Robynn Storey: Selling Yourself Through Your Resume
I want to see the things that make you, you. If you were a bartender, or a waiter or waitress while you were in college, I want to see that you were the person that got the highest percentage of tips.
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Cubicle Farm sat down with Robynn Storey of Storeyline Resumes to discuss ways a candidate may increase their chances of landing their dream job.
If you aren’t familiar with Robynn, she founded her agency in the year 2000. She and her team have since helped write over 400,000 resumes, LinkedIn bios, and other career documents. Much of her clientele come from Fortune 50, 100, and 500 companies.
When Robynn speaks, you’d better listen up. She knows what she’s talking about.
If you’re looking for more valuable content from Robynn, you can can find her on LinkedIn, or go to her website directly for additional services.
Is the path to a career different for a younger person than it is for a seasoned person?
The answer is YES!
Careers span a long time. They may span the loss of several loved ones. They may span several marriages. A lot of time, effort, sweat, and tears go into your career. Hopefully you end up doing something that you love.
When you’re young is the time to take chances, to take jobs that maybe feel like they don’t make sense to you. To have a plan and not have a plan (...). Now is the time to figure out what you love (…). I encourage all young people, whether they’re 18, or 22, or 23, or whatever the case may be, to change jobs often. That’s non-traditional advice.
Non-traditional or not, Robynn makes a great point. If you are 35 or 40 and you are miserable in what you’re doing, it may be in part because you never took the time to really explore.
But all is not lost!
Robynn believes that exploration can occur at any time within a career. No one ends up where they started. However, as a person becomes more seasoned, the importance for exploration may decrease.
I don’t think that there is ever a time where you should stop exploring opportunities to get yourself into a job that you love. There’s a time where that’s no longer first. It might be when you get married and you’ve got someone else to consider. It might be when you have children and you’ve got 3 or 4 kids, mouths to feed, a mortgage to pay, college to save for - the idea of leaving a well-paying job with health insurance benefits to explore something you should have done when maybe you were 20 is probably no longer going to be an easy option for you. Can it be done? Absolutely! But somebody’s going to have to pay the price for that. That’s why I say explore these things when you’re younger, because if you make a mistake, no one else is impacted but you.
What is the single most common mistake that people make when writing a resume?
This was an easy question for Robynn. It was hands down that people undersell themselves.
In your first full time position post college, if you were a low level analyst, I don’t want to see a description of what being an analyst is. If I’m hiring an analyst, I already know what you do. I want to see that you discovered that reports were being created redundantly. You were able to streamline something. You were able to eliminate something. You were able to create a report that was more of a contributing factor to identifying opportunities for cost savings or improving productivity (…). I don’t want you to describe your job for me. I want you to tell me things that made you stand out in that role.
Robynn couldn’t make it any clearer. Describing your job is not the function of a resume. It is describing the value that you have brought, the lessons that you learned, and the impact that you made.
If you were an intern and you contributed to a group project, spend the majority of your resume retelling the story of how you contributed to that project. There has to be some take away for whoever is reviewing your resume. What can they learn about you and what you bring to the table?
How often should you update your resume?
There are two resumes that Robynn believes in: A short resume and a long resume.
The short resume is what you provide to potential employers or to your network. This should always be up-to-date. Upon starting at a new company, after 1-2 months have passed, take 5-10 minutes to start telling your current role’s story on your resume.
The long resume is for your own purposes, and not for anybody’s eyes but yours. Any reward you receive, positive note extended by a manager, or goal accomplished, you should throw that information into a document and add it to your long resume folder. Update this 2-3 times a year. At anytime, if you need to demonstrate in an interview how you navigated a specific situation, or you need to adjust your resume to prove that you possess a certain skillset, you can quickly call on your long resume experiences to prove your point.
Throughout the course of your career, as you are going from smaller jobs to bigger jobs, meaning higher paying, more responsibilities, maybe into a manager role, it’s very difficult to sit down with a professional resume service like ours, or even if you’re doing it on your own, and trying to recall things that happened 5, 10, 25 years ago.
Do experiences become antiquated over time? Absolutely. If you are 50 years old applying for a COO job, you won’t be using examples from when you were a 20-year old intern. You will simply prioritize more recent experiences over older ones.
What’s the first thing that someone should do when they are laid off?
Become informed about what is owed to you.
There are documents that you should collect while you are still employed. Store these somewhere that you can access at any time, even if you are terminated effective immediately. These documents include:
Copy of your annual performance review
Copy of the employee handbook
Copy of your offer letter
Once your employment ends, do the following:
Understand the company policy for employee separation:
What is the severance policy?
How long will they pay for your health insurance?
Will you be reimbursed for unused Sick days and PTO?
Understand your state’s employee separation laws, and whether they are required to pay out the following:
Bonuses
Commissions
Unused PTO
Unused Sick Days
Ensure the company considers you to be ‘rehireable’.
If you were let go by no fault of your own, such as via a rif, then ensure you are considered ‘rehireable’ by your employer. This will be important for when a prospective employer calls your ex-employer for a status check. You don’t want to lose the job because your ex-employer made a clerical error.
Sign up for unemployment through your state.
Do this within 1 week of being laid off. Note that the amount you receive will vary per state.
Decompress.
Many people panic. This is understandable. You have bills to pay. But panicking will not speed up the hiring process.
You want to make sure you’re making the right next logical move for you. We see a lot of people, no matter the age, that get laid off and they immediately jump into a job that they know is beneath them, it’s underpaid, it’s not really fitting into the trajectory of their career. And then they spend years trying to make up for that back step, because once you take a step backwards, in salary, in job title, in responsibility - that’s who you are! So it ends up becoming a little bit of an obstacle. So you want to make sure that you’re not panicking.
Losing a job can be emotional and taxing to your mental health. So take a chance to decompress.
How important is a cover letter?
If you ask Robynn her opinion, she’ll give it to you straight. “Cover letters are bulls**t”! Many companies are making the application process more convoluted than it needs to be. It doesn’t hurt to have a standard cover letter that is about 3 paragraphs long. When you apply for a job that requires the cover letter, use the standard template you have built, and don’t spend more than a couple of minutes customizing it for that specific role. In this current time where the power has shifted from the employee to the hiring company, you are going to need to send out a large number of applications before you start getting interviews. Filling out too many cover letters is just going to slow you down.
We have developed about 400,000 resume packages here through the years, and I can probably count on two hands the number of people that said, ‘It was really my cover letter that got me the interview’.
What is the one thing a person should do when writing their resume?
This ties back to the number one mistake that people get wrong when writing their resume: tell others the story of how you provided an impact to your company. Don’t just regurgitate the duties of your role. Don’t undersell yourself!
I want to see the things that make you, you. If you were a bartender, or a waiter or waitress while you were in college, I want to see that you were the person that got the highest percentage of tips.
How important is your perceived brand when looking for a job?
It’s incredibly important!
I always tell young people (…) there should be absolutely nothing on social media that you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see. You shouldn’t be swearing on social media. You shouldn’t be drunk on social media. You shouldn’t be at a protest on social media. You can be at a protest all you want - you don’t need to post about it. Because what I believe and what you believe might be two very different things, and ultimately I’m going to make the decision about whether or not I’m going to hire you.
You are free to post about whatever you want, but you aren’t free to determine the consequences of your posts. So you just need to be careful about what kind of content you are pushing out for the world to see.
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I feel like resumes in general are complete bullshit lol. They're so inhuman and structured and rarely do they tell the story of the person behind it. It's unfortunate.
I think all resumes should be required to read as a life story. I wrote about this exact thing a few months ago:
https://open.substack.com/pub/wildhoodwanted/p/job-search-resume-story?r=2qffbg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web