Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep37: Why you're NOT getting interview calls.

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. In today's podcast, I want to talk about what you need to fix in your resume, as well as your LinkedIn profile, if you're using that as your online resume. So as you guys know, I have been a director at Standard Chartered Bank for some time

Starting point is 00:00:49 and as part of my role, I was also the hiring manager for my team located in Singapore as well as my team located elsewhere. So one thing that I don't think people fully recognize is that the hiring manager or the HR team really only spends about like 10 seconds reviewing your resume. Yeah, that's right. Literally 10 seconds because most of the time these people are busy just like how I was really busy in the past. So when I received a pack of 30 resumes from HR, I had to take time away from my day job and away from my priorities to review the profiles, right? So how much time do you think is allocated because i mean everyone's really busy right so it's really important that you understand that the your resume needs to be written in a way that makes it easy to read for the hr person or even the hiring manager. I have seen so many fresh graduates get caught up in the incorrect advice

Starting point is 00:02:09 that their resume template needs to be really fancy. And this is really not true. Because sometimes the fancier the fonts that are being used, and the formats and the colors, it's really distracting. And aside from that, I think it displays a high level of immaturity which is not what you want to get tagged to if you are a fresh graduate or relatively junior in your career so this I think is one of like the the biggest mistakes and I think a lack of awareness of this thing has kind of prompted a lot of job seekers to kind of get

Starting point is 00:02:45 caught in the trap especially when I see that you know if you sign up for a resume course I see people offering you know you know 10 20 design templates like really all these are really unnecessary just keep if you want to put in colors right keep it professional like maybe gray you know a little bit of blue for the banners and I think that's fine so for this purposes of the podcast I will use the LinkedIn profile as your online resume so what I normally recommend my clients do is treat your LinkedIn profile as your online resume so whatever that you're saying in your hard copy resume should not differ significantly from what you're writing in your profile. In fact, my recommendation, keep it 100%

Starting point is 00:03:34 consistent because your LinkedIn profile can be accessible by pretty much anybody. I mean, if you set the settings right, that's a separate discussion it's a 24 7 resume and i've also seen instances where you know a person's resume i mean i receive a person's candidate's resume and i went to the candidate's linkedin and it said something completely different so to me that kind of demonstrates a lack of like conscientiousness, as well as maybe attention to detail, proactiveness. So you don't want to create confusion because if a recruiter or HR reaches out to you via LinkedIn and they say, hey, you know, I'm really interested in your profile. Can you send me your updated resume? And then you send them something completely different, it creates the impression

Starting point is 00:04:25 of like, is this guy trying to waste my time or is this lady wasting my time? Because that's what like the HR people are doing, right? That's kind of scouting through all the profiles and scouting through hundreds of resumes a day. They want you to be as specific and as clear as possible. The other big, big mistake I see, and you absolutely need to fix that right now, is writing about, so when you share your experiences, I see a lot of people just like writing about their job description. Okay, you know, I'm responsible for A, B, C, D, E. Like, okay, yeah, we know. But what does that translate into value? So fine, you're doing all these activities

Starting point is 00:05:09 and pretty much it's a task list, right? It's like, okay, you know, as part of my job at this company, I was doing this eight things. But the question is that what's the value? Okay, you have done all these things, right? But like, what does it mean in terms of what you can do for me?

Starting point is 00:05:23 Because you're changing company. So I don't really care what you were doing at the previous company. But what I want to know is what are some of the skills that you can translate over and make and add value to my team or my department, right? Which is the new company. So I feel like I don't see a lot of skills being called out. It's just a list of like roles and responsibilities, which I think is not good enough. The other thing is around like value. So especially if you happen to be in sales and marketing, right?

Starting point is 00:05:53 This is the perfect time to really talk about your KPIs. And what does the KPI mean? Like, is there a benchmark? Like, are you 10, 20% better? Because one of the things like, I actually work with quite a number of um accountants and sometimes like when i look at their resume i feel like they just give me a bunch of numbers but i don't really know what this means so if you want to put in a kpi right you want

Starting point is 00:06:18 to put in a a number to demonstrate your achievement then what is it comparable against like if i look at if you say 20 like is it good is it bad is it average is it a lot better like it's really not clear so i feel like these are really really the big things that you need to fix in your resume i would say way beyond your you know grammatical errors and structural errors. And this could be some controversial advice because if you ask anybody else out there, they might say that, oh, you know, you need to have that perfect English, blah, blah, blah.

Starting point is 00:06:55 I mean, English is the last check that you can do. But if your content in your resume is rubbish, then it doesn't really matter how good the English is. And one thing I used to tell people is that try to write the resume yourself, because if you don't write it yourself, then it's going to be very challenging for you to be able to articulate and share that when you are being interviewed. And I've also been in situations where when I interview the person, I ask them specific lines of what they've written in their resume and they cannot

Starting point is 00:07:25 actually explain that. So to me, that's a massive turnoff because you should know what you have written and how you express it and what were the experiences that could add value, what exactly did you do in this role, in this situation. So really take some time to think about what have you actually done in the role and how have you helped your boss, your team member, how have you helped your department and get that written down in your resume. So don't get caught up in the whole fluff of what other people are doing. Focus on yourself, right? So if you're a younger professional, sometimes I realize that, you know, you like to

Starting point is 00:08:05 ask your friends oh what do you think do you think i should write this and that it's good to get some feedback but number one they are not experts number two unless they have actually hired people in their role they might be actually giving you the wrong advice which is worse number three it's much better to spend that time doing some internal reflection and really asking yourself because if you have been doing the job and you have been doing your job very diligently, why aren't you able to express that, right? So make sure that you are clear and then write that down. And the last step, of course, you can ask for someone to check your English for you. So those are really the big ones.

Starting point is 00:08:50 So when I work with my clients, either it's one-on-one or sometimes I also run group classes, I help them to reposition their roles and responsibilities. I think that's really the biggest issue. People don't know how to call out the value that they have added

Starting point is 00:09:09 to their company or to the team. The other thing also is that the executive summary for most people's resumes that I've seen, whether when I was hiring in the past or even as a coach, is very, very weak, right? So the executive summary

Starting point is 00:09:23 is what someone will initially read because it should be right up right on top and that's the immediate impression somebody gets from you from the four to five sentences so if you're not putting in this section you are missing out massively if you are putting in something but it's very poorly written like oh hi i'm so and so and i'm looking for a role in this and that or oh i'm looking for a role to enhance my learning i mean those are really really weak words right so focus on write a little bit about your education write about your previous and past roles and what actually gives you value right why would it's like it's almost like a pitch right why would the new company want to hire you and if you can kind of squeeze

Starting point is 00:10:12 that in the executive summary then then your resume will immediately be a winning one and way above other people's so those are the i would say biggest biggest things that you have to fix either in your physical copy the hard copy resume or on your linkedin profile where you are using it as a resume so be really really clear be precise have full knowledge and full clarity on your contributions and your value that you have added, even in your universities or your short years of working, and make sure that that comes out very clearly. And lastly, do feel free to reach out to me. I am currently offering resume reviews

Starting point is 00:10:59 as well as LinkedIn profile audits. So it's all via one-to-one, so I'll be able to provide you with personalized guidance on how you can better position your successes as well as your value so that you can get that step closer to your dream job so till next time bye

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep37: Why you're NOT getting interview calls.

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