Writing Resumes for Skim Readers

Writing Resumes for Skim Readers

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
Most of us have heard that people review resumes in 6 seconds or less before making a decision to interview or not. My guest, Virginia Franco, and I discuss writing resumes for people who don’t read them but skim them.

00:00 Introduction
00:43 Skim readers? How did you get focused on resume skim readers?
02:09 Adapting resumes for smaller devices
04:03 Blocky resumes?
04:37 ADD resume reading
06:50 Do people print out resumes?
07:12 Should key information be in the first 2 page downs?
10:04 When can you use a 3+ page resume?
10:26 Summarizing what we’ve covered so far
12:09 Team player. Out of the box thinker
12:44 What do you recommend people do with LinkedIn profiles different than resumes?
14:23 LinkedIn’s resume builder?
16:55 Cutting and pasting your resume. Should you do that with your LinkedIn profile?
19:39 Boldfacing for LinkedIn
21:29 Resume mistakes people make
24:07 Which bullet do skim readers read?
26:18 How do people read?
26:37 Outro

Writing the Perfect Resume

Jeff Altman  

So, my guest today is Virginia Franco, a multi-certified executive resume and LinkedIn writer, coach and storyteller, whose documents are written for today’s I love this online skim reader, and get interviews, helps them get interviews, and she founded Virginia Franco resumes, which helps job seekers worldwide to tell their stories and test the job search waters often for the first time in years or after deciding to make a career change. Virginia, welcome. Thanks for making time today. Appreciate it.

 

Virginia Franco  

Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

 

Jeff Altman   

You’re welcome. Online skim readers. No one talks about that. How did you get focused in on that? What did you notice online skim readers?

 

Virginia Franco   

Well, you know, I noticed it as I began to write for all audiences, my backgrounds in journalism, which gave me the opportunity to write for newspapers and magazines and websites, and a little of everything and as our screens cut smaller, I discovered that people, I noticed change in how people were reading and I also learned that that applied to resumes because I was reading resumes at the same time. You know, 20 years ago, people were mostly reading resumes in print, right? We had that the lovely off-white paper that we used to buy and then they begin reading it on big desktops, and then laptops, and now it’s mobile devices. So, far, it doesn’t seem to me that anyone is reading it on an Apple Watch. But maybe that is to be expected. But the small ones the device, the harder it is to read, and you have to take that into account.

 

Jeff Altman   

So, as someone who’s writing a resume, or LinkedIn profile for that matter, you have a unique perspective on how people are reading these things, which is really what we’re going to be talking about today, folks, is writing for how people are reading and where they’re reading. So, what have you learned? What have you noticed about how resumes need to be adapted for these devices?

 

Virginia Franco   

So, I guess there’s three things that I keep in mind. The first is that when we read online, well, actually make back up everything designed for an online read, when written well, can convey well in print. It’s just the documents designed mostly for print, don’t do well online, and they do really, really poorly on mobile, because our eyes do two things sort of differently and by taking into account, you can facilitate a skim read of anything from an email to a slide deck to a resume. First and foremost, we have a really hard time digesting dense text. So, big paragraphs that are longer than three lines, bullets that are crammed together are really, really hard for us when we’re reading, because that five-line paragraph on a big screen turns into a seven or an eight line on a smaller screen and think about how you read terms and conditions when you sign up for something online.

 

Jeff Altman   

Read them…

 

Virginia Franco   

It’s teeny weeny. It’s squished together and you go up, I’m not reading that, which is probably what they have in mind. But it says same principle. Luckily, though, it’s an easy fix, you can, you know, tighten up your language, widen your margins a little bit, you can go as far as I’m comfortable going out to about half an inch on all sides to keep your paragraphs to two to three lines and then by adding whitespace in between each and every paragraph and bullet, you’re just sort of making the I think, oh, that’s not too tough to read because what happens is if something’s hard to read, and someone’s in a rush, you run the risk that they’re going to skip it and that is true across any kind of writing especially resumes.

 

Jeff Altman  09:58

I know what I used to critique whereas amazed a lot. I think I even did a video with this title killed blocking resumes. You know, resumes that are blocking are completely unreadable and it’s even more so on a mobile

 

Virginia Franco  10:13

It is. You know, think of a recruiter or hiring manager that’s got to look at 70 to 100 pieces of paper and they’re gonna look at the one with the big thick block scrunched up text versus the one that’s shorter and sweeter and easier to read, probably, they’re gonna read what’s easier, because they’re pressed for time. The other thing that we do that’s a little different online is that we are, I call it being ADD, we jump all over the place depending on what interests us and that’s a departure from how we were taught to read as kids where you open a book and you start at the beginning of the page, and you go left to right, top to bottom. So, because we jump all over the place, I like to use some design elements like bolding or shading, things like that to sort of draw the reader where I want them to go. But then when I’m writing a sentence, I front load it, which means I put the most powerful part of whatever I’m trying to say at the beginning of the sentence, because I know that there’s a chance that the reader might go on to something else, because I know that’s how I read and so those principles can really help to capture a skim reader’s attention and even if you don’t capture it fully, at least they take it in the key pieces that you’re trying to convey.

The Dirty Dozen Resume Mistakes

Jeff Altman   

It’s fascinating, because, you know, as I think about the different devices I own, most of my work I do on a laptop and then I’ve got the iPad, and I’ve got the phone, and I’m in different places, and I read my messages, and I read resumes that people send to me why I have no idea. But that’s a different conversation and I’m trying to get through different views of things on each of the devices, the phone, as large as my phone is these days, it’s still small the iPad is the intermediate device and to think of writing the resume to accommodate all three is fascinating.

 

Virginia Franco   

Well, the good thing to me is that if you run it by your iPhone, which is I guess we’re on camera, you know, this is sort of the average size. If it works well with your phone, it’s going to be great on your iPad, really good on your laptop, and super easy and print. So, you sort of have all your bases covered because resumes, in my experience get read for the first time online. But then people do print it out. It’s just a little bit later down the road. It’s not usually that first read.

 

Jeff Altman   

Yeah, and I don’t even know that they do print it out, do they?

 

Virginia Franco   

I mean, some hiring managers, when they just have three people to interview, they might print it out and they might highlight. You don’t know how old school or new school you’re dealing with. But I have heard that people are printing still. So, I don’t want to rule that out. But you cannot ignore the fact that the stuff is read first and foremost online.

 

Jeff Altman   

So, let me just check with you about something that I’ve told people for years and it’s laptop oriented or computer oriented and that is the information that you want to communicate a batch of background that’s relevant for the job should be within one if not two tops page downs, so that there’s no one’s going to go to the middle of page two to find something relevant. Is that still applicable or do you recommend something even simpler?

 

Virginia Franco   

So, I know there’s a lot of studies about one and two- and three-page resumes, I feel like two pages is more than enough to convey what you need to convey when you have, you know, 10 plus years of experience. But in terms of the good stuff, I with you, if something really relevant to your job, target happened, and it’s from 8 to 10 years ago, and likely on page two, you should reference it in maybe the branding at the very top. So, you want to tease anything relevant from page two at the top of page one, so that the reader at least is clued into one or read more. To me, I always think resumes are read really the same way you and I read the news when we’re pressed for time. Think about when you want to get your news, whether you go to Twitter or a new site or newspaper, you look at the headline, the headline tells you what the story is going to be about. Then you read that first paragraph and it gives you sort of a sense for what the rest is going to be about. Those two sections when you bring them over to the resume they help the reader to do the same thing and so in that summary, that first paragraph, that’s where you sort of say, this is some cool stuff I did on page two where you reference it.

 

Jeff Altman   

Gotcha and I was thinking about that page down option on the keyboard is being.

 

Virginia Franco   

Oh, okay, got it. All right.

 

Jeff Altman  

No, that’s fine because I think it’s important to that anything relevant that would be on page two has to get teased on page one to make them want to go look for. But I always think in terms of, okay, when I was first reading resumes, I was skimming, because I was looking for what was most important to me and not all the extra fluff as someone was trying to communicate. I always thought in terms of the Page Down button, and I was at paged down at once…

 

Virginia Franco   

[Cross talk] of my thumb. It’s probably with my thumb. Yeah.

 

Jeff Altman   

In days of old with laptops, you hit page down if it wasn’t there, one more word if you still didn’t see it, it was too old.

 

Virginia Franco  

Yeah, you have to be pretty tenured and fabulous for me to go well into a third page.

Reminders for Your Executive Resume

Jeff Altman  

Yeah, I don’t believe in three-page resumes, except for individuals with a PhD. You’ve got lots of publications.

 

Virginia Franco  

Yeah. So, one has like, I’ve worked with M&A people where they have like, deals that they like a highlight or supplemental piece, or I’ll add a third page for that.

 

Jeff Altman 

Yeah, that makes sense because the deals are really what people are buying. So, when people are reading resumes, and I’ll see if there’s something different with LinkedIn profiles in a second, but because of the multiple devices, you want to front load all the information, create a lot of whitespace around that. So, it’s more easily readable and do you have people communicate with personality as well and their resume, or is it more data oriented?

 

Virginia Franco  

So, I like to infuse personality with by showing rather than telling. So, I don’t want to say someone is a team player, or, you know, great multitasker, those adjectives are really overused and so they’ve lost their value, but you can show it so you can suggest that someone, you know, key contributor to a team shows that you’re a team player. If you wore three hats as part of a startup, and you sort of outline that, that shows that you are a great multitasker. If someone is really passionate about something, and it’s really critical to the kind of work they do, like if they’re really I worked with a woman the other day who was really committed to helping women advance in technology and so right off the bat at the beginning, I said that she has been a longtime champion of girls who code and a couple of things like that and so that suggests something about their personality, and what’s important to them, but then it backs it up with some data.

 

Jeff Altman  

I’ve been a big believer in that as well. Sounds like team player or out of the box thinker.

 

Virginia Franco  

Yeah, it used to work great. I love 15 years ago, when I could just come up with really fabulous adjectives. But they got, unfortunately, they lost their punch.

 

Jeff Altman  

I know, I learned when I was still doing recruiting. So, if somebody does something out of the box that shouldn’t that she’s created, or implemented, and then you hear pretty standard stuff because no one could backup the stuff.

 

Virginia Franco   

That’s in the box.

 

Jeff Altman   

Very much. So, with LinkedIn profiles, what do you recommend people do, they’re different than the resume.

 

Virginia Franco   

So, LinkedIn, I think the latest stat I saw is that 64% or 54%, over half of our readers are using mobile. So, that’s important and then obviously, it’s exclusively online. So, the principles around front loading and blocked texts, avoiding it, that’s all super relevant. In terms of the tone though, LinkedIn is very different. So, it’s conversational versus the resume that’s a little bit more formal. So, I like to, especially in that about section, I like to make sure to talk about the person in the first person and maybe elaborate on what makes them tick. Like, how do they lead teams? What is it about them that people rely on them for over and over again? Just things so that when someone reads that section, they feel like they walked away with having had a conversation. But in terms of readability to me, it’s the same components. You can’t use design elements and LinkedIn as effectively without compromising some of the searchability. LinkedIn is really algorithm driven and so you know, a lot of people talk about keywords in resume. To me, it’s probably more effective to put keywords in the LinkedIn and so I’ll use LinkedIn resume builder to come up with keywords that align with someone’s job search target, and then I make sure to put them in the headline, and the experience sections, and then the skill section at the bottom.

Interview Questions About Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Jeff Altman   

And I’m gonna play for audience for a second. LinkedIn resume builder. Where did they find the resume builder?

 

Virginia Franco  

So, if you click on, you know, the picture button, you’re looking at your little picture, right? So, you’ve got your, your name, your background, and then there’s a little thing that says more, and you click on the more button, and there’s three tools and one is build a resume and then you type in the job title that you’re interested in. It will come up with a list of keywords that are relevant to their to LinkedIn database. My understanding is that if you have premium, you get more keywords than you do otherwise. So, to me, that’s a perfect reason to use the 30-day free trial, just if nothing else, just to get a bunch of keywords. But I love it because then you’re not guessing as to what the keywords are. It’s those are the ones that people that are using LinkedIn recruiter, and then who have job postings on there, or they put into their job titles, or their job postings.

 

Jeff Altman   

Right! And as someone who worked in recruiting, I purchased LinkedIn recruiter, and folks think of it from the standpoint of that being a data dictionary. They don’t want to make it completely free flowing vocabulary. It’s simpler for the systems and the algorithms to work with this dictionary of terms. So, every time you start typing something, and it gives you an option from auto populating it. That’s really the data dictionary offering you a preferred choice, use their choice, because otherwise you wind up being invisible.

 

Virginia Franco 

Exactly. When you weave in one or two keywords in the headline at the top one or two, you know, in the job titles, you can expand upon your titles and include some keywords and then in the skill section, I’ve seen that it can really help someone to show up or in search. So, it’s one of my favorite tools when I’m writing.

 

Jeff Altman  

Excellent and folks have a LinkedIn resume, make it easy for people to find you. That is what you want when you’re looking for a job.

 

Virginia Franco  

Right! It’s a two-fold tool. Let’s use it to find others and get found.

 

Jeff Altman  

Bingo! So, is there something else that people should be trying to do with their LinkedIn profiles in order to deal with how people read them?

 

Virginia Franco 

In terms of how people read them, it is not a cut and paste of your resume. I mentioned the tone. The other thing that I would say with LinkedIn, when you’re writing your experience section, there was some data that or some information you might share on your resume that isn’t appropriate for every LinkedIn audience. So, if you work for a private company, for instance, you’re not going to share certain revenue figures, you’re certainly not going to throw your current employer under the bus and say you jumped in and fixed a hot mess. So, what you want to do is speak to, you know, conversationally, this is what I was brought on to do, this is what I did and if you were currently working for a company and things are a wreck, and you’re working to fix it, you could still just, you need to write it in a way that is positioning you as a good corporate store because it to me the best balance is, if you’re employed to show that you are the best employee while also being a really strong candidate.

 

Jeff Altman   

So, let’s say you’re a sales professional. Imagine a sales professional takes a very different tone than a social worker.

 

Virginia Franco   

That’s right. They’re both people facing. Now, they’re both customer facing, but you want to the salesperson needs to explain what the company does, what the products about. They’re not going to say that they came into a neglected territory, though, because that doesn’t look really good for the company, for your current role but that’s stuff you can share on your resume. But you can say I’m, you know, I’m leading an eight-person team, and this is my territory, and this is the product and this is how it’s helping countless people.

Stupid Resume Mistakes: Cool Resumes Suck

Jeff Altman   

Of course, you share your numbers with that.

 

Virginia Franco   

And then in the resume you go into the details around that we’re hemorrhaging money, and now they’re not and those sorts of things.

 

Jeff Altman   

And I was such a wonderful contributors, all of this.

 

Virginia Franco 

That’s right

 

Jeff Altman   

I made everything wonderful, all because of me.

 

Virginia Franco   

That’s right. But the good thing is that reading online is the same whether you’re reading LinkedIn or resume, a slide deck, so you keep your paragraphs to two to three lines, you add whitespace and you read everything you write past your phone. That’s my litmus test for everything.

 

Jeff Altman   

It’s a smart approach are always tested on your phone because so many people on LinkedIn are reading profiles on their phone.

 

Virginia Franco   

Well, we know we have the numbers and you and I talked offline about the old data point, the six seconds of attention that people give to documents that’s probably true on LinkedIn as well and so you’ve got to scroll for six seconds with your thumb and if you’re not catching the salient points, then you need to go back to the drawing board.

 

Jeff Altman   

There’s no way to both face on LinkedIn to draw someone’s eye.

 

Virginia Franco   

There are, there’s different fields, I forget, I’ve got a couple of websites are called fancy fonts that you can use to do bold and underline and things like that and I will use those a little bit. But anything, any word that you put in those fonts cannot be read. It’s by the tools that are looking to find you on LinkedIn. So, you need to make sure that whatever, if any word you put in there is really important that it shows up in plain text as well. Does that make sense?

 

Jeff Altman   

So, the translate for the audience, you have to mention a twice. One of the fancy font, once in plain text.

 

Virginia Franco   

One is for the machines to read. One is for the humans to read.

 

Jeff Altman   

Excellent and I know sometimes with posts that I do, I’ll do them offline. Not on LinkedIn. I’ll write them out with the fonts and with style, and then bring it over to LinkedIn and it will appear correct.

 

Virginia Franco   

Yeah, I use lingo. I’m looking at my screen lingojam.com, fancy text generator. That’s one of my favorites.

Stupid Resume Mistakes: Showing Markups

Jeff Altman   

Oh, say it one more time.

 

Virginia Franco   

It’s called lingojam.com. Fancy text generator. That’s one of them. The other one’s a weird one. It’s not very good.

 

Jeff Altman   

Let’s stick with that one. Free tool, pay tool? Okay, free tool.

 

Virginia Franco  

Totally free.

 

Jeff Altman   

Everyone loves free.

 

Virginia Franco   

Yes.

 

Jeff Altman   

So, we’ve talked about how people read these days. Let’s just talk in terms of resume advice that you have for people that is unique to you.

 

Virginia Franco   

I feel like this is a best practice that a lot of people speak to, but I see it over and over again as an issue in resumes. Well, there’s two things. One is that people don’t write with a target in mind and the more targeted your resume is, the more effective you know, how you write for social worker is different than how you write for sales. The points that you pull out of someone’s experience are different. Your headline is obviously different. It informs everything you write. So, I always say make sure that you are clear on your target, because you use that target to think back to each role and ask yourself why was I brought on? What were things like before I got there? What are things like as I’m leaving, or when I left? And where did I make an impact with that? And how can I prove it? And those answers are what you base. That’s the stuff you include on your resume. So, your resume needs to be really accomplishment, focus versus day in and day out responsibility focused. What you did at the end of the day, is much more memorable and impactful than all of your different responsibilities and the good thing is that you can sort of imply what your responsibilities were by talking about your accomplishments. But those always start with the target in mind.

 

Jeff Altman   

So, I always go back to journalism. So, I was a high school sports editor, and the thing was who, what, where, when, why and how.

 

Virginia Franco  

That’s right, and how can you prove it?

 

Jeff Altman   

Correct.

 

Virginia Franco  

That context makes all the difference.

 

Jeff Altman  

And that’s the way journalists were taught to write, and I have to assume for you, as someone who helps people with resumes, and look at it from the standpoint of okay, we know who you are and what did you do what’s the most important element to what we’re trying to communicate. So, those elements who, what, where, when, why, and how, get into your story of the resume and LinkedIn profile, but what’s most important, what’s going to catch the reader’s eye. For some careers, it’s the how. For some careers, it’s the, the where’s the branding for where you were working, and how that draws people to you and you can go through each of these elements who got where, when, why and how, and pull things out from that. That will be useful to standing in out from the competition.

 

Virginia Franco  

That’s exactly right. The other thing that I always keep in mind, and this is something related to skim reading online. So, in print, we read the first bullet and the second and the third, then the fourth, but skim readers, we know that they usually will read the very first bullet and if they happen to have extra time, they’ll go down to the bottom bullet, which means the stuff in the middle often doesn’t get looked at until a little bit later down the road. So, you want to make sure that you lead off with something that’s really, really impactful. So, often, I will ask my client, what are you proud of stuff and I’ll work that into, I’ll make that my first bullet and then I might weave in a descriptor about the company or something that shows the reader, this is what the company was about and what that does is it replaces what how resumes used to be written where you would lead off with, you know, I work for Kraft Foods, a fortune 500 company with 36,000 employees and then you go into your achievements, by flipping that lead off with achievement and sort of describing the company, you’re killing two birds with one stone.

Stupid Resume Mistakes: Focusing on the Wrong Thing

Jeff Altman 

Yes, somehow, rather, we all know, who Kraft Foods is. We no longer have to explain it to everyone.

 

Virginia Franco   

That’s right. But some companies are a little bit you might not know. So, if you need to describe it, then weave that into a little piece. But don’t make it the very least the only thing that reader sees at the beginning because you’re missing that moment of their attention. So, think top bottom middle when you’re looking at bullets, and then when people are reading, when you call it like lists that go what’s the word when you have like a word, another word, another word, and you have the up and down bars, bracket types, they read right, left center, when they’re in a rush.

 

Jeff Altman  

Interesting, and thus think in terms of where the high flux and on the phone, it’s gonna be different than on your laptop and the iPad. There is the middle of the vise may be different. What haven’t we covered yet that we really should Virginia?

 

Virginia Franco   

I feel like we’ve covered it all. To me, it’s comforting because I think through how do all of us read the news when we’re in a rush, and then you can apply it to anything you’re writing. You just don’t tell your English teacher because it’s a big departure from how we were taught to write in high school. So, keep that on the download.

 

Jeff Altman   

Thank you. Virginia, this has been great. How can people find out more about you the work that you do everything?

 

Virginia Franco  

My website is VirginiaFrancoresumes.com. I cannot come up with a better name than that when my accountant asked me for one years ago, so it’s my name and I’m on all the socials LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all of it.

 

Jeff Altman   

Super! Virginia, thanks for making time today.

 

Virginia Franco  

My pleasure. Really good questions.

 

Jeff Altman   

Thank you, and folks, we’ll be back soon with more on Jeff Altman. I hope you enjoy today’s show. If you did, you’re watching on YouTube, share it, leave a comment, click the like button, do something that lets people know it was worthwhile and I’ll also mentioned Visit my website thebiggamehunter.US. There is a ton in the blog that you could watch listen to a read that will help you. Also, you can schedule time for a free discovery call with me or a coaching session. Find out about my courses, books and guides. There’s just a lot there. Lastly, connect with me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com\In\thebiggamehunter. Hope you have a terrific day and most importantly, be great. Take care.

4 Steps to Getting Better Results With Your Resume

ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a coach who worked as a recruiter for what seems like one hundred years. He is hired to provide No BS Career Advice globally. That can involve job search, hiring staff, management, leadership, career transition and advice about resolving workplace issues. Schedule a discovery call at my website, www.TheBigGameHunter.us

He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 2500 episodes.

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