This is a YouTube video titled "The Art of Landing Your Dream Job with Mike Richards" containing a monologue by Mike Richards recorded in June 2023. In this content, Mike Richards provides detailed advice on resume writing, including tips on spelling, formatting, personal statements, and how to highlight achievements effectively to impress potential employers.
A lot of people get quite, you know, wound up by their resume and think, oh goodness, you know, what do I have to do? Well, one of the first things you have to do is make sure it's no spelling errors. You know, how hard is it for you to hit on your keyboard? F5. That's all you need to do. Do a quick spell check and make sure it works, then check it again. Now, the number of times I see manger instead of manager, I've seen attention to detail with detail spelled wrong. Don't know why spellcheck doesn't pick that. Don't use boxes. You know, basically anything that distracts you from just a nice plain document which goes through in chronological order about your background is, you know, waste of time. We'll come into in a moment about personal statements and things like that, but it's just some of those and we will share these as well. Professional email address. Yeah, I don't want to see mike has20beersmail.com. That's not true anymore. It's only five beers. But more than that, I want to see something that makes me think, actually this is a professional worth meeting. And your CV will also resume. Will actually tell you or tell the your audience member why they want to meet you and why they should talk to you. So the next question, personal statements. Yeah, as you can see, I'm not a fan. Why A lot of the time I see it saying, well, in fact, we'll just skip on to the next bit just to show you. What should you have in a personal statement? If we go back here, it shouldn't be something saying I'm a motivated individual with a great attention to detail. I'm a Treasury professional. I did this in an audience and I one of actually one of the Windy City conferences. And I actually said to you guys, right, how many people have on it cash management, how many people have foreign exchange? How many people have this? And everyone's hands were going up. I said, so you're really unique, are you? And everyone was like, oh no. So you don't want to have a generalistic personal statement. In my opinion, 50% of people, a lot of the time hate them. So what you're doing is by putting a personal statement on there saying, I'm a motivated individual, you're turning off half your audience, throw it in the garbage. You know, you don't. In the trash can. You don't need that. What you need is either a cover letter or a personal statement that is adapted and targeted towards your audience. How long should it be Now? I've, you know, I've seen, you know, inordinately long resumes which are poor and quite boring to read. I've seen when you've crammed it into one pages and people said, oh, one page, that's all you should read. You know, some people, if you're a treasurer with 20 years experience, how are you going to get all of that and get some meaning into one page? I don't think you need to. I think it can last two to three pages. It shouldn't be, you know, a diatribe. It shouldn't be War and Peace. That's already been written. You know, we've read that, thank you very much. So it needs to be a chronological view, so start with most recent roles and then obviously, less detail as you go back, because you've built on that experience as well. Says there about employment history and things like that. This achievement, that this is the key thing is that when it's, you know, when you're reading that resume, someone is looking at that, they're going to make a decision about you in the first five to six seconds of reading that resume. So what you want to pick out on that, when you say achievements, it's, have you implemented a cash management system? Have you implemented a Treasury management system? Oh, great. Which one and what impact did it have?
