Karen Gray is a multilingual technical writer and teacher with decades of experience, but when it came to writing her own resume she confesses, “it was a work in progress for at least 10 years.”
I met Karen at the DC UserFocus conference last September, where I’d given a presentation on UX resumes—the presentation that formed the basis for this blog. She asked if I would give her some feedback on her resume.
I don’t want to steal Karen’s thunder so I’ll just show you a sample from her original resume:
- Led the Writing for the Web workshop for the 30-member Humanitarian and Adoptions Branch that went on to receive the USCIS Excellence in Plain Language Award for Best Revised Web Content; the engaging monthly Plain Language Overview; and customer-focused, individually tailored Writer’s Review Workshops. Introduced new employees, at the biweekly agency-wide orientation, to tried-and-true tips and techniques for communicating successfully. Consistently earned the highest customer approval rating, “10 = Fantastic.”
- Co-wrote go-to reference tools such as the USCIS Plain Language Guide, the quarterly USCIS Plain Language Newsletter, and scripts for Think About Plain Language instructional videos.
- Wrote, marketed, and kept current the OSI Style Guide, the OSI Glossary, the OSI Document Checklist, and the OSI Best Practices for Document Clearance.
… and her most recent resume:
- As a key point of contact, founded and supported the USCIS Plain Language Program that has trained more than 5,645 employees, 30% of the USCIS workforce.
- Consistently earned the highest customer approval rating for training, “10 = Fantastic.”
- Recommended including Plain Language in orientation for new employees nationwide. Introduced tips and techniques for communicating successfully from the first day on the job.
- Received the Outstanding Service & Initiative Award for producing Chapter 1 of the Office of Security and Integrity (OSI) Handbook within 2 months of OSI’s startup, a Top-10 Strategic Goal.
- Edited OSI Connection, OSI’s primary outreach platform and must-read quarterly e-zine.
When she sent me that last resume—a lean, purposeful, single-page document that shouts confidence and professionalism—I about fell out of my Aeron. When I’d recovered from my shock, I emailed her to see if she’d be willing to tell her story for the blog.
Because if she can do it, so can you.
» A writer’s struggle
Karen reckons she worked with at least four professional resume writers over the years. As she put it,
I could write or revise somebody else’s, but doing your own—that’s where the difficulty comes in. For obvious reasons, you’re too close to it. You’ve got too much invested in it.
That guidance helped her shrink her original “behemoth version” from four-plus pages down to the one-and-a-half pages it was when I first saw it.
My initial feedback was tactical because Karen’s resume was pretty strong already. I suggested she:
- Focus on her professional work by removing less relevant experience such as community service and continuing education
- Balance the space given to each job (one job in particular took up half the first page)
- Not lean too heavily on awards
- Edit long bullets to be less wordy
I was reluctant to critique her prose because she’s a professional writer, after all, and I didn’t feel comfortable having that conversation with someone I had just met.
» A radical remedy
When I got her next draft a couple of weeks later, however, the gloves came off:
I feel like you’re close to an excellent resume, but to get there you need to start from scratch. I’m attaching your PDF with the actual accomplishments highlighted. This is what I suggest:
- Start a new file.
- Bring over your name and contact info, job titles and dates, your education, and nothing else.
- Take each of the highlighted items and write them as a clear accomplishment bullet (the ones under L-3 Communications are pretty good already).
- Limit yourself to one bullet on each job that is about an award you received. In all other bullets, try to articulate the value to your client, or the end users of your work.
- Think about HOW you achieved these results—what you did that makes you stand out from other writers—and include that in each bullet.
- Watch out for concatenated lists (“wrote, marketed, and kept current”). Instead pick the strongest verb that best expresses where the value of contribution was, and use that one.
- Each bullet should be no longer than 2 lines.
- Now add in your responsibilities as two or three sentences of prose under the job title.
- You should have a really tight, strong resume at this point that is no longer than 1 page.
- You’re done!
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think she’d actually follow this advice. Nobody likes being told to throw out what you’ve got and start over. I certainly never imagined she’d follow it to the letter.
Here’s how Karen described her process:
I did leave the headings in and the dates and whatnot, but beyond that, just stripped it down. It was like stripping paint off a wall. I just took each one of your bullet points and just kept referring back to them. And just kept chipping away at it.
I met Karen at a UX conference, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that instead of being intimidated by this technique, she approached it like a true UX professional:
One thing that you might want to mention is just the whole iterative process. That people shouldn’t be disappointed by the fact that it takes as long as it takes. And in my case it happened to be 10 or so years! It definitely is an iterative process.
She also suggested I add one more bullet to the end of the list:
Just forget about it… Put it aside for as long as you possibly can and not think about it. That’s what did the trick. A month happened to be enough time for me. Don’t be afraid to just forget about it, for however long that might be.
Setting her resume away for a month allowed her to look at it with new eyes and put that last bit of polish on it. In her case, that meant finding the better word.
» Lightning and a lightning bug
When I got her final resume, I was struck by how confident and natural it sounded. It wasn’t until she pointed it out that I realized it was because of strategic word choices she’d made. For example:
- Led the 23-member One Book Process Review Group to fast-track recommendations.
- Engaged participants in standing-room-only training rated “Excellent” month after month.
- Edited OSI Connection, OSI’s primary outreach platform and must-read quarterly e-zine.
As I’ve often complained in this blog, most resumes employ stuffy, stilted language that makes them a very dull read. The result is the opposite of what designers hope for—instead of sounding professional and polished, they come across as awkward and unsure.
Mark Twain famously said, “the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” Karen’s decision to use modern, business-oriented language makes her bullets more readable, energetic, and persuasive. As she points out,
People shouldn’t be afraid of using totally acceptable commonly used terms that add some vibrancy.
» Confidence from the writing
Karen can’t tell yet if her new resume is getting better results, but she did say that she’s much more confident about it—because she knows it reads better.
One of the reasons it was so hard to cut the fat in her old resume was because:
You’re writing in a vacuum for an unknown audience. You don’t know what your reader wants. So therefore I was throwing in everything but the kitchen sink. Because you don’t know. And you don’t want to run the risk of not interesting somebody or not getting past somebody because you haven’t mentioned X, Y, Z.
This struck me as a tremendous insight. Karen felt like she couldn’t leave anything out because she didn’t know who would be reviewing her resume or what they would be looking for. But that resulted in a resume she knew wasn’t representing her effectively.
By cutting her resume down to the hard, bright accomplishments and polishing those accomplishments with effective word choices, she created a document she’s proud to hand out.