Crafting Better Resume Bullet Points

Join Isaiah as he explains why you need to carefully craft your resume bullet points and what information you should include in each of them

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah discusses why you need to do research before you write your resume bullet points
• Next, Isaiah reveals what industry employers care about the most when looking at your resume
• Finally, Isaiah reviews the information you should include in a good bullet point and why it matters

From This Week’s Show… 

Why You Can’t Improvise Your Resume Bullet Points

The most challenging part of putting your resume together is carefully crafting the bullet points that will go on it.

Think about the last resume or academic CV you created. What did you write for the bullet points? Was any research involved?

Here’s what I’m guessing you did: you either found a job posting you liked or merely thought about a job title you liked and started crafting bullet points that you assumed would sound impressive for that job based on your past experience.

You focused on the complex technical skills you learned in academia and emphasized the number of years of experience you had in your PhD field or other academic field.

You didn’t talk to a company who was actually hiring for the role. In fact, you probably didn’t even look at the job posting carefully. Instead, you just skimmed the posting to get a “feel” for the role.

There was no keyword research involved, no data, no inquiry, just you writing whatever you could pull from your memory at the time.

This unstructured and sloppy resume strategy is a losing strategy and it’s why your resume is not getting any responses from industry employers.

What Employers Want To See In Your Resume

If you want to use your PhD to transition into industry, you need to get serious about the information you’re writing on it. You need to look at every bullet point from the viewpoint of your audience: the employer.

What’s the number one thing they care about over everything else? It’s your ability to get hired, learn the role quickly, get along with everybody else on the team, and fit in with the overall culture of the company.

This is what industry employers care about first and foremost. They want to know that if they hire you, you will not disrupt their current team or their current processes. They care more about what’s working already and who’s working for them already than anything you can bring to their organization.

How To Craft Your Resume Bullet Points

The only way to ensure that you understand what’s important to industry employers is to start every bullet point with what these employers prize most: transferable skills.

Quantified results are a close second. Do you know how bad it looks to say you have a lot of experience and then not to mention anything you’ve achieved during the time you spent gaining that so-called experience?

You have a PhD? So what? You have the exact skills the position calls for? So what? You worked with a Nobel laureate? So what?

Ask yourself “So what?” over and over again as you write your resume bullet points until you get to a result that matters, and then quantify that result.

The good news is you have achieved meaningful results in your academic career whether you know it or not. The better news is that the exact result you have achieved matters less than your understanding of the importance of results and your ability to communicate your results.

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.