You Ask, I Answer: Digital Marketing Resumes That Stick Out?

In today's episode, Alan asks, I need some help making my resume stick out. What would appeal to you if you're hiring for a digital marketing position? I have the experience in gaining new certifications, but I'm truly trying to shine through this unemployment situation. Well, this is obviously going to be a uh recurring topic for a little while. I should probably first say that I've been a technical recruiter, so I've been on the hiring manager side and the recruiting side, and your resume is one part of a piece of the puzzle.

It is the entryway, it is the opening round, I guess. Uh more important these days is a solid LinkedIn profile to go with the resume. Because that LinkedIn profile gives people the chance to dig in a little bit more and get to know you more on a professional level. Um obvious things, you know, all the basics of LinkedIn, like uh having recommendations and endorsements, having complete coherent uh work histories, all those things I assume that you're doing. There's two things you have to do, and your resume and your LinkedIn profile have to do these two things.

One, you have to beat the gatekeeper test, and two, you have to answer three questions that are in a hiring manager's mind. So let's talk about these. Number one, the gatekeeper test. Most hiring management systems, HRMS, are fairly primitive systems that take in data, resumes, whatever, they scan them. Uh so make sure you use a font that's easily uh legible if i uh and make sure you provide a digital copy.

Um they scan it for keywords, right? It is resumes and dealing with these HRIS systems or HRMS systems is a lot like old school SEO from like a decade ago where you know keyword stuffing and and uh prominent mentions of things. They don't use a lot of the modern day AI that that makes modern SEO work. So you have to beat those algorithms while remaining honest, right? You don't want to be the person who stuffs their resume full of uh useless keywords and then it it's unreadable.

It still has to be uh legible to a human, understandable uh to a human. So that's step one. Make sure that your resume is information rich, uh, with the appropriate keywords for the position that you're going for. Um you don't have to list every single skill you have, but take advantage of things like work histories. If you have five jobs that you held in the past, but three of them are have strong relevance to what you want to be doing now.

Go into little detail in the descriptions, making sure again you're checking the box on it. If you did Facebook ads, make sure Facebook ads appears on there. Uh, if the job position itself uh has specific skills it it you want to see, make sure that those skills are on your resume as long as it's honest, as long as you're you're being honest about it. Second, after you get past the gatekeeper test, which is true for most larger organizations, smaller organizations won't have uh HRMS systems, they will have uh someone in HR reading the resumes. So another reason why it has to be legible and and understandable.

The hiring manager cares about three things. They have three questions they need you to answer in their resume, in your resume, in your uh telephone screen, in your uh I was gonna say in-person interview, but we're not doing a whole lot of that right now in your video interview. And the hiring manager may not say these questions outright, but they're thinking them, and they may not even be thinking of them, or they may be thinking of them in more polite terms. But the three questions are number one, are you gonna make my life more difficult? Right?

So there that that's sort of a chemistry test, which is especially important for the interview. Um gonna make life more difficult for this person. Is hiring you a better option than not hiring at all? Uh companies in the next year to two years will be very, very risk-averse. They want someone to they want to hire somebody who will just fit exactly in the role like a little Lego block.

No training, no effort, just plug the piece into the machine and and the machine runs. That's what they're looking for. A manager is looking to not invest heavily in you, uh, not spend a lot of time training you, not worried about are you going to slow things down? Yes, there'll be some grace period for you know getting up to speed, but not much. If you remember back uh for those of you who are old enough, the Great Recession, you know, companies wanted to hire perfect fits, they were not interested in hiring anybody they had to train.

So make sure that you are spending your time getting trained up on on the things that a job would require. Question two Will you get the manager fired? Right? The manager's thinking, am I gonna get fired for hiring this person? Are they gonna make me look bad?

Am I gonna regret hiring this person? And it's different than someone who just takes up your time. This is someone who's actively going to be a problem. Um when you're hiring, when you're when you're looking at resumes, you're trying to assess is this person going to make my life worse? Are they going to, you know, do they do they show the ability to get work done?

And so that's where things like skills and stuff become very important. Coherent work histories. The worst thing you can put on a resume is, you know, chief data scientist at TrustInsights.ai, you know, worked as a chief data scientist at the organization supporting business lines. That tells me nothing. This question, am I going to regret hiring you?

Is a risk mitigation question. Am I taking a risk on you? The work history had better be able to say, nope, I am not a risk at all. I'm I'm gonna not be the nail that sticks up. I am a good fit for your organization.

The last question, again, managers are not going to say this outright. Well, a few will if they're really honest, um, but they're thinking it. If I hire you, are you gonna make me look good? Right? Are you gonna make me shine?

Are you gonna keep me from getting fired? Are you going to make me get my bonus? That's what the a manager is thinking, motivated by. Will you make them look good? And that's where in your work histories you need to have a lot of detail about results you got.

Increased revenue 42%. Uh you know, increased ad spend or ad results by 16% year over year. Uh drove ROI 41%. In your work histories, if there aren't numbers that showcase your results, you need to go back and sharpen your pencil. Even if they were collaborative results, that's fine.

Be honest about that. Even if you worked in an organization where you couldn't necessarily quantify everything, being able to quantify what you did is incredibly important in a work history. Whether it's on your LinkedIn profile, whether it is on your resume, you know, if you say increased lead generation 5x in nine months, guess what? I want to talk to you because you're going to make me look good. I'm going to hit my numbers because of the work that you did.

And that's what a manager cares about. The hiring manager really cares about. So you've got to be able to answer those three things in the resume, in the phone screen, and the video interview, or in person eventually. Some things you may want to think about. Again, LinkedIn, your profile needs recommendations and endorsements.

When I was hiring even a decade ago, if you had no recommendations, I didn't even bother going further. Because if you can't market yourself, you're not going to market my company, right? Um, and marketing yourself means getting those testimonials. Nobody wants to call references. It's a expensive, it's a pain in the butt.

If I see that other people are recommending you on your LinkedIn profile, especially current or previous employers, that's solid. I don't need any more because you you've put that out in public. Videos on YouTube talking about specific examples from your resume are a powerful way to pre-interview, right? Give somebody a link, you know, learn more and a YouTube link on your resume. If I'm a hiring manager, I can go and watch that video of you talking about it, and you will benefit because you don't have the nerves of an in-person interview.

You can talk more calmly about these things. Best possible thing, if you can get video testimonials from previous employers, that's golden. We can spend a lot more time on this, but those are some of the things that you need to get started with. You have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel on the newsletter.

I'll talk to you soon. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit trustinsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.