Bring the job you want, not the job you had

Bring the job you want, not the job you had

Okay you guys, new module. This is the part I actually think matters most, and it's the part people skip.

Before you touch another line on that résumé, you need to answer one question: what job are you applying for. Not "what job am I qualified for." Not "what have I done before." What job, specifically, do you want next.

I know that sounds obvious. It's not. Most of the résumés people bring me are written for the job they had five years ago, or the job they had ten years ago, or some blurry combination of every job they've ever held, aimed at nobody in particular. That's why nothing's landing. You can't hit a target you haven't picked.

Pick one job posting. A real one.

Here's the homework I want you doing right now, at home, before you write another word.

Go find one actual job posting. Not a job title. Not "something in customer service." An actual posting, from an actual place, with actual language in it. If you don't have one yet, that's fine — pick the kind of job you're aiming for and find three or four postings that look like it, so you can see what they have in common.

Read it slowly. What words do they use over and over? What do they list first? What shows up in every bullet point? That language is not decoration. That's what the hiring person is scanning for, and it's what you're going to build your résumé toward.

Your résumé is a translation, not a transcript

This is where I want to tell you about Jennifer.

Jennifer came to me after being home with her kids for a long stretch — years, not months. She sat down and told me she basically had nothing to put on paper. No job title. No paycheck. She felt like she was starting from zero.

I told her that's not true, she just hadn't translated it yet.

She'd been running a household budget for five kids. She'd been coordinating five different schedules — school, sports, appointments, all of it — without dropping anything. She'd been managing a rotating set of vendors, basically, if you want to call the dentist and the piano teacher and the soccer carpool "vendors." That's project management. That's logistics. That's exactly what a hiring manager for an office admin role or a coordinator role is looking for, they just don't call it "being a mom" in the posting. They call it "managed competing priorities" or "coordinated multiple schedules and stakeholders."

We sat down and rewrote every line of her experience in that language. Not lying. Translating. She wasn't inventing anything, she was describing the real thing she did in the words the hiring person actually uses. She sent it out. Got two interviews.

That's the whole game. You take the real thing you did, and you say it in the language of the job you want, not the language of the job you had.

How to actually do this at home

1. Take the posting you found. Highlight the recurring words — the skills, the verbs, the qualities they keep repeating.
2. Take your résumé, the one you've already been marking up in this class. Go line by line and ask: does this line speak to anything on that highlighted list?
3. If a line doesn't connect to the job you want, it's not automatically wrong, but it's not doing you any favors either. Move it down, shrink it, or cut it.
4. If you have real experience that connects but you've described it in old language — old job title language, old-industry language — rewrite it using the posting's words. Not word-for-word copy-paste, that reads fake and some systems flag it. But the same spirit.

Do this for real experience only. Don't invent a skill you don't have to match a posting — that gets found out fast, usually in the interview, which is worse than not getting the interview at all.

The opinion part

Here's the one I'll say straight: tailor the résumé to the actual job, not to "jobs" in general. I would honestly rather you send five résumés, each one built for a specific posting, than fifty copies of one generic résumé blasted everywhere. The generic one lands nowhere. It's built for an audience that doesn't exist. Five tailored ones, even if that's all you have time for, will outperform fifty vague ones every time. That's not a guess, that's what happened when I tracked my own applications.

One more thing before you go

If you're sitting there thinking "but my skills are ten years old, they're still relevant" — maybe. Ask yourself one question and actually sit with the answer: is that the job you want now, or is that the job you had then? Don't answer me. Answer yourself. Write it down if you have to.

Before next time: bring that job posting with you, printed or on your phone, and bring the highlighted words. We're going to use it directly on your résumé next class.