The Simple Guide To Resume Revision

Over 90% of my business at Stolen Ground Media runs through my resume service. Why? Because I made a huge discovery in early 2020 that completely destroys what I thought I knew about how to optimize a resume.

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably been working like crazy trying to make waves in your industry and gain recognition. You’ve probably also been browsing jobs thinking about that promotion that you absolutely deserve. And, you’ve probably been sold a crazy story about how HR professionals are the best people to optimize your resume. What you need is an expert in the creation of comprehensive personal brands.

Who Can Revise My Resume?

If you’re arrested and ready to stand trial, do you want to be represented by a defense attorney or another judge? Think about it: both have been in a million court hearings, both know law very well, but both have had very different contexts within the law.

A judge would tell you they’re the best person to represent you because they’ve been inside a judge’s head. But they haven’t won a court case in years.

Ladies & gentlemen, “an experienced recruiter” may be the silliest person to trust with your resume. Like a judge, they’ll tell you all about their vast experience reviewing resumes, but they’ve not won over another recruiter any more than you have, and they’re quick to claim representation for every recruiter on planet earth, as if the way they might view a resume is the way resumes are viewed by all.

They sound great, but they’ve spent their lives on the wrong side of the table. It sounds harsh, but when I see great candidates spending hundreds of dollars on a resume only to be denied in seconds by their dream job, it really annoys me!

You are WORTH that new job. You are WORTH that pay raise. You are WORTH those health benefits. You are WORTH those regular hours.

You are WORTH a resume that doesn’t adhere to one single recruiter who, “at the low cost of” a freaking month’s rent, can get you an interview in a heartbeat (as long as it’s their twin sibling).

Not only can a marketing expert easily infuse things like subtle rhetoric & concise language into a document, but someone that studies Search Engines like Google & Bing can even leverage advanced skills like keyword optimization in a heartbeat.

Stolen Ground Media is set up as a marketing-heavy blog that uses all of those tools to influence even job applications. AND I’ve spent my career building personal brands like yours- from your side of the table.

What Makes A Professional Resume?

A professional resume starts with these sections:

• Summary
• Education
• Skills
• Experience
• Awards
• Extracurriculars

Depending on your experience, you don’t need to add all of these to your resume, but these are great places to start.

Be sure to use a simple but professional font (I like Times New Roman & Verdana), and the size should be no larger than 12pt outside of the titles.

Use concise language (no more than 2 lines per bullet) and set margins to “Moderate,” then start with as many numerical wins as possible in your experiences (“I saved $200k on…” or “I decreased team hours by 25% by…”).

From there, you’ll need it optimized for Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and other recruitment tools used by potential employers, so you’ll want to send that to a resume writing service.

Here’s the link to mine through Stolen Ground Media!

When you optimize for recruitment technology, you’re ensuring that the document you write for the human reviewing it also appeals to the machines they use to help weed out bad applicants.

Those “robots” are responsible for knocking out 75% of all resumes in any one job posting, so you’ll want to take them seriously!

How Do I Revise My Resume For a Career Change Without Experience?

First of all, congratulations on taking that leap of faith into a new career! It’s scary but you can totally do this!

All of my resumes show growth by leveraging action verbs (those first verbs in each bullet). You can show vertical growth or horizontal growth.

If you’re changing careers, you’re showcasing that horizontal growth.

That means, the majority of your bullets need to describe not what the bulk of your day was, but the things in your day that relate to your new career.

For example, I’m a digital marketer. If I wanted to change careers and go into sales, I wouldn’t write a single bullet about my Google Ads expertise (where I spend 99% of my day-to-day).

My bullets will all be about different pitch decks I helped out with, any vendor negotiations I did, and all of the money (with real amounts) I’ve generated for the company by clients’ investment increases.

Those are a small portion of my day, but a recruiter for a sales job will set WAY more value by those elements of my job than what I do for most of my time, so I play up those events and play down my Google Ads work.

Strong career changers & other professionals write resumes intelligently, which means they leverage smart marketing tactics from rhetoric to machine optimization.

And even if you don’t use me… don’t hire the judge!