When you haven’t touched your resume in years, you likely need to drastically rewrite it, or potentially start from scratch. Here are my four favorite tips to get started.

Look at Job Descriptions First

Before you ever put pen to paper (or fingers to keys), you need to understand what potential employers care about and expect. This seems counterintuitive at first. Why should you look externally to create your resume—a document intimately focused on your personal experience?

My reasoning is as follows: you’re too close to your own accomplishments. You likely have attached feelings and memories to specific successes in your career, and this can skew your perception of what really matters.

Looking at job descriptions for positions you want will help you frame your resume around skills, experiences and achievements that matter to potential employers. From there, you can pick and choose the career accomplishments that will make the biggest impact in your job search.

Action: Find 10-15 job postings that might be interesting to you. Copy the bullets in the job description and paste them into a duplicate word finder like this, and see what words show up the most. Look for specific software, skills, responsibilities and other items that correlate with the job titles you want to pursue.

Share Results, Not Activities

Now that you know how to frame your resume to match employer expectations, you need to begin writing bullets. You may be tempted to simply describe your daily/weekly/monthly activities and call it a day. I politely ask you to resist that temptation.

Listing activities gives no context about your attractiveness as a candidate, leaving your resume feeling empty and bland. Instead, reframe each bullet to show what resulted from your activities. Be as specific as you can, including numbers and descriptive outcomes whenever possible.

“But Steve, my job doesn’t really have accomplishments, I just [insert excuse here]”.

Almost everyone tells me this. If you were gainfully employed for any decent amount of time, its because you provided value to your employer. And if you’re providing value, there’s a result involved. Find it.

Example 1: Michael Phelps

• [Activity] Represented the United States in the Olympic Games for swimming
• [Result] Won a record 18 Gold Medals in swimming for the US across three Olympic Games

Example 2: SAT Prep Tutor

• [Activity] Helped local high school students prepare for the SATs
• [Result] Helped thousands of students score an average of 200 points higher on the SATs

Example 3: Sales Ops Manager

• [Activity] Implemented new automated calling platform for sales team that resulted in more outbound calling
• [Result] Led implementation of RingCentral for sales, improving outbound calling activity by 33%

Start With More Than You Need…

Traditional resumes suffer from a timeless restraint: they need to be printed, and thus, need to fit on a standard 8.5×11″ sheet of paper. This restraint causes many to focus too much on layout and design rather than writing meaningful, result based bullets.

Enter the master template. The master resume should be a plain document devoid of design or styling. The goal of this document is to be a holding tank for all your bullets, allowing you to list all your accomplishments from past jobs without fear of running into another page or leaving something important on the table.

Creating a master resume template gives you the creative freedom to try writing new bullets, knowing that no one will ever see this document (except for you.) This becomes critical when tailoring your resume for different job listings, allowing you to quickly customize without rewriting bullets from memory each time.

Action: Create a new document, and don’t you dare touch the font, colors, size or margins. List all your relevant jobs, and begin filling in achievement-based bullets for them. Let this document run wild – it doesn’t matter if it’s one page or three.

…But Be a Ruthless Editor

There’s always a but. That 8.5×11″ restriction didn’t disappear, and at some point you will have to consider practical restraints when making your final resume. Some experts say to dedicate one page of your resume for every 10 years of experience you have, but I tend to disagree with this. Most people tend to focus on “what have you done for me lately” and care more about your most recent positions than your first entry-level job years ago.

This is where all the advice above comes into play. Every iteration of your resume needs to be a tightly written, accomplishment driven document that aligns with the job description you’re applying for.

Being your own editor can be tough. You need to put yourselves in the shoes of the person reviewing the resume, and ask “what are the 4-5 most important things they care about?” You are competing against time, against other candidates, and against the attention span of the resume reviewer, so it’s critical you delete less relevant bullets.

Besides, there’s one other factor you need to keep in mind: the sole role of the resume is to land you an interview. It’s a first impression, a catchy hook. Landing the interview gives you an opportunity to dive deeper into your experience and share a more nuanced view of your career.

There’s a lot that goes into creating your resume, but I hope these four tips can help you get started. If I missed anything, or if I’m dead-wrong, please share your thoughts with me in the comments.

Change is in the air. As the holidays come to a close, we can look forward to a new season, a new year, a new decade, and for some—a new job.

Unfortunately for many people, here’s how the job search typically starts out:

• Hmm, recruiters are all over my linkedin profile. Job market must be heating up.
• [Does some Googling.] Unemployment at record lows? Job seekers market? Talent gap? I think this might just work out in my favor.
• [Quick search on Indeed.] Wow! Look at all these great roles. They’re perfect for me. All I need to do is send my…
• [Blows dust off resume.] Shit, haven’t touched this in years. I’ll tackle this…tomorrow.
• [Two weeks later.] Uh oh. Those three jobs already disappeared. I better update that resume now.
• [Types. Deletes. Types. Deletes.] Please help me.

The resume writing process can defeat even the most optimistic job seeker, turning unbridled excitement for new opportunities into a painstaking trek of agony and gloom.

But why? What is it about this glorified outline that creates so much tension?

I have a theory: Resumes create stress because we forget their purpose. Many people feel like their resume is a career mirror—a reflection of who they are professionally and what they’ve accomplished at work. If you treat your resume like a mirror, you’re going to suffer. Instead, you should view your resume for what it really is—a stepping stone to an interview.

That’s it. A 24-kilobyte movie trailer. The chorus from your most famous song. A flashing banner that says “Click me! Click me!” When you approach your resume this way, you put more focus on the most important person in the process. (No, not you—the job poster!)

Job posters don’t care as much about getting the best person in to interview as much as getting the right fit for the job. The first question you have to answer for them before even being considered is “can you get this job done.” That’s the point of your resume, to succinctly match your capabilities with the needs of the role. Things like culture fit, personality and potential are all incredibly important…just not yet.

With this newfound perspective in hand, job hunting becomes much less about you and much more about each individual role. You realize there is no final draft, but instead many iterations that highlight your capacity to fill different roles. You no longer have to debate your proudest moments or most glaring failures, you simply have to match experiences to the needs of job seekers. Mirror shattered.

My Five Favorite Resume Tips

Now that the pressure is off of you, here are some practical tips to help you reboot your resume for your job search.

1. Build a master resume. The “master” resume is a template of sorts. It should contain every job you’ve worked at, and include all the most important tasks, responsibilities and achievements for each. You should never actually submit this resume, but instead use it as a holding tank for all the cool stuff you do. This will drastically improve your ability to customize individual resume files without spending valuable brain power (and motivation) recalling your best bullet points.
2. Make it easy to read. Is your font size so small that I need glasses to read it? Did you decide that margins were optional? Is everything bold? If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, we need to have a talk. There are too many damn good resume templates available today to use the “I’m not a designer” excuse. Like a movie trailer, your resume needs to capture the viewer in seconds and keep their attention long enough to say “let’s give ’em a chance.”
3. Let the job listing guide you. You apply for a job as a graphic designer. The job listing says that you should know Photoshop. Luckily, you’re a Photoshop expert. So let me ask you: Should you write “Photoshop expert” or “Adobe Creative Suite Expert”? If it sounds like common sense, it is. Use the words that the job listing uses, not the words you think are important. Additionally, you don’t need to mention that you’re CPR certified when applying for an accounting role. Which leads me to my next point…
4. Highlights only, please. Not every job you’ve ever worked needs to be on your resume. It’s okay to omit experiences that don’t fit the role that you’re applying for. If you feel really guilty about leaving jobs out, simply add a small subsection near the bottom of your resume called “Additional Experience” and list company names, titles and dates as single lines. Remember, you always have the interview to go more in-depth.
5. Take the time to customize. This sounds silly, but trust me on this one. Personalization works! I encourage you to drop in the company name, job title or both somewhere in the resume. If it doesn’t make sense, at least save your resume as firstname_lastname_resume_companyname.pdf. By putting in even the tiniest amount of effort here, you may catch the job poster’s eye and show them you care at least a little about their listing.

Happy New Year, and good luck on your upcoming job search!

A common trope in the marketing world is that you should specialize as much as possible to enhance your career. Find your niche, double down, and become the ultimate authority in your subject matter.

While this can be sound advice for many, I don’t believe that specialization is the only path to success for today’s marketing professionals. As a lifelong generalist, I’ve found that adopting the Pareto Principle can be a useful, and productive, way to spend your time learning new skills. By focusing on the 20% of knowledge that gives you 80% understanding of a topic (or even the 5% of knowledge that gives you 50% understanding), you can become a better planner, strategist, manager and prototyper.

Which brings me to a common phrase that makes me cringe: “I’m not really a technical marketer, that’s not an area I want to spend my time on.”

Technical knowledge shouldn’t be treated as a specialists domain anymore. Nearly every marketer needs to be involved with technical projects, employees or elements to do their best work. Still, it can be daunting for a non-technical employee to try to cram a nearly endless flow of technical know-how while still staying productive in the short term.

We sit at a fork in the road: How does one become a more technical marketer without becoming a full-time technical marketer? Here are my top five suggestions to help you get started.

How Databases Work

This is a non-negotiable entry point into technical marketing. Databases play a critical role in so many different business functions that it’s amazing they aren’t taught in primary school yet. If you’ve ever used the following systems, you’ve interacted with a relational database in your career:

• CRM systems like Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics and Zoho
• Marketing automation programs like HubSpot, Marketo and Act-On
• Accounting software like Quickbooks
• CMS or website platforms like WordPress

The list goes on. I encourage everyone in marketing (and business) to understand the core functionality and design of databases as soon as possible. While this rabbit hole goes much deeper than the others on my list, I recommend focusing on a few key questions to get the most out of your research:

1. What is a relational database, and why is it important?
2. When should you use a database versus a spreadsheet?
3. How should data be structured in a database?
4. What are the pros and cons of different types of data fields (fill in the blank, drop-down, checkbox, etc.)

While only scratching the surface, these four questions will help you understand the opportunities and limits of a database, and help you plan better data collection, hygiene and reporting features from the get-go.

How Websites Work

Look, I realize the above headline is kind of…stupid. The term “website” is a catch-all term, and there are many different underlying technologies that play together to create the modern web. But let’s not get caught up in the details and instead go back to basics.

It’s critical that marketers understand how basic tenants of the web operate so that we can understand what inputs are required to get our desired outputs. Changes that may seem simple can sometimes require a massive backend investment, while other changes can be completed with a few strokes of the keyboard.

For example – you may ask your development team for two simple changes: Change the font size of your default text, and have your site search sort by most relevant pages rather than chronological sorting. The first change is a simple CSS update that can be deployed in minutes. The second might require a wholesale investigation of how your database (there’s that word again) stores and retrieves data, and what algorithms have been programmed to determine relevance — a task that can take significant amounts of time and effort.

Keeping the same format as earlier, here are some key questions to dive into:

1. What are HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and what does each control?
2. What is the difference between front-end and back-end web development?
3. What are some other popular coding languages that you’ll encounter (i.e. PHP, Java) and what role do they play?
4. What is the difference between my domain, my hosting, my content and my CMS or Framework?

Learning how to do all these things can years of research and practice, but that’s not necessary. Focus on how these elements affect your projects, and trust that your development team can figure out the rest. And the next time you ask your devs for a “simple” change, take a step back and try to understand what will be required.

How Search Engines Work

Like databases, search engines play a critical role in our everyday lives. We use them to find answers, research the competition, drive new customers to our websites and even book our next flight. But aside from the basic formula of “type question, get links”, do you really know how a search engine works?

Luckily for you, this blog post has a cascading effect, much like the CSS you’ll learn about in the second section. Knowing more about how databases work and how websites are built will give you the foundational knowledge to understand how search engines crawl the web, organize information and serve the best results for each unique query. You can then use this information to become a master researcher, or to help your digital campaigns reach more in-market customers.

Here are some key questions to explore:

1. How do search engines find new and updated websites and pages?
2. How do search engines organize all the information they find in their index?
3. How do search engines rank and match the right content for different search queries?
4.  What are the different types of search results, and where do they come from (i.e. links, videos, images, rich media)

One of my favorite topics I stumbled upon when first learning about search engines was “search operators”, or custom commands to give you specific search results. I won’t spoil the fun here, but I encourage you to dig deeper into these commands to see how they help you master sites like Google, Bing, Reddit, Twitter and more.

How Microsoft Office Templates Work

This next topic really toes the line between technical marketing and cubicle-life basics, but I’ve included it here anyway. Why? Because without any real statistics besides my own anecdotal experience, I can confidently say 85% of the marketers I’ve worked with have no idea how to use Microsoft Office templates.

Office templates borrow a lot of concepts from web design (or maybe it’s the other way around?) in the way that they separate content from styles. Once you understand this relationship, you can develop a few core templates up front and never worry about styling a PowerPoint or Word doc ever again. If that last sentence sent a double shot of endorphins into your brain, I urge you to drop this post and skip right to your research.

Here are a few areas to start with:

1. What are master slides and themes in PowerPoint, and how can I use them to quickly create repeatable slides?
2. What is the Styles pane in Word, and how can I update entire sections of a document with it?
3. How does mail merge between Word and Excel work for creating mass customization?
4. How do I save a template into the quick templates area of Office apps for easily creating new documents?

I promise you I’m not overdramatizing when I say the following: Learning how to use Office templates changed my life as a career marketer. When you can focus all your effort on content and never spend another minute aligning text and bolding headlines manually, you’ll see what I mean.

How Typography Works

My last recommendation blurs the line between technical marketing and design. So why include it here? Because as marketers, presentation can make or break anything we do. Blame Don Draper and Super Bowl commercials, but everyone expects marketing to be both show and tell. And because of that expectation, it’s up to each and every marketer to know how to clean up our presentation skills.

I focused on typography because it lives at the core of nearly all we create – from printed materials to landing pages to pitch decks to investor reports and everything in between. Just look around you, and you’ll start to see the rules of typography at play.

Ever notice how books tend to have nearly identical spacing, alignment and margins? Or how text never touches the edges of a newspaper page? Or how most of the text we see is very dark gray on an off-white background? Or how headings tend to use a different size, weight and typeface than regular body text? Chances are, you subconsciously know many of these rules without every knowing you knew them.

Let’s restate the examples above in an easier way to research:

1. What is typography and why does it matter?
2. What’s the difference between good typography and bad typography? (Google Images can resolve this one in seconds.)
3. What are some basic rules for spacing, typeface (font), colors and contrast?
4. What are some popular header and body typography combinations?

Knowing the basic rules of formatting text can create a first impression that locks your audience in and keeps them focused on what matters most: the content.

Digging Deeper

While I believe these five areas are an excellent base, there’s still so many more areas that marketers must understand to be more effective. Video, web analytics, statistics, wireframing and other technical topics are open game depending on your organizations resources and strategy.

I hope this list helps you, and I look forward to hearing what technical marketing skills have helped you grow in your career.