Dear Sam: I will lose my job in a couple of months due to upcoming layoffs. Thankful to have a little notice to prepare for a transition, I am considering returning to the customer service field. I am concerned, however, as I am over the age of 50, and while I have tried to minimize my age on paper, I feel the format and content of my resume will bore a hiring manager. Would you be able to provide some feedback? – Tim
Dear Tim: I am so sorry to hear about your impending layoff. Allow me to paint a picture of your resume for readers. You open with Qualifications, essentially a brief overview of your administrative, technical, and soft skills. You move on to Education, which contains your high school diploma and two college experiences without reference to what was completed. Employment follows with each position described in a paragraph, spilling to page two with additional jobs presented without descriptions. Your resume ends with a listing of training programs.
I am glad you recognize that your current presentation of your career is not optimal. Let me point out the areas in which you need to revise.
You have omitted all dates from your resume – probably one of the worst things you can do. Not presenting dates does not avoid aging your candidacy; it probably paints a much worse picture than does reality. You must show dates—years only, no need for months—on your resume for a hiring manager to understand the chronology of your career. Most hiring managers want to see about 10-15 years of professional history, so consider dating positions back through that timeframe and perhaps bylining earlier roles without dates.
Your resume reads like a biography. Each paragraph contains brief fragmented statements on select aspects of your role with no prioritization of what was most important. When hiring managers screen your resume, they are looking for the value you contributed in each of your roles and a sense of the context in which that occurred. Currently, I have no way to tell what you did in each of your roles that (1) was more important than anything else you did, (2) added value to your employer over and above your just doing your job, and (3) relates most to your current career target.
Go through each of the engagements you are presenting and think about your position in terms of your scope of work and how you did your job well. Perhaps only include your last 3 roles as this would likely present the expected 10-15 years of experience while capturing what appears to be—based on paragraph length—your most impressive and related role.
Additionally, consider what you are communicating in your education section. Hiring managers assume you have a high school diploma, so that section wastes significant real estate on page one. Additionally, as you have only communicated where you went to college and not what you studied while there, I am left wondering what you pursued and whether you have a degree.
Lastly, updating the aesthetic of your resume is very important in showing a hiring manager a modern presentation of your brand.
There are several samples of resumes on my website, as there are on other reputable sites, in recently published books, and many other places. Just be sure you take cues from up-to-date examples from professional sources, not just from internet searches of resumes, as they are generally not good examples of how you create a personal brand in 2022. All the best.
