Tips to improve your CV/Resume as a Product person
Help recruiters know who you are and what you do and stand out from other candidates.
When we are looking for a job, we usually want to tell everything we have done in our previous positions. Even, highlighting those projects or tasks that may not make much sense anymore with the current role we want.
While this may not seem very critical, let's put ourselves in the recruiters' shoes. They post a new job opening on LinkedIn and in just the first day they have already received 10 to 25 applications. The company is urgent to fill the position and they have a time limit to find the ideal candidate, therefore, they discard all those applications that did not capture their attention in the first 20 seconds.
Let's remember that the human attention span varies between 10 to 20 seconds. This figure decreases over the years (The Human Attention Span)
In this issue we will cover some tips that can help us when looking for a job:
An introspection about who we are helps us to understand what our achievements have been throughout our career. Answer the question who am I?
Now that we know who we are, it is time to define the direction we will take and be clear about what we want for our future. Think as a recruiter, how do you benefit companies?
The CV/Resume is one more tool to help us reinforce our experience and skills.
Let's make use of keywords to help recruiters quickly identify our profile.
Every vacancy is different! We will get even better results if we adapt our CV according to the needs of the company.
A tool that can be very useful to compare your CV against the vacancies you want. 👇
¿Who am I?
Before I got my first job as a front-end developer, back in 2014, I had invested many hours of my free time in creating a resume-formatted website template that could be sold through Envato.
For better or worse, my template never passed the platform's guidelines but I learned something very valuable, web design. Without realizing it, I had raised my own standards for web design and acquired a cleaner, clearer style that, at the time, was not common in my locale.
In addition, I was able to capitalize on my own product. I created my website based on the CV/Resume template and it opened the doors to different opportunities as a Web Developer and Designer, which was not a conventional skill among developers.
Subsequently, I got to know other areas such as UX, Analytics and, most recently, Product Management. However, although I no longer work as a Front-end Developer, the skills and knowledge I acquired years ago help me stand out from other candidates who lack technical knowledge.
It all depends on how you want to tell your story, in short, how you want to sell yourself.
Be clear about who you are and what you are looking for
It is important that you are consistent across the different platforms or networks where you are looking for a job. Your LinkedIn, CV and Cover letter should tell recruiters what you do and what you're looking for right away.
Let's look at it as starting a new relationship, wouldn't it be easier if both parties are clear about what they are looking for and then make a match? If recruiters are like our friends who are helping us get a match, we need to be specific about what we want.
For this we can use a positioning model. Let's treat ourselves as a Product, so the model will help us answer the following questions:
What is it? (Describe yourself in a few words).
What are the benefits of the product? (What do you have to offer employers. Here you can mention your Superpowers and skills).
Here are my answers based on what I am currently looking for:
¿Who am I?
I am a Product Manager with a background in software development, UI/UX design. I have collaborated with organizational teams both from the business area (Marketing, Finance, Sales) and technical (IT, developers, Analytics, UX Research) to develop products that meet the needs of our customers.
How do I benefit companies?
I help companies to develop software products from idea to launch with the help of agile/SCRUM methodologies, collaboration between multidisciplinary teams and my strong knowledge in software development and UI/UX design. Always betting on continuous process improvement and seeking to meet the needs of users.
Putting this little introduction about us, makes a huge difference with recruiters to know if we are or not the ideal candidates and it was just a few lines of text. But it is up to us to mold this overview to fit what they and we need.
Reinforce your answers in your CV/Resume
Our Resume should be concise and to the point, but it is also a good place to reinforce the answers from the previous exercise by mentioning our skills and demonstrating results.
Some tips
Mention what kind of companies we have worked for: startups, agencies or large organizations?
Use bulletpoints to help recruiters read point by point and quickly scan our CV.
Include evidence of our achievements in a quantifiable way and show results.
Describe in detail our most recent position. We can use 3 to 4 lines of text to mention our most recent activities and use only 1 to 2 lines for those positions that are old but still relevant.
Be concise when distributing all our work experience on a single page, unless we have been working for more than 10 years and need to describe more skills.
Use keywords to your advantage
Another way to enhance your CV is to use the vocabulary (slang) according to the profession you are looking for. Sometimes this often goes unnoticed, but it is very valuable for recruiters as it helps them understand that you are a person who knows the subject.
Below you can find some examples focused on Product Management/Product Ownership but also useful for project management.
Keywords you can use
Development
Agile
Sprint
UI/UX
ROI
Scrum
Kanban
KPI’s
Verbs of action
Help
Organize
Create
Motivate
Share
Explain
Direct
Prioritize
Coordinate
Exercise
Enhance
Perform
Provide
Offer
Tailor your CV according to the vacancy
One last tip, iterate, iterate, iterate! Each vacancy is unique and different, sometimes companies need a very specific role. Don't stick with just one version of your CV/Resume, it's better to have different versions and test which version gives better results, it's all about testing!
For example, it is not the same to look for a position for an IT team than for a fintech startup. It's best to match our experience to what recruiters are looking for.
Example for Fintech
I increased the company's revenue by 25% over the previous year by prioritizing and leading projects that benefited different business units.
Ejemplo for IT
I prioritized the product roadmap by working closely with the IT development team. I created detailed User Stories and had QA Testing sessions that helped to considerably decrease the error rate in releases.
🧰
Finally, there is a tool that can be very useful to compare our CV against the vacancy we are applying for, the results can be very interesting and revealing. Here is the link to Jobscan
