As the job market gets tougher and as ageism creeps into your career when looking for your next job, there is an increasing tendency for job seekers to make their résumé more and more “versatile” by showcasing their myriad skills going back to their first job after graduation. “A résumé replete with all those key words will increase my chances of getting past the ATS screens,” is the common refrain I hear from those who come to me for career guidance as they find themselves out of work or when their responses to open jobs result in ghosting.
This misguided view of scoring high on the ATS screens from the preponderance of key words is now a Jurassic concept. In the current version of ATS on how it calibrates a résumé is based ot just on key words, but also on a variety of other factors such as your career progression, impact of your accomplishments, and the caliber of the companies you worked for, especially if you worked for the Magnificent Seven: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, nVidia, and Google. Further, AI-based scoring systems even look for your hiring risk based on number of factors (e.g., short stints), which makes it even harder to fashion your résumé to secure high ATS scores by simple manipulation.
So, what is the problem with this “versatile” résumé that is supposed to protect you for consideration as a candidate worthy of the first phone screen? With technologies getting more and more esoteric and specialized in each areas of their use cases, employers are increasingly looking for candidates that demonstrate their ability to not only deal with those needs, but to also show them your capacity to further extend those needs in anticipation of advancing the current state-of-the-art, giving them an edge over their competitors.
What employers are now looking for is a highly specialized “sword” to fight the competitive war and not a versatile Swiss-Army-Knife-like war weapon. For what they now need is their ability to conquer the market. Candidates that ply in a highly specialized technology show a singular focus and commitment to that craft and that is what employers are now looking for. They are also looking for a craftsman who understands the difference between what they can get away with and what they are able to do to makes a difference.
So, where does a “Swiss Army Knife” approach to your résumé work?
Packaged correctly, such a versatile résumé can work better in roles that include project or program management, operational roles, jobs that require good knowledge of one technology with awareness of adjacent technologies and use cases that make you a valuable candidate in such job markets. So, be careful about the nature of your target jobs and the requirements that define those jobs and assess what narrative in your résumé will create a strong match with the posted jobs.
So, how does one design their résumé narrative to increase their hit rate in a tough job market? What applies to your résumé applies equally well to your LinkedIn profile. The major difference between the two is that you can have multiple flavors of your résumé, whereas your LinkedIn profile gives you only one shot at how you want to present yourself. What makes this task more challenging when crafting your LinkedIn profile is that, because it is searchable and ranked accordingly, you must decide one main area of focus how you want to manage your search ranking. Here’s is what can work:
- A clear pursuit: The first and foremost task is having the clarity of purpose in how you want to target your job search. Do you want to be a principal software engineer, a technical program manager (TPM), a development manager, a professional- services manager, a product operations manager, a product marketing manager, or a product manager? Although these job categories are quite diverse, I have dealt with clients, who were pursuing all these jobs and not getting any traction with their Swiss-Army-Knife strategy, until we sorted that out for them to move forward with purpose and clarity.
- IC or manager: This is yet another area of conflict for many as they see some glamor is pursuing a manager job, even when their most recent decade or so had been in senior IC roles. Even when such an individual has shepherded a project(s) and delivered a release(s), that experience does not count as having managed a team as a line manager. In the case of one such client she had managed a mid-sized team (of ~20) as a line manager nearly 15 years back in India in a service sector (bank) she was mostly an IC doing hands-on development work at a Sr. Staff-engineer level for the past decade. She was going after both manager and Architect roles in software with a single résumé and was frustrated with the lack of any traction before she came to seek my help.
- Accomplishments not Experience: Most do not make or understand the distinction between the two. Experience (E) section in your résumé merely lists the work and the tasks you have completed. Accomplishments (A), on the other hand, represent the impact of your leadership in how it moved the needle in your area of responsibility and in your business.
So, here is a good example résumé bullet of this argument:
(E) Hired five engineers and completed the project on time for customer’s Holiday- shopping demands.
(A) Despite a tough job market, on-boarded five superstar engineers from within my own network and released the product on time to help the customer achieve record Holiday-shopping revenues and profits. This resulted in even a bigger follow-on contracts from that customer in the ensuing years.
- A Narrative, not a Smorgasbord: A narrative is a carefully curated list of cogent leadership stories that coherently showcase your accomplishments in your job of interest. So, only those stories that directly support your expertise in the target job(s) within just that job family come together to fashion that narrative. A smorgasbord approach to résumé results in a compilation of disparate experiences that can only confuse its reader as to your true expertise in the area of their exact need. It is somewhat akin to the Swiss-Army-Knife strategy, but what makes this even worse is that everything you ever did in your past lands here pell-mell.
- Title match: Yet another factor in the current ATS screens is having a title closest to the title described in the job posting. So, if the opening is for a senior director and your current (or recent title) is senior manager you are likely to be screened out. If, however, your current title allows some flexibility in how it can be presented then use that advantage to reframe your title. E.g., a Sr. TPM can be equivalent to a director role. So, in your résumé write the Sr. TPM as your title with (director-level) next to it if you can justify that claim.
- Certifications: Many rely on subject-matter certifications to position themselves as worthy candidates, competing with those who have years of hand-on experience in that field. Certifications are necessary but typically not sufficient to get past the ATS scores. One way you can fortify that credential is to showcase a few projects that you executed—even on your own—using that certification with use cases relevant to the potential employer’s job needs.
- Growth Mindset: In this ethos or rapidly evolving technologies it is nearly impossible even for experts to keep up with what is going on in every aspect of their specialty. So, if you can showcase your career progression through showing curiosity and through risk taking it can position you favorably, even when you do not meet all that the employer is looking for. Showing your potential for growth can more than offset your lack of any specific skill that the employer may be looking for.
- Human Skills (EQ): Although they are often labeled as soft skills (communication, influencing, trust) they are often much harder to acquire than the typical technology skills. This is perhaps because there is no structured and systematic way by which one can acquire and master these; they are acquired through awareness, practice, and diligence. Although the best way to showcase these in a résumé is through your stories (accomplishments) that require these skills (show), most people take the lazy way out by claiming that they have excellent human skills (tell); which must be avoided.
These are just some of the most common factors that require careful attention in crafting your résumé and your LinkedIn profile. There are, of course, others that can matter, but these are the essentials.
Good luck!
