RESUME 101 | Designed to be hired.
If you’ve ever sat down to update your resume and suddenly forgotten everything you’ve accomplished, you are not alone. It can feel overwhelming trying to capture years of experience on one or two pages. Most people don’t struggle because they lack experience. They struggle because they don’t slow down and fully reflect on what they’ve actually done.
Before you stress about formatting, keywords, or making everything sound polished, start with clarity. Give yourself space to think! I always recommend beginning with one simple but extremely helpful exercise called a brain dump. Which you can access my free template in the steps below.
Starting with the brain-dump exercise helps you see the full picture of your skills, growth, and accomplishments. From there, building a strong, strategic resume becomes much easier and you become much more confident.
1) Start with an exercise called brain dump.
You want to document anything and everything that you have done. It does not matter if you do the task once or multiple times, just document it. You want to list out all your tasks, accomplishments, challenges, actions, tools, etc. Nothing is off limits during this exercise and there is no ‘right or wrong’ way to do this. Do this for every job you have held in the last decade.
If you need help with this process, download my Resume Brain-Dump Template HERE.
Your brain dump session will eventually turn into your Master Resume document. This will be the starting place for all resume creations for future jobs that you apply to. This information doesn’t change based on the role. However, the resumes you create from your Master Resume document will change based on the role and the job description (JD) you are applying to.
It is key to change the resume you leverage to align with keywords within the JD. This is helpful for your resume to flag with at ATS machine. ATS stands for applicant tracking system and this helps companies scan high volumes of applicants and streamline the recruitment process.
2) Make sure your resume is very well organized.
Ensure your resume has clear headings with succinct detail of your applicable experience. Think of your resume as prime real estate, you do not want to waste space by sharing unnecessary words and details. This is also helpful for your resume to flag within the Applicant Tracking System (ATS). A couple of other tips, current roles should be written in present tense. Former roles should be written in past tense.
3) Use AI when you can to make life easier for you.
After you have done your brain dump, you can drop it into AI and ask for it to help turn your brain dump list into resume points. The key piece here is to review what it provides you with. AI can completely spit back information that is completely inaccurate to your actual lived experience. Also, if you find yourself using the same action word for every task, use AI to provide you with a list of other action words so your tasks do not seem repetitive.
After you have your resume together, you can even leverage AI to compare it to the JD you are applying to.
4) Build & Update your LinkedIn Profile.
I have been recruited multiple times on LinkedIn based off of my profile even when I was not in an active search season. This is because recruiters leverage LinkedIn when conducting searches and for posting open roles. If you pay for LinkedIn premium, which I highly recommend, you can see job statistics and your match probability. LinkedIn will also show you what is missing from your profile based on the role you are applying to.
