The Death of the Resume Template

E2 The Death of the Resume Template

Career counselor and host Erin Ahart explains why using resume templates can negatively impact your job search. She discusses the components of a good resume and highlights common mistakes found in templates. Erin provides tips for creating an applicant tracking system (ATS) friendly resume and recommends resources for finding sample resumes. Listen to today's music recs in Career Composer's master playlist below!

Timestamps: Career content - 4:04

Penn State Career Guide (Pages 23, 27, & 28) 

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Transcript

0:18

This is Career Composer. I'm Erin, and I'm helping you, professionals under 30, navigate your careers with a music themed twist. I'm giving you the job search and career advice you need to get that job, but we'll also talk about music, how to balance our personal and professional lives, and figure out what we're meant to do. Ready? Let's go.

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Welcome to Career Composer. My name is Erin Ahart. I'm a full time career counselor in Washington, D. C., and I'm helping you, professionals under 30, navigate your careers with a music themed twist. Our topic this week is resume templates and more importantly, why you should never ever use them. I'm going to explain why and for every flaw that resume templates have, I'm going to tell you what I would put on my resume instead. Career Composer is a music themed career and life advice podcast. So every episode is focused on a career topic that is meant to help young professionals in their twenties. Every episode also starts with some kind of music theme that goes along with our topic, which is called the Prelude. If you want to get right into the career advice, feel free to fast forward to the timestamp in the show notes below. Ready? Let's go. In the first episode, you learned about the spicy love letters between Claire Schumann and Johannes Brahms. And today's episode is called the death of the resume template in honor of the death of a bachelor by panic at the disco. So of course I really went down a rabbit hole of big dramatic male vocals this week. Think classic rock full orchestras in the background, Freddie Mercury, Greta Van Fleet. You get the gist. First up we have, I would do anything for love by meatloaf. This song is so dramatic, but what's absolutely hysterical is that the lyrics just do not make sense. If you Google search lyric meaning of, I would do anything for love by meatloaf, you will go on a music scavenger hunt because news outlets and radio stations have been trying to figure it out for years. Next up we have Inertia by AJR. AJR is very similar to Panic! at the Disco, at least in my mind, because of how modern they are. Their lyrics and vocal lines are just so strong. Inertia has the same big sound that AJR is known for, but the acoustic version is even better than the original and is absolutely gorgeous. The lyrics are all about having big plans for your life and kind of joking about the excuses in everyday life, things that really prevent us from doing what we set out to do. And the way this song is written, I just really felt the message in my soul. Super relatable, especially on this podcast, talking about our careers and what we're going to do with our lives. Finally, we have Until Your Love Comes Back Around by Brian Mace, which came out in the 90s in the same era as Meat Loaf. Something that I'll talk a lot about on this podcast is that I lived in Salem, Massachusetts for a year and a half before coming to Washington, DC. And when I lived there, I actually met Brian Mace, who is a lesser known musician, but he opened for Aerosmith and U2. And when I met him, he was playing piano at the Hawthorne Hotel, which is known as one of the most haunted hotels in America. Ghostbusters have camped out there before. And I noticed that he was closing his eyes when he was playing the piano, so I asked him why. And he said that no matter how big or small the crowd is, closing his eyes still makes him feel more comfortable. And he was such a nice guy. you can find all of these recs on our master career composer playlist. And I would absolutely love to hear your song and playlist recommendations too. the links to our playlist and the survey where you can submit your song recs are in the show notes below. Finally, You can stay up to date on all things, career composer by following us on Instagram at career composer, now let's get into our topic, The Death of the Resume Template.

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Chances are, if you're listening to this episode, you have used a resume template before, and I'm willing to bet that if I polled the entire US population of job seekers, 100 percent of people have downloaded an online template or have at least thought about using one. Why? Because they're so incredibly easy to use. Someone else has already done the work of making them, and there's a level of trust that if someone made a resume template, they probably know how it should look and what you should include. If you don't know what to put on your resume, templates outline everything we need. We fill in the blanks, and our resumes are complete. At least we think so. I also hear all the time from people that I coach. Aaron, creating my own resume takes such a long time and templates do help us save time. But I also don't know that packaging your skills and experience in a way that makes you uniquely stand out to employers is something that should take only five minutes. This might surprise some of you, but while resumes should all contain some basic core components, your resume should clearly be your own unique document. When you build a house, it has to have a strong foundation, running water, electricity, a roof. But when you see and walk into someone's home for the first time, you instantly know that it's their house. Everyone's home says something different about their life, and your resume should communicate how you as a professional are unique and special. You can't do this by filling in the blanks on a resume template. Especially when the people creating these fill in the blank documents are shocker graphic designers. They are rarely career counselors, recruiters, or human resources professionals. And while I love graphic designers, we can't trust them to build our resumes for us. Another reason why we can't trust templates is because they are more likely to be rejected from ATSs. ATS stands for Applicant Tracking System, and these are the systems that job sites and employers use to screen applicants before they look at resumes. When I worked in HR, I screened candidates using Indeed for employers, and Indeed would actually score candidates resumes and put the highest scoring resumes first for me to review. According to certified professional resume writer and LinkedIn contributor, Olivia Atwood, if you choose a resume template with a flashy design, there will be trouble with screening software. By using a template, you could be getting rejected before an employer even reads your resume. So let's not let that happen to you. For the rest of this episode, we're going to break down resume templates, piece by piece and talk about what the worst resume templates all have in common. Listen closely because my intention is to help you identify red flags. So you know what makes a good and a bad resume. And if you still choose to continue downloading online resume templates, at least, you know, the difference between the okay ones and the God awful ones. For every flaw that resume templates have I'm going to tell you what I would do instead. So the first thing that I noticed when I look at a resume template is that they almost always have a color colored fonts, colored borders, and unless you are in a creative industry like art, fashion design, and you're really trying to highlight your design skills, stay away. Color can be distracting and a turn off to people who don't care about the design and just want to know if you can actually do the job. You never know who will be looking at your resume and what they prefer. The solution? Use a black font on a white background. Other distractions might be hard to read or unprofessional looking font styles like Comic Sans, or using multiple font sizes throughout your resume. The most ATS friendly fonts that you should use are Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Georgia, and Times New Roman. Cambria is also okay, and that's actually the font that I use on my own resume. For font size, the only text that should be different from the rest of the text on your resume is your name and your header. Because you want your name to pop and stand out. Next is profile pictures. I always thought it was super strange when I would come across a resume with the picture of the person on the document. All that profile pictures do is take up space and take away from the information that actually makes you a great candidate. When you hear a great song for the first time, do you care what the artist looks like? Absolutely not. The employer wants to know if you can do the job, yes or no. So the less frills the better, and instead, add your headshot profile. Another common component of resume templates is outdated information. For example, your full address and a reference list. You should include your city and state only because employers don't need to know your full address since they're not sending information to your house. References may be requested from you in a separate part of the online application, but they are more often requested after you have already interviewed and you're a finalist in the hiring process. You don't need to take up more space by saying references available upon request. Speaking of elements that take up space, columns, soft skills, and hobby sections. Columns are awful, I absolutely hate them, and that's because you never want the employer to have to search for information. Use text across the full page, with your section headings left aligned or centered, and with your bullet point text left aligned on the page. That's another thing. Don't use paragraphs, please use bullet points instead. Again, because it's really easy for the employers to find information since it's the standard in resume writing. For soft skill sections, get rid of them completely. Soft skills are things like time management, team oriented, great communicator, blah, blah, blah. You know, the drill technical skills are different. They do matter because they are measurable. Microsoft office suite proficiency or Adobe creative cloud are included in technical skills. Soft skills and their own section on a resume is pointless because employers have to take your word for it. Instead, demonstrate your ability to work in a team, for example, in your bullet points. One way you might say this is collaborated with a team of five to develop and execute a social media campaign, resulting in a 30 percent increase in engagement and a 20 percent growth in followers over a three month period. Now that is an excellent bullet point one, because it shows that you collaborated with that first action verb. Oh, if you're watching on YouTube, there's my cat. She decided to join us. And the second reason why that's a great bullet point is because it includes quantifiable information. With hobby sections, some employers like this, some really don't. If you're applying to work at a non profit or a charitable organization, hobbies might be nice for you if you volunteer in your free time. But on templates, these sections often take up way too much space. Your hobbies shouldn't be a focal point unless they're highly relevant to the role. Now, remember when I said that you can't show off what you uniquely bring as a professional by filling in the blanks? Well, the first reason this matters is because templates often include sections that are irrelevant to you, or sections that are way too general. Because again, templates are meant to suit the masses and not you specifically. If you're applying to work as a translator, for example, there might be a technical skills section in your typical template. What might be more important for you are your languages and your proficiency in those languages. So I would switch out technical skills with a languages section and indicate whether you're advanced, fluent, or a native speaker of those languages. Your sections and headings should be based off of you and your specific experience and what's relevant to the roles that you are applying for. Also related to sections is the order of the sections that you do choose to include. Most resume templates that I've come across put education at the bottom. But what if you're a recent graduate and the most relevant experience you have in your field comes from your class projects that you did in school? What if your specific degree is required for the jobs that you're applying for? You should definitely be putting your education first if this is your situation. By now you know why resume templates are dead. Those are all of the do's and don'ts But if you do choose to create your own resume in Word or Google Docs, where should you start? What I would love to do is create ATS friendly resume templates for you that are vetted by someone like me Who has experience as a career expert, but Career Composer is still new and we aren't quite there yet So in the meantime, what I recommend is finding a sample resume to reference that you like the look of Trustworthy examples can usually be found in online career guides that are created by college career centers And if you're a few years removed from college You These examples are not all geared towards undergraduates. Some guides will actually differentiate between examples for working professionals, graduate students, and undergrads. I'll link a couple of the guides that I really like in the description below. Then, I would add the elements that you like from the sample resume to your own document without copying and pasting any text over. This part is really important because again, certain coding or any elements from the template could then be added to your document and HES systems might not like that. So typing out plain text is definitely the best way to go. This will take some time for you to find the font you like to play with line spacing and headings But I promise that once you do it, you will thank yourself later as you edit your own resume down the line. There is so much more to talk about with resumes, so stay tuned for future episodes. And that is the death of the resume template. If you do choose to continue downloading resume templates, again, please refer to the do's and don'ts that I shared in this episode to choose between the okay templates and the horrible ones.

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I hope you found today's episode helpful. Career Composer will be back with a new episode every other Monday. And if today's topic really resonated with you, I hope you'll consider leaving a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Reviews will really help this podcast grow so I can keep bringing you the career content that you want. You can also email me at careercomposerpodcast at gmail. com with feedback or questions, because I want to give you the career advice that you actually want to hear. That's all for now. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next time and have a great day.