How To Write Project Manager Resumes That Capture Recruiter's Attention In Less Than 10 Seconds

Okay, awesome. So here's what you're going to learn today. We're going to cover why you don't need to know everything in order to get started. I'm also going to cover how to write your remote PM resumes and put together your application so you do get noticed by recruiters in 10 seconds or less, because that's just how long you have to impress a recruiter.

Mm-hmm.

I'm also going to share with you how to be irresistible during your interviews, and you're going to have multiple rounds of interviews as well. So we're going to cover what to expect in all of those rounds and how to land multiple offers. So lots of great information. Now, now as we're diving in today, let's start off by looking at a typical project manager job description, and I want you to just keep in mind, like, what is it that these companies say they want? As you're looking at these job descriptions, think to yourself, What is it that they think they want, right? So these are real job descriptions I pulled from indeed.com. And you can see here, this is a job for an associate project manager. It says lead small and medium complex projects, play support role on large projects, manages financial forecasts and conducts ongoing reconciliation, breaks down strategy problem, analyzes data. Monitor and track performance, judgment skills, entrepreneurial skills, learning abilities. It goes on forever. It actually goes on for 2 more pages, and I just didn't have the space to screenshot it. Here's another one. Excellent written and verbal skills, ability to empathetically yet firmly— yet firm with challenging customers. 4-year college degree, demonstrates success managing projects and relationships at a distance, superior organizational skills. Here's another one: determines and establishes the appropriate program/project organizational and work breakdown structures, directs strategic AML projects, accountability for end-to-end projects assigned, provides leadership, motivation, coaching, and mentoring. Expert risk management skills, project management skills. So we can see, negotiates complex contracts. So you can see here is that usually you see this really— when you look at a typical job description, what you're seeing is that it's usually really long. And a lot of the things that they're saying are hard to qualify. What is excellent communication skills or organizational skills? How do you define that? That's kind of an arbitrary thing. What's excellent to one person may not be great to someone else. Usually for job descriptions, you see this huge, sometimes overwhelming list of things, and a lot of items that they're putting onto this list are arbitrary and they're hard to quantify.

Mm-hmm.

But here is the truth that I want you to know though. The truth is that you've been misled. You don't need to know everything, and the job description is a lie. So here we have in the gray circle all the skills in the job description that's listed, and in the blue circle are the actual, actual skills you need in order to get hired. Well then, now you might be saying to me, well, Helena, why are job descriptions so crazy to begin with? Why can't they just list all the things in the blue circle? blue circle, that would make everyone's lives easier. Well, the reason that they list all of those things is because the job description are actually a wishlist and they don't reflect the real hiring requirements. Essentially, the hiring manager is looking for this mystical unicorn with all of the criteria that they dream of. And unfortunately, unicorns don't actually exist. They're mystical for a reason, right?

Right.

And they will be more than happy So they know that they're not going to get a stallion, but they're going to be more than happy to hire a stallion.

Yeah, they won't get a unicorn, but they will definitely hire a stallion.

Yeah. Yeah. So, and we're going to teach you throughout this training how you can be that stallion. Okay. So the key takeaway I want you to have from this so far is apply for jobs, even if you don't have all of the qualifications listed. Don't let that long list of requirements really deter you if you really want to worked for that company and you really want to get that job. Now, it's not like if someone has 10 years of experience and someone else has 5 years of experience, that person with 10 years of experience is automatically going to get hired, right? So if you want more remote PM interviews, here is exactly what you need to do. First of all, we need to look at your resumes. And if you want to pull up your resume as we're going through this, that'd be great as well. When you're writing your project manager resume, I want you need to follow this simple format for all of your bullet points to describe the experiences that you have had. So this 3-step process is, what did you do, how did you do it, and what impact did it make? Now let me give you a bad example and a good example so you can see what I mean for this in reality. So bad is, I built a recommender system in Python, or my project built a recommender system in Python, right? So that's This just doesn't tell me a lot, like how long did it take you to do it? What is a recommender system? What impact did it make for your company, right? So here is it. So here's what you could say instead. I built a recommender system in Python using collaborative filtering and matrix factorization. So that shows me the exact techniques this person has used, and then they went into the impact that resulted in a 5% increase in basket size and $4 million increase in yearly revenue. Wow. So if I was the CEO of a data science company, I know that I definitely want to talk to you as a project manager because you have achieved results in the past. So try to be as specific as possible and really put down those numbers and really highlight the impacts you have made, right? And list the specific techniques you have used as well, right? Don't just make it general or make it vague. Okay, so the point here is that you want to write a results-driven resume. Okay, continued. So you want to focus on the results that you have had. Okay, resume continued. So you want to make your resume around a 5th grade reading level, and the reason that you want to make it a 5th grade reading level is because now most recruiters are just skimming your resume. They're not reading it from word to word, so you have to make it easy for people to skim, so you don't want to use all these complex jargons and make it really long, have these paragraphs that are supposed to make you sound really smart, but when someone's reading it, they're like, okay, what did I just read? You don't want that. You want to make it very easy for the recruiter and the hiring manager to pick out what have you actually done on the job. Also, you want to have the right keywords on your job as well, and there's a tool you can use called jobscan.co. The reason you want to have the right keywords is because nowadays there's been a lot of people applying for jobs. And recruiters are basically like— before it even gets to a recruiter, a bot, like a resume bot, is going to look at your resume first before the recruiter actually looks at it. And these bots are scanning your resume for keywords. For example, for project managers, a common keyword used is PMP. So they're looking for, you know, PMP-certified project managers. And if you don't have those keywords on your resume, then it's automatically, you know, in the no pile, right? So you do have to make sure you have the right keywords on your resume. And Tony, I think you wanted to say a word about the results-driven resume as well.

I was, I was going to say, guys, before, like, it's not what you've completed, like, as a goal or achieved thing. It's always about the results that came from what you did, right? That's the kind of stuff that they want to see. So if I, like, if I say that I directed a group of 10 volunteers For some project, a hackathon or something like that. They don't care about that. They care about the team that I had was able to— I was gonna say herd cats, but that's not what I want, you know. But whatever the end result was, right, we were able to herd whatever, a certain amount of individuals, or complete a task that did what? What did it do?

Right.

That was of success. And in some cases, it's tied to monetary compensations or monetary value, which is great 'cause you can actually pinpoint that exact number. But the more exact that you can get, the better. It's not just about the overall sort of objective or whatever it was that you accomplished. It's more about the actual deliverable, measurable results that occurred.

Yeah.

And that is what you wanna think about when you're filling out your resume. And seriously, it's literally like, hey, we did this, we ran sprints weekly versus every 4 weeks, and we were able to increase revenue by say 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2020. You know, things like that. Literally those kinds of metrics, those kinds of measurements are the things that they want to see.

Awesome, thanks Tony. And then once you finish your resume, so it might take you like a day or two to really fix it up, you want to go through all of your work experiences and through all of your work experiences really use those 3 bullets like what did you do, how did you do it, and what was the impact it made, right? And then once you're finished, All you need to do is just copy over your resume and post it on LinkedIn, copy it over to LinkedIn, and then once your profile is ready, you can start applying for jobs right away. LinkedIn is the world's biggest job search engine. There's a lot of other ones as well, but LinkedIn is the one that probably all of us know. And even if you see a job that looks really scary or intimidating, don't let that deter you. Just apply. Anyways, then if you want to go the extra mile, find 3 to 5 key decision makers from each of the companies that you just applied to and send them a follow-up message. You can do this right inside of LinkedIn, right? Just send them a request to connect, and then if they accept, then you can just send them a message. So that way you don't even have to pay for LinkedIn Premium in order to send a message. And so when you send them a message, don't send them like your entire biography from the day you were born into like now. So just keep this like really short, like 3 to 5 sentences, you know, keep it quick, keep it simple, understand they're busy. And the point is just to quickly show that you are enthusiastic about that company, right? So you just want to briefly pitch your unique superpowers and how you can help that company, right? So keep it to, you know, 5 sentences max here.

Again, one of the reasons this is important, you guys, is because nowadays people don't remember you unless you give them a reason to, right? So like you've got to put, you got a couple of touch points that you can go— you can use email to some extent, like LinkedIn, give sending the messages. If you use other profiles or things that you might be able to connect with them, sending them letters, or— I mean, I say letters because, because it's another touch point, but you don't need to go to that extent. But what I meant is the more they see you, the more you show up. What if, what if your hiring manager that actually, uh, uh, has sent you an email said, hey, we've accepted your your, your application, what if they have a blog? What if they have a presence online? What if all of a sudden they see you and you're interacting and you're engaging? All of a sudden you seem more than just another number, another application, right? And so you don't have to go and do all those things. But if you just did something like using LinkedIn to apply for jobs and to actually reach out to some of these people, you're able to do multiple touchpoints so they remember you.

Absolutely. So the key here is establishing a routine because applying for jobs is a marathon. It's not a sprint. Like, it's, it's not, you know, you apply for one job, and then they're gonna call you back. It's really like a numbers game. But like Tony was saying in the beginning, it just takes one opportunity. Like, you could have 99 nos, but you just need that one person to say yes. And then, you know, you got yourself an $80K, $100K, or $120K job per year, right? So even if you got 99 nos, like, it doesn't— it's like a coin toss, right? Even if you got like 99 heads in a row, the chance of getting a tail on the 100th try, it's still 50%. So just because you got, you know, 99 nos doesn't mean that your chance of getting the job on the 100th try is any less. In fact, it's probably higher since you have gone through, you know, and learned so much from getting so many rejections, right? So if you have gotten like a lot of rejections from recruiters, like, I just want to say like, you know, don't give up. Like, you know, just push through it and learn from each of those experiences.

Especially when it comes to remote opportunities, right, Helena? Like, for instance, we're gonna start seeing a bunch of them start popping up. They already exist, but they're gonna be coming into the market. These job listings and positions are gonna start opening up like crazy, right? And the thing about it is that you really just start— if you're one of the early adopters, or at least the early— you accepted it, the fact that this is gonna be a reality for us moving forward. You go into it, you start applying, you start applying yourself to these positions. Before you know it, you're an expert than most people who are trying, who may start in a year from now or 2 years from now because they just were scared or didn't know what was gonna happen in the world. Here you are, the troopers of the industry, and you're the soldiers that are going to go out there and get these things done during a time when it's actually in high demand.

Right, right, right. So key here is establishing a routine. So you can create a spreadsheet that would track all of the jobs that you just applied to and all the people that you contacted in that company. And you just want to write like short notes on what happened because you don't want to like contact the same person 3 times with the same thing, and people have done that to me on my LinkedIn before. It's like, you just said that to me before, right? So just keep track of it. It just keeps it professional, because if you just contact the same person with the same message multiple times, they will know you're just copying and pasting that message a couple of times, right? So really keep track, stay organized, have a spreadsheet to help you track all of this, right? So here is a sample of what your routine can look like every day. Checking your inboxes for messages, seeing if any recruiters called you back or messaged you back, and then check for new job postings. And if you see those new job postings, apply to 3 to 5 companies per day. So this is kind of like spending an hour per day doing it instead of marathoning— sorry, sprinting it, spending 10 hours per day and then not doing anything for 2 weeks. It's better to do it consistently every single day. Also, new job postings are coming up every single day, so it just allows you to stay ahead of the curve, right? Bonus points if you customize your resume and your cover letter for every single position, because that will show that you're not just handing in something that's very cookie cutter. Read through the job description, see what they actually need, and pick that out, and then put it into your cover letter. Now, I should also mention here that you also want to establish a routine for every single interview you go into as well. Every time you go into an interview and you come out of it, write down all of the questions that you were asked, as many as you can remember. Write down as many questions as you can that they just asked you. Then when you have a future interview, you have a list of real questions that you have had in the past that you can practice with. It just makes it better. Then once you go through maybe 5 interviews, you'll see that they start— start to see patterns and you start to see that they're basically asking you very similar questions, and then you can better prepare in that way as well.