Monday, August 26 - "Is My Resume Broken?"

Good morning,

Happy Monday!

Here’s what’s on the job description for today:

1. New roles at one of the world’s most important financial institutions.

2. Rose asks, “I’m not getting as many interviews as I expected. Does this mean my resume is total crap?”

IN HIRING

Bank of England

• As a company with massive impact on world’s financial markets, there are few institutions where your decisions reach the scale of BoE.

• There are currently ~30 positions open with a highly varied set of roles including technical and more strategic options.

• Here are a few of the most interesting roles available

  • Senior Analyst, Data and Analytics - Click here for full details

  • Manager, Operational Resilience - Click here for full details

  • People Insights Manager - Click here for full details

Click here for the company’s career page

TODAY’S QUESTION

Rose asks, “I’m not getting as many interviews as I expected. Does this mean my resume is total crap?”

If you’re getting zero interviews, clearly something is broken.

Recommendation: We can’t know for sure whether it’s your resume but here is how I would think about next steps:

• First, find out how relevant you are to the roles. Find 3 people who have the role you want and ask them directly how relevant your experience is. When they start speaking about your experience, the less you speak the better. If you begin defending your fit, it’s unlikely you’ll get anything useful.

• If you find through those conversations or other means that the roles you’re applying for are relevant enough, then your resume probably sucks. Here’s what I would focus on:

  • 1. Get rid of all errors in formatting and spelling

  • 2. Ask your most detail oriented friend to review the resume for errors. It’s hard to see them all when you wrote it

  • 3. Make sure each bullet has an action and an outcome. That’s the absolute basics - if the outcome can be relevant to the job description, then you’re on your way to magic

  • 4. Align the first few bullets on the most recent role in your CV with the JD as closely as possible. It’s never as closely aligned as you think it is

• Finally, setup a process for tailoring your resume to jobs. Here’s the one I use:

  • 1. Do the action words of the first role so they’re relate to the soft skills of the JD

  • 2. Make it obvious that you have used the hard skills to complete similar or at least similar sized projects in the past

  • 3. Are there any errors (are the dashes the same size between dates, is the spacing all perfect, etc.)

Conclusion:

Yeah, your resume probably sucks if you’re not getting interviews but first make sure that’s the problem.

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