CHALLENGE #1: Trying to Make an Industry/Career Change
Like so many I’ve seen as a professional resume writer, the pandemic was a wake-up call for Clara. After years of volunteering for causes near and dear — she took a leap and made a plan to leave her career in Corporate America and move into nonprofit.
When writing her resume and LinkedIn, we worked to appeal to this new audience by focusing on 3 areas.
Understand the Lingo
Every industry has a different way of expressing itself. In nonprofits, for instance — terms like “margin enhancement” aren’t used. Instead, use “cost savings.” There are many more.
Understand the Goals
Every industry has different end goals. Using Clara as an example, where revenues are the ultimate measure of success in the corporate world — in nonprofit donations and fundraising rules.
Understand the Painpoints
At the end of the day, companies face similar struggles (from using $$ and resources wisely to managing projects on time and on budget to elevating their brands) regardless of industry.
Use stories to show you understand their struggles and how you’ve solved similar ones in the past. Here’s an example of a bullet point we included to show how her corporate leadership style was well-suited for nonprofits.
- Earned top survey results for fostering culture of inclusivity, ensuring teams had resources and knowledge necessary to feel engaged and empowered and to operate without business disruption.
The bottom line?
It’s critical to become familiar with the organization or industry. You can do this by reading articles, listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos and reaching out to people in the know!
CHALLENGE #2 Lackluster Recent Performance
Erik had been a rock star with a history of solving problems, putting out fires and growing revenues.
Then the pandemic of 2020 happened. His industry took a beating, his company restructured and laid people off.
In 2021 and 2022, Erik was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. While Erik continued to work, his numbers well into 2023 weren’t stellar.
He was worried that the past 3 years would impact his ability to get hired.
By providing context around the events of 2020 through 2023, we were able to tell a story of against-the-odds success. Here’s how:
The Story for 2020: While his numbers weren’t great, they were way better than those of other divisions in his company. Moreover, he managed to retain 100% of his customers where his competitors hadn’t.
This is the story we told.
The Story for 2021 and 2023: Even though Erik’s numbers didn’t look that great — his employee survey results were out of this world. In fact, they exceeded both industry and company benchmarks.
This is the story we told.
The bottom line?
The numbers don’t always tell the real story and the real story can be powerful.
CHALLENGE #3: Worried About Appearing Too Old
Megan worried disclosing her full career history would subject her to age discrimination. Eliminate it and she feared this key experience would be discounted and pigeon-hole her as a one-industry HR person.
To make things more complex, after working with top-tier companies as an HR Business Partner back in the late 1980 through mid-1990s, she’d left the workforce for 14 years before returning to work full/time in 2011.
As a professional resume writer, here’s the strategy we employed:
1) Impress the reader with a bit of “name-dropping,” — referencing her work for these top-tier companies in the Summary section at the top of Page One on her resume.
2) Highlight industry diversity by creating an “Additional Career Experience” section where we listed the earlier roles and the job titles she held.
The bottom line?
An earlier experience section can help your resume be timeless – because no one needs to know if you’re 35 or 75 when reading it!
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