What we're actually doing here (and what I can't help with)
Okay. You guys brought your résumés, right? Good. Have them out. We're going to be working documents in your hands today, not just listening to me talk.
Here's what this class is, plainly: we are going to fix your résumé so it gets you interviews. That's the whole job. Not a career overhaul, not a personality assessment, not a "find your passion" exercise. You already have the experience. Most of you have more of it than you think. What's usually broken is how it's written down.
Here's what this class is not, so nobody's disappointed in week three.
I can't help you with design. If you want columns and a nice sidebar and a headshot, I'm the wrong person, and honestly I'd talk you out of it anyway — but we'll get to that another day. My eye for "make it pretty" is not good. Never has been. My résumés are plain because that's what I'm capable of making look decent, and it turns out plain works better anyway, so it's worked out fine for me. But if you were hoping for font advice beyond "pick one that's easy to read," I don't have it.
I don't do LinkedIn. I know some of you are going to ask. I don't love handing my whole work history to a platform, and I've never built out a profile in any serious way, so I'm not going to stand up here and pretend I know what I don't. I can get you a paper document that gets you in the door. What you do online is somebody else's class.
And I'm better on paper than in a room. Interview coaching is not my strength. I can help you get the interview. Once you're sitting across from somebody answering questions under pressure, that's a different skill, and I'd be lying if I said I was great at teaching it. I'm the person who gets you to the door. Somebody else has to teach you what to do once you're through it.
So. What we ARE doing.
Today we throw things out. Actually throw things out — get your red pen or your delete key ready. Most résumés I see are twenty years of accumulation nobody ever cleaned up. That's not a résumé, that's an archive. We're not archiving today. We're building one document aimed at one kind of job, and everything that doesn't serve that gets cut.
I had a woman in a class a while back who would not cut a set of skills from a job she'd had ten years prior. She was sure they still mattered. I didn't argue with her about it — arguing doesn't work, in my experience, you just get a standoff. I asked her one question: is that the job you want now, or the job you had then? That's it. Didn't push past it. She sat with it for a week and came back with it cut herself. Nobody has to convince you of anything in here. You just have to answer the question honestly.
That's basically how I run this room. I'll look at a line on your résumé and ask you what it means, specifically. If you say "I was responsible for customer service," I'm going to ask what that actually looked like. Not to embarrass you — the vague line is almost always where the weak spot is hiding, and once we find it, we can fix it.
One opinion, straight out, because you're going to hear it a lot from me over the next few weeks: one page, unless you have a real reason for more. Almost nobody has a real reason. Fifteen years of work does not need four pages. It needs one page that says the right four or five things. We'll get into the "how" of that later. For today, just know that's the standard I'm going to hold your document to, and if that number sounds impossible right now, that's fine. That's what the next few weeks are for.
So here's the plan for today, concretely. You're going to pull out your current résumé. We're going to go through it line by line as a group, and for every line, you're going to ask yourself: could a total stranger verify this? Not "does this sound impressive," but could someone check it. If the answer's no, that line gets a mark. We'll deal with the marked lines next.
Bring a real appetite for cutting things. That's the whole first step, and it's harder than it sounds, because people get attached to old jobs and old lines the same way they get attached to a couch that doesn't fit the room anymore. It served you once. It doesn't mean it stays.
Before next time: find your current résumé — the real one you'd actually send somewhere, not an old file from a decade ago — and bring it printed on paper. We're marking it up by hand next week and it's easier with a pen in your hand than a cursor.