leave the opportunity open for an ambitious student. Until somebody steps up, the following articles provide very good non-quantitative review of the concept:
- https://www.sitepoint.com/a-solid-understanding-of-negative-space/
- https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/43645364.pdf
Conclusion
We made many other small changes that helped his resume. For instance:
- His contact information used to be the footer, which some ATS will remove, eliminating him from consideration.
- We condensed much of the experience that was less related to the types of jobs he was applying for.
- We removed “Microsoft Office” from computer skills, since that wouldn’t impress anybody under the age of 120.
When we delivered the new resume to Randy he wrote:
“RezScore took my hot mess of a six page resume and turned it into a two page, content-rich, professionally presented and designed piece of resume art. I highly recommend you use RezScore!”
If you’d like your resume subject to a roast, RezScore is the right place. We are always happy to review your resume! We built the world’s leading resume grader at https://rezscore.com/, which you can use to get a free, instant, and confidential resume grade, tips on improvement, salary estimates, and skills analysis. When you’re ready to apply for jobs, try out our new Jobs Board, where you can track your application through every step of the application process so your resume never falls into a black hole.
