Your resume is the first impression when applying for a new role, and you want it to be strong and to tell a story about why you want the position you are applying for, and what you have accomplished in the past. Resumes are notoriously tough though because you may be thinking, how do I tell that story? How to showcase my accomplishments? How do I show them who I am outside of my numbers? How do I grab their attention? Overall, how do I create a really strong resume and how do I do this in a timely matter?
I can’t give you every answer in this one blog post, but I can get you a lot closer and I can give you a framework to get your resume done with the information and resources you have today. Below I give you a 3-step time management framework to showcase your skills and who you are, and to get it done in 2-3 hours of time. I have a summary at the end you can scroll to if you don’t want to read the whole thing.
Separate Your Time Into 3 Blocks
- Content Dump – 25% of your time
- Editing – 50% of your time
- Design – 25% of your time
In regards to time allocation, if you are just updating your resume the content dump should take no longer than 30 minutes, design SHOULD take less than 30 minutes but often doesn’t, and editing the content to sound professional/tell a story/showcase who you are should take up the bulk of your time.
Most people lose a ton of time normally trying to do all of these things in one step. This leads to people working on their resume for weeks with very little progress. Other common mistakes are misallocating their time to the wrong category, but the biggest time suck of all is when people try to do their resume without having someone else look it over, or outsourcing for skills you don’t have. You really need another set of eyes, be it a peer, a mentor, or a service to help with editing and/or design blocks. I’ll take you through what each step means and how to know if you should outsource parts of it, and how to do so below.
But first, let’s quickly cover off on the necessary components of your resume. You must include:
- Name and Contact Information
- Summary/Objective
- Experience and Achievements
- Education
There are also optional pieces you can include in your resume that can help you tell a story:
- Skills
- Languages
- Interests
- Extracurricular/Volunteer Organizations
- Awards/Certifications
Please keep in mind if you’re starting your resume from scratch, it’s going to take a lot more time than 2-3 hours because you have to start with a blank slate and that’s ok. You can and should still use this guide, just understand that it will take you more than the 2-3 hours I’m referencing here. It is exceptionally hard to tell your story with little or no experience, and that takes time to develop. Don’t sweat it. But if you’re simply updating your resume, it really should take no more than 2-3 hours of total time. Let’s jump in now to how to go through each of the 3 blocks I listed at the beginning of this post.
Content Dump
The content dump step is all about typing out the bullets on what your general responsibilities are and what you accomplished in that position. In this step you don’t care how it sounds, if it looks messy, etc., just list out everything you can think of about what you did in your previous role. One thing you absolutely need ESPECIALLY as a sales professional are your numbers; percentage to goal AND revenue numbers. If I ever see a sales resume that doesn’t have sales numbers on it, I throw it away.
Besides looking up your numbers from your commission statements or your CRM, the rest of this should come out pretty quickly as what you feel like you accomplished should sit with you, it is your story. Set a timer for 30 minutes, and just write as much as you can or whatever comes to mind. Here are some examples below from a dump. Remember, these aren’t the polished bullets, it’s just the dump:
- 102% to goal – $5M in revenue for 2020
- Really good Q1 and Q3
- Won award for top seller for March
- Sold to Fortune 500 companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, Adobe, BP
- Responsible for prospecting, pitch, and close – was good at closing, have numbers to back this up
- Won new accounts such as Williams-Sonoma and Target
- Was an important member of the office and well-liked
- Was promoted
- Good attitude in office/always positive
Hopefully this gets your ideas flowing. Get as much of this out on paper as possible. Once you get all the appropriate content dumped onto your resume, it will feel really good and you will be able to visually see yourself making progress. Your body actually gets a Seratonin response when you can see progress you’re making. So make sure you take a second after your timer goes off and look at all you got out on paper.
Editing
The editing step is literally the editing of the words you wrote in your dump. You want to do two things in this step:
- Tell a Story
- Sound Professional
Sounding professional is a lot more of a math equation, where as telling a story is more of an art form. This is why this part of the process will take up at least half of your time. Some quick tips on sounding professional:
- You want to start each bullet with an action verb (ie, developed, prepared, managed, etc.)
- Do not start with pronouns (ie, we, I, etc.)
- The order is important. You want to start the first bullet as the most important accomplishment you had in that role. That should be an award you won, or your numbers.
I have a template for purchase here that provides a layout for your resume and some sample language.
Regarding telling a story, most of this will come from the Summary/Objective paragraph at the top of your resume. This all comes from your identity as a Sales Professional. This is a place to showcase your values, what you’ve accomplished, but also what you are looking for. You also want to build this paragraph so you can tweak it slightly for each job description you are applying for, to cover off on the things that the organization is looking for in that position. Again, this is an art form. I’ll show you an example of mine below:
In this Summary, I establish in the first sentence that I am a PROVEN leader that VALUES building a place that people like to work, and that I fundamentally believe that if I service my team and take care of them, greatness will follow. I say all of that in the first line. Already, the recruiter or hiring manager will have an idea of what I care about. In the second line I establish what industries and areas of the organizational structure I have that experience in. I expand upon that in the third line. In the last line, I close on everything they should be looking for in someone to lead a team.
When you’re creating this summary, you need to ask yourself, what do you value? How do you define yourself professionally? What skills and experience do you want to showcase? This is a complicated and involved question. If you don’t know the clear answers to that, I have a one on one process where I help you better understand your values and further, your identity in business that you can sign up for here if you want a short cut. It takes two sessions and a take home assignment. This will also help you understand what types of positions you want to go after in your career, or give you more of an idea where to look if you are making a career change. If you don’t have the time to do that, or don’t have the money to fund it right now, just try your best at answering those questions and telling that story in your summary. Remember, we’ve already allocated at least 50% of the time for this process to this piece. Write the best summary you can and then have a friend or peer look over it.
Outside of your summary, you can also tell the story in your soft skills in the bullets under each position you’ve held, the organizations you are and/or were a part of, what you focused on in college, if you played a sport or music in school, if you play a sport or music as a hobby, if you like to travel, etc.. Ask yourself, what you consider part of who you are or how you identify. If that thing falls under any of the categories mandatory or optional categories I listed above, include it. It will only help humanize this sheet of paper, so the person reading it can get to know what you really bring to the table, and why this resume stands out amongst the thousands of others.
Design
This one is easy. If you have design skills, do it. As a rule of thumb, If you can’t do it in under 30 minutes, it’s not worth your time. I have wasted so many hours trying to align paragraphs or pick the right font or have a subtle color scheme, and it was not worth my time AT ALL. This does not mean design isn’t important, it is. You want the resume to look clean and professional, but you also want it to stand out.
My recommendation is to outsource it. There are many services out there, but I have used Fiverr in the past. Fiverr is a site that you can use to outsource tasks you don’t have the skill or resources to quickly complete. I used Fiverr to design the Sales Whale Pro logo for $37, I used them to design one version of my resume, I used them to design a t-shirt logo for an organization I co-founded and run. Fiverr is great because they are cheap, fast, and provide a quality output. Most of the time they give you revisions to make sure you like the end result.
My point is outsource this one if you can’t do it in 30 minutes. You can spend $20 bucks and have a beautiful resume and not spend any time on it and returned to you in 24 hours while you look for jobs. This is well worth the money.
Summary
TLDR, break your resume into 3 distinct blocks of time: Content Dump, Editing, and Design. Set a timer, and dump as much content out as you can in 30 minutes. Spend most of your time on editing, telling the story of who you are and cleaning up your wording from the content dump. Then save yourself a ton of time and headache, and outsource your resume to design to a service like Fiverr.