How to Write a 21st Century Resume, with Titus Blair
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Your resume is a crucial tool in your job search, but the process of creating and updating a resume feels outdated. This week’s guest expert, Titus Blair, shares techniques to use automation, analytics tools, and more to customize your resume and bring the job application process into the 21st century.
This Week’s Guest
Titus Blair is the founder of A.I. Resume, a technology company that helps job seekers stand out, manage job applications, and see who really looks at your resume. Titus has built and run successful several startups. He also has been featured on major television stations and in national newspapers and magazines.
Resources from this Episode
- A.I. Resume, (Find Your Dream Job listeners win a free trial of this tool, along with a personal resume consultation, here.)
- How to Find Anyone’s Business Email Address
Transcript
Mac Prichard:
This is Find Your Dream Job, the podcast that helps you get hired, have the career you want, and make a difference in life. I’m Mac Prichard, your host and publisher of Mac’s List.
I’m joined by my co-hosts, Ben Forstag, Becky Thomas, and Jessica Black, from the Mac’s List team.
This week we’re talking about how to write a 21st century resume.
Thanks to new technology, you can build an online resume that will help you stand out and manage your job applications. And you can even learn who looks at your resume. Our guest expert this week is Titus Blair from A.I. Resume. He and I will talk later in the show about how to make the most of these 21st century tools.
You see a job you want. Before you apply, you want to learn more about the position itself but you don’t have any email address for the hiring manager. Ben has a found an online tool that can help. He tells more in a moment.
What should you say about your professional skills that don’t relate to the desired experience in a job posting? That’s our question of the week. It comes from listener Wendy Lynn in Talent, Oregon. Becky shares her advice in a moment.
First as always, let’s check in with the Mac’s list team.
Our topic this week, gang, is the 21st-century resume. Our guest, Titus Blair will share ways listeners can use online resumes to attract employers, measure engagement, and stand out in a crowd. How have you all seen people use online resumes effectively? What examples come to mind?
Ben Forstag:
I think we can all think of the really cool looking resumes that we’ve seen featured on Buzzfeed; The Top Ten Resumes Ever Submitted, things like that. I think those can work, particularly if you’re in the tech field and you’re showing off, “Look how well I can program this website.” I remember one that was particularly good; it was like a video game this guy designed, and every world you got to in the video game, you learned a little bit more about his background, and how he designed it, and built it. Which was really cool.
But I think for most people, that’s probably overkill. I think the best thing you can do, if you’re not in the tech field, is spend some time thinking about keywords and really make sure that you’re pegging the right language and the keywords that the employers are looking for when they type into LinkedIn or Google, the kind of candidates they’re looking for.
Becky Thomas:
Yeah, I think the point about using your resume to showcase what you do…I was thinking about a couple different ones. One is, have a friend who’s a visual designer, so she incorporates some of her personality and some of her visual style into her resume. I have another friend who has two different backgrounds and she created a super simple, personal website that just had her resume, a little bit about me, sort of crafting that narrative. In a way that’s easy for an employer to take a look and be like, “Oh okay, this is what this person is about, here’s the value they offer.” Sort of a broad resume of the basics. Because I think the challenge with online resumes is you have to be somewhat broad because you’re not going to be changing it every time you apply for job. It’s your baseline. So I think it’s good to have that solid foundation for what you have on your online presence, whether it’s on a website, or LinkedIn, or whatever. That’s when I feel like people are doing it right, when they know their identity and they showcase that on their resume.
Mac Prichard:
I’m glad you brought up the personal website, because…
Becky Thomas:
Yeah, people are doing that so much now, and I think it’s great.
Mac Prichard:
I do too, particularly if you have a common name, because it helps you stand out and makes it easier for employers to find you. We should be clear, we’re talking about something different than a LinkedIn page here. A LinkedIn page should not be a resume. An online resume, or a personal website, can let you create something very similar to a resume, and also not only attract the attention of employers, but link to your social accounts. It helps with SEO and draw attention to your work.
Becky Thomas:
Yeah, I sort of see it as your home page. “Here’s me, here’s my resume, here’s how you can contact me.” Super simple but it showcases some of your style.
Mac Prichard:
Yeah.
Ben Forstag:
But I like your point that to some extent, your online resume can be a reflection of the work that you do.
Becky Thomas:
Yeah, your portfolio.
Ben Forstag:
So if you’re a designer, your design skills. If you’re a computer programmer, you’re showing off some of your programming skills by having a really flashy site.
Becky Thomas:
Yeah, but only when it works for you. Not just because you want to be flashy, if you’re a librarian. Not that librarians can’t be flashy, but you know what I mean.
Mac Prichard:
Good.
Jessica Black:
Yeah, no, I was going to say the exact same thing about the personal website. That’s where I’ve seen it done the best. But again, I’m just reiterating what you all have said, about it works most when you have a specified industry. It’s harder if you are a little bit more of a generalist and you maybe are customizing your resume. If you’ve maybe fallen between a couple different industries, and you are customizing a lot more, but it is a big jumping off point. I think it’s always good to have that, like you guys said earlier, to have that visible, and have that showcased. Presenting yourself in that way.
Mac Prichard:
Great. Well good, and I know Titus is also going to talk about why you not only need the online resume, but how you can use it to engage, and track who’s coming to see you, and use that information to connect with employers and ultimately get a job.
Jessica Black:
Yeah, I’m really excited to hear what he says about that because I think that’s the key to the online resume, is the analytical side of things, other than just a static, on your personal website kind of thing, which is wonderful, but you don’t really get to see how people are interacting with that. That’ll be really interesting.
Mac Prichard:
Yeah, great. But first, we’re going to turn to Ben, who’s out there every week poking around the internet looking for tools, books, and websites our listeners can use in a job search or career. So, Ben, what have you uncovered for our listeners this week?
Ben Forstag:
This week I want to talk about one of the challenges that a lot of job seekers face. We always tell people, to the extent you can, always send your application and your resume to the hiring manager. Find their email address and reach out to that person. But unfortunately many job descriptions don’t include the name of the hiring manager, let alone their email address. It can be sometimes a challenge to dig around and get the right email address. The resource I have this week is a web page that is called How To Find Anyone’s Business Email Address and this comes from the website marketingprofs.com.
You may remember way back in episode 47, I talked about a similar resource, and that was called verifyemailaddress.io. Now that was a tool where if you were going to guess what someone’s email address is, you could put it in and see if the internet pinged that and if it was a real email address. That was kind of a guessing game, and I think that’s still an element of finding the right email addresses.
This website tells you how to do a little bit more sleuthing, so you’re making educated guesses about what that email address might be. Lo and behold, the secret to finding people’s email address is…does anyone want to guess what it is?
Jessica Black:
The person’s name at whatever it is.
Ben Forstag:
Well that’s a good guess, but the secret tool, lo and behold, is Google.
Jessica Black:
Oh. Of course.
Becky Thomas:
Ah, it’s so simple. Google is the answer to everything.
Jessica Black:
Yes, of course.
Ben Forstag:
And Google has the answer to everything. So basically what this post does is walks you through Google in a really systematized way, and how to use some of their special operator functions, to find email addresses. Things like searching specific websites for data, instead of searching the entire internet, or how you use quotations, and the ‘and’ sign, and other kind of Boolean search features.
It’s a really cool tutorial to go through that search process, if you’re not familiar with it. In addition to showing you how you can start doing searches to figure out what is the email address that they use for internal staff positions, things like that, at the end of it, they go back and reference those email checkers that I mentioned before. So you can figure out, make that educated guess, then plug it into an email checker and see if it actually pings correctly.
So again, until hiring managers start putting their email addresses on their job descriptions, or at the very least, putting their email addresses in their LinkedIn profile, which I still think is a best practise, there’s this tool you can use to go out and find that email address and get your application right in front of the right person at the organization.
So again, this is How To Find Anyone’s Business Email Address, and it comes from marketingprofs.com.
Jessica Black:
Nice.
Mac Prichard:
Great. Well I know there will be of a lot of interest because that’s a question that we get a lot. How to track someone’s email address down.
Ben Forstag:
Yeah, and I would just ask everyone one more time, if you’re listening to this show and you have a LinkedIn profile (and you should have a LinkedIn profile), please put your email address in the summary section of your LinkedIn profile. It makes it so much easier to find and contact you if it’s right there.
Mac Prichard:
Yeah. Agreed. Well great tip, Ben. If you have a suggestion of your own for Ben, please write him. We’d love to share your idea on the show. Ben’s address is info@macslist.org.
Now, let’s turn to you, our listeners. Becky is here to answer one of your questions. Becky, what’s in the Mac’s List mailbag this week?
Becky Thomas:
So this question came in via Facebook from Wendy Lynn of Talent, Oregon. She asks:
“When customizing a resume, should you leave off skills that don’t match the job or just downplay them?”
This is a good question, and totally relevant to our topic today. You are definitely on the right track that you want to customize your resume based on the job that you’re applying for. There’s a couple things to keep in mind here.
The first one is, you need to customize as much as you can for the job at hand. I would get as specific as you can about the skills that they require. That’s the priority, that’s the first thing you want to do. Whatever the skills that they really want, whether they’re saying, “required skills” or whatever it is. Think about that and get as specific as you can. If the job, for example, is focused on email marketing, you show all your relevant skills, so all of the relevant things that you’ve done specific to that job. For this one, it would be content creation, email templates, list management, automation. List all the tools you can use specifically within that realm . Design tools or software, tools that you have used that are specific to that job. These are direct skills, so they are the priority. They’re what you want to focus on.
Then once you’ve got that down, you may not meet all the requirements. You might not have quite enough to flesh out your resume as your customizing for that specific job, and that’s when you think about the skills that you have that don’t directly match the job.
The thing to think about here is, most of your skills are probably transferable in some way, and we’ve talked a lot about transferrable skills on the podcast. But it’s basically, you break down the tasks you’ve been doing to the basic skills they require. For the email marketing example, you might still list a past job that’s not marketing or email related at all. Like if you were a barista five years ago, you can still reframe some of the skills you used to show the new employer how those skills helped you get ready for the job at hand.
How is your barista experience relevant for the email marketing job you want? Maybe you were in charge of ordering supplies at the coffee shop, and you had built a spreadsheet of all your orders and what was running low – instead of writing “Managed supplies and ordering for the shop,” you could write, “Created a detail-tracking system to automate supply purchasing for the shop, cutting down ordering time by 25%”, or whatever that might be. That might sound like a fancy way of saying what you actually did. But what you’re really doing is, tailoring that skill that you have and you used for a previous job and tailoring it towards the job that you’re applying for. Because that task, it shows that you’re detail oriented and you know how to simplify processes. These are both skills you need to be good at the email marketing job that you want.
You can be flexible, and frame your skills in a way that you’re proving to the new employer that you can do the job. There’s a lot of ways to break down those transferrable skills, because I know sometimes it can get weird and grey area. I did find a worksheet online from PSU that gives you… you look at the key responsibilities in the job and you can break down your past experiences and how you might reframe those skills for the new job.
I think that will get you pretty far into that question. If you have a skill that, “This has no relevance”, I would probably leave it off, unless you’re brand new in your career and you have no other experience, then you should definitely list everything that you have done professionally. But later on in your career, you have some flexibility to mix and match and get as customized as you can.
That’s my advice. Do you guys have any other thoughts there?
Jessica Black:
No, I think that everything you said was great. I was gonna just going to say the same thing of, customizing is excellent, and I think use your best judgement. What you were saying, Becky, of, if you think something is completely out of left field and it’s not relevant to this job at all, and you don’t have enough space, maybe leave it off. But you never know when these things may come in handy, where they may not have fleshed out the job description as much as they intended to or whatnot, and you may list a skill that you have, that they are going to see, and say, “Oh wow, that is actually going to make this candidate so much better and we weren’t even thinking about that skill.”
You just never know, and I think that sometimes it can show your well-roundedness. What you were saying, again, about the transferrable skills, being able to show how your past experience has brought you into a stronger point of view, and a stronger place to be able to do this particular job better.
Becky Thomas:
Yeah.
Ben Forstag:
I think that’s a great point. At the end of the day, you only have the job description to go off of. Obviously you want to give most real estate to your resume to the skills they’re talking about in that job description. But if you’ve got some extra space, there are so many skills that every employer wants, whether they articulate them or not. I just pulled up a website here Ten Skills That Every Employee Should Have. These are things like communication, customer service, empathy, organization, problem solving, ability to research and gather information, and teamwork.
If you’ve got some experience that speaks to those skills, and you’ve got the space in your two page resume, then yeah, why not throw them in there?
Becky Thomas:
Yeah.
Mac Prichard:
Well great advice, and I really like the fact that you’ve dug up the transferrable worksheet. For her, the transferrable skills worksheet.
Becky Thomas:
Oh yeah. It such a good thing to write things down and it’s going to help your process a lot, Wendy. So good luck.
Mac Prichard:
Good. Well, thanks, Becky, and thank you, Wendy. I think this is the second time we’ve had a question from Wendy.
Jessica Black:
It is.
Becky Thomas:
It is, yeah. Thanks for asking.
Mac Prichard:
Great. Well I know we’ve sent her a book once, so I don’t know if we should send her a second one.
Jessica Black:
She told us she didn’t need a second one.
Mac Prichard:
Okay.
Jessica Black:
But she likes the first one.
Mac Prichard:
Well good. If you do have a question for Becky, please email her. Her address is info@macslist.org. You can also call our listener line; that area code is 716-JOB-TALK. Or send us a message on Mac’s List Facebook page, like Wendy did.
However you reach out to us, if we use your question on the show, as we did with Wendy, we’ll send you a copy of Land Your Dream Job Anywhere.
We’ll be back in a moment. When we return, I’ll talk with this week’s guest expert, Titus Blair, about how to write a 21st century resume.
Now let’s turn to this week’s guest expert Titus Blair.
Titus Blair is the founder of A.I. Resume, a technology company that helps job seekers stand out, manage job applications, and see who’s really looks at your resume.
Titus has built and run successful several startups. He also has been featured on major television stations and in national newspapers and magazines.
He joins us today from Ormond Beach, Florida.
Titus, thanks for coming on the show.
Titus Blair:
Hey, thanks for having me.
Mac Prichard:
Yeah, it’s a pleasure.
Now Titus, our topic this week is the 21st-century resume. Can you tell our listeners what we mean when we say 21st-century resume? What does that look like?
Titus Blair:
Yeah, that’s a good question, because people have never really heard of it, because we’re used to using the 19th or 20th-century resume. Which is like a printed item that you mail in or email. The 21st-century resume is more of a resume that’s dynamic, engaging, uses modern technology, and you’re able to track it, watch what people are doing.
Mac Prichard:
So what are some common examples that people might recognize when they go on the web? What does it look like in addition to those features you mentioned?
Titus Blair:
If you’ve ever been to a really well-designed website, that’s responsive, that means you can expand things, good colors, and good design, that is the core of what the electric resume is. To make sure that it’s a very engaging, good looking resume, first of all.
Mac Prichard:
Okay, and to be clear, we’re not talking about LinkedIn profiles here. This is a stand alone micro-site. I think for many people, what often comes to mind are personal websites, where people might express their professional experiences and maybe include portfolios of work. Do you have other examples in mind, in addition to those personal websites people might use in their job search?
Titus Blair:
Well yeah, these days, there hasn’t been much revolution in resumes. When people think about resumes, they think of static resumes. Like you said, there are sites like Strikingly, and stuff so people can make their own designs. So it’s kind of like having your own resume, that’s hosted online, that gives you a lot of information that you never get normally from your resume. That’s the useful part of it. It’s like a resume in the Cloud, would be a good analogy.
Mac Prichard:
Okay, so you talked about the features of an online resume. Let’s talk about, when you want to do one, how do you get started, Titus?
Titus Blair:
Well yeah, for what we’re talking about today, because I like to get people’s skills regardless of whether they would use the resume. There are some key components to a 21st-century resume, that I can cover if you want.
Mac Prichard:
That would be great.
Titus Blair:
There’s automated nature, there’s intelligent, data driven, and engaging. So those four things, and we can talk about it if you want more information about each one, how you can make a 21st-century resume on your own.
Mac Prichard:
Okay, yeah, why don’t you take us through that. You know, the people who are listening are saying, “Okay, it’s automated, it’s intelligent, it’s data driven and engaging. But I’m sitting at my computer, I want to do this. How do I get started?”
Titus Blair:
Yeah, if you want to try it out, you can go to A.I. Resume.com, and then you would just sign in, and put in your resume details. So it’s simple, in regards to getting an A.I. resume going.
Mac Prichard:
I know that’s your site, but speaking of, are there other sites that people can use or ways they can apply these principles in building out a 21st-century resume?
Titus Blair:
Definitely. Talking about those four components, they go together. So if you want to automate, one of the things you should do in a 21st-century resume, is you need to automate your job search. So that’s the first component of whether you use the A.I. resume or not, that you would like to do. A lot of people go on sites like Indeed or Monster, and there’s things called job alerts. So it’s ways you can kind of get a new job in your email every day, related to things you’re looking for, based on your location. So the first step I recommend when you want to do a 21st-century resume, is get your job search automated by getting job alerts.
Mac Prichard:
Great tip. I know in addition to emails, you can get those often depending on the site, by text messages too. What about intelligence? You mentioned that as the second of the four qualities of a 21st-century resume. How do you make your online resume intelligent?
Titus Blair:
That’s a great question. You need to send it off to college. No, I’m just kidding.
Mac Prichard:
I like that.
Titus Blair:
Yeah. You send it off for training and it comes back a lot more intelligent.
Really, these days, a lot of people do different things. Sometimes they’ll have a professional look it over. I also recommend, in regards to what I do, is you need to study the companies that you’re applying to. Look at their feeds that they have on Twitter, any social stuff they have, things in the news. Use Google trends, so you can kind of get intelligence about the company, about the position that you’re applying to specifically.
Then when you write your cover letter and you’re putting in your job skills, that you make sure to put that in there, specifically targeted, using that intelligence that you’ve learned about the company and the position. So that when they look at it, you fit exactly to the role that they’re looking for, and also you show that you understand and you’ve done some homework about the company.
So that’s the part about putting intelligence in. We also use artificial intelligence now; there;s the technology to do some cool stuff. That’s kind of complicated. I’d say if you want to start doing this on your own, get as much information as you can about the company, using social media and other channels, and Google trends specifically. So you can really make your application targeted for that company.
Mac Prichard:
Okay, so just to paint a picture for our listeners; you’re doing this research and you’re creating a unique resume for that application. Could it be, Titus, that the application requires that you send it in as a pdf, or an online form? But do you also recommend that you take that unique resume and post it online and share that url with the employer too?
Titus Blair:
Definitely. Yeah, the reason you want to have some sort of link where you can direct people is because you can track that link. When you give someone a .pdf or a document, there’s no real way to track it, what they’re doing with it, how they’re looking at it. So I recommend this to people who are using A.I resume (because we do generate those links for people), is that when you write your cover letter, because there’s a lot of automated systems when you apply, and they’ll ask for a cover letter, so you can upload it. I recommend that you put in the cover letter, “Hey, I designed this custom resume for you; it’s targeting exactly why I’m a good fit for the company. Take a look at it.” Then you provide the link.
So the cover letter is kind of like a landing page into your real resume and that really converts well.
Mac Prichard:
Let’s talk about the benefits of that, because I think that brings us to your third point, which is that these 21st-century resumes are data driven. So it’s good to know that you provide a link that someone can just click through, but what else can you learn by using this approach? What are the benefits of doing that, Titus?
Titus Blair:
That’s a great question, and this is the really exciting part about technology today, is you can direct someone to your custom resume. Then what you can do is you can capture a lot of information. You can capture what they look at, how long they spend, for example, if they are looking at your skills area, and they really focus on something, a particular skill. You will know it, they’re very interested in that. If you get a call, you’ll know, “Hey, this is something they’re going to be talking about.”
Also you can see how many times, and from what locations, someone accesses your resume. So if they’re passing it through the team, if you’re applying for a job on the east coast, but they forward it to the west coast. It’s possible they may have positions there that are a good fit for you too. So you get really good information about how they’re engaging with your resume.
Mac Prichard:
Okay, so you had mentioned engagement being the fourth value. Anything else you want to say about the benefits of engagement that you get from using an online approach like this?
Titus Blair:
Yeah and I’ll tell you a quick story, real quick, about data driven.
Mac Prichard:
Sure.
Titus Blair:
I think you’ll like it.
So a long time ago, I created a resume for myself because I was just tired of sending resumes out and never knowing what in the world was happening. Was anybody looking at them? It was kind of discouraging. So I built it so that I could track that and I immediately saw that the resumes I sent out were being viewed. What was really cool was I could see and estimate, based upon this data-driven information, when I was going to get a call. So I would look at it, and I would watch, and all of a sudden I would get ten, twenty hits in a couple of days on the same resume, for a company. Then I’d get a call or an email and I was not surprised. I knew it was coming in.
Mac Prichard:
Yeah.
Titus Blair:
Then also after, right before I did the interview, they’d hit my resume a few times, so I knew they were kind of taking a look at it, and here’s the great part. Oftentimes, after an interview, you never know, “Okay, was it good? Was it bad? Did they like me, did they not?” I would know if they liked me and if there was a second interview coming up, because all of a sudden, my resume stats would blow up. I would see a lot of hits after my interview.
So I knew, “Okay, they’re really looking at it, they’re getting more serious.” And that was usually a good precursor to getting a second call, or in the end, a job. So that was really exciting.
Mac Prichard:
I know you all offer services for people who want to create resumes at your company. Are there other off-the-shelf tools that people can find online that can help them set up an online resume, and provide these kinds of tracking features, that you can recommend as well?
Titus Blair:
Yes, and that goes right into the engaging part of the 21st-century resume. But there are sites, and you can look them up when you search. There’s Wix or strikingly; they’ll let you build your own little custom page. So you can custom design it however you wish. There’s also some plugins and things that you can use, like Snipply, and they let you do some popups and things. So the popups are really cool for the 21st-century resume, because you can have messaging pop up at certain times, or after they’ve visited your resume a certain amount of times.
Then video, like Youtube. Everyone who’s listening today, I’ve got to tell you, get a video of you on Youtube, talking about your skills, and I would customize it for each application you do. I can’t recommend this enough. When we hire at A.I. Resume, it’s part of the requirement when you apply is to do a video. So I would recommend that. It gets you a good, cutting edge advantage when you say, “Hey, so-and-so company, I would like to apply for the job, these are some of the skills I have…” because sometimes you can say a lot more than you can write down, and that can convey your personality a lot better.
So those are some free ones. To recap for you, there’s strikingly, and Wix are kind of for your own design. Snipply is a good custom popup company. Then also, you can use Google Analytics and there’s companies called Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics that you can use as well for analytics for your 21st-century resume.
Mac Prichard:
Great. Just to go back to video for a moment, any tactical recommendations about the length of a video like that, and key points that people should make? I’m guessing it’s probably a few minutes in length, and it’s talking about who you are, and why you want the job. But what have you seen in your experience to be effective, when people are creating videos like this?
Titus Blair:
Well, it’s going to sound funny, but not to make a cookie cutter. Because I have gotten videos where it’s just like, “Hello…” and you know it’s been sent to every company. You’ve got to make sure you customize it. So length, for me, most people are engaging up to a minute. Think about a movie trailer pretty much. So you want to keep it really short but also address, specifically how you can help the company, and your passion for what you’re going to be doing with the company itself and the work you’re going to be doing. Because coming off of this as being a boring, not interested, is also going to show them that you may not be interested in the position, or you might not be a hard worker, or excited about what you’re going to be doing.
So definitely, come across as excited and passionate about what you’re going to be doing, and that you really want to serve and help that company.
Mac Prichard:
Okay, well a lot of the principles that you’ve laid out here, are things that I think are timeless. Creating custom resumes, thinking about the needs of employers, but the tools have changed, haven’t they?
Titus Blair:
Definitely, and what you get by the way. Never before could you have… like right now, you can watch…with A.I. Resume, you can watch what people are doing in real time on your resume. So if I sent that out, I could watch if a future employer looks at it, what they’re doing exactly. So it’s pretty amazing.
Mac Prichard:
Great. Well terrific, Titus, it’s been a great conversation. Now tell us, what’s coming up next for you?
Titus Blair:
What’s coming up next? Well, I love to travel, so I’m going to be travelling with my family. Travelling all around, and of course, growing A.I. Resume, and speaking about that. So just exciting times ahead, and enjoying the sunshine in Florida.
Mac Prichard:
Great. Well I know people can learn more about you and the work you do by visiting A.I.resume.comand I know you have a special offer for our listeners at A.I.resume.com/contest/macslist.
Titus Blair:
Yes, we’re going to be giving away the pro version. Which is like the works, it’s everything you can imagine. Plus, I personally am going to be helping people get a job. Those who win, will have me personally helping them with what I know.
Mac Prichard:
Great. Well thank you, Titus, I’ve enjoyed our conversation. Thank you for being on the show.
Titus Blair:
I really appreciate it, it’s been great being here.
Mac Prichard:
You’re welcome, take care.
We’re back in the Mac’s List studio with my colleagues. What were some takeaways you all got from my conversation with Titus?
Becky Thomas:
The main thing that I got out of it was that the current resume process is really outdated. Realizing how many tools are out there that we can optimize our resumes to get audience data, and who’s looking at it. The normal way is just to write it in a Word Document, save it as a .pdf, send it out, and you have no idea. So I think there’s so many possibilities here. I think that it’s something that will only be growing in the job search industry. That employers are going to start expecting more of this interactive experience from the applicant. So I think it’s definitely on job seekers to learn more about this and explore and figure out what they can do for their own job search.
Mac Prichard:
Yeah, it’s a good point. As you talk, Becky, it reminds me of websites, and I’m dating myself back to the 90’s, and we thought, “Oh it’s so cool that we can reach all these people.” But we didn’t understand the real value, the real change, was that you could actually eventually see who was coming, what they cared about, and that gave you insights into how to serve them better, how to engage them better.
Becky Thomas:
Right. Yeah, I think this is just the evolution of that. Everything is becoming that way.
Jessica Black:
Yeah,
Ben Forstag:
There were two points that I really liked.
First, was his emphasis on creating a video, which I think is…
Jessica Black:
Yeah, I thought that was interesting too.
Ben Forstag:
I mean, I’ve seen people do video resumes, and sometimes you roll your eyes, but… so we know that an employer, the first thing they’re going to do is Google you, if they’re interested. They want to get some background information. It just so happens that one of the highest ranked Google results is going to be video. So if you have your name on a Google video, imagine how cool it’s going to be if an employer types in your name, and the first thing they see is a video about how you want to work for them. It’s just like this little piece of marketing, and it’s a gimmick, but it’s a gimmick that would totally work. I really like that idea.
I also really like the idea that you can see that an employer is coming and looking at your resume, and how often they’re looking at it. It reminds me of kind of like LinkedIn, where you can see people on LinkedIn who are checking out your profile. I remember, the last job I applied for, which, do you know what employer that was, Mac?
Mac Prichard:
Uh, Mac’s List?
Ben Forstag:
It was Mac’s List. I could tell that I was getting some traction with the employer, because first you looked at my profile, and I saw that. Then after my first interview, everyone else in the organization looked at my profile. So I was like, “Okay, something good’s happening here, they’re checking me out. Hopefully they’re not turned off by the profile photo.” But it’s cool that you can do that with your resume as well and get some good analytical feedback from that process.
Mac Prichard:
Yeah.
Jessica Black:
Yeah, I mean, we’re living in a data-driven world right now, automated, and all of those things. I think what he said about 21st-century resumes being automated, intelligent, data driven, and engaging, those are all really important areas. I know you mentioned this in your interview, Mac, about having an intelligent resume in terms of customizing it to the employer’s needs specifically, and doing your research. He mentioned doing research and all of that. That’s something that we tell job seekers to do now, and that’s something that’s expected. But I think the data-driven component of it is just going to… what you guys have all said already. It’s just going to make a huge difference. Both for the employers and the job seekers.
So I think it’ll be interesting to see how this evolves, because I think it’s still in the early stages of being relevant. But I think it’s already really relevant and really exciting.
Mac Prichard:
I agree with you, Jessica, it’s early days.
Jessica Black:
Early days, yeah.
Mac Prichard:
But it’s important to become aware of these principles and think about ways you can apply them.
Jessica Black:
Yeah. You don’t want to be the last adopter, still hand-delivering your resume to places.
Becky Thomas:
If you start doing this stuff now, you can get good at it while other people are still doing it the old way. Once it’s mainstream, you’re going to be really good at it. So it really only behooves you to get on it.
Mac Prichard:
Good, well great feedback. I enjoyed that conversation with Titus. Well, thank you all. Thank you, our listeners for downloading today’s episode of Find Your Dream Job.
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