When someone is writing their resume, the most common thing is to just write down what their role entails, however, the focus should be more about what they have done for that company and what they can do for the next company. So here are 8 questions you should ask yourself while building your resume:

1- What’s in it for them?

The resume has to highlight what you will be doing for the organization you are working for. How much revenue you will be generating, time will be saving or anything else. This is usually shown by writing about what you did for your current company. 

2- How have you had an impact?

This dove tales into the previous company, but doesn’t have to be the financial impact that we talked about in the previous question, but kinda like Dennis Rodman who did the intangibles and had a very high impact. 

3- Have you worked with customers?

The answer is usually yes. Whether you’re a sales engineer, professional services, or a software designer, at some point, you may have interacted with customers. You just need to think back and figure out how you’ve done that. Even if you’re an IT working for a bank, the users are your customers.

4- Are you using exact numbers?

As sales engineers, we need to put in the quota we’ve achieved, new customers you’ve helped acquired, and so on.  If you’re not a sales engineer, you’re going to have to think of the impact you’ve done, going back to the first question. And you need to put in some exact numbers. If you’re in proserv, you’ve implemented $1,345,210 worth of projects,  helped build a feature that sold $9.35M. 

5-How have you gone above and beyond?

Did you set up trainings for your teams to improve their skills, did you start a youtube channel that talks about the products your company makes? If not, why not? Can you?

6- Does your resume list your technical knowledge as binary?

A big mistake I see in resumes is the skills or technologies listed at binary. You are either an expert or you don’t know anything about it. That is not the case for many of us. We have different degrees of knowledge of the different technologies, so why do we list them as binaries. 

7- How have you improved yourself over the last year?

Did you get certifications? Do you have a home lab? What are you doing to improve? It’s important to show that you continuously work on yourself to get better. Technology is always changing, and so should you.

8- How can you write it better?

“I apologize for such a long letter – I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

― Mark Twain

Is your resume too long? Too short? can you combine bullet points? It is well-formatted? Any typos? 

There are so many other questions we can ask ourselves. Let’s start with this and move forward from here. 

Don’t forget, next Wednesday I’m hosting a Linkedin live to talk about Linkedin Profiles and review your profile.