Expert Advice
Like many people, I compete with robots now.
However innovative I become, whatever tricks I pull out of my bag, AI is always right there, breathing down my neck, waiting to eat my lunch.
I’m well aware that the minute people find a bit of code that generates a resume that gets them a job, I’ll be out of mine. The robot’s resume don’t even need to be as good as a human’s; it just need to be good enough to get a job.
As a long-time professional resume writer, it breaks my heart a little to say this: that people would choose a mediocre resume over an extraordinary one, as long as it gets them a job. When it comes to looking for work, being special isn’t nearly as coveted as being seen.
But AI doesn’t care about my woes, nor do job-seekers for that matter, so I’ll get on with it.
Why am I no longer worried about my livelihood?
Because my clients tell me not to be.
Just yesterday, a client came back after 5 years. He came to me with a well-written, nicely formatted 2-page resume. It had a summary section, great action verbs, relevant job titles, and more keywords than you can shake a stick at.
He’d partnered up with AI to write it:
Dear ChatGPT,
Bam! In a few minutes, he had a resume, with almost zero effort. And precisely zero investment.
Brilliant.
Except…
It didn’t work.
He got no interviews.
“It’s well written,” he said. “…way better than I could do, but…”
And then he said the thing that bottom-lines the limitations of AI as a resume-writer.
“I don’t know what’s missing,” he said.
Neither does AI.
AI is amazing, almost magical in its production, because it consumes the entirety of the Internet and then spits it back out at you in elegant prose.
But, when it comes to writing your resume, it will never have all the answers. Because the Internet doesn’t have the answers. Not these answers.
Sure, the Internet has all the keywords. The internet has all the job listings ever posted, the Internet has data on your companies, your industries, your job titles… but how much information does the Internet have on you? And how good is it?
AI can’t possibly write about you, because it doesn’t know you.
Most of what’s out there online about you, and everything you tell it to know about you, is written by you. And, see, that’s the problem.
Although we are all experts on our lives, we’re ironically pretty terrible at describing who we are and why we’re great. We’re even worse – indeed, complete failures – at remembering things we’ve forgotten and seeing into our blind spots.
Here are some prompts Chat.gpt cannot help you with:
I no longer fear chatGPT for the same reason I stopped relying on questionnaires to get information from my clients: because, by the time clients come to me, they’re stuck on a story that doesn’t work. People come to me for the same reason they go to therapy, take on a new hobby, call up a friend, listen to music, or walk in the woods. They need to get out of their own confines. They need to find a new way of thinking, a new perspective, a new language.
You can’t possibly break free if you’re pulling prompts out of your head and feeding them into a machine that only knows the Internet. You’ll just keep recreating the same story that’s not working (albeit maybe more elegantly written). Worse than that, you’re likely to drift farther and farther from the truth, that being “you.”
That’s why my client came back.
He’d asked AI to describe him – his best moments, his greatest achievements, what he was capable of, and who he’d evolved into – and AI came up short, made stuff up, stretched the truth, and missed it completely.
So he came to me.
Instead of scouring the Internet for answers, we rummaged through his last 5 years in a Q&A.
This time, I was the one with all the prompts and he was the one spitting out the data, line by line.
But it was new data, information that hadn’t seen the light of day before, perhaps ever. Things he’d forgotten about. Things he didn’t realize were important. Things he didn’t know you were allowed to say, things he didn’t think were impressive, things that were found nowhere else but inside him.
We mined it all, that gold that’s tucked away in each of us.
And (to highlight another way in which ChatGPT will forever fail against humans), we had fun while doing it.
We discovered his new story, or rather, his now story, in all of its complexity, infused with numbers and nuance, keywords and caché – a resume that reflected who he was and all that he’d become. In the end, he not only had a great resume, but he truly felt like he could back it up, like it was really him being presented and not some unmarked skeleton key.
We created a story worth reading for a person worth hiring. We connected. We rebuilt. We designed.
And it worked.
Everyone hates writing their resume.
That’s why we came up with Resume Therapy.
In grad school, while I was getting my MS in Counseling, I paired up with like-minded SFSU professor and career counselor, Rebecca Toporek, who shared the belief that building a resume could (and should!) be a much more cathartic process than it actually is.
We invented a new type of coaching-infused resume-development model, which we eventually published in the Career Planning & Adult Development Journal (Vol 21, #4). It was Rebecca who, commenting on the therapeutic effects of using our method, came up with the monniker “Resume Therapy.”
Ah. Resume Therapy:
A collaborative process that leaves job-seekers feeling more confident, self-aware, focused, happy, and driven, in addition to churning out an actionable deliverable — that being a keyword-rich, uber-impressive, and authentically representational resume.
Based in proven therapeutic techniques, Resume Therapy draws from several psyschological modalities:
In plain terms, Resume Therapy leverages the therapeutic aspects of storytelling grounded in counseling psychology, human-centered coaching, and career development principles. Coaches guide the client in rediscovering their strengths, embracing unique talents, confronting shortcomings, and establishing congruence between what is and what could be.
It is a guided journey through your work history, bolstered by an intentional counseling approach designed to extract things you’ve forgotten, overlooked, or undervalued.
Resume Therapy is meant to be transparent; that is, you may not even realize it’s happening, until you reach the end of the session and you notice how energized you feel, how much more open your eyes are, and how many more (realistic and achievable) possibilities are in front of you.
It’s transformative, both for you and your resume.
—
Each of our all-inclusive resume packages include Resume Therapy.
It’s a word we’ve all been using.
A supposed non-partisan way to express our disgust and fear for the way things are being run in politics, in tech, in business.
But I don’t think it’s uncertainty that irks us.
What’s worse than uncertainty?
00:06
Uncertainty.
00:07
It seems to be a word we use a lot these days.
00:11
Uncertain times.
00:13
Future is uncertain.
00:16
Everything’s uncertain without certainty, blah blah blah.
00:20
And I agree.
00:21
I think these are uncertain times.
00:24
I think most of us have no idea what’s coming down the road.
00:31
I think we know it’s going to be pretty dramatic, it’s going to be drastic, but we’re really not sure what’s going to happen, which jobs are going to be around, which ones are going to be gone, what new jobs are going to spring up, all of that uncertainty.
00:48
And you know, it’s it’s mostly an uncomfortable feeling, uncertainty.
00:54
But I do want to point out there are some people.
00:59
Who are not uncertain.
01:01
If you look at big tech, if you look at the largest corporations in any industry, they’re doing something right now.
01:15
They’re pretty sure of what they’re doing.
01:20
And the thing that bothers me, actually what what I’m getting at is they’re figuring out a way.
01:28
To use AI, everyone’s scrambling.
01:31
Everyone is scrambling, and understandably so.
01:35
It’s an extremely powerful tool, and it should be used absolutely by everybody, and certainly by big corporations.
01:44
But the thing that freaks me out is the silence.
01:50
I’ve yet to hear anyone speak out openly.
01:56
And emphatically, and in a caring way to share what they think is going to happen with the future and what they’re doing to contribute to it.
02:08
So in other words, you got big plans, you’re you’re you’re making changes.
02:13
All most of us see are lots of layoffs, layoff after layoff, or if you’re lucky enough to keep a job.
02:22
You’re probably working three or four FT ES worth of work.
02:29
So we’re seeing all this and there’s panic and everybody’s running around.
02:33
And you know what would be helpful is if the people that are impacting so many other people in so many ways were transparent.
02:44
That’s a word companies love to use.
02:47
We’re transparent.
02:48
We’re actually sharing what they’re doing.
02:51
What are their hopes?
02:52
What are they worried about?
02:53
What are their plans?
02:58
So when I think about uncertainty, that feeling is uncomfortable.
03:04
But the thing that’s worse than uncertainty, and there’s I guess a lot of things worse, but one is feeling a sense of lack of control.
03:16
And I think that’s what a lot of us are dealing with right now.
03:19
Yeah, we’re uncertain, but we also have no control over what’s going on.
03:27
And the people that do aren’t being very generous with their ideas of what the future holds.
03:38
I don’t know.
03:38
Let me know what you think and take care of each other.
03:42
It’s rough out there.
Looking for work is hard.
00:05
It’s lonely.
00:06
It’s often fruitless.
00:08
It takes up a lot of your time.
00:10
It can get dark.
00:13
And we all know this, and we all know somebody.
00:16
We all know somebody who’s going through this right now.
00:19
And whether or not they share with you that they’re in a world of suck, you can be assured that they are.
00:28
And if.
00:29
If I can go by what my clients say, it’s that they don’t want to burden people, right?
00:36
So if you’re looking for work, you just don’t want to kind of lay on all that darkness into the cocktail hour, the happy hour you’re having with your friends, which is a noble thing.
00:46
But you got to know these people, your friends, your colleagues, they’re suffering.
00:53
It’s hard.
00:55
And so that leads you to think, hopefully, like, what?
00:58
What can I do?
00:59
And it often feels like there’s nothing you can do.
01:02
I don’t have a job.
01:02
How do I help out?
01:04
But there are ways you can help.
01:06
There are ways you can help immensely that won’t take much effort on your part.
01:12
So the first thing I have three, I have three ideas.
01:15
The first thing is initiate a hangout.
01:20
And I don’t mean.
01:21
You know, it is good to call them up and say, hey, let’s go like blow off some steam.
01:25
But I’m talking about let’s focus on them.
01:28
So they should be doing this.
01:29
They should be reaching out to you and saying, hey, can we have a coffee?
01:33
I want to talk to you about my looking for work.
01:35
But a lot of people don’t do that for all kinds of reasons.
01:38
So you, the person who’s stable with the job, who feels pretty secure right now, think about the people you know that are looking for work and reach out to them.
01:51
I don’t know if you can hear my dog’s click clacky feet in the background.
01:55
Hey, what can you do?
01:55
Home, home, studio.
01:57
So reach out to your friends and and make it a point to say, hey, I know you’re looking for work and we never talk about your work.
02:06
Why don’t we set up an appointment or just, you know, get a coffee, hang out, but let’s talk about what you’re going through, what you want to do next, and see if we can come up with some ideas.
02:18
It’s like 30 minutes, maybe an hour, but you are giving them an appointment that is literally going to be the best thing in their day.
02:28
So that’s one thing you can do.
02:29
Another easy thing is just check in.
02:34
So again, they’re not going to be forthcoming, but just to say, hey, I know you’re looking for work, that’s rough.
02:41
Like what’s been going on with that?
02:43
Just check in every once in a while.
02:45
And the third thing.
02:46
And this goes for people you don’t know.
02:50
Take the call.
02:52
And what I mean by that is when somebody reaches out by LinkedIn or by e-mail or phone or drops in or whatever, and they’re looking to do an informational interview, take the time to give it to them.
03:05
I mean, when you’re looking for work, that is the greatest thing that can happen is getting somebody to speak with you, especially someone you don’t know.
03:16
So what a gift you can give, right?
03:19
20 minutes of your time.
03:22
And you get to talk about yourself.
03:23
You get to talk about your industry, your career.
03:26
It’s fun.
03:27
It’s actually a good time.
03:29
So take the call.
03:31
Take the call.
03:32
Take, I mean, LinkedIn.
03:33
Take a second.
03:34
Look and see who they are.
03:36
If you don’t like them, don’t respond, but take a few minutes.
03:39
Maybe they’re an interesting person.
03:41
Maybe at the end of the call, you have another ally.
03:47
In your in your little industry, in your little neck of the woods, right.
03:51
It’s always good to connect with people, but you’re really, really helping just by having that call.
03:57
You don’t have to promise anything.
03:59
It’s just being that bright light on the horizon.
04:03
Oh my God, this Thursday I’m talking to somebody at blah, blah, blah.
04:08
It just means the world.
04:10
So I’m trying here cause I coach people on one side looking for work.
04:15
Now I’m kind of coaching on the other side, people that have a job that are secure or maybe who are unemployed but just want to pitch in.
04:25
If we help each other, we can relieve the suffering.
04:30
All right, people.
04:32
So be well, be kind.
Twitter, Meta, Amazon, Salesforce… titans of Tech, supposedly too big to fail.
But we’re seeing some wavering. And employees are certainly feeling the quake.
Inflation is taking its toll, the global supply chain is still screwy, and consumers are pinching their pennies. As a result, profits are down, even for the big guys, and the #1 strategy of public companies to keep dishing out shareholder dividends is to cut the workforce. And fast.
Tens of thousands of workers are being laid off, in some cases 10%-50% of the workforce.
If you’re not lucky enough to be above the fold, you may find yourself dumping your desk tchotchkes into a cardboard box with an unrequested escort to the front door.
It’s not enough to work hard and be loyal.
When the chips are down, your salary can always be rescinded.
===
Part of protecting yourself is knowing this to be true and taking precautions to be ready for when it occurs.
Life is uncertain. Companies have plenty of failsafes in place to protect them from sudden catastrophes.
Do you?
Everything’s automated now. So why not automate the process of building a new resume?
The benefits are obvious: a resume. And fast. You enter a few action verbs and phrases, pick a template, and presto, the resume gods spit out a brand-new resume for you. As a resume writer, I thought about building something like this. I still might but I always come back to the same reasons why I don’t think it’s a good idea.
They can hurt more than help.
If you’ve got a linear career path with no job gaps or short-term jobs, and your most recent position and company are directly relevant to the job you are targeting, then a resume builder should be fine for you. You should catch the attention of recruiters and HR folks easily. Well done toeing the line.
Another scenario where resume builders work well is if you’re applying internally. That is, a job opened up at your company, and you need a resume to apply for it. As long as the people doing the hiring know exactly who you are, then it’s not such an imperative that you wow them with words on your resume. A slight caveat, though: you may be surprised how little people know about what you do, including the colleagues you talk to every day.
Resume builders don’t allow you to pick and choose where to put content, such as titles, company names, dates, education, certifications, and skills. You’re stuck with a template. The template decides which foot you put forward first, and that can mean a dangerous step in the wrong direction.
For example, if you have a job gap or a short-term gap, having prominent dates could be a problem. If your job titles don’t match up with the industry, showcasing titles might trip you up. If you just got a groovy new certification, but the template forces you to put it at the bottom of the resume, under your education, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
Resume-builders don’t allow you to have subheadings, sidebars, case studies, and other callouts in your Experience section. It’s tricks like these that help to tell an accurate story, visually and literally.
Another big gripe about resume builders: they rarely offer the option of creating a summary section. You’ll usually be allowed to create a massive keyword list, which is critical, but you won’t have a nice juicy intro on your resume saying who you are and what you’re about.
This leads me to the biggest issue with Resume Builders…
The content comes from you.
You’re already struggling with what to say. It’s hard to know what to include and what to leave out, what to infer and what to explicitly state.
No resume builder is going to help you with this.
There are a few paths you can take to free yourself of the burden of building your own resume (or outsourcing to a bot).
Sometimes a robot can’t do a human’s job. When it comes to mapping out your career and telling your life’s story on 1 or 2 pages, resume builders are usually going to come up short. It’s tempting to want to believe you can magically create a winning resume with the click of a button, but…
If your career runs a path that is anything but straight and narrow, think twice before you push that button.
Getting let go from work is like getting hit by a bus.
And like getting hit by a bus, people who get fired, laid off, or asked to leave often experience PTSD (post-traumatic-stress-syndrome). I see it more often than you might think.
The symptoms show up in one’s work history:
–extended time off
–private consulting
–gig work
–sudden or serial entrepreneurism
–underemployment
A common behavior amongst people with Job-related PTSD is complete and total avoidance of an intentional job search — like a batter avoiding the batter’s box or a veteran avoiding loud noises or a driver circumnavigating busy intersections.
It’s understandable. It’s a smart reaction to a bad experience: the brain saying “hey that sucked. Let’s not go through that again.”
But it abbreviates your life. It makes you take U-turns that keep you from certain roads.
To break free of job PTSD, you have to confront it. (Ghosts hate it when you give ’em a name.) Talk about it, replay the crap-ending to someone who loves you and supports you. No need to deconstruct it or overanalyze things, just pull it into the light and let your emotions go where they go; you’ll probably cycle through quite a few of them.
Then go back before that ending and remember the good stuff too. And if it was always bad at that job, go to the one before it.
You’ve got victories; you’ve just forgotten about them. They’re obstructed. The ghosts are in the way.
Once you get them to move, you’ll see all the roads again. And the intersections will be clear.
Most interviews start with the same question (which, actually, isn’t even a question):
“Tell me about yourself.”
Why?
Because open-ended questions are the best way to get to know someone. And, they’re the easiest way to allow someone to reveal themselves.
The question is simple enough, yet most people answer it incorrectly. Continue reading this entry »
Is anyone hiring?
Not really. There are, indeed, industries and companies that are going strong, but they’re not necessarily adding to their headcount right now. Everyone’s in waiting. HR departments are in an Arctic freeze. People with jobs are clinging to them like driftwood in the cold open sea. Unemployment numbers are rising, which means the competition for life rafts is growing.
It’s hard to be cooped up in your house, knowing all of this is going, feeling like you should be “out there” looking for work.
Still, it’s always better to take action during a crisis. Action delivers a sense of progress. It fans the flame of hope in the night while we pray for the sun to come back over the horizon.
Here are some ways to stay productive and generate your own warmth in this time of uncertainty: Continue reading this entry »
I had the privilege of engaging an HR panel who took the time to share what they wanted to see (and did not want to see) on a job candidate’s resume. Here’s what they had to say: Continue reading this entry »
Recessions tend to push hardworking people into two groups. On the one hand, is the layoff survivor handling the load of multiple former employees. On the other is the hyperqualified, abruptly laid-off job seeker who needs to explain the abrupt ending to their tenure. Different destinies but both types tend to struggle with how to present these career changes on their resumes.
Here are some tips: Continue reading this entry »
Had to dig this one out of the archives…
KQED called me up to be the San Francisco Bay Area career hero on the California Report with Scott Shafer. Scott let me use his own career as an example for how to use seemingly irrelevant work experience as an asset, not a liability. We also discussed taking a different approach to networking, and some of the things that employers look for in job candidates.
Check out the podcast; they even included the original take which has plenty more advice for people looking to beat a tough job market. Continue reading this entry »
I admit I’ve had a couple of challenging clients recently. It’s easy to write them off but it’s always best to look inward before casting blame.
So, what’s really going on? Continue reading this entry »
As a seasoned professional, you have much to offer but remember to make room for new experiences as well.
An effective resume will balance your strengths (i.e. what you can teach) with your areas for growth (i.e. what you can learn). In regards to the latter, I’m certainly not suggesting you claim ignorance. Rather, consider showing a recently developed interest in a new industry or field.
This is best done by illustrating how you’ve already Continue reading this entry »
Recently, a resume client of mine forwarded a newsletter article from a job board discussing ways to overcome “job gaps” of 3-6 months.
Here’s a snippet from the article, and my subsequent retort as to why we should redefine the criteria for a job gap: Continue reading this entry »
One of the best kept secrets in job-hunting: The government has offered to pay part of your expenses!
You read correctly: Career expenses, including fees incurred for career counseling, professional resume writing, and job-search coaching, are tax-deductible for everyone with only a few exceptions: Continue reading this entry »
Truth be told, some hiring managers will never read your cover letter.
I know screeners who delete the cover letter immediately, some who forward it on to others but never read it themselves, and others who print it out only to staple it behind the resume.
But you know what else they tell me? Continue reading this entry »
1 or 2 pages?
This concern is valid, especially since lengthy resumes can make an applicant appear arrogant, unfocused, anxious, old, or overqualified.
So how do you know when to stop writing? Continue reading this entry »
After sending out 1000+ resumes with not a single job offer, a job seeker concluded that he needed to lie on his resume. In his case, he felt he was overqualified and therefore needed to dumb down his resume to get some interviews. It’s my estimation that he’s looking in the wrong place Continue reading this entry »
A software developer was looking to move further into management but had no idea how to build a resume to support this transition. I told him about some of the things I’ve done in the past to help clients do just that…”
As luck would have it, I’m currently helping a developer transition into management — and he came to me because I helped his friend do the same thing (successfully) just a few months ago. Here’s what we did: Continue reading this entry »
