Finding Brave 89: Building a Crazy Effective Resume That Gets Real Results, with Austin Belcak

Hello, everybody. Kathy Caprino here. Welcome to another riveting episode of Finding Brave. And I'm so excited to welcome back Austin. You might be the first guest I've had twice. So that's such a huge honor. Austin Belsack, I'm so excited to have you. Thank you for being here.

Thank you so much for having me, Kathy. It sounds like a lot of pressure is what it sounds like. But I will do my best.

I'm going to rock it, my friend. I think it was episode number four you were on and it was so good. I still hear so many comments, compliments about how chock full that was about great tips for younger people about how to get great jobs without interviewing, how to really make a difference, how to stand out. Right. That's what we talked about last time all those years ago, right?

Yeah, absolutely. How to get a job without applying online. The whole deal. That's, that's what we talked about. But also the chock full of info. That's the plan. So hopefully we can, we're gonna nail it again.

And we are talking about. I love it. Building a crazy effective resume that gets real results. And I know from everybody I work with, Austin, you too. It's a conundrum. We don't know how to do it. We don't understand what the bot thing is all about. We don't know how to brag about ourselves. That doesn't come come across like bragging. It's just a mess really, when you haven't been trained to do it. So we are going to help you all how to write a resume. And I think this will apply for your LinkedIn profile as well. What we say here, right? Wouldn't you agree that it transfers 100%?

Absolutely.

So you know, LinkedIn is my happy place. So whatever you learn here, I hope you'll head over and we will link below to a webinar I've done on LinkedIn. LinkedIn. I'm sure you have some great tips too, Austin, so we'll cover that. But I want you all to know everything about Austin. So here's his bio. So Austin Belsack, finally pronounced that correctly. Right? Jeez. Is the founder of CultivatedCulture.com where he teaches people how to land jobs at the world's best companies without applying online. Austin has helped thousands of job seekers get hired at places like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Salesforce, Facebook, more. His strategies have also been featured in media platforms like my beloved Forbes, Business Insider, Fast Company, Inc. And more. So there you go. And you're holding down like Three different aspects of professional life, aren't you, you're doing coaching, you have a full time job. It's pretty amazing.

Yeah, we're staying busy and I think this Forbes feature can be, I have you to thank for that. So, you know, I will take it. But I appreciate it.

Oh, gosh, you're so welcome. I love it. All right, so now let's jump in here. We're just, we don't even have this scripted out folks, but we both deal with so many resumes and we both had our own challenges with our own resumes. Tell, let's start here. Austin, what do you see is the biggest mistake that you immediately help people fix on their resumes? What's going wrong?

This is a great question because it is probably the most common mistake that I see. You know, if I had to put a percentage against it, it would be, you know, 95 point plus percent of resumes that come across my desk. And you may see the same thing. But the biggest problem with the resumes I see is that people tend to summarize their experience instead of selling themselves. And so resumes, in my opinion, they're not for summarizing, they are for selling. Because at the end of the day, the job search process is, it's really a sales process. And the product that you're selling is yourself. So you have to think about it from the other person's point of view, the hiring manager, the recruiter, whoever is reading your resume when they are reading through 10, 20, 100 different resumes and everybody says the same thing, you know, they're a goal oriented, results focused leader, or they are, you know, they're a team player who drives synergy in cross functional roles or whatever it is. Yes, exactly. All that stuff doesn't, it doesn't drive any value. Right. Because if 10 people all say they're result oriented and they're a team player, how do you differentiate between those 10 people? And so the way that I like to approach this is with a specific bullet formula that I've kind of come up with that's based on a field called copywriting. So copywriting is essentially in plain English. The definition would basically be using the written word to drive action or persuasion. And copywriting is a very, very prevalent field within the advertising space. And the main reason for that is because advertisements use the written word to get people to take action, to go buy a product. And people have been studying this for over a century at this point. But the cool part about the times that we live in now is with all of the data that's out there and all the tools that are out there, we've been able to take a much deeper dive into the principles and the strategies that work when it comes to writing effective copy. So you have sites out there that are crunching data points on cold emails and different headlines. And if we think about the headline of an article, I recently read an article out there that says 80% of people only read headlines and only 20% of people actually click through and read the article itself, which.

Wait a minute, let me understand. You mean they're looking through Forbes, they'll only read the headline and not the piece? Is that because they're bored? They don't want to read the piece? Or you mean even if they're compelled about the topic, they actually don't want to read more than a headline?

So that's a really interesting question, and this blew my mind, too. It means that they are just reading headlines and they will click on the ones that they think are interesting. But the importance of the headline is such that nobody is going to click on your piece unless the headline really grabs their attention. And so it's not like they're going and clicking on every article and reading through the first couple paragraphs to see if they like it. They are legitimately just scanning through the headlines and they're clicking on the one that stands out to them. That kind of grabs their attention. And so in advertising, so David Ogilvie is like the grandfather of advertising copywriting. And he basically said, if I have a dollar to spend on advertising, I'm going to spend 80 cents on the headline. That's how important the headline is. And the principles that make up a great headline are very similar to the principles that make up a great resume bullet. We are selling. We want to include measurable metrics. We want to use compelling language. And so I've spent a lot of time studying copywriting. I built my business off of it. You know, I've grown my following on LinkedIn through those same principles. And so I take those same copywriting principles and I apply them to my resume and the people's resumes that I write and that I coach. And it's really amazing. Once you start seeing, you know, once you talk to people and you say, which. Which of these headlines stands out to you? Why? And then you start saying, well, why don't we apply those to your resume bullets? When we transform the bullet, because we start adding in some of these principles, the person immediately says, wow, this is so much better than what I Had before. This really feels like what I was trying to say. The formula that I've come up with, it essentially breaks down like this. So 45% of your bullet, we want to be industry terms, keywords, skills, things like that. Then we want 15% of it to be measurable metrics. 15%, we want to be action, power, compelling words. So instead of saying I increase sales 10%, maybe we say sales surged 10%, they skyrocketed 10% or whatever it is. And then finally, we just want to fill in the rest about 25% with common words. And so let's say we're talking about a person who is vying for a support role, and they say on their resume, I'm responsible for solving clients problems and finding solutions. That's one person. And then maybe the next person says, I created a process that eliminated 40% of a Jira ticket backlog in eight weeks. That is so much more compelling than just saying I help clients find solutions. Because we talk about jira, which is a ticketing system, which is relevant to the role they're applying for. We talk about the that fact that they created this process and then we have those measurable metrics. Reducing tickets 40% in eight weeks is fantastic. And so now that bullet is standing out far, far above and beyond everybody else who's just using that generic jargon. And if we apply that formula to all the bullets in our resume, that is going to create a very, very powerful resume that's not super buzzword focused. It's more value focused. And now we're selling ourselves instead of just summarizing the experience we have.

Holy cow. All right. Whoo. There was a lot there. Can I highlight what I'm hearing? Yes, at the bird's eye level. First of all, when you say resumes are for selling, I want everyone listening to really understand that that it's not just presenting you in this bland way. You times are competitive now you have. And now with digital applications, you know, for every job, there could be a thousand resumes that come through. So you must do a good job of describing why an employer would ever want you. And it will never be with these vague terms. It's going to be what you did, who you did it for, and what happened. The so what of it, which I think is exactly what your bullet just did. What kind of solutions did this person deliver how. And like, could you say that bullet again? You know, the new bullet that you came up with? Because I wanted dissected even more if I could. Could you say it One more time.

Yeah. So if the old bullet is for the support person, you know, if it's responsible for finding solutions to client problems, the new bullet might be responsible or not. I hate starting bullets responsibly. So it might be created new ticketing triage process that eliminated 40% of Jira ticket backlog in eight weeks.

All right, so we have creating, which says they're innovative. Right. What did they create? A new process. A new ticketing process. That did what? Eliminated blip. And what did that do? It, you know, it create, eliminated backlog. Right. So what I think you're really pointing out here is that every sentence, every word is going to attract more of what you want. So be as specific as you can. A lot of people, and I want to ask you this question, don't have metrics. A lot of women push back at me and say, I don't have any metrics. So I want to ask you that in a minute. What do we do when we don't? But you can see how what we're trying to do here is sell, or let's come up with another word, demonstrate clearly the value that I will be bringing, that maybe someone else will not. Would you agree with that?

Absolutely. And it goes back to what we were just talking about, where if there. Because like you said, the competition is stiff. There could be hundreds, if not thousands of resumes for this position. And so if everybody says that they're proficient in Excel, what does that mean? Does that mean that you're the office Vlookup guru, or does that mean that you're responsible for creating this valuation model that values alternative assets on a daily basis? And if you're just saying that you're proficient in Excel, the person reading your resume, they have no context. You know, your experience, you've. You've put in the time, the blood, sweat and tears, you've been through all of that, but the other person is just reading black ink on white paper. And so they don't have any of the context. If you don't make it crystal clear, they're not going to pick up on that. And you, if that's the case, you may lose out to somebody else who wasn't as qualified as you, but just did a better job of illustrating it on paper. And I'm really glad you're going to ask about, what do you do if you feel like you don't have results? Because that's a question that I get a lot. I was going to bring it up if you didn't tell me what do.

We do with that? All right, I don't have these beautiful metrics and, or, and, or I don't even know if the new ticketing process I came up with eliminated backlog. I don't even know what do they do then exactly.

And so a lot of roles out there are not numbers driven. Right. So I work in sales, obviously very numbers driven. Things like support, technical stuff, it's very objective. But maybe if you work in a creative field or if you work in human resources or something that's less numbers focused and that can be a big question. It's one that I get a lot. If we think about the company in general, at the end of the day, everybody there is being paid to do something that's going to impact the bottom line at some point. Whether or not you see it immediately doesn't mean that it's not happening. Because companies want to make money, they want to be profitable. Somebody is looking at the work that you're doing or your team is doing and they're saying, we're keeping these people on because they matter to our business in this way. And so what you have to do is go find the people who care about the end metrics that your work is delivering. So let's take a creative person as an example. Maybe we have a graphic designer and they design all the collateral for this company. They make decks, they make maybe the creative or the image for ads that they run. They make the company's website, they design that and they make their designs and they move on to the next project. And they say, you know, people seem to like my designs. You know, I get good feedback on them. People say they look great and that's wonderful. But when we need to translate that to a resume, just saying that, you know, hey, here's a quote from Johnny in accounting who said, my designs look great. Quote, unquote. That's not the value we're looking for. And so if we take it one step further and we think about the things we created, let's go find the people that that impacted. So if I made that design for a sales deck, let me go find a salesperson and say, hey, you delivered this recently to a client. Did we close that deal? And if so, how much was that deal worth? Or maybe we have that image that we put in an ad. Maybe we're running some digital advertising online. Maybe we go to the marketing team and we say, hey, remember those three images I made for you for the ad campaign? Hey, how did that ad campaign do? How many clicks did we get how many of those clicks resulted in sales, what were those sales worth? And then if we take the final, yeah, if we take the final example of designing the website, we can go to somebody who maybe looks at all the analytics and the metrics on the back end and we can say, hey, how do the metrics differ for this new design that I created versus the old one? How many more people are clicking through to the site? How much longer are they spending on the site? How many people are then spending signing up for the email list versus the old site? And now all of a sudden, because you went to these people who are actually implementing the work that you've done, those people have the metrics. We just have to go chase them down and we have to find those metrics and then we can tie them back to our resume.

Fantastic. I love it. Now I'm going to age myself a little bit, but for a lot of the mid career people I work with, they're out of those jobs now. And I've had people who are 50 years old and they did amazing digital media work, but they can't go back in and get the data. What do you do then? What do you suggest then?

Definitely the best thing that you can do is, well, first I will say, and this is always, this doesn't really answer your question, but for everybody out there, the best thing that you can do starting now is keeping a sheet of all of the projects that you work on and the results that they get. And be it numerical, quantitative or qualitative. And that way when you do hit this situation, you should have a running doc that goes through your whole career and you should be able to go back and say, at this company, I worked on this project and here was the outcome. Now if you don't have that, you are in a little bit of a tougher situation. And I think the best thing that you can do is go find some sort of metric. So if the company was public, you can potentially, and depending on how large the company was or the department you work in, you could try to go find some metrics on that particular quarter, that particular period of time that you were there. If you could try to potentially, I mean, most people don't have access to their emails, but if you also save down your emails, that's something I do before I leave companies, you could go back and look at that or you could just try to think of like a potential ballpark estimate. So you could say, you know, I know that before I did this work there, we had zero results Here, or the company was spiraling in the wrong direction. And I was able to turn that around. Even saying something like taking this specific department or this specific project from zero to enough users to sustain doesn't necessarily have to be a specific metric. But talking about the actions that you took and the results that came from it is going to be much better than just saying, I'm goal oriented or I'm a team player. So you just want to shift the language to, here's the result we got. You know, we added enough users to exceed our goals. And that's much better than just saying, you know, we're, you know, we're, I guess, goal oriented or a track record of exceeding goals. You can say specifically what you did to exceed those goals. So just getting a little bit more specific.

Oh, I love it in so many ways, you know, and I want to just share with you. Do you know I started out as a copywriter in publishing. That was my first job.

Amazing, Amazing.

And I think I want everyone to understand this. When you have an ability to write in this way, everything that you do gets more engagement, gets more notice, gets more attention, gets more traction. So this is a life skill to be able to learn how to speak compellingly, really about everything. But it's also interesting, you know, I've written something like 560 Forbes posts and what you're talking about with headlines, it's so true. There are things that have gone viral. Absolutely. Because of the headline. And I just want to reiterate something. The two most viral posts I've ever had had numbers in them. 7 crippling parenting behaviors that keep children from growing into leaders. That's 8 million views I've got. And on LinkedIn 7, six toxic behaviors that push people away. How to recognize them in yourself and change them. So another thing I think that you're saying maybe in a different way, you know, when we put numbers on a headline and you're talking differently in a resume, but I think what it says to people also is this is digestible. This is something I'm going to get something out of. And it puts like a scope around it. So I think that's why for people who aren't numbers oriented and they're thinking, why do I need all this metric crap for? It's because it helps us understand the scope of your impact. So if you brought in three clients that were worth $5 million versus three clients worth $50, there's a scope change here that makes us sit up and go, holy cow. And the second thing it's just like a headline of a Forbes post. Why do people click on something? Because they're afraid if they don't, they're going to miss out. So if I say seven crippling parenting behaviors, no parent wants to miss that. They don't want to be crippling in their parenting. So in a way, that's what you're also talking about here. How do we present something that a prospective employer would say, wow, I want that. That's exactly what I need. Right. Isn't that kind of what we're talking about?

Absolutely. And I'm really glad you brought it back to copywriting, because one of my good friends, her name is Madeline Mann, and she has a fantastic YouTube channel with career advice. She just posted today and said, what's one of the best skills that you can learn for the job market today? And my answer is always copywriting. I think people tend to say, they're like, oh, learn about AI or these trendy topics or whatever. If you learn how to write in a way that persuades other people to take action in favor of your interests, that is the best thing that you can do, whether you're searching for a job, whether you're trying to sell an idea through internally, whether you're trying to convince a client or somebody else that you're reaching out cold to take an action. Copywriting is so, so powerful because so much of the communication today is written, whether it's via email or whether we're talking on social media or via text message or whatever it is. And if you learn how to write in a way that persuades others, you are going to be at such a huge advantage. And it comes resumes is one thing. LinkedIn is another. You know, somebody clicks on your profile, they see your headline at the top, they go to your about sect and that's what compels them to a recruiter to reach out to you and say, hey, I saw your LinkedIn profile or even on your cover letter, you know, if you have. I was just, I wrote a cover letter for a client of mine and we were talking about it was an education company with educational videos she was applying to, and she's a teacher right now. And her original cover letter was something like, you know, dear sir, you know, I'm very excited about this opportunity for whatever role. And so we changed that. A few months earlier, she had shown a video to her class about this tradition, Spanish tradition called the 12 grapes tradition, which I think is a New Year's tradition for them. And so the company was called Discovery Education. So we opened our cover letter with grapes and Discovery Education. I never thought I'd get so much joy from combining the two of those things.

Oh, man. So I gotta read that. I'm like, what the hell is she talking about?

Right, Exactly.

And you're so pulled in. You're so pulled in.

Exactly.

My gosh, I love it. All right, now tell us what else. Tell us about the bot thing. What do we have to do to make sure that we're getting scanned in the right way and the right words are being used so that we're a good fit, we are recognized as a good fit for the role? What do we need to know?

Yeah, absolutely. So the biggest thing to know is that whenever you press submit on an online application, there's a piece of software on the back end called an Applicant Tracking System, or I like to call them resume scanning robots. But it basically scans your resume and it looks for specific words, phrases, criteria. So years of experience, the job titles that you have on your resume, the key phrases and skills and platforms that you've used, and it matches it up with criteria that the hiring team has put into the tool. And it basically presents a match rate. And so the candidates with the highest match rates, they are basically deemed to be the most qualified. And so one of the biggest issues here is that you may be very qualified, but if you don't tweak your resume or tailor your resume in a way that matches up with what the Applicant Tracking System wants to see, your application is going to be tossed out. And so if you're applying for jobs that you feel like you're qualified for and you're not hearing back, this is probably a very big reason as to why that's happening. But on the other hand, if you are coming from a bit of a non traditional background or you know, you may not meet all the qualifications, you can still give yourself a leg up by understanding what the Applicant Tracking System is looking for and aligning your resume to that. So there's a couple different ways to do this. There's two tools out there that do this very well, but they are paid. So you have to, I think you get 10 free scans for each, and then you have to pay some sort of monthly fee. One is jobscan jobscan co, and the second is skillsyncr skillsyncr.com and both of those, you paste your resume on one side, you paste a job description on the other, and it'll give you a match rate and it kind of breaks everything out. I have a Bit of a free workaround that while it's free, you have to do a little bit of legwork. But essentially there's this website called word clouds.com and I'm sure we've all probably seen a word cloud where it has, you know, all those different words and the ones you know, some are bigger than others and they usually have a fancy design. So that's what Word Clouds is originally intended for. But if we copy the job search or the job description, excuse me, and we go to Word clouds dot com, there's a little button that says word list and then there's another link that says paste type text. If you click that and you paste the job description in and you hit okay, it'll create a word cloud out of all the words in the job description. And then if you go back and press the word list button again, it will tell you specifically how many times each word showed up. And so the words that appear most frequently on the job description are the ones that you want to include in your resume. Now you have to do a little bit of legwork here. So there may be some filler words in there that you want to remove. Maybe the company name, things like the or around or. And exactly you want to get rid of those. And then also you kind of have to put two and two together with, you know, if the role is customer experience manager, let's say customer and experience are going to be on two different lines. We probably want to put two and two together and put them together and make sure that they show up together on our resume. But if you do a little bit of that legwork, this is a free workaround, it works fairly well and that will give you a much better chance of beating the resume scanning robots. When you do press that submit button on your online.

Now, I've got two questions that I truly don't know the answer to. What I've always said is, and tell me if I'm wrong. When you're looking at a job description, it's pretty clear what they consider most important. Here are the top requirements. 5 years in customer service service, you know, I mean, proven da da da in customer support technology. It's pretty clear. Here's the requirements. If you don't match that in any way, you're wasting your time. Really. I mean, you're wasting your time. Well, it's interesting. Research shows that men will apply go for a promotion when they have 50% of the qualifications. Women wait till they have 100%. So I'm not saying if you have Meet all of it, you shouldn't apply. But if you're not a fit for the 5, 10 requirements that they have, something's wrong with this, with this picture. But. Right. Would you agree?

I would say a couple things. I think it's really interesting that you mentioned that I posted something on LinkedIn that said if you don't meet all the qualifications for a job, you should still apply anyways. And I got a lot of flack from recruiters for that post.

But can I just say one thing, Austin? I don't mean you have to match everyone, but if you match none of them, don't apply.

That was what I was going for too, but it was taken to the extreme, which is all good because it's great to have a healthy discussion around it. And this is a great question. I would agree with you that if you don't match any of the qualifications or even like 75% of them, I wouldn't say don't go for the role, but I would say go about it differently. And this kind of goes back to the first conversation we had in the previous episode around how to get a job without applying online. Essentially going and finding those people who might influence your ability to get hired for a role and working to build relationships with them and potentially building something like I call it a value validation project, but essentially a deliverable that illustrates your ability to do the role. The hope there is that you get a referral. You don't have to apply online because somebody passes your resume along. That's the way to go. If you're coming from a very non traditional background and on paper things just don't match up. But if the job requires five years of experience and you have three, or if it requires 10 years of experience and you have seven or eight, you.

Should go for it. Of course.

And if you meet, you know, if they're asking for, you know, hey, do you have Google Analytics experience? But you have experience in this other analytics tool, like definitely still apply for it. So if you look at the job description and you say, yes, I can do this, and my experience lines up, you know, to at least about 50% of what I'm seeing on here, I would absolutely, I would go through the steps we just mentioned with the keywords, I would still apply for that job online, but always, and this is my personal belief and philosophy about job searching. But I think you should only spend about 10, maybe 20% of your time applying for jobs online. I think you should spend the other 80% finding those people who are in Positions to help you get hired, reaching out to them, working to build a relationship. Because at the end of the day, like you said earlier, I think the most recent stat I read was the average job out there gets 350 applications. And we're talking about average being Johnny Sandwich shop around the corner to Google who gets. I think they got 50,000 resumes a week last I saw. So everything in the middle 350 is a lot. And only four to six people are brought in. So no matter how well you optimize your resume, you're still looking at a 2% chance of success when you apply online. So the real thing for me with resumes is not to beat the resume scanning robots. You definitely want to apply online to cover your bases. Don't get me wrong, you want to do your keyword research, you want to make sure you're taking your best shot there. But the resume really shines when you go have a conversation with somebody and that person says, wow, Kathy, you know, this is a great conversation. I'm so glad you reached out. Let me pass your resume along if you don't mind sending it. I'll get in front of the hiring manager and now you're going to read my resume when I send it to you. But then also the hiring manager is going to read it. And that's really where we want our resume to shine. That's where we want that selling over summarizing to come into play. And so that's where I believe the resume is really, really critical. Just because the chances of success when you apply online these days, it's tiny.

Oh my gosh, there's so much to talk about. We need another two hours. Are we already at 30 minutes? I don't like it. Two things I have to say. What was it, you know, what I'm noticing? Well, first of all, this validates what you're saying. The latest research I saw is that 85% of jobs are gotten not through applying online, but through networking who you know and who you've connected with. So that validates exactly what you're saying. And I just want to hit this home for people. You know, as I think I mentioned, my son at is 22 and looking for work extensively. And you know, young people hear these things like, you've got to network, you've got to connect, you've got to reach out, you've got. And especially if you're an introvert, you're like, no, I don't have to do that and I don't want to do that, but he is, you know, having a mother as a career coach. He's hearing this over and over and he's even seeing, at age 22, holy cow. It's who, you know, like he was in the AE PI fraternity and, oh, he sees someone else at the BU Boston U AEPI fraternity and he reaches out. And these people, often, some are not, but many are so generous. Like, oh, so great to hear from you. I'd be happy to talk to you about my trajectory. So please don't make the mistake of thinking if you have a killer resume, that's all you have to do. It's not, it's not nearly all. But to your point and the other point I want to make, I think that now recruiters are immediately going to your LinkedIn profile.

Yeah. So I actually just read a study. Well, study. Study is a generous term. I read an experiment that a company called Resume Go did and they essentially took a whole bunch of different resumes. They bucketed them into three categories. One did not have a LinkedIn profile link. One had a link to a LinkedIn profile that was sort of bare bones. And one had a link to a comprehensive LinkedIn profile. And they found, I think they did this across 20,000 resumes. So about, you know, six resumes in each bucket. They found that the resume with a comprehensive LinkedIn profile actually linked in the resume has a 71% chance, better chance of hearing back when they apply online.

Linked in the resume.

Yeah. So if you, if you have one, you have the comprehensive LinkedIn profile. So the webinar that you're sharing in the link below the show notes, fantastic resource because people need to get to that all star level. They need to make sure that everything is fleshed out. But then they need to take their one, they need to fix their URL if they haven't already, and make sure it's clean. So, you know, yours could be at K Caprino, mine could be a bellsack. We grab that link, we put it in our resume, but not just in black and white. We actually go and hyperlink it in our resume. The study found that you have a 71% better chance of hearing back. And then also you get some visibility in the process. Right, because if I apply to Google and then two days later a recruiter at Google magically shows up and views my LinkedIn profile. Like, I don't think that's a coincidence. Somebody probably saw my resume. And so we have a little bit of feedback there as well. I'm really glad that you mentioned that.

Oh, Good. My God, it's so good. All right, now I want to ask you this because I hear this a lot. What do you think about lying or embellishing on a resume?

It's a big no. No, definitely.

And I think I held my breath.

That goes back to what you're saying.

Why is it so terrible?

Yeah, I mean, lying is never a good strategy really ever in the job search, but on your resume. And this is really where it's important to understand the copywriting and marketing aspect of your resume. Because there are ways that you can make your bullets sound very compelling with the results that you have, let's say. But you can do that without straight up lying. Lying is never a good idea. Saying that you got results that you didn't get or saying you have skills that you don't have and you'll figure them out on the job, that's going to become very clear and very obvious from the get go. And that's going to get you in a lot of trouble. And then on top of that, people are doing background checks. Sometimes companies will have you do a case study. I'm coaching a couple people now who are having to put together a little sales pitch or they're having to put together answers for a specific case study. And the way that the companies are setting these up, it's very obvious. If you don't know what you're talking about, if that's how you're getting in the door, you're most likely going to get found out. And in my mind, it's really not worth the risk because also you're setting yourself up for failure. You know, if you lie on your resume and then you get the job, you're going to have to kind of scramble to make stuff work and it's going to be stressful and it's not going to be a good situation. Whereas if you go find something that matches up with what you know you can do, and it's something that you enjoy doing, and you show up to work knowing that this company took a chance on you because of what you brought to the table. Truthfully, you're not going to be stressed. You're going to be in a much better situation. You're going to be coming from a place of positivity and abundance, which is huge for your well being and your success at that job. So, yeah, lying is a big, big no, no for me with resumes and the job search in general.

I so love it. And I want to add one other thing. As a therapist, we learned about something called muscle testing. And you can look it up, I'll link to it literally. If I put my arm out and someone's and the idea is to keep it strong. If you ask me a question and I'm truthful and then you press on my arm, there's strength there, it doesn't go down. If you ask me a question and I lie, what's my name? Bonnie? Honest to goodness, you can't be as strong. The arm goes like this.

Yeah, I'm going to try that.

As soon as you try it, go try it on someone who doesn't understand, doesn't know the result. But what I have found is you weaker when you lie. So even if you're trying to sound all great, everything is energy and it is sensed. When you're not telling the truth, you become weaker. And I also believe folks, that when we, we lie because we don't really believe that we have what it takes to deal with the consequences of the truth. So either one of those you be that you become weak or you don't think you have what it takes to deal with the consequences of the truth and it's keeping you in a weak, powerless state and that's not who you should be. So I just want everybody to understand that now you have an amazing new resume tool. But before we talk about that and you can tell everybody where to go, is there any other final word, Austin, you want to share about resumes and LinkedIn profiles and anything at all?

I think for me we're sort of moving when it comes to actually landing the interview. I think we're moving away from the resume era and more into the LinkedIn era. That's just my personal feeling, especially, you know, from some of the studies we've seen out there, like the one we just talked about. So one of the best things you can do is when you write your resume, there's a lot of transferable stuff there. So in your about maybe I like to have people always highlight some, what I call case study bullets. So hand picking some of the best experience from any of the jobs in your resume, it doesn't matter how old they are or new they are, whatever. It is just the stuff that showcases you best and putting it right up in your about and then actually taking the bullets from your resume and putting them in the work experience sections of your LinkedIn profile, doing small things like that, it boosts your chances of being found on LinkedIn because people are searching for your profile and all those words are searchable and indexed by LinkedIn search algorithms. But on top of that, your LinkedIn page is where I think something like 90+% of recruiters are sourcing most of their candidates through LinkedIn. Now, like we just said, 71% better chance of hearing back if you have a comprehensive LinkedIn profile. Everything is pointing to the fact that LinkedIn is becoming very prominent. And I think that the main reason I wanted to bring this up is I think that people spend hours and hours and hours tweaking their resume and they spend a fraction of the time focused on their LinkedIn profile. So for anybody who's listening, you know, if you, whatever you're spending on your resume, I want you to take that same time, energy, focus and intensity and put it towards your LinkedIn profile. And you only have to do it once because with a resume we tweak it for every job we apply to. Right. But our LinkedIn profile is more of a general catch all. We can't do that. So you really, you need to get focused in. You need to make sure that you're capturing the spectrum of jobs that you're interested in with the copy that you put in your profile. But you need to invest some time. You do it once. Your profile is going to look great. More people are going to find you through searches, more people who show up at your profile are going to reach out to you. You're just going to improve your chances of getting a job, of getting that interview.

Wow. I wanted chock full strategies and I got it. Austin. Holy cow. I love it. Now tell us about your resume tool and where everyone can read more about that and more about you.

Tell us for sure. So yeah, I just launched this free resume tool and one of the things that frustrated me the most when I was a job seeker was creating a great looking resume that actually got results. Wasn't easy. And all the resume builders out there, they said they were free. And I would spend 20 minutes building my resume and then I would try to save it and I would get slapped with a hey, you need to pay for premium if you want to save it or download it or whatever it was. And that was so frustrating. So I just spent the last couple of months building out a resume tool with applicant tracking system friendly and recruiter approved resume templates. And it's 100% free. There are no limits, there's no fees, there's no subscriptions. So you can find it by going to cultivatedculture.com resumetemplates you can also just go to cultivatedculture.com and right at the very top in the Navigation There's a link to the resume builder. But I went out there, I talked to recruiters at Google, I talked to recruiters at some of the best financial firms on Wall street and Amazon and Microsoft and all these companies. I had them look over the templates. I had them approve the templates. I've run them through ATS scanners myself. The whole everything there is going to set you up for success. It includes all the best practices that I've kind of figured figured out having reviewed thousands of resumes from my audience. It's all baked into the tool and it's all 100% free. So again, cultivatedculture.com resume templates or you can just go to the homepage and at the very top it says next to the blog link, there's a resume builder link right there.

Holy cow, I'm going there. I'm going to send everybody I know to it. Thank you, Austin. And look at you giving it for free. What a generous soul. That's amazing.

Job seeking is tough as it is. And you know, there's so many free tools out there for everybody else, for business owners, for marketers, for salespeople. It's time that time that somebody paid attention to job seekers and gave people who can't afford to pay a coach or whoever for help to give those people a little bit of a leg up and some resources as well.

And I just want to end this by saying, look, I can tell your brain works in such a particular way. When you have a challenge, what you do to overcome it is research what other people have done to do. Like this is how you, you know, got your job at Microsoft, I think, right? You, you, you turn your mess into a message is. Is what I'm saying. Right? I love that your analytical research mind and say, what the heck, we got to figure this out. And then I want to share it with others. Right.

Which absolutely. That's the goal.

You're a beautiful soul. Thank you for sharing all your fantastic tips with us. Come back again. Come back again soon if you'll have me.

Kathy, I will be here. But thank you so much for part two here. I really appreciate it. I had a blast chatting and thank you again.

Thank you, Austin. Folks, if you didn't get a lot from this, I give up. We'd love to hear from you. I know you're gonna head right over. We're gonna have the link below to the resume tool. Give Austin your feedback. Where can they do that? Should it be LinkedIn? If they have thoughts, where should they personally connect with you.

Totally. So anybody can email me. My email is austinaltivatedculture.com I am super active on LinkedIn so you can find me there as well. And then for the resume builder tool, there's a bunch of areas of feedback within the tool but you can also send an email to supportultivatedculture.com if you have a feature suggestion or something's broken or you're having issues or anything else.

Oh my God. Be prepared to be inundated, my friend.

The more the merrier. I love it.

Happy interviewing. We hope this, you know, takes all the kind of guesswork and frantic insecurity out of it. Figure this out because it's time that you shine and get the job and get the role that you want and that you deserve and we're here to help you do it. All right, Have a wonderful week, folks. See you next time. And thanks again, Austin. So fun. Bye.

Thank you, Kathy. Bye.