231. Customizing Your Resume Per Application

Do I really need to customize my resume per job I apply for? How do I manage all of that customization? What do I change if I want to customize my resume for the specific application? What are the benefits of customizing my resume? These are the questions we will answer in today's episode of Dev Questions. 

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Customizing your resume to the job you're applying for is a major way to improve your odds of getting an interview. Yet people often fail to take a step. In this episode of Dev Questions, we're going to talk about why resume customization is important and how you can do it without a lot of extra work.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Software development is more than just writing code. So let's talk about the rest of it. Specifically, let's talk about why customizing your resume is important and how to do it efficiently. I want to know if any of these phrases sound familiar to you. The job market is really tough right now. I keep applying, but I don't hear anything back. I've applied to hundreds of positions, but have only gotten a couple of interviews. Every position has hundreds of applicants. Now, yes, the job market is tough. Competition is high. That's reality. You just need to find a way to navigate the current market. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results isn't a plan. So what is the plan? Well, in episode 180, we talked about job hunting in general and the various steps you could take to increase the odds of getting a job. One of those steps was to customize your resume. So let's start with why you should customize your resume. Number one, it makes it easier for an applicant tracking system or ATS or an HR person to match you. Again, you're thinking about the person who doesn't know what you do and doesn't really know what the technology is that they're hiring for. They just know six years of.NET. So customizing your resume will allow you to better pass the ATS or HR person or both, because it better matches up with what they're asking for. So number two, it makes it clearer why you're qualified. If your resume is a little vague, if it's if it's not really targeted to what the person's asking for, well, then it's not really clear why you're qualified. So number three, it gives you a better first impression. So now we've got three reasons why it's important to customize your resume. It's going to get you past the non-technical person more easily. It's going to be more clear why you are qualified, and it's going to give you a better first impression to the people hiring you because you better align with what they're asking for. Now, over the years, I've hired a number of software developers. Each time I open a job posting, I get hundreds of applicants. And part of that is because of my reach, but part of that is just because there are a lot of people out there looking for jobs. And I tend to hire for jobs that are remote jobs. So right away, I start throwing out applications. And that might feel kind of bad to you. You're like, wait, you throw applications? Absolutely. Some people don't even look at what the job really is. I'll ask for a senior level developer and they'll never have written a line of code professionally. Others can't follow directions. I'll state that you know you have you can't be, I can't sponsor a work visa. Yeah, I'll get dozens of people that apply that need a sponsorship and don't necessarily even say that. So after I get through all the clearly invalid applications, the ones that just won't work out for me, then I move on to evaluating the resumes against the job. This is where the lack of resume customization really shows up. So I'll look at resumes of people I know are qualified. I'll know them from outside of this application, but I can't tell that they're qualified by their resume. I might ask for five years' experience in C sharp, but their resume never mentions C Sharp once, even though they've worked with it for years and I know that. So I can't read their minds. I can't know this. And so even though I know from outside experience that yes, they'd be qualified, their resume doesn't tell me that. So the person who I don't know from outside, I'm skipping over because I don't know that they're qualified. Or I'll see a list of 20 skills, only two of which are relevant to my position, and they're buried in the list. So how do I know which of those skills they're most adept in and which are just things they've built a demo in? Well, I don't. And if it's buried in the list of 20, I might not even see the skills that I'm looking for. I do my best to carefully evaluate and read between the lines. But I know that I end up rejecting qualified candidates because I cannot see the skills I'm looking for. Their resume is filled with assumptions. They assume that I know what they can do. Unfortunately, I can't read minds. So I end up rejecting potentially good candidates because I just don't know. And I don't want that for you. So let's talk about how you would customize your resume without getting overwhelmed. Number one, have what I call a complete resume, one you will never turn to anybody. So have a complete resume to work with. It's everything that is honest about you. Okay, that's your complete resume. It made two, three, four pages of information. Next, number two, have a template resume that needs to be filled in. I prefer to have a Word doc template. So I create a file. You can actually save a Word document as a template, which means when you double-click on that template file, it creates a blank Word document with the template as a starting point. So have a template resume that needs to be filled in. So have your unchanging details in the sections. So maybe you have your header, maybe you have your, you know, your name, your picture if you're gonna put your picture on there, your email address, your phone number, your contact information, and maybe some things that are not going to change. For example, uh your employers. Yeah, you may just always list your employers or last three employers, something like that. But maybe you don't put the skills underneath them, the bullet points of what you did for them. Maybe you don't put those in yet, but you have your employers there ready for you to bring information over from your complete resume. So take from your complete resume the relevant items and put those into your template for each job. So maybe you're applying for a.NET development job. Well, you pull your.NET development resume bullet points in, you pull your.NET experiences in under each job, you pull in the relevant skills that match up with.NET or complement.NET. So you have C sharp and you have SQL and you have Azure and you have a couple other things in that list, not too many, but in that list that all kind of go together and could be secondary skills, but that are relevant to your primary skill, pull those things in to create your finished resume. And then number four, make sure you match terms carefully. Remember, your first step is the ATS and or HR reading your resume. So if they ask for 10 years of.NET experience, then don't say C sharp experience, say.NET experience. If they ask for eight years of C sharp experience, say C sharp experience, not.NET experience. Because those two can be interchanged, even though they're not the same thing. They can be interchanged. Make sure that you match up what they're asking for. If they ask for JavaScript, don't say React. Say JavaScript. Okay. So you're trying to match these things up. And you might still say React, you might still say C sharp when it's.NET, but your primary things need to match up with what the job posting asked for, because they're gonna take the job posting and compare it to your resume and say, I'm looking for five years experience.net. I don't see that anywhere. It says eight years of C sharp, but who cares about that? Like that should be a direct match, but they don't necessarily know that. So make sure those terms match up really well. All right. So each application, that's probably probably take you about 10 minutes to do. But the result will be a much higher percentage chance to get through the screening process into the actual interview. Plus, once you get to the interview, you will have a much better presentation for the hiring manager because your resume matches up much cleaner with the job as posted. HR might say, hey, this is a this is a winner, not this is a maybe, this is this one's you know really good. And the hiring manager might say, well, actually, all three of these are really good because they're all kind of matching, but you kind of didn't care for that one as much because it said C sharp instead of.NET. But when your hiring manager looks at your resume and goes, hey, we asked for eight years' experience in.NET, and I can see you did 10. That's great. So they're they're starting to see the exact comparison, even though they're technical, and you'll be putting your best foot forward. So that's how you make sure that you're writing a resume that is going to get past the first level or have a better chance getting past the first level, that's going to give you the best chance possible to get that interview and even set yourself up for better success in the interview process. So while it's going to take more time than just copying and pasting a generic PDF resume that you give to everybody, it's going to give you a much higher percentage chance of success for each application. When you're looking at 0.1% chance of success with a generic resume, you might get a 10% chance with a customized resume. That's huge. It's a hundred times better. Now, of course, I just made those up, but it will give you a much better chance. And a much better chance means less applications need to go out before you have interviews. So I want you to set up for the best possible success. And this is one of the ways to do that. As always, I am Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Dev Questions. When you're ready to learn to think and code like a professional developer, head over to IamTimCorey.com and enroll in a course.