 Thank you very much, Angela. I appreciate it. Thank you for coming. So we're going to talk about three things. We're going to do a brief deep dive into preparing a resume. And then we're going to talk about cover letter. And we will also include talking about the applicant tracking system. So I'm going to share my screen and go through a slide set. The slide set will be available to you and Angela will send that to you after the program is over. And also the link to the recording. So let me share my screen and we can get started. OK, so hopefully you can see the screen. So Sasha, can you see the screen? Got it. There's the thumbs up. Thanks a lot. I'm going to get myself out of the way. So let me introduce myself. And I'm David G. Robbins. I am a job search coach and trainer. I've been teaching classes in job search for the last 14 years with JVS out of San Francisco, since the pandemic, doing everything remotely. As a trainer, I've been working in all different kinds of organizations. I'm certified as a certified professional in learning and performance. But for the last 15 years, 14 years with JVS and a few years also with Neha Tarasin, I've specialized in teaching job search skills, advising people who are job seekers, and having speaking engagements where people want to hear more about job search. So that's a little bit about me. This is what we're going to be doing today. Take us in three parts. The part that we'll spend the most time on is with resume. We want to talk about how to create it. Because what people do is they say, I need to have a new resume. And they sit down and they think about all the things that are wonderful about themselves. And they write a beautiful resume. Sometimes they even pay to have somebody help them write a beautiful resume. And they take a look at some of the templates that are online and they try to make it beautiful. And I have to tell you that we're going to look at this from a different point of view. We're not going to look at it from the point of view of making a beautiful resume. My purpose in teaching resume writing is to help people write a resume that will get to a recruiter and then get to a hiring manager. They don't really pick resumes by how beautiful they are. They pick resumes by how does this person understand what the job is that we're going to be teaching, that they're going to have to come in and do. So we want to talk about what's important in preparing a resume and industry standard formatting. From that, since we're doing some research to figure out how to prepare the resume, we can use that same information to create a covering there. And we'll talk a little bit about why I recommend that a cover letter could be really important. Some people say no one reads it. We'll talk a little bit about that. And then if you're going to be entering, applying to a job through the internet, most companies these days are using an applicant tracking system, the ATS system, and it tracks who's applying for the jobs, but some of them also put filters on there. And people sometimes don't get a response because they're not really qualified and the applicant tracking system is recognizing they're not qualified so it doesn't put the resume through to the recruiter. So we'll talk about those three pieces. We will have time for questions between each section. Well, I'll open it up for questions. Also, rather than you holding your questions till the question slide, you can put the questions into chat and the librarians will, right now, tonight, today, it's Angela. Angela will be watching the chat and she'll be grabbing the questions that are pertinent and we'll bring those up. So just if you have questions, put them in the chat. That's the best way to get them taken care of. We'll start off with tips for preparing a resume. So the first thing, who's your audience? You know, so people think I'm writing the resume for the recruiter. Well, you are, the recruiter is kind of a middle person between you and the hiring manager. So they're there to choose the right people for the hiring manager to then pursue. So your audience starts with the recruiter and then your audience continues through to the hiring manager and in between those, there might be also the applicant tracking system. But the most important point of all of this is that the hiring manager is telling you what they want and what they need. So if you're responding to a job description, something that's posted somewhere on the internet, it could be posted on LinkedIn, it could be posted on Indeed, it could be posted on a career builder, wherever you see that job description, know that the hiring manager put that together to tell you exactly what it is that they're looking for. And that's why it's important that you start with the job description when you are applying to a particular position. So that's what we're gonna do. We'll take you through an exercise looking at, here's a job description and what do we do with it? How do we actually analyze it or what I call decode the job description? So we'll take a look at that first. This is a sample job description. This is for an administrative assistant. They actually administrative assistant two at UCSF. This is an actual job description that I used and adapted it and we used it at JVS. I'm still using it for these presentations, but it tells you about what it is that this job is asking someone to be able to do. So in the job overview, it says here's what you're going to do. So the first step you need to take when you're going to apply to a job is grab that job description and start to decode it. So step one. Identify the duties of the job. So when you look at that, and we're gonna go through that and actually show you how we would look at identifying the duties of the job. But if you find that here are the duties of the job, but you know what? I've never had any experience doing any of those things. It'd be really hard for your resume to match the job description. Now you don't have to match it 100%, but we say that for the duties of the job, you should match 70 or 75% of what those duties are are things that you've either done before or you know you can do and you'll be able to use transferable skills. You'll be able to identify, yeah, I can put this onto my resume. Now there are also requirements usually on a resume. The requirements is where the hiring manager is being a little more or isn't so forceful, but actually a little more stringent. And they're saying, this is what I need you to do. These are required for you to apply for this job. And we say that you should match those 90% or more. If you have say 10 requirements and you only match one requirement, there are gonna be people who are matching nine or 10 requirements. And for that reason, you're probably not going to be in the running. So by doing these first two steps, identifying the duties of the job and identifying the requirements of the job and matching it against your own experience, it'll also tell you, should I be applying for this job or not? Now, I'll add one thing. I never tell people, don't eliminate yourself, let them eliminate you. But if you know that you really have no chance at this position, don't spend more of your time with analysis, with writing, with wordsmithing. Move on to something that would be more likely for you to be considered. So those are the first two steps. And then the third step is researching the culture of the organization. So it's interesting that many times in a job description, you'll see something that is about the organization, about UCSF, about this health project. If you could point to matches that you have for what the organization stands for, the values of the organization, the culture of the organization, that could also show that you might be a good candidate for a position. And then looking at your own experience over the years, whatever experience you have, what is it that you have that might also stand out for this particular hiring manager? So I'm gonna take you through the steps to see where we would get to through this. So the first step is to analyze the job description. Here's the job description again. And the first thing was looking at the job duties. So that would be up here. And I made a bigger version of it right here. And I pointed to here are the things that I would identify as what it is that the hiring manager is telling me I'm gonna need to do if I'm going to get this job. I will be the initial point of contact, right? For a member of the public walking into the offices. I would greet all walk-ins and I will provide them the needed information. I would contact the appropriate staff clinician. I'll answer all incoming telephone calls. So as I'm going through this, I highlighted these in red to show you that pretty much the verbs, they're telling me here are the things that you would do. And this becomes a list of here are the duties that I'm gonna need to perform. Wouldn't it be good for me on my resume to point out that I have experienced doing these things. I've already done something similar to most of these things. Because if you could show that right at the top of your resume, possibly right in the summary, then you're gonna grab the hiring manager's attention and they're gonna wanna read the rest of your resume in detail. So we do know that managers, even recruiters, they don't look at each resume from top to bottom, top to bottom, top to bottom. They spend maybe six seconds scanning a resume and they know what they're looking for. So they're looking for those key words. So they're looking for things like administrative support to clinical activities. They're looking for directing calls as appropriate. If you could show these words in your resume right at the top, they're now more interested in you. So that's why it's important to decode that job description and start looking at it from the point of view of here are the duties. Now, there's more to the job description. So let's take it another step. And we look back at the job description. The second step that we talked about was coming up with the requirements. What are the requirements and how do I match the requirements? So we can see down here, it says required. I'll make this a little bigger. Three years of directly related administrative experience or a combination with education. Spanish language proficiency. It's not like you should be able to speak Spanish. It actually says you're required to have a proficiency in the Spanish language. And a minimum one year experience using PCs with the standard Microsoft suite. So it's saying these are required. You're gonna hopefully match 90% of these, right? So in this case, if you can match two of these really well, you have a better shot than if you can match none of them. So that's the required qualifications. Let's take it up another step. We also have this thing called preferred qualifications. Now, some people like to just jump and say, yeah, let's just consider these to be requirements also, which would be fine. And in preferred qualifications, it says previous UCSF experience. And that's why it's not a requirement. It's a preferred qualification because we would like people who are familiar with UCSF. We would like people that have a minimum six months documented experience working in a facility serving multicultural populations. Diverse in gender and sexual orientation. So this is something that it's not so much in the duties, but it's here under qualifications. And then excellent verbal telephone written communication skills because you know that that's gonna be part of your job because you looked at the duties. So now I've taken a look at the different parts. And the last thing we said you should look at is what are the, what's the chemistry like? Can you match the value system? So what is there about this organization that you should know? And here it tells you it's a mental health service to provide persons at risk requiring or living with HIV AIDS, members of the LGBTQ community. So the Alliance Health Project provides publications and trainings, et cetera, et cetera. And it tells you what they are proud of, right? They serve thousands of clients, counselors and clinicians, and they have a reputation as one of the leading HIV and LGBTQ mental health agencies. So now you know something else that you might wanna make sure that you include in your resume. And that is have you done any work with the LGBTQ community? Have you done any work with people who have HIV or AIDS? So it tells you that that's the stuff that they're actually working with. And although they didn't put it into the job description, it's something that looks like it's gonna be pretty important to them. That's what they exist for. And then a little more about UCSF here, it tells you that they are a school. They promote health worldwide. They have research, graduate level education. So again, it's giving you more information about what it is that they actually do. So now you have the pieces. I have the pieces that say, I know the duties. I know what they're requiring of me. And I know now more about what it is that they actually do what they're proud of. So if I have those together, I should be able to put together just the top of the resume. Just the summary section of the resume to match as much of that as I can. So this was the actual job description. This is a resume that Samuel Hernandez wrote. And this is the top of his resume, right? So standard contact information at the top of the resume. We'll talk about that in another couple of minutes. And then his professional summary, I underlined the parts of what he wrote here that matches what we just did when we decoded the job description, right? It asked for at least one year of public health and administrative experience. Sam has 15 years of administrative experience. And he has compassionally served San Francisco HIV, AIDS and LGBTQ community. So right away, he's saying, I'm familiar with what this job is about. He also says right up front that he's bilingual, but he actually emphasizes it more as he goes to the bullets. So here he has extensive experience providing agency information support to diverse populations. That's words that were actually in the job description, supporting diverse populations. Customer facing telephoto written communication skills. That was one of the preferred qualifications. Flexible and adaptable, performing well under shifting demands. That was under the duties. Proficient Microsoft Word Excel and PowerPoint. That was also in the requirements. Familiar with UCSF policies and HIPAA regulations. Now this was a little different. It asked for preferred qualifications, someone who'd worked at UCSF. Sam never did. But in order to just identify that he knows what it is that they're looking for, he wants to make it clear that he's familiar with UCSF policies. Now, I don't know if people here in the room know what HIPAA regulations are, but they are health codes that demand privacy of people's health information. Every health organization has to abide by HIPAA regulations. There was nothing in the job description that mentioned HIPAA. Why did Sam add that into his professional summary? This is that last piece that we mentioned at the beginning. Something that makes you stand out. Because now the higher manager knows not only is he matching a lot of what I asked for, he even knows more than what I asked for, he understands HIPAA regulations. So this is the special sauce. This is what makes Samuel Hernandez a unicorn. Why would he come up with this? Because he knows that he has this experience and he understands what it is in this job that it's sitting inside UCSF, which is a medical facility, a health organization, and a school and knowing HIPAA regulations actually gives him one leg up. And then he emphasizes again, strong English, Spanish, bilingual proficiency. So important to point out that the very first step is, I'm going to just flip back to a couple of slides here. The first step before you actually write the job description, the first step is to, before you sit down and write your resume, the first thing you're going to do is analyze the job description. So we give you some instructions for that. I gave you a few examples. How do I do that? Well, piece by piece, you're going to look at what the job duties are, then you're going to look at what are the requirements, and then you're going to look at what's more about either requirements or something special about the organization. You're going to look at, you're going to do a little more deep dive. You might actually, and we would recommend that you also go to the website of the organization, learn more about the organization that way, so that you can respond to something on your resume that says, I know what it is that you do, and then you could put together just the top of your resume. And now everything below this, everything under the experience section, even the education, but in the experience section, it would point out the detail about a lot of what you've done here. And that's what Samuel Hernandez did. So step one, decode the job description. Step two, create that professional summary that's going to catch their eye. And step three, is then complete the rest of the resume. So we don't start with writing the resume and then figure out what does this match. The first thing we do is analyze the job description, know what it is the manager wants, and then start writing the resume from there. And then once you have the top of the resume matching, that summary of qualifications is matching what is it they're looking for, now you can get into the detail. So we're going to talk about key resume format pieces, contact information, where that goes and what should be in it, summary of qualifications we talked about, then the experience should all be management statements, not just tasks that you've done, but what you're actually accomplished, and then your education. A couple of things, I've worked a lot with people who are recent immigrants and want to point out that on an American resume, no photo and no personal information. And it's really interesting. People who put a photo on their resume thinking that that's going to be helpful, but they don't understand as many recruiters when they get a resume with a photo on it, they'll shred it immediately. And that's because they're trying to avoid any possibility of implicit bias. So they don't want to see, they don't want to see your photo at this point. They want to see your experience and does it match what they're asking for in the job. A couple of other things some people say, I have to cram everything into one page, not true. Two pages are acceptable. We recommend not going over two pages. I've seen people who say, well, I have a lot of information, I'm going to put four pages. They're still going to spend six seconds. They're probably not going to get to pages three and four anyway. But maybe you're writing a little too much. Sometimes they say less is more. Two pages probably fine. Now, for people who don't have years of experience, I've been working since the early 1900s. So I have enough experience and most of it relevant experience that I usually will have a second page. But people who are just graduating school or people who are pivoting into a new profession, one page may be enough. But don't let people tell you it has to be one page. That's a resume myth. What is important is each resume that you write is targeted to each job that you're applying to. So there are people who write a resume. They say, God, this looks terrific. This is beautiful. And it really covers everything from that job description. I'll use it for the next three jobs or four jobs or five jobs I'm applying to. But each one of those other jobs has a different job description, even though the titles might be the same. Administrative assistant, administrative assistant. One is focusing on healthcare. One is focusing on calendaring for your executives. They're very different jobs. So the same resume actually does not work from job to job to job. So definitely a consideration. Each resume should be targeted to each job you're applying to. Now, as you get used to doing this process, it becomes easier and easier. And you don't have to start always from scratch. You can have a resume and realize, oh, I can't have to adapt this. This is a different job description, so I need to move things around. I can take off what's not relevant. And now that I think about it, I have some relevant information from my experience that I could add to this. So you have all of those possibilities as long as you're going to make sure that you're analyzing the job description so you can target the resume. Okay, one more thing here. Trying to keep things out of my way on the screen. Okay, let's take a look at what is the format of the resume? So if we're talking now, step three is completing the resume. What are we talking about the format of the resume? So you'll hear people talk about two different kinds of resumes. Chronological resume, which I have to tell you is kind of the corporate standard. Reverse chronology. They want to know what was your most recent job, the job before that, the job before that, the job before that. So that's a chronological resume. Some people say, well, I heard that I can use a functional resume. And a functional resume, I actually identified the functions that I've done in my prior history. And I categorized that. So here is my administrative work and here are the tasks I've accomplished. And here is my library work. And here's the tasks I've accomplished. And here's my problem-solving work. And here are the tasks I've accomplished. And that kind of makes sense because you're getting right to the point. Here's what I have done. The problem with it is if it's a pure functional resume, it doesn't include the companies that you worked for and the dates that you worked for those companies and the titles that you had. So that's where we come up with a hybrid or combination resume. So if you want to use that functional style, make sure that after you put those categories, you're also going to list and here are the companies I've worked at. And I've worked at this company. This was my title. These were the years. And then I worked at this company. This was my title. This was the years. So if you do not have the company information and the dates, once again, most recruiters in the U.S. won't look at a pure functional resume. What we're going to do is we're going to focus actually on the chronological resume. So let's just stay on chronological resume, but they all actually work with a similar format. So the first thing that you're going to have at the top of the resume is your name and your contact information. Now, I'm going to mention this now. I'll mention it again later, but you don't want your name and contact information in the header of the Word file. You want it to be in the body, so it should be right below the header. We'll talk about why when we talk about the output contracting system. Your name and contact information. So what do you put in the contact information? In the old days, and I know some of the old days, we would have my name, my address 2435 Haring Street, Brooklyn, New York, my phone number, and that was it. Well, it's different today. Number one, nobody needs your home address. So it's just taking up space and it's actually confusing. So we do need to have your name, your city and state, where you're located, or San Francisco Bay Area, California. But you don't need to have the street address in your contact information. Now, some people say, well, I'm looking for a virtual position so it doesn't matter where I am. According to the recruiters that I've worked with, they still want to know where you are located. So city and state would be great. Do not include the zip code. Now that's interesting. Now they want to know where you are, but they don't want that much detail. And that's because the zip code identifies the neighborhood that you live in. And that again might lead to implicit bias. So just city and state. So you have your name, city and state. You want to have your phone number, a phone that you will answer. You want to have your email address. And then we would recommend always having a LinkedIn address also in that. And some of you might have a portfolio of your work. Then you want to have your portfolio link also on the top. So your name and contact information could be pretty complete if you have all of those pieces. So you want your name, city and state. You want to have your email address. You want to have your phone number. You want to have your LinkedIn address. And maybe you want to have a link to your portfolio. So that's at the very top. Now below that, sorry. Below that, you're going to have your summary of qualifications. Now we just talked about how to build that summary of qualifications when we start. So many times that's how you're going to start. You're going to have your summary of qualifications built and then you're going to put all these other pieces around it because that's where you did the decoding of the job description. Now for those of you that are tech enabled, that you're looking for a tech position and you have been working in tech maybe even ever so briefly, your summary of qualifications might be really brief or not there at all, but you would have in there your technical skills and the languages that you can write code in. So tech might put that up near the top. Otherwise you could have your summary of qualifications and your tech skills down below your education. Below your summary of qualifications comes your experience. Now some people will tell you that below your summary of qualifications you shall have a list of your skills. Just a bulleted list of all your skills. I don't recommend it. I think it's just taking up space. Recruiters see a list of skills that doesn't mean anything to them. How have you used them? What have you done with those skills? And that's going to show up in the experience. So the experience section is really important. The experience section is the proof point for everything that was in the summary. And it says this is what I did which identifies the fact that you've used skills. If you did something to use skills, you don't even have to call out the skills. They hear it when they read through your accomplishment. And then they should have a result. Resulting in a one hour saving in time. Resulting in a 25% increase in customer support. Whatever it is your experience should be identified in terms of your company name, your title, the years you were at that company, and then your bulleted list of what your accomplishments were in each of those jobs. And then below that is where you would have your education and maybe other things that you would combine with education. So if you have enough room on your resume, you might have a section called certifications. But you could put education and certifications all in one box pretty much in one area because that all fits together. You're written and oral speaking languages could be in there. Volunteering that you've done. 60% of hiring managers appreciate people who've done volunteering. Professional associations that you belong to, which says that you're still pursuing your craft, which is really good. So you can see that it completes the rest of the resume the way that we've always experienced what a resume should look like. I'm going to go through each of these pieces in more detail as we go forward. First question is one for you. Here are two resumes that go to you. You're the recruiter. How do you get these two resumes? Which resume would you rather review? I only have a certain time in a day. Some of our recruiters are looking at 300 resumes every day. So which one of these would you rather spend time reviewing even if it's only six seconds? And I can't see people's faces, but if you could, in the chat, put in the one on the left we'll call number one and the one on the right we'll call number two. So in the chat, put down which would you rather work with? Number one or number two? Okay, it seems we may have a quorum here. Yeah, number two. And so we'll put in fewer words. It's not only fewer words. It's also, it's easier to scan. If I start looking at this, I have to read all of this bulk of text. And then there's very little white space for my eye to rest. There's kind of a little piece of white space, a little piece of white space, a little bit here. Oh, look, finally something bold that tells me there's a change, but it's really tedious to go through. Where here I could immediately take a look and say, okay, well, I've got it. Here's the summary. Here's the highlights. And here is the experience. And I can quickly scan through the experience. There's, you notice this is also justified left and right, almost like newspaper text. It's not easy again to look at compared to this, which is ragged easier again on the eye. So understand that this is trying to cram everything in. And I've had clients that show me something like this. They say, well, I had to do it that way because I had to get it all on one page. Well, once again, you don't need to get it all on one page. Okay. And you definitely don't want to cram it in like this. You want to have white space. You want to make it easy for someone to scan. So this is the beginning of how the resume should look. The summary of qualifications we talked about, this is just a little review of it. You'll notice in Samuel Hernandez, he had a one sentence at the very top. It's not an objective statement. And that's something that's gone away in resumes. Because the objective statement was always something is, I'm looking for a position as an administrative assistant. Well, it's almost silly. You're applying for a job as an administrative assistant. Why are you telling me you're looking for that position? Are you saying that you don't care if you get this one or not, because you're looking for another one? Summary of qualifications should be talking about what your qualifications are. Not what your objective is overall, because that's about you. They care about themselves. They care about their company. They care about filling a position. So if you're going to start with any kind of sentence, it should be what we call a targeted branding statement. Reputation is dynamic, innovative, strategic marketing leader who develops, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So if you can get this into the summary of qualifications, it right away catches their attention. And then you can start putting the bullets below that to add, again, more information about how you match what it is that they're looking for. The reader should learn who you are and what you can do for the organization. And you should be highlighting what makes you unique. Don't include all the detailed duties. In the summary of qualifications, you're high level. You're giving them a 30,000 foot view of what your experience is. And then you're going to get into the detail in the experience section. Keep it short, easy to scan. And everything that follows in the resume should support the summary. So when we get into the experience section, there are a couple of things to just make clear. Yes, they do want to know the company that you worked for and where it was located. So you notice here Alameda County Community Food Bank, Oakland, California. It's important that they want to know where did you do this work. And then you want to have the job title. Now here the job title comes first and then the company name and then the job title comes first and the company name. That's fine as long as you're consistent all the way through. You could also do company name and job title, company name and job title, whichever way you want to sequence them, make sure that you're consistent all the way through. So it doesn't confuse the person who's scanning through this resume. Yes, you do have to put dates. No, you do not need to put down day, month, year. You do need to put down year to year. Now if you want to put month to year, that's fine. My resume actually has month to year, but that's up to you. What's required these days is just having at least a year in place. And then the bullets under that are your accomplishment statements. Some people refer to them as the star statements. Situation or task, action or result. You want to have your keywords, your results as metrics. You want to take those keywords as the research of the job posting. Target company websites, LinkedIn profiles. You want to make sure that you're doing your research to figure out what bullets should I have in my experience. What is an accomplishment statement? I call it a star statement. When we talk about preparing for interviewing, we talk about having star stories, which can actually start thinking of your star stories as you're writing your resume. Because the star story is going to come up in the interview. The resume is going to get you to the interview. So you might have things that are reflective of your experience with star stories in your experience section of your resume. So here's a way that you can actually develop an accomplishment statement. It's kind of a three-step approach. So this is target job skill. This is an art director. And one of the things that we need to do is working and influencing in a cross-functional context, leveraging research and data to inform the design of the experience. So if I think of, okay, what kind of experience do I have that matches that? Well, I created a visual lookbook for International Streetwear Brain. That's basically a lookbook. It's basically photos. Now, if I'm going to put this into an accomplishment statement, I want to start off with an action verb. So I conceptualized or collaborated on this visual lookbook. But then don't leave out the result or the impact. And the result was that we were able to stay on brand, highlight, showcase, stay true to the original design and the client's vision. So if you know that this is what you want to put into that bullet, you can pull it all together in a sentence format, creating a visual lookbook with an art director in Japan, the right-of-way that tells you that you work cross-functional and you're talking about maybe international could be helpful. Director in Japan resulting in consistent design collaboration for three consecutive years. So there was a result. The impact was this visual lookbook created a consistency in the design collaboration. A different way to verbalize the same thing, collaborated with an art director in Japan and created a lookbook for a streetwear brand which resulted in consistent design collaboration for three consecutive years. Or conceptualized the visual lookbook for Japanese international wear brand, leveraging research and market data and staying true to the client design. That's another result. So in this short bullet, you want to just start up with an action verb. You want to, at that point, talk about what it is that you did very briefly but then make sure that you're also putting what the impact was of what you did. Because that says to the hiring manager, hey, David did this and provided value to his last employer that he could probably provide value to me. So that's where that result or impact statement becomes really important in getting you to be considered over other people who leave that out. Okay, let me finish this up before we go for questions. A couple of other things in how the resume could look. Some people will have a certification in Memberships section after the experience. Professional associations that you belong to show that you're still pursuing your craft, which is really good. If you need to show what systems you work with, what technology you work with, that you could have as a separate section, languages and interests. But you could also move some of these things right into education. The education piece is usually required. These others are optioned. Okay. One last thing before we go to questions and that is a couple of recommendations for the font that you use on a resume. And we're going to talk about that same thing for a couple of minutes. We recommend a sans serif font. Sans serif means that it doesn't have the little extra pieces of ink. So if you look at the letter T in a sans serif font, it's a vertical line and a horizontal line. If you look at a letter T in a serif font, it's a letter, it's a line, vertical line with a little base to it. And then a horizontal line across the top with little pieces hanging off each side of it. Now that's nice. Times New Roman is pretty standard. If you went to school when I did, pretty much everybody put their essays together in Times New Roman. But for resumes, remember we want to have more white space. And those little extra things in each letter, they're just getting in the way of our white space. So we recommend something like Calibri or Ariel. And there are others, but they're called sans serif, French for without. So it's without those serifs, those little extra things. That's the first recommendation. The second, you should make sure that there are in fact margins. They don't have to be really big, but top and bottom, you want to have a 0.5 margin and 0.7 side to side. These are just recommendations, but the main point is you need to have margins. And I did have a client a long time ago. He ran his resume from one side of the page to the other side of the page. And I said to him, what happened to the margins? I thought it was just an error. He said, oh, I couldn't use margins because I needed to get it all on one page. Again, the myth, the one page myth, don't need to get it all on one page and no one's going to read it if it's just ink across the page and ink across the page every line. So make sure that you have some kind of margin. Avoid underlines, boxes, multiple fonts and colors. Now this is where people sometimes put up a little bit of a fight about this. I always told that having boxes and columns could be really helpful. We're going to talk about that toward the end of this presentation. We still have some time to go. And it is important to understand that those things could actually completely eliminate your resume. And that's the way the applicant tracking system is. So you don't need underlines. You don't need boxes. You don't need even putting bold for what you think are all of the keywords. You don't need that. It's just going to confuse the reader, who's the recruiter first and the hiring manager second. But they know what they're looking for. They're scanning and they're looking for the words they're looking for. You put a word that's bold. That's not what they're looking for. They may miss the word that they are looking for. So just a human factor of the way that the eye is going to work. Don't second guess what you think should be the words that are in bold. Don't put anything in bold unless it's a title or a category, a title, sections. That's where you can have bold. Your title, the company name could be bold. But don't pick words to make bold. Avoid big blocks of text and full paragraphs. You all voted for that. Maximum of two pages is what we usually recommend. One page is great, but don't go beyond two pages. Now, just some resource information. You're going to get this, this slide set so you can, you can pick this up later. These are 39 resume accomplishment statement examples to show you how people write accomplishment statements. Those are the bullets that the recruiter and higher manager are actually looking for. Not only that, they'll also pick some of those when they're interviewing you. So if you get that resume right, they'll invite you for the interview and they'll sometimes use the resume to say, can you tell me about this one? Can you tell me about this one? So this is a great way to identify some accomplishment statement examples. And then there's an article here about why recruiters hate functional resume. And I have to just let you know what a caveat is. They hate pure functional resume, but it will in this article talk about the combination of hybrid resume and then the consecutive job resume. So you have some resources for each section and we'll include some resources. Okay, I think I jumped in with a whole bunch of information. So I'm going to stop here and ask for any questions. I'll ask Angela first. Anything that came in chat, there were questions. Yes. Someone asked, I haven't been, I have been advised that if you are older or have many careers, leaving out dates in the resume is a strategy to avoid appearing to have gaps in employment if you don't include jobs that are not relevant to the position. And this is where it's really good to work one-on-one with a career advisor, but number one, you can't leave the dates off. The only place you can leave the dates off is in education. They're not looking for the date that you graduated. So you can leave the dates off on your education, but for the positions that you've had, you have to put the years down, at least the years. Now, as far as identifying gaps, I've worked with a recruiter advisory council for years, and they did talk about the fact that the gaps don't matter to them if they can understand what was going on. So if you have a gap between one job and the other, what were you doing during that gap? And maybe you lost a job and you were applying for the next job, and it took months, it took a year, maybe. But what were you doing during that time? Were you taking any classes? Were you trying to learn a new computer handy? So you could actually put that gap in there and you could talk about sabbatical to improve my skill set and actually put in the bullets the different trainings that you took in order to move forward. Now, maybe you didn't take classes, but there was something else that you did. For example, my wife took a break in her job trajectory. But during that break, she was raising our children, but also she was a co-president of the PTA, the Parent Teacher Association at the elementary school. Now, what did she do as the co-president? Well, they raised $30,000 every year for an art program. That's a skill. That's something that you could put into what we could call a gap, but you could put that in as to what you did during that time between jobs. So when people talk about if you have a gap, you're eliminated. That's not true. If you have a gap and then you work for a few months and another gap and you work for a few months and another gap, that will hurt you because then you really do want to work with somebody who can help you figure out how to rework all of that so those gaps don't show as multiple gaps in your job history. That's the part that's negative. But having a gap, we all have it. As a matter of fact, if the gap was in 2020 to 2022, you know what the recruiters think that is? The pandemic. Okay? So they understand that people are sometimes between jobs. So don't worry about it, but if you did anything to enhance skills, if you did anything to accomplish things that you maybe volunteered at your church or your synagogue as an accountant, that is work that you've done. So volunteer work can also fill in a gap. It doesn't say professional paid work experience, the category. It just says professional experience. And if I'm volunteering as an accountant somewhere, I'm using my professional experience and I can actually show what the impact was and come up with some really good accomplishment statements. So I hope that helps. Thank you, David. Someone asked, I have been told that for older workers, you should not put more than 15 years of work history. Would 15 years be a good number of work experience? And a similar question someone asked, if you're an older applicant for a job, how many years back should you list on your resume? Okay. So basically similar questions. I don't think that there's a number of years that is your cutoff. So, you know, people who work two years or three years at a job. Yeah, you know, if you go back 10 years, you've probably covered everything that's relevant for the job you're applying to. I worked at JVS for 14 years. That means that's the only job I could put down on my resume. If I say, well, you can't go back more than 10 or 15 years. But I have more relevant experience. So what I'm going to do is not put 12 bullets down for JVS, even though I was there for 14 years. I'll put down the relevant bullets that match the job description, shorten that up, and then I'll have the jobs before JVS that are relevant. I worked five years at Leigh-Hat-Tarrison doing similar work in career advising. You know, whatever is relevant, so the keyword is relevant. So if you go back and you're going to put things in about your experience, if you were a programmer and you were a cobalt programmer, nobody's programming cobalt anymore. So you don't need to go back that far. Also, if I'm looking for a job in job search training, I don't have to include the 16 years I worked at Hewlett-Packard in corporate technology education. I don't need to put that there. If I'm applying for a position in corporate technology education, I want to make sure I have my Hewlett-Packard experience, even though it ended in 2005. So yes, it was a long time ago, but if I could show the education experience I have now with job search, so I would do my wording to show education experience, education training, and make that real brief so I could have room to put in the work I did for Hewlett-Packard internationally, and now covering both bases. So think of relevant and don't worry so much about years. If you go back more than 20 years, if it's all relevant experience, it still works for you. Now here's the other question. Someone said, but they'll know I'm older. Yeah, they will. They're going to go to your LinkedIn profile. They're going to see your photo and they're going to see that, because the white beard, David's older. When you come in for the interview, darn, they're going to see that you're older. Now hopefully you'll be vibrant and you'll come in and you'll shake a hand and you'll be okay, but if the company is agist, you don't want to work there anyway. So I think the last program I did here at the library was Job Search Tips for Job Seekers Over 50. So you could actually go to the library LinkedIn page and you could look for that recording and get some information about my view of how to apply for jobs when you're over 50. And when I worked at JVS in those 14 years, I actually managed a group that we met twice a week, particularly for Job Seekers Over 50. We talked about that. You're not going to fight the ageism fight. What you want to do is show that you are the right person for this job and you're going to do that by writing a really good targeted resume. Okay, should we move forward? There's one more question relating to resumes. I think regarding the example you gave about gaps in your resume, if you didn't work for a few years because of COVID and you were recovering from various surgeries, what do you list? And what would you say during an interview without disclosing medical information? Well, you could just say I took leave for health reasons and they're not going to ask you what was the health reason because that's illegal. So you could say took time off for medical reasons. It was one of my clients that used the word sabbatical for a gap and I went, what a great word, right? Because professors use sabbatical all the time. That's a great word. So sabbatical for health issues. What are the bullets going to be there? You're right. You don't want to talk about what the health issues were. What did you do during that time? I understand you were recuperating, right? I've also been in situations where I wasn't going to be taking any classes. But in that time and as you were recuperating and you were looking for that next position, did you take any classes? Did you go to LinkedIn Learning? Did you go to Coursera? Did you go someplace to get some online training? Did you take a YouTube class? Put those things down and it says that, okay, this person needs to take time off for their health, but look what they were doing. They were increasing their skill set. That's what you want to show. So try to get a positive out of that the best you can. And if you don't want to say it, the sabbatical for health reasons, talk about sabbatical to improve my skill set. Something else, but you took a gap. I mean, you took a break. You have to talk about the fact that I took a break if you're going to have that chronological wisdom. Thank you, David. I'm going to move on to writing a cover letter. I'm going to get right into it. So the first thing is, what is a cover letter? Because people think it's a way to, again, talk about how wonderful you are. It is. This is the opportunity to talk about how wonderful you are. Because it's a sales letter. You're selling your skills. You're selling your enthusiasm. And you're selling a bit of your personality. You can't put personality into a resume. A resume is just, it's kind of a rote document. It's like, here's what I did. Here's what I was good at. Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. But in a cover letter, you could talk about what you're excited about. There are two key points out of a cover letter. Why I want to work for you and what I could do for you. Now you notice what's interesting is the you part. A cover letter also is not generic. It's targeted. You're applying for a position as an admin assistant at UCSF. Why do you want to work there? Well, you read how wonderful UCSF is. You read about all the research that you do. Well, talk about that. Talk about the fact that I'm excited about working for an organization that has their model duplicated around the world. Right away, they feel crying and they feel good about the fact that you're applying for this position because you know something about the organization. So why do you want to work for them and what you could do for them? And focus on the experience, education or strengths most relevant to this position. Once again, cover letter is targeted. Why do we use a cover letter? This is interesting because I just, in LinkedIn, I chimed in on somebody else's discussion when they talked about the fact that nobody reads a cover letter and that's not true. I will tell you that according to the statistics that are out there and then I did a poll of my own on LinkedIn and it came up with the same thing that I spread in the statistics. 60% of hiring managers ignore a cover letter. 40% of hiring managers, on the other hand, want to see a cover letter. I worked for an international school for a short time and the vice president there who looked through all the resumes, if there was no cover letter she wouldn't read the resume. It's just straight up, not interesting. So should you have a cover letter or not? Well, first of all, if they ask for a cover letter, don't think you can skip it because that's going to be that person who if you don't send in a cover letter won't look at your resume. So if the job description says you should have a cover letter, have a cover letter. If the job description doesn't say you need to include a cover letter, you might want to include a cover letter because it can help you. And it might be the 40% of hiring managers that want to see that cover. And it presents more of your personality and style. Companies hire for two things. They hire for competency, your skill set, that's going to show up in the resume. But they also hire for chemistry. Do you match the people that they have in the organization? So the cover letter presents more of your personality and more of your style. And it clearly states this is the company I work for and I have experience doing this kind of work. Okay, a little more on cover letters. Now here you are restricted. I would recommend no more than three quarters of a page, two thirds of a page, even better. But definitely don't go into pages because they're not all that interesting. And you could get everything you need to say in two thirds of a page. Don't cram everything in. Make sure you leave white space. I had a client who gave me, and I'll show you the format we're going to talk about in the structure. The first paragraph is how I found out about this job and why I think I'm a good fit. The second paragraph may be second and third paragraph, but the second paragraph explains some of your experience and matches the job that you're applying for. And what this person gave me was a big paragraph, lots of text again. And I said, why don't you just break that into two paragraphs? You don't mean it will eliminate anything? No, you could actually keep it with the same text, but just break it up so there's white space in between. And here's why. It's a human factor. When people are skimming or scanning, they're going to read the beginning of that paragraph, and then they're going to go to the next paragraph. You're not going to get to the bottom, which has a whole bunch of good information. But if you break it into two paragraphs, they'll scan the first one, go to the white space, and then scan the second one, which was originally the bottom of the first paragraph. So the idea is sometimes the white space gets them actually to read more than if you cram it all together. And again, we recommend that you match the fonts that you have in your resume, caliber, your area. That becomes helpful. Okay, what else in the structure? The introductory paragraph should include the following information, how you found out about the position. That's sometimes going to be real helpful. Why you're interested and what applicable experience you have just in one sentence. So that's a really brief paragraph. Now, what's interesting is when you say, how do you find out about the position? You might have found out about the position from somebody who works at that company, put their name right there at the very top of your cover room. I'm applying for position as administrative assistant at UCSF. I was referred to this position by Joanne Smith, who works in the such-and-such department. So now they know that you are actually connected to somebody in their organization. They might even go to Joanne Smith and say, who's this David Robinson? So right away, you're adding more than what they could see on a resume. After the introductory paragraph, which is really short, two lines, three lines at most, then you have the cell, and that could be one, two, or three paragraphs, brief ones. Highlight the accomplishments and skills using the keywords from the job announcement and your analysis. This is where you're targeting your cover letter to show I have experience that relates to the job I am applying to your job. And then you have a closing paragraph. Here, again, stress how you will benefit the company with your skills and expertise. It could have a call to action, which is kind of the reverse call to action. I'm hoping to hear from you as soon as possible. I'm looking forward to talking to you further about this. Some people say I will call you next week, particularly if it said no calls, please don't say you're going to call them because they're not, they're asking you not to call them. If it's a generic job application and you're applying to a job, there was no job posting, then you might have something in there that says, I will call your office within the week or something like that. Just be careful about being too pushy here, but it is good to have the closing paragraph say, I'm looking forward to getting, again, excitement about working at this company doing this kind of work. Not many people are sending their cover letter in their resume through the email. So some people will send kind of a blank email with, and it says, attaches the cover letter and resume. Another way to do that, which might be a better way, is that the email is actually the cover letter. So the body of the email is in fact what you will put into the cover letter. But you would make it more email style rather than formal letter style. So you list your name, job title, and the subject line of the email message. Include your contact information in your email signature, not at the top of the letter, just like you would do with any email that you send. You don't need to put in the employer's contact information at the top. Well, yes, dear hiring manager or dear Mr. Smith, that could go in there, but you don't need to put the address and everything emailing it to them directly. You don't need to put the date because the date of the email already puts the date. Okay. So the cover letter then is the body of the email and then mentioned that the resume is attached. So to give you more resources, here are two articles that you could reference to customizable cover templates for any job seeker. The Muse is one of my go-to sites for job search information. Should you include a cover letter? There's a good discussion here with Andrew Seaman of LinkedIn. He's managing editor of their Get Hired. It's kind of a website and podcast. So there's some good information here for you. Okay. Time for some questions before we finish this up. Anything that people have any questions, Angela? No, David. It looks like there isn't any questions so far. Probably went too fast, but if anybody has any questions, raise your hand or throw it in the chat. We'll take it at the end. Okay. The applicant tracking system. It's a totally, well not totally, but very much misunderstood application tool. The applicant tracking system is used by companies to help them when they post job openings. And the reason is that they know that when they post a job, they're going to get hundreds of, if not thousands, I just saw a job then I said, oh, I'm interested in that job. 1500 people already applied in the first day that it was posted. So they know they're going to get all of these, but they also know that so many of them are people who are not qualified for the job that they're applying to. That's why the applicant tracking system might be there. The applicant tracking system works two different ways. One, it is in fact a tracking of applicants. So there are some companies that use it just to track the applicants, just so they know, okay, David Robbins applied to this job. And last month, David Robbins applied to this other job. And David Robbins applied two months before that for this other job. But they're all pretty good. So we know that David's interested in working for this company, yet he's not just applying to haphazard positions. They all pretty much look like the things that, that might be similar to what he's looking for. So that's the tracking part that they did. But also some companies and some recruiters will put filters that are the pay basically the keywords and phrases that they're looking for. So for example, they might be looking for someone who has five years experience doing similar work. The applicant tracking system might actually have a filter in there that says you're, that it's looking for five years or in the might say three to five years of experience doing this kind of work. People who have no experiences kind of work, the resume does not get through to the recruiter. Now recruiters that don't have the filter, they'll see every one of those resume. But recruiters that use the filtering method or using the applicant tracking system different ways, it may actually not get through. So let's take a look about how to make sure your, your resume is ATS friendly because you don't know how the company is using it. So do number one, apply to jobs that you're a qualified for. As I said, if they have 10 qualifications requirements and you match one of those requirements, you probably not qualified for this position, right? Now you want to apply to it. You can, if they don't have filters, it might get through the applicant tracking system. Pretty certain that you're going to have to have some kind of really dynamic resume cover letter for them to actually overlook the fact that you don't meet the requirements. If the posting is for an entry level accounting position and the system gets rid of resumes that come from a dentist or a vice president, those people are probably not applying to an entry level accounting position. Don't know why they're applying. The applicant tracking system might toss their, they don't throw it out by the way. They just put it into the database. Analyze the job posting only applies. So this is the one of the do's. I have a few other do's for you to make this applicant tracking system friendly. Do include the right keywords. ATS algorithms are not that different from human algorithms. We're all kind of skimming for the same thing. So they look for specific keywords just like Google search. Make sure you're covering the hard skills that you see in a job description. But also put your keywords in context. Now I know people say, well, I'm just going to list all my skills and that way to get through the applicant tracking system. It doesn't always work that way because it's not just looking for lists of skills. It's looking for skills that are inside accomplishments. So your accomplishments are unique to you. The keywords are generalized. So humans want to see how you use the skills. So even if it gets you through the applicant tracking system, it's not going to get you through the hiring edge. Okay. You want to show your skills, not just tell them you have skills. Choose the right file type. So those of you that are working in Apple products, your document might be a dot pages document. Don't send in a dot pages document because most companies, many companies can't even read that unless they're an Apple house. But the applicant tracking systems usually are looking for a Microsoft Word file a dot X or a PDF. So stay to those two and definitely follow the instructions. If they say send us your information as a PDF, send it as a PDF. If they say send it as a doc file, don't say oh, the PDF is better. If they want a doc file, send it as a doc file. If they want a PDF, it says PDF, but don't go out to other things. Some resume writing software packages will come up with a dot PNG or a JPEG. Applicant tracking systems won't read those. It'll just get tossed down. Okay. If you use Google Docs to create the resume, you can save it as or export it as a doc file or a PDF. So instead of sending it to pages, export it into a doc file or a PDF. Make your resume easy to scan. Once again, the ATS system interestingly enough reads from the top to the bottom, but left to right. That's why they actually prefer chronological resumes because it's understandable more to their software. Recruiters we find also prefer chronological. Pure functional format without the job histories not referred by recruiters. So don't apply to a bunch of jobs that are all different kinds of jobs at the same company because the tracking system is going to go, what the heck's going on here? David's applying to a janitor position and to a vice president position. What's happening? So don't look for an entry level and a director level position. Now, if there are two positions that are similar roles, maybe in different departments, they're looking for a project manager here and a project manager there. So don't apply to both. But make sure that you're looking at the job description for each because they might be different. And if they're different, you want to target each one differently. Don't try to trick the ATS system. Don't say I'm going to put a whole bunch of skills down at the bottom of the resume, all in white ink so that it doesn't show up when they print it out, but the ATS system will read it. So what I found out from the recruiters was the applicant tracking system. The applicant tracking system actually captures all that information. It actually parses it. It takes it apart, puts it together in a different format, and then it sends everything in black ink. So anything that you had hidden in white ink actually comes out in black ink, and then the recruiters are going to see that you're trying to cheat the system. Not a good thing if you're looking for a job. Make sure that you're using a keyword-rich summary in context and try to make sure you're dealing with the keywords inside your accomplishment statements. Avoid fancy formatting. The applicant tracking system will not read anything inside a box. It will also not understand that you made a beautiful lavender-colored column to the right of your experience section. It won't recognize that at all. And I don't have to look for all the things here it says to avoid, but let me give you an example of what that means. This is a really nice-looking resume. I think it's a nice-looking resume. And in this example, the people who were looking at this said, this candidate meets all the job requirements, contains all the keywords found in the job posting. She is the ideal candidate. There's a problem here if this is going through an applicant tracking system. And the problem is, first of all, the Victoria Harris and the address here are up in the header. The applicant tracking system wants to see stuff that's in the body. So it's not going to read Victoria Harris. Also, it doesn't read anything inside a box. So it doesn't get any of the contact information. It also reads from left to right right across columns. It doesn't know that there's a column there. So this would say research companies and generate 50-plus leads communications month using LinkedIn Sales Navigator awarded May 2018. It doesn't make any sense. I didn't believe this. I said, no, that doesn't make any sense. So I brought this up to the recruiter advisory council I was working with. And I said, is this true? Does this get corrupted completely? And the article that I read said, this is what the recruiter gets. And I showed this to them and they said, that's exactly what we get. And it's nothing they could do with it. They cannot even reply to you because they don't see any contact information. They don't see your name. They see things like research companies and generate 50-plus leads of communications. It doesn't make any sense. So when I realized this example was real is when I realized it's important for us to talk about the applicant tracking system. It's real. It could work for you if you do everything right. It could work against you also. So take another run at any questions that you might have. Come on, David, you can do it. Here we have questions. Hi, David. There's no new questions in the chat. Okay. Oh, I got a little tired. So if anybody has questions that you want to raise your hand or have Angela unmute you and ask the question whether you're available taking the questions that you have. And if not, quick summary. Each resume should match each job description, job posting, and be easy to read. Remember that they're not going to spend five, 10 minutes reading your resume. They're going to first scan it for six seconds. If they see things they like, they'll read it more detail. The cover letter, no more than one page again matching the job description. And the applicant tracking system again using the keywords from the job posting apply to jobs you have qualified for. Thank you for coming. I hope that this was something that could be helpful for you from contact information here and you'll get the slide set when we're all done. And at that point I can stop sharing and turn this back over to Angela. Thank you, David, for sharing information on how to prepare a resume and cover letter as well as talking about the applicant tracking system. I actually learned quite a bit about it because I didn't know many of the information you provided. And I also like to thank everyone for joining. I hope you found this presentation informative and helpful to you. As David said, I'll be sending out a link to the recording as well as a copy of the presentation slides as well as a survey. If you guys can fill out that survey, any feedback can help us improve in our programming. And with that, good luck, everyone, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your Sunday. Goodbye, everyone.