How to Write your Resume if you have little or no Professional Experience

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07
Jun 2017

Summer is heating up. For many of this year’s college graduates, the festivities are dying down, and the need to find a job is becoming more pressing. Yet many recent grads or those who have taken career breaks find themselves in a conundrum when they begin their job search: how to write an outstanding resume if they have little or no professional experience. Embarking on a job hunt is never easy, but it can seem even more daunting if you feel you haven’t had the professional experiences that hiring managers look for when screening job applications. Fear not, however, because there IS a way to frame your unique experiences and skills so that they translate in to valid, valuable bullet points on your resume. With a little research, some personal reflection, and determination, you can write your resume and begin applying to jobs within a few hours of reading this post.

1) Do your research

Decide which industries you would be interested in working in. Once you’ve picked two or three, use sites like monster.com, indeed.com, and idealist.org to peruse some job postings for entry-level positions in your chosen fields. In each posting, there should be a list of qualities and qualifications that hiring managers desire in potential entry level job candidates. Make a list of these traits and skills.

Once you have a good list with quite a few skills and traits, examine any that repeat. If you begin to notice patterns across job postings from various companies, you can get a general sense of what is expected of an entry level worker in that field. For example, if you were researching desired traits for jobs in sales, you might see that customer service, persuasion, negotiation, and diligence are among dozens of skills that are emphasized when working in that field, according to TheBalance.com. Now, analyze your findings. Do you possess any of the qualities that recur across job postings? Circle all that are relevant to you.

2) Do some personal reflection

Once you’ve got a sense of what hiring managers are looking for, you can begin to reflect on your own experiences to discover if any work you’ve done over the years would demonstrate your suitability for a position in your chosen field. The trick here is to stop limiting your interpretation of “professional experience” to solely conventional long-term jobs, which you may not have had yet. Professional experience can be anything you have done that utilized or developed your skills. Perhaps you were a TA in college or you volunteered at the writing center or as a tutor. Maybe you gave tours to prospective students or were assigned to have a visiting student shadow you one day. Maybe you worked at the library.

For recent college grads, work experience doesn’t necessarily have to be confined to your college, either. You may have worked on a catering team at a wedding, or helped take care of your neighbors’ children. A family friend may have asked you to help with a home improvement project or help fix a car one summer. Even hobby activities can be considered experiences that demonstrate your value as a worker.

It may make it easier to reflect on these experiences if you think of times when you collaborated with others to achieve some sort of end. What projects have you completed? What volunteer work have you done? Now reexamine the list of desired qualities in your industry. Focus on the ones you circled, those you possess. Try to think of how you acquired, developed, or utilized these skills throughout your past work, volunteer, or other project experiences. These experiences will be the bullet points in the Professional Experience section on your resume. For help formatting this section and others on your resume, see Resume Yeti’s “Anatomy of a Perfect Resume” Pro Tips.

3) Make your resume look the part

Since you are searching for employment with few “conventional” job experiences, it is of paramount importance that your resume be as close to perfect as possible. In an article about the most important resume characteristics for an applicant with no experience, Business Insider states that the number one way to make a resume stand out is that, “The layout is clean and easy to read.” Your resume should contain no spelling or grammar errors, no formatting inconsistencies, and it should have a clean, polished design. In order for hiring managers to take your resume seriously, it needs to be visually as good as or better in caliber than those of applicants competing for the same positions. First impressions are key!

 

Once you get over the initial anxiety of feeling like you have no work experience, you’ll be able to crank out your resume and start applying to jobs immediately thereafter. And remember, the employee profiles that hiring managers post in job listings are only desired qualities; they are usually not hard line requirements for every applicant. Show hiring managers that despite not having had conventional work experience, you have had valuable learning experiences in the past, and you are ready to put your skill set into action.

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3 Creative Ways to get Noticed and Land the Job

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23
May 2017

There is a fine line between gimmicks and authentic creativity when it comes to capturing the attention of hiring managers. A stunt too outlandish will land your resume in the garbage, but there are several tricks job hunters may employ that—with finesse—just might pique the interest of hiring managers and get you in the door for an interview. Each of the following strategies requires a bit of extra time, and in some cases a little money upfront, but each is a way that has been proven to move job hunters forward in their search for employment.

1) The Unsolicited Application

The strategy of cold calling has historically been one of the most tried-and-true methods of job hunting, although it has changed a bit in the last decade. To set this strategy into motion, you need to do your research. It’s a good idea to use a spreadsheet to organize your findings. Start by making an exhaustive list of companies and organizations that interest you—be it the company’s mission, the products they make or advertise, or the ideal next step up in your career. For each entry in your spreadsheet, record the company’s name, a sentence about why it interests you, and the available contact information about the staff member most likely to be in charge.

Once you have several entries, begin contacting the companies. In an email, send your resume along with a formal, individualized message about why you’re interested in the company, your skills that you think would make a positive contribution to their staff and workplace, and a reminder that even if they are not hiring at the moment, to please keep you in mind for future opportunities. The majority of these emails may go unanswered, but sometimes, companies are looking for employees for positions that haven’t been posted yet, or hiring managers and staff members will remember your outreach efforts and might contact you in the future.

2) The Role Reversal

Some of you may have heard about programmer Andrew Horner’s website that encouraged employers to apply to have Horner work for them. While this strategy was ultimately very successful for Horner, it is not likely that everyone will achieve the same results. However, there are a few ways that you can “turn the tables” so that people solicit you to work, rather than the other way around.

One tactic is to advertise on Facebook and Google. To make a Facebook ad, you’ll have to start a business page. Once you do, you can follow these steps to create advertisements for small fees to reach specific audiences. To place advertisements on Google, you’ll have to make a Google AdWords account. Once you’ve set that up, there are many options to create Search Ads (those that appear in the list search results when you Google something), and Display Ads (those that appear as banners on websites you visit). There are also many different payment tiers, depending on your needs and the audience you want to reach. You can learn more about how to effectively use Google Adwords here.

Another “role reversal” tactic is to post advertisements for your services on sites like TaskRabbit and Craigslist Jobs**. While Craigslist tends to be a bit more of a wild card in terms of gaining actual clients, it has proved effective when used intelligently and persistently. It’s also easy to post–you can do it within 10 minutes! Craigslist uses what’s called “relay mail,” so that you can communicate with potential clients anonymously until you have reached an agreement and feel comfortable exchanging other contact information with your client.

TaskRabbit allows you to create a profile that lists your skills and strengths so that people who need work done can contact you if your skill set is a match for what they need. You can become a “tasker” here. As a tasker you can also browse work that people need done and contact them to offer your services. If they agree that you’re a match, then you’ll move forward with a contract and you’ll be on your way.

** Remember never to post personal information inside ad text, never to give bank account information or passwords, and never to send/wire money over Craigslist.

3) The Imitation Game

Maybe you’ve heard of Alexander J. Velicky’s video game resume, which he submitted to Bethesda Game Studios, where he was keen on working. Or perhaps you’re aware of Jeanne Hwang’s Pinterest CV, which she submitted to Pinterest. Or Leah Bowman, who built a Lego-themed resume to appeal to future employers.

These are three examples of job hunters who grabbed hiring managers’ attention by synthesizing and personalizing elements of the companies’ branding, mission, and work. By thoroughly researching the companies they wanted to work for, these job hunters were able to project their best qualities by imitating the characteristics they loved best about the companies. When the hiring managers saw enthusiasm for the companies mirrored in their job applications, these applicants were invited to interview.

 

All three of these creative strategies require a bit more time, research, and even money (in the case of advertising) upfront. But for jobs that you’ve got your heart set on, it just might be worth a shot!

Have you ever used a creative strategy to land an interview or job offer? Share it with us on Facebook or Tweet us @ResumeYeti!

 

Cover image provided by WOCinTech Chat

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5 Phrases that will kill your Resume (And how to replace them)

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15
May 2017

Employers are often shocked at how many job applicants include outdated language on their resume, regardless of their age or level of career experience. In today’s hyper-competitive job market, you cannot allow employers’ first impression of you to be shaped by archaic words, writing styles, or catchphrases. Luckily, these buzzwords are easy to spot, if you know what to look for. What follows is a list of ResumeYeti’s Top 5 outdated resume phrases, with our Pro Tips on how to replace them if they appear on yours.

1) Personal Pronouns

Using the pronouns “I,” “my,” “me,” etc. comes off as overly informal and thus, unprofessional. Employers automatically assume that everything on your resume is related to you and your experience. Think about the lessons you learned early on about writing academic or scientific essays. The most authoritative voice is the one that remains objective. The same goes for resume language.

Pro Tip: Find ways to express your career experiences without pronouns. The phrase “My responsibilities included training my interns to use the digital asset manager,” could be reworked to be, “Trained a group of 5 interns to use Portfolio Digital Asset Manager.” The new sentence is preferred because it is direct and objective, and it also quantifies an element of your job (resume readers love this), AND it specifies a computer program/system you are skilled in using.

2) Address

You should not include your full address in the “contact” section of your resume. In the past, the address was typically included as a formal gesture, but today, your personal address is seen as unnecessary information that visually clutters the top of your resume.

Pro Tip: DO include your phone number and email address. You should use dashes, periods, or parentheses (for the area code) to format your phone number. When you list your e-mail, be sure to use a professional address with your name, rather than a silly account that does not identify you.

3) Exceedingly formal or wordy language

The flip side of making your resume seem too informal by using personal pronouns would be making your resume seem so extraneously proper that it comes off as silly. Some examples of this language are phrases like “responsible for,” “duties included,” “oversight of,” and “references available upon request.” Apart from taking up precious space on your resume document, these phrases complicate the details that you are trying to convey to employers. Today, advertisers are lucky if they catch our attention for 5 whole seconds before a YouTube video plays. If your resume language is complicated and verbose, you can count on it being buried in the pile and overshadowed by other applicants.

Pro Tip: Be direct and concise. If you’ve gotten to a point where you’re stuck and you don’t know where to start, have a friend look it over. Instruct them to edit every sentence as if each one had a word limit. Every character counts. Try to pare down your language so that only the most crucial points remain. Think of it this way: for every overly wordy phrase you remove, you can use a bit of the extra space to specify or quantify a detail of your experience (thus improving your resume).

4) Vague Expressions

What do you think of when you hear the phrases, “out-of-the-box,” “dynamic,” “win-win,” or “team player?” Having a hard time envisioning something meaningful? Employers reading your resume will have a hard time, too.  Clichéd phrases like these are vague. They emit a gimmicky, sales pitch-y tone, and should be left off your resume.

Pro Tip: If you do spot these phrases on your resume, zoom in on the context in which you used them. What exactly is it that you are trying to express about yourself? If you describe yourself as an “out-of-the-box, dynamic team player,” try to imagine a time when your innovative ideas or actions were successful in a team setting. Did the success occur because you were resourceful? Enterprising? Efficient? Assertive? Isolate the clichés and either eliminate them or find a more expressive way to convey what you mean.

5) Everyday, general skills

It is assumed that most adults in the U.S. know how to use Microsoft Word. You do not need to assure employers (and waste space on your resume) of your proficiency in this common program. Other “skills” that are frequently listed on resumes are problem solving and being detail oriented.

Pro Tip: These are qualities that are essential not only to being an employee, but also to just being a human. Life is problem solving. If you pay attention to details, you’re more likely to get what you want or avoid situations where precautions were in the fine print. You’ll need to show, rather than tell, your future employer that you possess these qualities. To begin with, show your employer how detail oriented you are by spell checking your resume and cover letter. Go the extra mile by handing in your gorgeously designed ResumeYeti resume, complete with matching letterhead for your cover letter, and business cards to make a great first impression.

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