Robynn Storey - Writing Better Resumes with Storytelling

[00:00:02] Here's an experiment for you. Take passionate experts in human resource technology. Invite cross-industry experts from inside and outside HR. Mix in what's happening in people analytics today. Give them the technology to connect, hit record, pour their discussions into a beaker.

[00:00:21] Mix thoroughly and voila! You get the HR Data Labs podcast where we explore the impact of data and analytics to your business. We may get passionate and even irreverent, but count on each

[00:00:34] episode challenging and enhancing your understanding of the way people data can be used to solve real world problems. Now here's your host David Turetsky. Hello and welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast. I'm your host David Turetsky alongside my friend, partner, colleague, buddy, and also

[00:00:54] salary.com associate, Dwight Brown. Dwight, how are you? I'm good, David. How you doing? I'm okay. I got a cortisone shot today. Not that that's a surprise anymore. Those are always fun

[00:01:06] to get just like every shot. Yeah, this one hurt a little bit, which I'm a goalie. I usually don't cry when I get shots. Ah, you big wimp. Well, hey Dwight, today we have a phenomenal,

[00:01:21] brilliant guest. Today we have with us Robin Story. Robin, how are you? I'm good guys. How are you doing? Better now. Now that you're definitely the magic shot helps every day. So Robin, tell

[00:01:35] us a little bit about you and a little bit about your company. My name is Robin Story. I own the Storyline resumes. We're the largest privately held resume writing service in the US. We cater

[00:01:46] to primarily senior level and executives. We've been in business for 24 years. We've got a US based team here of 70 folks that help executives from primarily North America and a bit around the

[00:01:59] globe to tell their best professional story so they can go out there and win jobs, win board appointments, and win at life. Standing. Cool. So Robin, what's one fun thing that no one

[00:02:13] knows about Robin Story? I started this business. I left corporate America because my one goal in life was to get my kids on and off the school bus. And I couldn't do that if I had to be in an office.

[00:02:26] So I convinced my husband that I could start a business. And he said, you can do whatever you want if you pay for groceries. I don't care if you don't get a paycheck, but if you make

[00:02:36] enough to pay for groceries every week then I can float us. And I said, okay, that sounds great. So I couldn't even make enough to pay for groceries. So I left a corporate job at Pepsi and

[00:02:45] I ended up becoming a wage press. And I started getting my business running. The kids were little and I wrote resumes and did a little consulting during the day and then my husband would come

[00:02:56] home for work and I would go wait tables at night. Once I got over feeling like I needed to tell everybody that, you know, I was someone important. Of course I wasn't. You know, coming

[00:03:05] from corporate America, I was a terrible wage press but I had a wonderful time and love people and thank goodness the resume business beyond the boom. So now of course here we are 24 years

[00:03:15] later and I buy all the groceries. That's amazing. And then some, right? And then some. And it's probably very close to where a lot of people, you know, they have these interesting journeys

[00:03:26] and it takes them in strange directions. But I think we've all worked in not only retail but I think all of us have worked in food service for one point or another. I've been a busboy,

[00:03:36] I've been a waiter. Yeah, I like doing what I do now better. But my grandmother was a waitress for 60 years. My grandfather was a bartender both of my kids have waited tables. And I tell this

[00:03:47] funny story about my daughter who is educated. She's educated in New York City. She went to Wagner. She wanted to be a book editor her entire life. And she's just a brilliant person. She actually now runs the day to day for storyline resumes. She's been doing that for

[00:04:04] the last four or five years. But before that she spent many years working in New York City. But when she was a kid in college, she was applying for an internship and there were like 800

[00:04:13] people that applied for this internship. And she ended up beating out 800 folks to get this opportunity. And one of the key things that they looked for was did you have a bit of experience

[00:04:24] in working in the food industry as a waiter or waitress or bartender? They find it to be invaluable, which I thought always was so funny. But it was like the one thing that they were looking for.

[00:04:35] And I find that with a lot of entry level candidates, companies are looking for the same. So don't discount that working at the burger shop in the summertime. And I think that flows well into our topic. So what's get started?

[00:04:49] So today we're going to be talking about the most effective resume and job search strategies. How do people build a better resume? So how do they actually tell that story in a way that will get them to whatever their job is for that, for whatever they're looking for?

[00:05:13] So I think the most important thing is that you are being effusive, that you are showing passion, that you are telling a story on your resume that means something to someone. So

[00:05:27] I'll give you a little example. A couple of weeks ago, I have a book coming out next month. And so we did this little promotion on LinkedIn. If you went and pre-ordered the book, we'd do a mini resume review. We ended up getting like 400 pre-orders. So we've been

[00:05:38] knee-deep in mini resume reviews for weeks and weeks now. But the thing that I'm seeing consistently in resumes that people are sending over for a mini review is it's 90% their job description and 10% of their accomplishments. That number needs to be flipped. If you are an

[00:05:55] operations executive, a salesperson, a nurse, an accountant, a teacher, you do not need to describe your job for the reader of your resume. If they're hiring, they already know what it is

[00:06:05] that you do, right? What you really need to be describing is your impact and how that is being measured. So an example that I'm going to give you, if you're an operations person,

[00:06:17] whether or not you're an operations manager, or a supervisor, an executive, or whatever the case may be, what you really need to be looking at when you're creating your resume or working with a company

[00:06:25] like ours to create it, what are the KPIs or the requirements that you are grading on? So if you're getting a performance review a couple of times a year, once a year, you get goals that

[00:06:35] are set for you. You have goals that you need to meet. Those are the kinds of things that you need to be talking about on your resume. So for the sake of argument, say you're a

[00:06:44] production manager in an industrial facility, and your job is to help reduce turnover, improve safety outcomes, it increased productivity. Those are the things you want to talk about on your resume. So we love to start with the backstory, what was going on whenever you got here in this

[00:07:00] role? Where was productivity struggling? Where was it failing? What did you identify as the root cause? And then what are some of the actions that you took to improve that? And then how were you measuring that? So productivity increased by 20%. What does that mean in real

[00:07:14] dollars? Well, maybe that saves the company $400,000 a year. That detail, that sentence is going to be a hell of a lot more meaningful than saying I improve productivity. So you want to make sure that whenever you're using this, what I call valuable resume real estate, these two pages

[00:07:30] that you've been given to make an impression on someone that you're using it wisely and you're saying something meaningful to me. I totally agree with everything you just said,

[00:07:40] except are we actually selling a person these days on a resume or is it, we have to get by the AI that's looking for keywords, right? So is a resume different today than it used to be?

[00:07:53] Yeah, I mean definitely resumes are very, very different. We use AI in a number of ways here. ATS is often misunderstood. ATS absolutely is a system that recruiters use to vet and sort of

[00:08:07] classify levels of candidates and whether or not they meet the criteria, but most reviewing of resumes is still being done by a human. You just have to get through the ATS part. A lot of times

[00:08:17] that comes from qualifying questions or vetting questions. A lot of that comes from keywords that appear in your resume. So on the writing side, for instance, what we do here, well,

[00:08:27] first of all, we never use AI to develop a resume because AI cannot tell a story of genuine success because it doesn't know you, right? That comes from a conversation that you have with one of our

[00:08:36] interviewers. What we do do is when we work with a client, every single one of them, all 250 of them each and every week that come through our doors, we happen to do a little bit of homework

[00:08:47] where we're going to have them do they do like a mock job search. They're going to go online, LinkedIn, job boards, whatever they're going to find a couple of positions that they're

[00:08:54] interested in. We take those job postings, we drop it into AI and we say tell us the 10 top keywords that you are seeing in these job requirements, these job descriptions that the client has provided. Sometimes they send two, sometimes they send three, sometimes they send

[00:09:07] 10. Then what we do is once we've identified what the common themes are that people are looking for, companies are looking for in that particular function, then we make sure in an organic and genuine way that those keywords are being included in your resume. We're not loading them

[00:09:24] anywhere hidden in the resume, but we're telling that story. In operations, it might be KPI, it might be budget, it might be cost containment, it might be people retention, it might be whatever. Whatever those words are, that's what we're focusing on when we're

[00:09:38] telling your story. Now you don't need to take your resume and then customize it for every job that you're applying for because 99% of the time, the keywords that the people are looking for and the jobs that you're applying for is now organically built into that resume.

[00:09:53] That's an effective job search. When you're constantly tailoring, retailing, trying to change, looking at job postings, trying to come up with examples, that makes people crazy and then I don't want to apply for a new job. Job searching is long enough, miserable enough

[00:10:07] and challenging enough as it is to have to customize something every time you want to apply for a job or you want to click apply. And yet for the longest time, that's been

[00:10:17] what everybody's been coached to do is you have to customize your resume, you got to customize your cover letter and I would imagine some of that still needs to be done but it's nice not to

[00:10:27] have to do as much of that. Yeah, I mean, we'll say to a client, customize your headlines. So I always use cells as an example. You're a salesperson. That also means that you could

[00:10:39] be an account manager, you could be a business development representative, you could be a key account manager, a major account manager, an account executive, whatever. There's 27 different job titles for a salesperson in this country. So if you're online and you're applying and they're

[00:10:55] looking for a skilled business development executive, you're going to use that language in your headline on your resume. There's very few things that you need to change on a resume when you're telling the story that aligns with the goal. Now then we run into a caveat. So

[00:11:11] say for instance, you're in business development but you don't want to be in business development anymore, you want to be in marketing. Then you need to figure out a way to talk a little bit about how

[00:11:20] you should, you know, how your experience aligns to marketing and then your resume would have to be changed. That's a conversation for another day. But if you know the kind of job that

[00:11:28] you're going after, it may be a tweak here or there but I think that we're probably the only resume service that suggests that you do not customize your resume. There's a couple

[00:11:37] reasons for that. Right now, there's a lot of what we call fake jobs. So fake jobs are posted by companies and this is not me saying this was, this has been covered by the New York

[00:11:48] Post and the Forbes and many other publications. What we're finding out that a lot of job openings have been sort of created to prop up jobs numbers. They're also created to make your investors, your shareholders, your stakeholders, your customers, it makes it look like you're

[00:12:06] really busy. Look how many people were hired, we're growing. There's lots of jobs available on the website. It is said that something like 50% of jobs that you apply to are no longer valid.

[00:12:14] So either they are not real, they have already been filled, they're going to be filled internally or they are the same jobs that get posted and posted and reposted. That's a very common

[00:12:24] thing in a job search. Anybody looking for a job or has been looking for a job for the last year will tell you that they see the same jobs posted over and over and over. So that's

[00:12:31] what we're talking about with fake jobs. There's no job that you can't fill really in a couple of months. So that's the first thing. You want to make sure that you're playing a numbers game

[00:12:39] when you're creating your applications, when you're applying for positions. So if you apply to 50 jobs, you're maybe getting considered for 25, maybe. And then once you sort of whittle away, okay, well, three of these jobs are going to hire someone internally. Five of these jobs have been

[00:12:55] put on hold. Four of these jobs are underpaying for the position title or requirements. Now you've applied to 50, but now maybe you're down to 10 jobs. That's why it's so important that you

[00:13:07] send out as many applications, as many resumes and you get in front of as many people as humanly possible because what really gets through is a very minuscule amount. Like what you hear so far? Make sure you never miss a show by clicking subscribe.

[00:13:21] This podcast is made possible by salarie.com. Now back to the show. The second question was about conducting a job search today and you covered a little bit of that, but if you had like your advice for people about how they can conduct

[00:13:36] the best search possible, we already heard your advice about, you know, that you're going to be cut down or your available opportunities are really cut down, but what would you suggest they do? Where would they spend their time? What's the best use of time

[00:13:49] in trying to find the next best assignment for people? Sure. I mean, the best approach to a job search is really to use a compilation of things, right? So we hear so often that people are applying for a job and they've sent out one, two,

[00:14:01] 500, a thousand resumes and they're not really getting any results. They're not getting the interviews that they want, but they continue doing the same things over and over. So we find that when you have a mix in your approach, a little bit of job board, a lot of

[00:14:15] LinkedIn, some networking, what I call the friends and family network, going on company websites and identifying opportunities, making friends, connecting with headhunters and recruiters that are open to dialogues and conversations. People that are at a higher

[00:14:31] executive level do what I call the coffee meeting approach where they have enough street cred to reach out to an executive leader within an organization and say, hey, I'd love to meet you for coffee and talk a little bit about opportunities within your

[00:14:47] organization. Those are great ways to do. Not everyone's going to have the ability to do that. The bottom line is really use a combination of things. Don't get so caught up on just

[00:14:58] using the job boards. We see a lot of people going to job boards and they're spending a majority of their time there. That should just be a little bit of a portion. Use LinkedIn, which I think has

[00:15:08] probably the best job board. It seems to be more accurate maintained up to date. Then you want to do the networking piece. So we'll have clients of our services that never really send out a resume or apply for position online. They've been in an industry. They've got friends.

[00:15:26] They have peers. They have former clients. They've got former bosses. When they're either looking for a job or they've lost their job, they'll make a list of 40 people that they're going to reach out to.

[00:15:34] They might get on the phone. They might send an email. Hey, I just lost my position. Can you let me know who in your organization might be a good fit for me to have conversation

[00:15:45] with? When you ask people to do something for you and it takes less than a minute for them to do it, that's a really great way to get an end with the company. A lot of times,

[00:15:54] people will focus on the networking piece. A lot of times folks will focus on other avenues. I love this approach. I think it's a great approach. If you are working in an industry and you want to

[00:16:05] stay in that industry, make a list of the top 50 companies of that industry. It doesn't matter geographically where they are if they're small, medium or large. Get on those 50 company websites, set up a job alert on their job board. 99% of company websites are going to have a jobs

[00:16:21] board or a jobs careers page. Now you put the internet to work for you. Every time a position becomes available that meets the criteria of the job that you're after, you're going to get an alert.

[00:16:32] You get that email, you click in, you apply, you're done. Those are things that are very turn heat. Where people get caught up with this very demanding and time consuming job search is they're doing the same things over and over. They're getting online. They're checking a job

[00:16:48] where they're looking for updates instead of setting up alerts. They're going to a company site, they're searching for jobs instead of setting up alerts. Technology is really here to work for you, so put it to good use and that will make your job search much easier.

[00:17:02] I got to be honest with you. I was in a job search a few years ago and it was one of the most frustrating times of my life because I did a lot of the things you talked about.

[00:17:11] Now I was trying to grow a business at the time but I was applying for roles in various places and not only did I not get interviewed, I only got interviewed maybe two out of 150 or 200

[00:17:24] resumes I sent out. But the ones that I got rejected for, I got rejected for within seconds. And so when we talked about AI before, it wasn't even a question of was my resume

[00:17:37] okay or not? Was my background okay or not? Even getting, you talk about targeting and it's really brilliant. I love the being more personal and getting, you know, the, you know, establishing the relationships and going that direction because I got to be honest with you. The boards,

[00:17:52] they're just, they're just getting frustrating. Well, typically when you get a rejection within seconds, it means a couple of things. It means that job is no longer available, that job has reached its maximum number of candidates that they're willing to entertain

[00:18:08] or that job has expired. So the problem with a lot of the job boards is if you're an employer and you go to, I don't want to name any particular job board because a lot of them work the same,

[00:18:20] but if you go to a particular job board and you buy a job posting or maybe a group of job postings, right? You pay X amount of dollars for 30 day posting. So you might be three or four

[00:18:30] days into that posting and you've gotten hundreds of applicants and you know what you've already identified maybe 10 or 12 really great folks and you're going to start off with doing a, a vetting call or, you know, like a pre-interview call, right? You're talking about

[00:18:44] people are now applying for that job for another 25 days. So, you know, on my side, as the owner of that job posting, I have to leave that out because that's what I paid for, but on the portal side where I'm receiving that clientele, that information, that date of

[00:19:02] those resumes, I can shut that down because I don't want to look at any more resumes or maybe I'm a company that requires certain tracking mechanisms to be in place and I don't want to track 3,000 employee or 3,000 particular candidates, right? So I can shut that down.

[00:19:14] So when you're getting that immediate, immediate declination or you're getting that immediate rejection, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're rejecting you. It just means that something else is going on and nine times out of 10 has nothing to do with you or your

[00:19:28] resume. I feel much better now. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. I mean, it does because I've had the same experience before and it, I mean, it's still a broken part of the system, you know, but the curing the brokenness is a little bit different than the AI just

[00:19:46] auto-rejecting you just because it didn't get keywords. See, I think that a lot of the recruiting effort could, and I'm not sure why it is that companies tend to be sort of hesitating on using this approach if there is another reason for

[00:20:04] gathering information or data or whatever. But I think that every single job, its storyline, when we're hiring, we do a series of vetting questions and unless you answer yes to all of the basic or the minimum requirements of what we're looking for, you can't really advance

[00:20:21] to the application part. And I think that it would be so much more beneficial for both candidates and for companies if they had a series of five, six, eight or 10 vetting questions. So if you're hiring for a position and you're top 10 things, you want five years experience,

[00:20:38] you need this person to know this certain technology, you either need them to have a degree or not a degree. If you're looking for manager, you know, do you have experience managing three or more people for one or more years? Whatever. You can really set whatever it is

[00:20:51] you want. And then instead of having people going and applying and applying and applying and applying and going through very long application processes, the taking personality tests and skill stats and yada, yada, yada. Before they even get to the point where they can apply, they need to answer

[00:21:05] yes to all 10 of those questions. And if they don't answer yes, then what you can say is, hey, great to meet you. Thank you so much for your interest in this job. Based on our requirements

[00:21:17] and your answers, we're not going to have you go through the interview process or the application process because it's not going to be beneficial to you. We recommend that you go back to our careers page and maybe find something else or what I mean, you don't

[00:21:30] have to be a jerk about it. But people are spending hours manually filling out applications and they're literally going nowhere. I think that for the betterment of the job seeking society as a whole, if we were a little more upfront and we got people out of the process

[00:21:48] instead of inviting the men in and rejecting them later after they put on this time, the world would be a better place. So I think there's ways to streamline it. But there's also,

[00:21:56] you have to look and see why is it that a company would want to collect that kind of information? There could be other reasons or maybe they're going to keep it for a future opportunity. But I've been in this business for 24 years and we've worked with probably 300,000

[00:22:11] customers. I don't think one person in all these years has ever sent to me. I submitted my resume for a job and six months later they called me for something else. I mean, it's so rare. So I wouldn't

[00:22:22] bank on that. Yeah. I mean, it's so disrespectful to people's time and energy and effort and it does nobody any good when there's, you know, I like that process you talk about where here's our screening questions and you're not going to make everybody fill out a big long

[00:22:39] application and tailor things and do all that goes into getting to that point where you get the instino from the ATS. And by the way, I've actually heard lots of companies who've talked about using that database, the database of the rejections as a future bench strength.

[00:23:01] Well, they're not really a bench strength. You didn't keep them warm. They're not really your friend because you rejected them. So I'm not really, I don't really know why we'd be keeping that data

[00:23:09] around because it's also going to get stale the moment that those people get jobs or they, you know, move to another place. They're not going to be candidates anymore. So reaching out to them is kind of not really possible. I did a post on LinkedIn a couple

[00:23:24] of weeks ago, and I talked about how in 1994 1995, the average job search took about five weeks. In 2024, the average job search takes about five months. Back in the 90s, the average job search

[00:23:41] interview was one, maybe two, two at a very, very high level. The average number of interviews a candidate goes through now is six. Back in 1995, the average tenure of an employee in a new role

[00:23:55] is four years. In 2024, it is also four years. Nothing has changed about people's loyalty or about their tenure at a job, despite the fact that we are interviewing them to death. We are beating interviews over the head with a bat. I have clients at very high

[00:24:14] executive levels that have been on 15, 16, 17 touches for one job. Now when we are getting to that level, there's something systematically or systemically broken within an organization that doesn't feel empowered to make a job offer after talking to somebody three or four times.

[00:24:34] That's where the issue is. So in the job search function, this is where I don't think that technology has been our friend. Back in the day, we didn't have such a thing. If anybody is old enough to remember, you sent a resume, somebody called you on the phone,

[00:24:50] you went in for an interview, you had a conversation, they judged you and gauged whether or not that you were going to be a good fit, you have great personality, great experience, whatever. Then they made you an offer. Everything was pretty quick.

[00:25:00] It was pretty easy. A lot of times, at least 60% of the time, it was good fit. It took a couple of days. Everybody left happy and you stayed in that job for a couple of years.

[00:25:10] It is said that 40% of hires are bad fits. In 25 years, we've learned nothing. We've invested hundreds of millions of not billions of dollars in technology to help us improve candidate experience, candidate selection. People still are not staying very long.

[00:25:27] It's still around 60% that it's a good fit and 40% that it's not. Obviously, it has not improved on our ability to pick people that are fundamentally always right for the job. Yeah, but Robin, we could actually have an entire podcast, maybe even an entire

[00:25:43] presentation done for multiple people on the problems that may arise and all that that you just described because that in and of itself is one of the real reasons why there's something structurally wrong with not just the hiring practice,

[00:25:58] but with the management of those new hires and the management of the entire, well, the entirety of the processes seems like it's just freaking broken. Yeah. I mean, most job seekers, I think when they were young, whether they got on a high

[00:26:11] school or they were fortunate enough to go to college or whatever, they expected that they went into a job that someone was going to be training them. Somebody smarter than them had an idea of how to make them capable of doing this job. I don't know that that's

[00:26:24] happening as much today as it needs to be. Well, that all gets pointed to whether it's managers or the lack of training or the lack of good training resources. So totally hear you there.

[00:26:35] And also when you factor in sort of the age thing where companies are very sort of hot to get rid of folks that are older, been with company a long time, maybe they're costing

[00:26:45] them a little bit more. The amount of knowledge and wisdom and experience and just flying out the door is at a record level today. And these are folks that we really need to be tapping into

[00:26:58] to say, hey, train these young professionals, help to build programs to get these folks up to speed. I tell this funny story all the time and I actually talk about it in my book. There

[00:27:11] was a family that lived down the street from me growing up and they had five kids, four of the kids are engineers. The daughter is a school counselor and the dad worked for the water company.

[00:27:22] He was a laborer for the water company. And we grew up in a very rural area and every Friday night when all of us kids in the neighborhood got together, the parents would take turns driving them

[00:27:31] to wherever they were going, whoever was going to roller skating or to the mall or whatever. And anyway, so when this guy, this dad worked for the water company and he'd be taking us

[00:27:40] to a baseball game or he would be driving through the countryside and he would say, back in 1978, I remember we dug out that field and we laid out water there and those people

[00:27:50] all have wells. This is the problem that we ran into. There's clay under that dirt here on this farm but this farm is really good. There were mines that were here so we couldn't drill through

[00:28:01] that. And everywhere we went in his brain off the top of his head, he knew when we drilled there for water or sewage, we were successful or we weren't successful or we ran into rock

[00:28:13] or we ran into this or whatever. And I remember thinking to myself, I hope somebody's writing this down. Like is this written down anywhere because this to me seems like pretty valuable information. Is this on a blueprint somewhere? And that's what I think that we need to be

[00:28:27] thinking about in companies. The things, the experiences, the knowledge, the insight, the wisdom. Is any of this stuff being gathered? Is it being used? Is it being leveraged or utilized in a way to help to grow generations behind? And that's where I think there might be a world

[00:28:42] disconnect here. I call it institutional knowledge. That gets just let go when those people get let go. Absolutely. Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, man, I wish I could talk to David about this? Well, you're in luck. We have a special offer for listeners

[00:28:59] of the HR Data Labs podcast, a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast or whatever is on your mind. Go to salary.com forward slash hrdl consulting

[00:29:12] to schedule your free 30 minute call today. So let's talk about the third question, which to me is one of my favorites, which is let's talk about what your resume says about you.

[00:29:23] How do you actually focus on the story, on how to build it and how to capitalize on what each person's individual story is? Yeah. I mean, so, you know, that first story has to be rooted in

[00:29:35] success. And what success looks like to you or to someone else or even to the client that we're working with, it may not look like that to us, right? So even if you are someone who feels like

[00:29:46] you failed in a particular job, or that you didn't do as much as you could have, our job is to craft a narrative that shows why that is. I pull up the shit show approach. So if

[00:30:00] your professional and every professional has had this in their experience where they've walked into an organization or a job that they've inherited a mess from someone else, maybe they didn't see

[00:30:09] it all the way through to the end. Maybe they didn't turn around and make it a stellar success, but maybe they touched parts of it. Maybe they were able to shore up the team. Maybe they were

[00:30:20] able to go in and help to stave off the loss of customers. Not every job in your career is going to be a smashing success, right? But we need to figure and focus on the things that were for you

[00:30:32] at the time. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing is that you always, always, always want to have clarity. The people that are most successful in their

[00:30:42] job searches have an idea of where it is that they would like to go. So the days of you creating sort of a general resume and throwing it out there, and then someone on the other end looking at it and

[00:30:52] saying, wow, I really think David would be great in this role. Or I really think Dwight would be phenomenal in this. Or Robin would be a really great addition to this team. That doesn't

[00:31:01] really happen so much anymore. It seems like we're in a churn phase where we're always trying to fill positions. We're laying people off, and then we're bringing people back, and then we're trying to fill them. There seems to be no real time or availability

[00:31:15] for that kind of brain power, right? So you want to make sure that your resume is speaking in a clear language, clear direction, and you've got to focus on the kind of job that you want to go after.

[00:31:26] And then everything in that resume shall line to it. So the first thing I say is that no one ends up where they started out. So you might have started off in marketing, and then you

[00:31:35] got into sales, and then somehow you fell in the human resources. And now you're executive operations director and nonprofit, right? Everybody's experiences are different. We did all start off being in marketing, and now we're marketing officers. Life doesn't work that

[00:31:51] way. You neither do careers. But anything that we're telling from those experience, those stories, they need to be rooted in success and results and outcome, and they have to kind of flow. The language has to flow and it has to align with the job that you're after.

[00:32:04] So those are the most important things truly in a resume is to make it clear, to make it easy. Can someone look at your resume and make a quick correlation between the jobs you've had and the

[00:32:14] job that you want? And are you making it easy for that person to call you on the phone? Like, that's a lot. That has to be a logical choice in their mind. So that's so important.

[00:32:22] All right. I got to ask this question. Yep. Does format matter? We spend so much time formatting the crap out of these things. Oh my God. Yes. Yeah. I mean, format definitely matters. So we use what we call presentation style resume. So our resumes are very beautiful.

[00:32:37] I mean, they look like presentations basically because it's a celebration, right? It's a celebration of your history, your career, whatever. This is the format that you're going to use when you're emailing it to someone. When you get called in for an interview, people still print

[00:32:51] out a copy and they take it with them or they take a handful of copies for the people that are going to be in the room. This is the beautiful thing that you're going to use,

[00:32:57] right? This is the one that you're going to use for that. Then we also give you what I call the ugly resume. It's the ATS version. It's that text-only version. It's 90% aligned to most

[00:33:07] ATS systems that companies are using. Not always. It's not always a shoe-in because a lot of systems parse differently than they used to and they keep tweaking them and changing them. It's almost

[00:33:18] like they're trying to make it a little bit harder for you to apply. So there's your ATS version. So you need to know the difference. And then we also, of course, whatever word document or

[00:33:26] Google Docs or whatever it is that people use, that's the one that you're going to tweak. You're going to change and you'll say it as PDF or rewrite an ATS. But you kind of need to know

[00:33:35] from the tech perspective, from the type of document perspective how you're getting that content, how you're getting that information to your end user. It can't really use your LinkedIn profile. So let me just, I know you didn't ask me this question, but a lot of people say,

[00:33:49] what's the difference between your resume and your LinkedIn? Resume is for a captive audience. So when we go back and talk about going into an organization or a position that you took over,

[00:33:59] that maybe was a little bit of a mess. Maybe it wasn't as great as it needed to be. You can tell that story in your resume. You can't go on a public forum like LinkedIn

[00:34:08] and tell that story. So there's what I call the dirty laundry kind of stuff on your resume where I took something that was really screwed up and you turned it around. But on LinkedIn, you're not really going to say that. That's why you need them both.

[00:34:20] Makes sense. Well, the last question I had Dwight, I don't know if you have any more, but the last question I had is, is two pages too much? Do you keep it to one?

[00:34:28] I mean, I have 35 years of experience, so I'm not going to do five pages or six pages every single publication that I've ever been in. But what's your advice about, you know, the length? Yeah. I mean, you should always have a one-page resume. If you've got five

[00:34:41] or six years of experience, once you start getting into seven, eight, 10, 15, 20, always two pages. People need to realize that a two-page resume is the gold standard. It's not like the root of all evil. And in two pages, you have enough time and space to create those

[00:34:59] tales, to create those stories, to build that content that's going to ping those ATFs. So the more, you know, like in a resume, we might repeat a certain keyword two, three, four times, right?

[00:35:09] We're doing that for a reason, not because we've run out of words, right? So, you know, the more content that you can get into a resume and still make it consumable. I mean, you know,

[00:35:19] I had a resume open yesterday and the font was so tiny. I'm blowing up the, you know, the zoom on my screen just to read it. Nobody wants that, right? You want to make it look nice.

[00:35:29] You want it to be readable. It should flow. It should have some white space, you know, all those things. But yeah, I mean, two pages for anybody with any real experience, you know, multiple jobs and, you know, moving, you know, up in your career,

[00:35:41] that's the gold standard. Generally, what you're going to kind of articulate on the resume, 10 years, 15 years, like me, I've got 30 years experience, but my resume might only reflect the last. Yeah. Yeah. So really, like between 15 and 20, so it depends on the person, right? So you

[00:36:00] might be a person that worked for a company for 20 years and you have two jobs. We're not even going to hardly talk about the first job that you had because the majority of your

[00:36:07] experience last 10, 12, 15 years has been in this job. That's going to take the majority of your resume. But say you have had seven jobs in that period of time, then we're going to break them

[00:36:17] down back to like the early 2000s. But, you know, going back 20 years, like I always joke, because we work with a lot of people in technology, in technology, sometimes what you did last Tuesday is no longer relevant. That's how rapidly that industry changes, right?

[00:36:34] So certainly going back to when you were using Cobalt, that's not something that we would cover, right? So we kind of try to keep it as roll of it as possible. Okay. Awesome. Robin, thank you so

[00:36:52] much. You're an awesome storyteller. You're an awesome resume person. I encourage everyone to go, we're going to have it in the show notes to look up Robin's book. And for those of you who

[00:37:02] are looking for a new role, reach out to Storyline. But thank you so much, Robin. You're awesome. Take care and thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you so much for

[00:37:11] having me. It was great. Thanks. It's our pleasure. Dwight, thank you. Thank you. This is great. A lot of good ideas. Don't you get any ideas? You're not leaving anybody. Yeah, I don't mean

[00:37:20] like that. You know, I'm not leaving right now. All right. Well, thank you very much, everyone. Take care and stay safe. That was the HR Data Labs podcast. If you liked the episode,

[00:37:31] please subscribe. And if you know anyone that might like to hear it, please send it their way. Thank you for joining us this week and stay tuned for our next episode. Stay safe.