What if there is a way to create a resume that sells you well enough to get the ideal job that you want? Watch this video and/or follow the steps below!
To Write a Modern Resume that Sells: Highlight Your Core Competencies
This is a question I’m often asked! You have all this experience, and really want to be able to sell yourself effectively, and get in the door with that first interview. It’s good that we’re using the word selling, because that’s what a resume is. It’s a sales sheet. It’s a marketing sheet. And the only purpose of a resume is to get them to keep scrolling down.
The best way to do this is to highlight your core competencies. What are the key stakes in the ground that you want them to focus on? Usually there are just three main categories. So when we talk about core competencies, I’m talking about the really major headlines.
Before I forget, I want to be sure you know about my audio leadership course (it’s free) that’s designed to help you own your authority in your career and it works. It’s based on two decades of leading in Corporate America, (I’m a former Wall St. Executive) and those professionals I coach here at In Our Shoes. Now onto selling yourself…
Everything that you represent in terms of your experience, your skill sets, your lessons learned, and your career story – that overarching storyline should go through these three main categories, or your core competencies, the main headlines.
As an example, let’s say you’re a product manager. Typically, what I’ve seen with core competencies is one category with product management, another one with customer relationship management, and another one with product design. These are your three main categories.
To Write a Modern Resume that Sells: Use Mind Mapping to Flesh out the Categories
But how do you really put them forward? What you want to do is flesh out those main categories. And to get there, the best gutsy strategy tool is called mind mapping.
Mind mapping is where you take everything in your head that you can think of relating to all of your experience and your skills and your business acumen and technical acumen. You put it on paper, and literally map out the categories of information.
Branch out like a tree, what those core competencies look like. You have this main top level, and then it branches off to sub levels. That top level is your core competence in your major headline category.
If you want to get in the door with your resume, have those three main stakes in the ground, to make sure that they keep reading down.
When you are mind mapping, just let that stream of consciousness flow. Walk away for a few days, come back to it, and then maybe shuffle things around. (A good tool on the web for mind mapping is MindMeister.com. Three free mind maps!)
At the end of the day, your resume has to hit the beats on three main categories, your core competencies, so that way they can see the main storylines that you represent, that you are leading with, that you are looking to replicate.
When you have those laid out at the very top of your resume, everything that you talk about in the interview is acting like a filtration system, and is going through those core competencies.
Below is a great example of another type of “sales sheet”, an Executive Summary mind map, so even here, in order to sell your proposal, this tool can benefit you.
In order to get started digging into that resume, don’t sweat the technical and the formatting and the layout. That comes after and is the easy part. The most challenging part of getting your resume and having it sell you effectively is to really hit those beats and mind map all of those points that would land underneath those categories.
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