Boost Your Personal Brand (Part 1 of 3: Resumes)

Your personal brand will make or break you in your job search. It’s so important to ensure that you are utilizing every opportunity to tell your own authentic story consistently and effectively. Recruiters and companies actually really do want to get to know you and determine whether or not you’d be a good fit culturally and technically for the role. You should want that too! The tips below will help you boost your resume.

Resumes

Your resume is the gateway to your new job. It's the key to getting your foot in the door and will be one of the first impressions that you have on recruiters. A strong resume is essential to landing the job! These exercises below will help you take your current resume to the next level:

1. For each of your past jobs, I want you to go through and think a little deeper about what you actually did there. It might help to literally just say it out loud as if you were talking to a friend. Be sure to ask yourself these questions:

   
   

   1. What was the result I gave the company in this role?

   2. How did I improve this role for the person who filled it after me?

   
   

2. Numbers mean everything on a resume! They really help to show your contributions in your last role and speak to your experience. To add more numbers to your resume, try these steps:
   

   1. Add Range - Give a rough estimate of how much or how many of something
      

      1. Before: Responsible for training staff members

      2. After: Trained 10-15 staff members each quarter on compliance standards and regulations within the company
         

   2. Add Frequency - Share how often you perform certain actions
      

      1. Before: Made and reviewed reports

      2. After: Generated and reviewed 2-3 reports per week to measure KPIs and make data informed decisions on how to proceed with various issues
         

   3. Add Scale - Provide time or money savings to show the scale/impact of your actions
      

      1. Before: Created a new software process

      2. After: Built and implemented a new software process that optimized company wide productivity by 12% and led to $40K annual company savings

         
         

3. Go on LinkedIn (or your favorite job board) and find 3 job postings that you really like. Put the job descriptions side by side with your resume and see if there’s any overlap between what the job is looking for and your past experience. Re-word some of your past experience to use the same language as the job descriptions.

Always remember when crafting your resume, that it is a tool to help you land interviews. Once you land the interview, you can elaborate and fill in any blanks for recruiters!

Read Part 2 of this personal branding series for additional tips on portfolios and Part 3 for LinkedIn profiles!