Demonstrating Value: LinkedIn and Resumes

​If Content is King, Context is Queen
Resumes and online profiles are marketing tools that introduce you to prospective employers. Their purpose is to get you an interview. They highlight your accomplishments and points of impact in your work. They present your unique qualifications and evidence of these qualifications related to the opportunities that you're seeking. 

Resumes and online profiles are about you, and it's about your reader, too. Include information that is important to your reader's needs and interests. Focus your message: What is the professional snapshot you're giving to your readers? Even with a wealth of experience, you still need to target your message (content) for your next position or role (context).

Remember to write your own resume, cover letter, and online profiles, because you know your story better than others can. Avoid resume templates, because they typically do not provide the flexibility needed to demonstrate experience. Be aware that a resume writer will only be able to craft a resume based on the information you provide.

There is also more than one right way to format these communication pieces. The following tips can help you deliver your essential professional message clearly and effectively.

Highlighting Your Experience
The person reading your resume or online profile is meeting you for the first time. He or she is most interested in how you can help their company. Regardless of the format you select, a summary targeted to the job will help point out the value you bring and your best qualifications as evidence.

• All resumes and online profiles are based on accomplishments. Deliver your message in bullet points that highlight results and outcomes of your work and indicate the impact of the action you took.
• Be selective. Include content that corresponds to your current career goals, as well as what is most relevant to your reader. Exclude bullet points that are not relevant or that summarize work unrelated to the job you're applying for.
• Consider what skills and experiences are crucial. What will get you invited for the interview?
• Quantify results whenever possible. For example, dollar amounts or percentages of revenue, costs saved, increased productivity or new products/programs/ideas that were recommended or implemented.
• Whenever possible, use words or phrases that are in the job posting (these are possible keywords).

Tips by Experience Level
Experience level will impact the format and content of your resume and online profile. 

New Graduates:

• Highlight major coursework, GPA (if it's above 3.0), class projects, capstone projects (if any), leadership roles, and project accomplishments in student organizations and clubs.
• Document past employment, even if it's not a match for your job targets. At this early stage, employers often look at your work as demonstrating discipline and experience outside of the classroom and campus.

Recent Graduates
(Up to three years post-graduation or when changing employers for the first time since landing your first post-graduation job):

• Emphasize post-graduation work. Results and impact in your current and recent work, including leadership activities, should take precedence.
• Collegiate work experience and extracurricular activities may be summarized, keeping leadership and result-oriented statements.
• Emphasize the skills, experience, knowledge, and accomplishments that will potentially get you called in for an interview.

Between Three and Eight Years of Experience: 

• What accomplishments can you add to your list? How have you impacted the employer’s business?
• As you target job titles and functions, what experience can you summarize or even eliminate (probably those from school), and what is best to emphasize (most likely current and recent experience that highlights occupation-specific skills, knowledge of your industry and involvement in special projects)?
• What are your examples that illustrate functional, transferable skills such as communication, interpersonal and organizational talents?
• Professional activities, interests, and hobbies can be included to highlight commitment to the field, additional skills, and additional accomplishments.

Moving Along – Mid-level Experience: 

• What are the specific examples that will best present what is important to both you and your reader?
• What will get you called in for an interview? What early experience can you eliminate or summarize in this resume update?
• Are you advancing into or targeting a management role? Are you remaining in the profession-specific competence track, without a management goal? Have you pursued or are you pursuing further education?
• What can you add regarding up-to-date areas of personal competence and expertise?

Conventional wisdom holds that displaying the last 10 years of work experience is adequate for your resume. The assumption is that this body of work contains the best content and impact for the positions you're now targeting. You can also summarize earlier work experience or even highlight points still relevant to your currently targeted positions. For example, if you're returning to a previously worked-at industry from earlier in your career, your Highlights of Qualifications, and key bullet points from your earlier experience, can more prominently emphasize these qualifications. Reflect and use common sense and your best judgment.

Highly Experienced:

• What track are you on? Are you a content expert? Or, a specialist within a segment of your occupation? Are you in management?
• What are the prominent organizational or divisional impacts you want to promote?
• Select from broad or in-depth experiences and emphasize the qualifications that most closely match your targeted job/career/responsibility objective. Match these qualifications in job postings and descriptions you come across.

Executive:

• In what specific ways are you the best candidate in this narrower, more competitive level of the market?
• What are the key organizational or divisional impacts that you want to promote?
• The expectation is that you are a leader; talk about the experience you possess that best confirms that.
• What innovations do you want to highlight?
• If you haven't updated your resume in a while, reflect carefully, identify your accomplishments, stories and life chapters, and then write with confidence.

Career Changer:
If you're beginning a different career path, you may be returning to the status of a new graduate. Think about including a Headline and Highlights of Qualifications in the visual center of your resume page to emphasize the new area based the suggestions below:

• What practical experience in your new field can you list?
• Can you enumerate new projects, a new degree or a thesis or dissertation? These could be grouped under a Relevant Experience heading near the top of the resume to give them prominence.
• What relevant points from your previous career (transferable skills and experience) are you bringing with you?
• In the body of your resume, select and include qualifications from your previous professional history that are important to your new path; exclude (or briefly summarize) the rest.

Resume Formats
Reverse chronological: most common and preferred by employers; best illustrates what you did, for whom and when.

Functional: most often used by career changers or those making a shift to a new set of responsibilities. A Highlights of Qualifications (career summary/profile) section introduces bulleted, broad-themed statements in functional categories; your Experience section follows, in reverse chronology, with just names, job titles, and dates. While this format more clearly links past accomplishments with particular skills or strengths, an employer may be concerned that he or she may not be able to clearly see recent accomplishments. While you may use the functional resume to get the call back or the interview, have a reverse chronological formatted resume ready to share.

Combination: most often used by those who have worked for a single organization for a long duration, with progressive responsibility, and numerous job titles. Typically emphasizes your last five to 10 years of experience, with an overview of responsibilities and a bulleted list of key accomplishments.

Check out these Resume Samples for resume excerpts that illustrate the formats above.

Additional Content That Can be Useful
Add these sections to your resume or online profile when they are relevant to your target market and the story that you are telling:

• Professional development such as courses, certificates, seminars and degrees. 
• Awards and honors.
• Licenses or certifications.
• Computer skills (grouped by hardware, software or platforms).
• Professional affiliations, especially officer positions, specific projects or presentations.
• Other unique, relevant skills such as fluent languages.
• Include personal interests if they display goal-setting and disciplined objectives.

Final Tips

• Make the page(s) easy to read. Omit fancy fonts and use a font size of at least 10 points. Two-page resumes are acceptable for those with extensive work experience.
• New graduates may keep their education credentials at the top of their resumes, but after your first post-college job, educational information moves below your work history. Include additional training in a Professional Development section.
• The top-third of the page is the visual center for the reader; review the content of that area carefully to be certain that it includes important content for prospective employers' needs (e.g., your headline, career summary, areas of expertise and key bullet points of your experience).
• Proofread your resume carefully. Ask at least one other person to review and proofread it.
• Have a plain text file of your resume, with formatting removed, for pasting into employers' online job forms. 
• Keep your online profile(s) up to date to allow easier and more effective online applications.

Confidential Resume
Job seekers who are employed are sometimes concerned about their current employer seeing a posted resume, or having an HR rep at their current company find it when searching a resume database.

Here are suggestions for posting a resume confidentially to a website:

• Your resume heading can include a professional title instead of your name
• Include your phone number if your voicemail introduction does not include your name; if you want to keep your name in your voicemail introduction include only your email address as your contact information.
• Establish an email address that has no identifiers, such as your name. The email address should still be professional.
• List your current company affiliation as clearly but confidentially as possible. (For example: Global Financial Consulting Firm, 2012 – Present, Team Lead, Specialty Practice)
• Edit any resume content for your current work (information in a summary statement; bullet points) that may identify company-specific projects or jargon, but keep your content and professional message strong with respect to your accomplishments.

Using a professional networking site can be the more acceptable option. You can position your online profile as a general networking tool instead of a job search tool. However, this will impact how your target the headline, summary, and strengths.

When you aren’t actively looking for new positions, keep a resume up to date with new accomplishments. This can also be kept as a historical document that will make tailoring a new resume easier when needed.

​Adapted from material that originally appeared in the University of Illinois Alumni Association's Virtual Career Center
© 2020, Julie L Bartimus Consulting, Naperville, Illinois