Writing strong resumes and cover letters

Part 1: Three tips you can use to land your first professional position

Hey, everyone!

In my origin story yesterday, I mentioned writing a lot of resumes and cover letters once I felt my programming skills were sufficient to convince someone to hire me. There are endless examples of resume and cover letter formats online, so I'm not going to discuss layouts. Instead, I'd like to share three strategies I and others have used to get noticed and land our first professional positions.

Before I share these strategies, it is important to understand that your resume and cover letter are the job equivalents of penciling your name and personal information onto a three-by-five card and calling it a driver's license. Since an authoritative source to verify your skills and experience doesn't exist, what you say on your resume is your word that you can do the work, nothing more, so make the value of your word priceless.

With that in mind, let's continue.

Be authentic

The lack of resume verification may tempt you to claim experience you don't have. We refer to the practice as padding to make it sound innocent. However, it is still dishonest, and falsehoods have a habit of surfacing eventually. Avoid missing out on opportunities you want or getting fired from jobs you love just because you padded your resume. It happens!

So, what do you do if you have a skill but need experience? Say that! Then, demonstrate your skills in some way. For example, if you're applying for your first junior copywriting position in marketing, find a few products you like and write marketing campaigns for them. Then, in the Summary section at the top of your resume, write something like:

I am eager to begin my career as a copywriter and have worked hard to develop my skills. Since I'm seeking my first copywriting position with you, you'll find several examples of marketing campaigns I've written attached to my resume, which you can use in place of past professional experience to evaluate my work. I trust you'll be pleased with my efforts and would love a chance to bring my passion into your company.

Hiring managers are looking for a person to hire, not a made-up entity. Therefore, if what you present to them is authentic and demonstrates value, you will strengthen your chances of success.

Avoid buzzwords and keyword lists

Keyword lists weren't yet trendy when I chiseled my first resume into a stone; however, buzzwords were, and the two are similar. So I'll update my experience to account for modern technology.

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, it was common to see an extensive list of random words crammed into the bottom margin of a website. The idea was that search engines would glom onto these keywords, exclaim, "Wow! This site covers it all!" and push the site higher in their results.

Search engines became wise to this strategy and ignore it nowadays; however, the tools recruiters use to rifle through thousands of resumes automatically are still relatively primitive. As a result, it is common to see resumes with large sections at the top dedicated to meaningless mounds of keywords the applicant thinks might get a recruiter's attention.

Why waste a third of your resume on empty content? For example, if you were applying for a position managing my small business's website, knowing how to use a content management system is far less interesting to me than seeing what you've done with those skills. So, instead of wasting your resume on keyword stuffing like this:

Skills: WordPress, Adobe Illustrator, Yoast.

Showcase your skills like this:

To increase the number of customers in my dog-walking business, I created a website using WordPress and did my graphic design work in Adobe Illustrator. I also installed Yoast to make my site search engine friendly. My site also includes a referral system for customers to refer their friends. Within a week of deploying my site, I tripled my customers. You can visit my site at https://PickItUp.com. I'd love to bring this kind of success to your business.

If I had five applicants, four of which used keyword lists to enumerate their skills, and you gave me the latter example, you would have the job.

Show impact

My wife used to work at a place that milled crowns and dental implants. The company was great, but the pay could have been better. Unfortunately, the company was also nearly an hour away, and the cost of gas at the time ate away heaps of her salary.

My wife is detail oriented and excellent at math, so I tried convincing her to study programming and switch careers so she could make more and work closer to home. Finally, one day, I said, "If you're going to have to sit somewhere for eight hours a day anyway, why not get paid as much as possible?" That won her over.

So, I paid my wife's tuition for a coding boot camp that taught her how to write code using a web development framework called Ruby on Rails.

A few weeks before the course began, the boot camp sent her a book about Ruby on Rails and asked her to read it before the first day of class. So she quit her milling job and made that task her full-time job. She read the entire book, marked it up, manually typed out all the examples, and ran them on her computer.

By the end of the boot camp, my wife's book was crumbling with wear, and she had created a web application that showed the scheduled locations for several food trucks in the county we lived in.

Since my wife didn't have professional experience in programming, she used the top three-quarters of her resume to flaunt her food truck project. Hiring managers could see the work, the technical challenges she had to overcome, and the methods she used to resolve those issues. Within a few weeks, a large international retail company hired her as a junior web developer in their online marketing department.

When I went to pick my wife up on the last day of her boot camp, two guys were chatting by the entrance. I overheard them talking about jobs they would get and the success they would enjoy as I walked past.

I got my wife, and as we were leaving, I noticed both guys were holding pristine copies of the same Ruby on Rails book the boot camp had given my wife. I didn't think about it then, but I discovered later that they had interviewed with the company that hired my wife, but neither received an offer.

For several years after my wife's boot camp ended, I'd see these two together at tech meet-ups and job fairs. Out of curiosity, I'd ask if they had landed jobs yet, but to my knowledge, they never did.

I suspect the root cause of their failure was they put as much effort into building projects to showcase their skills and writing powerful resumes as they did into reading those mint copies of the Ruby on Rails book. 

Unfortunately, they both thought that the barricade to career entry was the high cost of the class. While valuable, boot camps and college degrees are less important than the importance of impact. Of course, you can succeed with both, but I know plenty of college graduates who are no better off now than they were out of high school.

The key to success is to put in the work, regardless of how you go about it, and then use your resume to show hiring managers you can impact their business. If you do, companies will hire you more often than college graduates who can't.

The challenge

Think about a talent you have, then write a strong resume entry for it. Post it in the comments if you'd like help.