Resumes & Cover Letters

Resumes

The Goal of Your Resume

• Resumes goal is to book you first round interviews

• Needs to show your qualified in 6 seconds

• Outside of that, hiring managers may reference resume during interviews just to ask questions

1. To get you hired

2. To connect the dots between your experience and the company’s needs

• If you’re not landing interviews it means your resume needs improvement. Its not connecting the dots between your experience and the job

• If you’ve submitted 50+ applications and you’re not getting interviews your resume is not working
Tailor your resume
• If you know what you want than your resume will speak to the job your looking for
• You should only need to tailor it once to the job you want, not each and every job. Maybe twice if there are two roles or industries you’re truly interested in. So you will have two versions max.
• Something else wrong if you think you need to tailor it more than once
Source: Mollie Lo
Think about what is the industry you want to work in and how can you make your resume reflect that. You want to position your experiences in a way that speaks to, for example, a fintech company and keywords. This reframing can be done with anything.
 
Resume needs to be nimble and flexible, but you should stay true to what you’re applying to. Meaning, your resume should be written so it’s applicable to more than one specific job, but still tailored to a defined industry or role. For example, if you are truly interested in both UX and UI, have two resumes tailored to each. You need to tell a story with each resume and show why your experience is related to that specific role or industry Source: Khrystyna Oros
On hiring a resume writer.
• Think of it like going on a road trip, you need: a vehicle, gas, and directions on where to go. Your resume is your rental car, the money towards the resume writer is the gas.
• If you don’t have a strategy, it’s like hiring renting a car and filling it up with gas and having no plans on where to go. You’re hiring someone and not knowing what to do with them

Layout and Components

Anatomy of a Resume + Template on Figma by Ideate Labs

• You can export it to a PDF (because these are scannable by ATS)

• It is easy for you to edit
 

For the resume layout they recommend

• A 1 - 2 column format
• Columns make it easy to scan
• Can sometimes use 3 columns (see Bestfolios example above)
• Khrys’ resume is 1 column and she hasn’t had any issues with it

• Including your title at the top

• Keeping your Education section should be placed after experience, at the bottom of the page, unless it’s directly relevant
• In the design field education will usually be under experience, as the industry generally prioritizes experience over education. Plus most people haven’t gone to school for design, and if it doesn’t help your story (unrelated education) it should be put low.

• Not including your address
• Khyrys’ doesn’t put anything geographical

• Including the time range of employment on the right-hand side

• Keeping your resume to 1 page (unless you have 5+ years of experience)
• Limiting it to one page challenges you to tell a more cohesive story
• Some folks even skip sections of employment that don’t resonate with next job, i.e. leave gaps in their work history
• Some of her students do this and she does this and it hasn’t impacted her
• Can call that gap freelancing time, or you can be honest and say it was a gap year and say why. It depends on how it fits into the story you want to tell
• Expectations around page count may be different depending on what part of the world you are in

• Adding a little bit of color to create a personal brand or keep it black and white
• Do: Use 1 primary color to highlight specific details (see Bestfolios example above)
• Don’t: Use too much! Make sure it’s not hard to scan or distracting; want readers to be able to focus on content

Layout and Components Mistakes to Avoid

• Images
• Example Having logos of tool but not words means ATS won’t pick it up

• Headshots
• Don’t include a headshot, biases will hurt you
• Expectations around this may be different depending on what part of the world you are in

• Skill trackers (bars, %)
• It’s all relative, your 30% may be someone else’s 10%
• May be hurting yourself and losing jobs, for example if a hiring manager is looking for 100%

• Too much color

• Bolding keywords

ℹ️

Examples of what not to do

 

 

 

Formatting your Job Descriptions

• From Khyrys’ understanding ATS looks for keywords

• If you are nervous about getting past ATS with a creative or nontraditional resume you can experiment and A/B test it. Make one boring, super traditional resume and 1 creative resume (the one you want to show off). Submit them and see which one is more successful

Recommended Template

• Use Bullet Points
• Make sure bullet points start off with actionable keywords
• Make the first bullet point a descriptive one that starts broad and gives an overview of your work, and make the following ones more granular and descriptive
• 1st line of job description - something overarching that has a lot of keywords stuffed in to show big impact of your responsibilities
• Ask yourself, if you describe your job to someone how would you say it?
• 2nd - 3rd lines - dedicated to big projects done
• Example Redesigned checkout features on page to increase customer retention and conversion
• You don’t have to use this format for everything

• Topics to Cover - Khyrys’ wants all students to be able to speak about:
1. accessibility
2. research
3. working cross functionally, especially with engineers and handing off to them
4. stakeholder management and negotiation (i.e., how you push project forward)
5. and design systems if you do UI
• Make sure you have a line that includes that or speaks to these
• With all that should have 3 -5 lines

• Old Jobs - If you had a job from years ago that is sort of relevant, you can have 1 - 2 lines about it if you want
• It really is ok to do just 1 line!

• When listing skills you can insert them into job descriptions
• Do: Soft skills should always go into job descriptions
• Use soft skills to tell story about how you behave at work
• Don’t: Don’t create a dedicated area for soft skills like you would for tools or tangible skills

• Tense
• Anything you’re doing right now needs to be present tense, anything done in past should be in past tense

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Good Examples

 

 

 

How to Write Job Descriptions

1. Go to LinkedIn and search for what you want to do
• Don't need to put senior or junior
• If you’re a baby beginner with very litter experience then look at intern positions

2. Study the language and keywords used in the results
• Khyrys’ likes to look at banks, she feels they have great descriptions
• But it’s still important to look at job descriptions from industries you’re interested in because they may have different language or keywords
• Can pull keywords from these to use for your job descriptions

Add keywords to your resume (either on the side or in the descriptions)

Add key performance indicators to show the “return on investment” (ROI) of your work

• Examples
• Coordinated with cross-functional partners and developers to deliver 35+ creative designs for website redesign over 16-week contract
• Involved in the full product development cycle to research, design, deliver and ship over 25 e-commerce and B2B digital products and features for native mobile applications on iOS and Android as well as responsive desktop

• Doesn’t always have to be a result, can be number of:
• clients you worked with
• interviews you conducted
• features you worked on
• projects you managed
• etc

Cover Letters

The Goal of Your Resume

• Goal is to help you stand out, don’t regurgitate what's on your resume
• Don't say “contact me because I’m great at X, Y, Z. everyone says that”

• Helps establish candidate brand as an expert in your space. Tell a story, show why they should contact you. it helps get you out of the maybe pile
• opportunity to be bold, authentic, and tell your story

In Both

• Keywords. Manager is already telling recruiter what keywords to look for

• Quantitative numbers. Helps recruiters paint a picture in their mind and better understand you
• Don’t spell out numbers, write them. It pops out more