Robynn Storey - Writing Better Resumes with Storytelling

Robynn Storey is the owner of Storeyline Resumes, the largest privately held resume-writing service in the US. Storeyline has been helping senior-level and executive professionals write better, story-driven resumes for over 24 years.  

In this episode, Robynn talks about how to use the power of storytelling to your advantage as your write or update your resume and how to find success in job searches. 

Chapters

[0:00 - 5:01] Introduction

•   Welcome, Robynn!

•   Today’s Topic: Writing Better Resumes with Storytelling

[5:02 - 13:26] How can you build a better resume?

•   Why your resume should tell a meaningful story and how

•   How to navigate keyword requirements for ATS

[13:27 - 29:15] How to conduct the best possible job search

•   Leverage multiple tools and people connections; don’t just rely on job boards

•   What it means when a company instantly rejects you

[29:16 - 36:50] How to focus on your story when writing your resume

•   Every story should be rooted in success

•   How long should your resume be and how much of your experience should it include?

[36:51 - 37:55] Closing

•   Thanks for listening!

Quotes

“What you need to be describing [on your resume] is your impact [at your company] and how that is being measured.”

“Use a combination of [job search tools]—don’t get so caught up on just using the job boards.”

Contact:
Robynn's LinkedIn
David's LinkedIn
Dwight's LinkedIn
Podcast Manger: Karissa Harris
Email us!

Transcript

Announcer  00:02

Here's an experiment for you. Take passionate experts in human resource technology. Invite cross industry experts from inside and outside HR. Mix in what's happening in people analytics today. Give them the technology to connect, hit record for their discussions into a beaker. Mix thoroughly. And voila, you get the HR Data Labs podcast, where we explore the impact of data and analytics to your business. We may get passionate and even irreverent, that count on each episode challenging and enhancing your understanding of the way people data can be used to solve real world problems. Now, here's your host, David Turetsky.

David Turetsky  00:46

Hello, and welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast. I'm your host David Turetsky alongside my friend, partner, colleague, buddy, and also Salary.com associate Dwight Brown, Dwight, how are you?

Dwight Brown  00:57

I'm good, David, how you doing?

David Turetsky  00:59

I'm okay. I got a cortisone shot today. Not the best surprise anymore.

Dwight Brown  01:04

Those are always fun to get. Just like every shot.

David Turetsky  01:08

Yeah, this one hurt a little bit, which I'm a goalie I usually don't cry when I get shots.

Dwight Brown  01:14

You're big wimp.

David Turetsky  01:15

Well, hey, Dwight, today we have a phenomenal brilliant guest, today we have with us Robynn Storey. Robynn, how are you?

Robynn Storey  01:26

I'm good guys. How are you doing?

David Turetsky  01:28

Better now. Now that you're here.

Robynn Storey  01:31

Definitely the magic shot.

David Turetsky  01:34

So Robynn, tell us a little bit about you and a little bit about your company.

Robynn Storey  01:39

My name is Robynn Storey. I own the Storyline Resumes. We're the largest privately held resume writing service in the US. We cater to primarily senior level executives. We've been in business for 24 years, we've got an US based team here of 70 folks that help executives from primarily North America and a bit around the globe, tell to tell their best professional story so they can go out there and win jobs win board appointments. And win in life.

David Turetsky  02:08

Outstanding. Cool. So Robynn, what's one fun thing that no one knows about Robynn Storey.

Robynn Storey  02:14

And then some right. And that sounds it's I started this business, I left corporate America, because my one goal in life was to get my kids on and off the school bus. And I couldn't do that if I had to be in an office. So I convinced my husband that I could, you know, start a business and and he said you can do whatever you want if you pay for groceries. I don't care if you don't get a paycheck. But if you make enough to pay for groceries every week, then you know, I can float us and I said okay, that sounds great. So I couldn't even make enough to pay for groceries. So I left a corporate job at Pepsi and I ended up becoming a waitress. And I sort of started getting my business running the kids were little. And I wrote resumes and did a little consulting during the day. And then my husband would come home for work and I would go wait tables at night. Once I got over feeling like I needed to tell everybody that you know I was someone important. Of course I wasn't. You know, coming from corporate America, I was a terrible waitress. But I had a wonderful time and love people. And thank goodness, the resume business began to boom. So now of course, here we are 24 years later, and I buy all the groceries.

David Turetsky  02:51

It's probably very close to her. A lot of people, you know they have these interesting journeys. And it takes them in strange directions. But I think we all worked in not only retail, but I think all of us have worked in food service for one point or another. I've been a busboy. I've been a waiter. Yeah, I like doing what I do now better. But

Robynn Storey  03:39

My grandmother was a waitress for 60 years. My grandfather was a bartender, both of my kids have waiting tables. And I tell this funny story about my daughter who is a educated, she's educated in New York City, she went to Wagner. She wanted to be a book editor her entire life. And she's just a brilliant person. She actually now runs the day to day for Storyline Resumes. And she's been doing that for the last four or five years. But before that she spent many years working in New York City. But when she was a kid, in college, she was applying for an internship. And there were like 800 people that applied for this internship. And she ended up beating out 800 folks to get this opportunity. And one of the key things that they looked for was, did you have a bit of experience in working in the food industry as a waiter or waitress or bartender, they find it to be invaluable, which I thought always was so funny, but it was like the one you know, thing that they were looking for. And I find that with a lot of entry level candidates, companies are looking for the same. So you know, don't discount that, you know, working at the burger shop in the summertime.

David Turetsky  04:45

And I think that flows well into our topic. So let's get started. So today we're going to be talking about the most effective resume and job search strategies. How do people build a better resume? So, you know, how do they actually tell that story in a way that will get them to whatever their job is for that for whatever they're looking for.

Robynn Storey  05:13

So I think the most important thing is that you are being effusive that you are showing passion that you are telling a story on your resume, that means something to someone. So I'm giving you a little example, a couple of weeks ago, have a book coming out next month. And so we did this little promotion on LinkedIn, if you want to preorder the book, you know, we're doing mini resume review, we ended up getting like 400 pre orders. So we've been knee deep into the resume reviews for weeks and weeks out, wow. But the thing that I'm seeing consistently, and resumes that people are sending over for a mini review is it's 90%, their job description and 10% of their accomplishments, that number needs to be flipped. If you are an operations executive, a salesperson, a nurse, an accountant, a teacher, you do not need to describe your job for the reader of your resume, if they're hiring, they already know what it is that you do, right? What you really need to be describing is your impact and how that is being measured. So an example that I'm going to give you, if you're an operations person, whether or not you're an operations manager, or a supervisor, or an executive, or whatever the case may be what you really need to be looking at when you're creating your resume or working with a company like ours to create it. What are the KPIs or the requirements that you're grading on. So if you're getting a performance review, a couple of times a year or once a year, you get goals that are set for you, you have of your goals that you need to meet, those are the kinds of things that you need to be talking about on your resume. So for the sake of argument, say you're a production manager in an industrial facility, and your job is to help reduce turnover, improve safety outcomes, and increase productivity. Those are the things you want to talk about on your resume. So we love to start with the backstory. What was going on whenever you got here in this role, where was productivity struggling? Where was it failing? What did you identify as the root cause? And then what are some of the actions that you took to improve that? And then how are you measuring that? So productivity increased by 20%? What does that mean in real dollars, when maybe that saves the company $400,000 a year, that detail, that sentence is going to be a hell of a lot more meaningful than saying I improved productivity. So you want to make sure that whenever you're using this what I call valuable resume real estate between these two pages that you're that you've been given to make an impression on someone that you're using it wisely. And you're saying something meaningful to me.

David Turetsky  07:38

I totally agree with everything you just said, except are we actually selling a person these days on a resume? Or is it we have to get by the AI that's looking for keywords? Right? So is a resume different today than it used to be?

Robynn Storey  07:53

Yeah, I mean, definitely, resumes are very, very different. We use AI in a number of ways here on ATS is often misunderstood. ATS absolutely is a system that recruiters use to vet in sort of classified levels of candidates and whether or not they meet the criteria, but most of reviewing of resumes is still being done by a human, you just have to get through the ATS part. A lot of times that comes from qualifying questions or venting questions. A lot of that times that comes from keywords that appear on your resume, right. So on the writing side, for instance, what we do here? Well, first of all, we never use AI to develop a resume because AI cannot tell a story of genuine success because it doesn't know you right? That comes from a conversation that you have with one of our interviewers, what we do do is when we work with a client, every single one of them all 250 of them each and every week that they come through our doors, we happen to do a little bit of homework where we're going to have them do they do like a mock job search, they're going to go online, LinkedIn, job boards, whatever, they're going to find a couple of positions that they're interested in. We take those job postings, we drop it into AI and we say tell us the 10 top keywords that you were seeing in these job requirements, these job descriptions that the client has provided, sometimes they seem to sometimes they send three sometimes they send time, then what we do is once we've identified what the common things are that people are looking for companies are looking for in that particular function, then we make sure in an organic and genuine way that those keywords are being included in their resume. We're not loading them anywhere hidden in the resume, but we're telling that story. So an operations that might be KPI might be budget, it might be cost containment, it might be people retention, it might be whatever. So whatever those words are, that's what we're focusing on. We're telling your story. So now you don't need to take your resume and then customize it for every job that you're applying for. Because 99% of the time, though, keywords that the people we're looking for, and the jobs that you're applying for is now organically built into that resume. That's an effective job search when you're constantly tailoring retailer and trying to change looking at job postings. Try had to come up with examples that makes people crazy. And they don't want to apply for a new job job searching is long enough, miserable enough and challenging enough as it is to have to customize something every time you want to apply for a job, or you want to click Apply.

Dwight Brown  10:13

And yet for for the longest time, that's been what everybody's been coached to do, as you have to customize your resume, you got to customize your cover letter. And I would imagine some of that still needs to be done. But it's nice not to have to do as much of that.

Robynn Storey  10:29

Yeah, I mean, you know, we'll say to a client, you know, customize your headline. So if you so I always use cells as an example, you're a salesperson, that also means that you could be an account manager, you could be a business development representative, you could be a key account manager, or major account manager and account executive, whatever, there's 27 different job titles for a salesperson in this country. So if you're online, and you're applying, and they're looking for a skill, the Business Development Executive, you're gonna use that language in your headline on your resume, there's very few things you need to change on a resume. When you're telling the story that aligns with the goal. Now, you know, then we run into a caveat. So say, for instance, you're in business development, you don't want to be in business development anymore, you want to be in marketing, then you need to figure out a way to talk a little bit about how you should you know how your experience aligns to marketing and then your resume would have to be changed. That's a conversation for another day. But if you know the kind of job that you're going after, it's maybe a tweak here or there. But I think that we're probably the only rather resume service that suggests that you do not customize your resume. There's a couple of reasons for that. Right now, there's a lot of what we call fake jobs. So big jobs are posted by companies. And this is not me saying this was this has been covered by the New York Post and the Forbes and many other publications, what we're finding out that a lot of job openings have been sort of created to prop up jobs numbers. They're also created to make your investors, your shareholders or stakeholders or customers, it makes it look like you're really busy. Look how many people are hiring, we're growing, there's lots of jobs available on the website, it is said that something like 50% of jobs that you apply to are no longer valid. So either they are not real, they have already been filled, they're going to be filled internally, or they are the same jobs that get posted and posted and reposted. And that's a very common theme and a job search. Anybody looking for a job or has been looking for a job for the last year will tell you that they see the same jobs posted over and over and over. So that's what we're talking about with fake jobs, there's no job that you can't fill really in a couple of months, right. So that's the first thing. So you want to make sure that you're playing a numbers game when you're, you know, creating your applications when you're applying for positions. So if you apply to 50 jobs, you're maybe getting considered for 25 Maybe, and then once you sort of whittle away, okay, well, three of these jobs are going to hire someone internally, five of these jobs have been put on hold for these jobs are under paying for, you know, the position, title or requirements. Now you've, you've applied to 50. But now maybe you're talking to 10 jobs. That's why it's so important that you send out as many applications as many resumes and you get in front of as many people as humanly possible. Because what really gets through is a very miniscule amount.

Announcer  13:16

Like what you hear so far, make sure you never miss a show by clicking subscribe. This podcast is made possible by Salary.com. Now, back to the show.

David Turetsky  13:25

The second question was about conducting a job search too. And you covered a little bit of that. But if you had like your advice for people about how they can conduct the best search possible, we already heard your advice about, you know, that you're you're going to be cut down where your your available opportunities are really cut down. But what would you suggest they do? Where would they spend their time? What's the best use of time and trying to find the next best assignment for people.

Robynn Storey  13:52

Sure, I mean, the best approach to a job search is really to use a combination of things, right? So we hear so often, that people are applying for a job and they've sent out one to 500 1000 resumes, and they're not really getting any results or not getting the interviews that they want, but they continue doing the same things over and over. So we find that when you have a mix in your approach, a little bit of job board, a lot of LinkedIn, some networking, what I call the Friends and Family Network, going on company websites and identifying opportunities, making friends connecting with headhunters and recruiters that are open to dialogues and conversations. People that are in a higher executive level, do what I call the coffee meeting approach, where they have enough street cred to reach out to an Executive leader within an organization and say, Hey, I'd love to meet you for coffee and talk a little bit about opportunities within your organization. Those are great ways to do not everyone's going to have the ability to do that. Right. The bottom line is really use a combination of things don't get so caught up on just using the job We see a lot of people go into job boards, and they're spending a majority of their time there, that should just be a little bit of a portion, use LinkedIn, which I think has probably the best job board, it seems to be more accurate maintained up to date, then you want to do the networking piece. So we'll have clients on of our services that never really send out a resume or apply for a position online. You know, they they've been in, in industry, they've got friends, they have peers, they have former clients, they've got former bosses. And you know, when they're either looking for a job, or they've lost their job, they'll make a list of 40 people there, they're going to reach out to them and get on the phone, they might send an email, Hey, you know, he had just lost my position, you know, can you let me know who in your organization might be a good fit for me to have conversation with, when you ask people to do something for you, and it takes less than a minute for them to do it, that's a really good, great way to get an in with a company. So a lot of times people will focus on the networking piece. And a lot of times, folks will focus on other avenues. I love this approach, I think it's a great approach. If you are working in an industry and you want to stay in that industry, make a list of the top 50 companies in that industry, it doesn't matter geographically, where they are, if they're small, medium, or large, get all those 50 company websites set up a job alert on their job board 99% of company websites are going to have a jobs board or jobs careers page. And then now you put the Internet to work for you. Every time a position becomes available that you know, it meets the criteria of the job that you're after, you're gonna get an alert, you get that email, you click in, you apply, you're done. Those are things that are very turnkey, where people sort of get caught up with this very demanding and time consuming job search is they're doing the same things over and over. They're getting online, they're checking a job where they're looking for updates. And instead of setting up alerts, they're going to accompany site, they're searching for jobs, instead of setting up alerts, technology is really here to work for you. So put it to good use, and that will make your job search much easier.

David Turetsky  17:02

I gotta be honest with you, I was in a job search a few years ago. And it was one of the most frustrating times of my life, because I did a lot of the things you talked about. Now, I was trying to grow a business at the time, but I was applying for roles in various places. And not only did I not get interviewed, I only got interviewed maybe two out of 150 or 200 resumes I sent out. But the ones that I got rejected for I got rejected for within seconds. And so when we talked about AI before, it wasn't even a question of was my resume, okay or not? Was my background, okay, or not even getting the you know, you talked about targeting, and it's really brilliant, I love the being more personal and getting, you know, the, you know, establishing the relationships and going that direction, because I gotta be honest with you, the boards, they're just, they're just getting frustrating.

Robynn Storey  17:55

Well, typically, when you get a rejection within seconds, it means a couple of things, it means that job is no longer available, that job has reached its maximum number of candidates that they're willing to entertain, or that job has expired. So the problem with a lot of the job boards is if you're an employer, and you go to and I don't want to name any particular job, or because a lot of them work the same. But if you go to a particular job board, and you buy a job posting, or maybe a group of job postings, right, you pay X amount of dollars for 30 day posting. So you might be three or four days into that posting, and you've gotten hundreds of applicants, and you know, what you've already identified maybe 10, or 12, really great folks, and you're gonna start off with doing a betting call, or you know, like a pre interview call, right? You're talking about people are now applying for that job for another 25 days. So, you know, on my side, as the owner of that job posting, I have to leave that on up because that's what I paid for. But on the portal side, while I'm receiving that content, that information that date of those resumes, I can shut that down, because I'll hold it anymore resumes. Or maybe I'm a company that requires certain tracking mechanisms to be in place. And I don't want to track 3000 employees or 3000 particular candidates, right? So I can shut that down. So when you're getting that immediate, immediate declination, or you're getting that immediate rejection, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're rejecting you, it just means that something else is going on. And nine times out of 10 It has nothing to do with you or your resume.

David Turetsky  19:29

Well, I feel much better now.

Dwight Brown  19:30

Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. Does because I've I've had the same experience before and it. I mean, it's still a broken part of the system, the you know, but the curing the brokenness is a little bit different than the a.ai just auto rejecting you just because it didn't get keywords.

Robynn Storey  19:50

See, I think that a lot of the recruiting effort on could and I'm not sure why it is that companies tend to do be sort of hesitating on using this approach, if there is another reason for gathering information or data or whatever, but I think that every single job it storyline when we're hiring, we do a series of betting questions. And unless you answer yes to all of the basic, or the minimum requirements of what we're looking for, you can't really advance to the application part. And I think that it would be so much more beneficial for both candidates. And for companies, if they had a series of 568 or 10. vetting questions. So if you're hiring for a position in your top 10 things, you want five years experience, you need this, this person to know this certain technology, and you need to either use them to have a degree or not a degree, if you're looking for manager, you know, do you have experience managing three or more people for one or more years, whatever, you can really set whatever it is you want. And then instead of having people going and applying and applying and applying, applying and going through very long application process is a Dicky personality tasks and skill sets and yada, yada, yada, before they even get to the point where they can apply, they need to answer yes to all 10 of those questions. And if they don't answer, yes, then what you can say is, hey, great to meet you, thank you so much for your interest in this job, based on you know, our requirements, and you know, your answers, we're not going to have you go through the interview process for the application process, because it's still going to be beneficial to you, we, you know, we, you know, recommend that you go back to our careers page and maybe find something else, or what I mean, you don't have to be a jerk about it. But you know, people are spending hours manually filling out applications, and they're literally going nowhere. I think that, you know, for the for the betterment of the job seeking of, you know, society as a whole. If we were little more upfront, and we got people out of the process instead of inviting them in and then rejecting them later, after they put all this time. Yeah, the world would be a better place. So I think there's ways to streamline it. But there's also you know, you have to look and see, you know, why is it that a company would want to collect that kind of information, there's there could be other reasons, or maybe they're gonna, you know, keep it for future opportunities. But I've been in this business for 24 years, and we've worked with probably 300,000 customers, I don't think one person in all these years has ever said to me, I submitted my resume for a job. And six months later, they call me for something else. I mean, it's so rare, so I wouldn't bank on that.

Dwight Brown  22:22

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's so disrespectful to people's time and energy and effort. And, and it does nobody any good. When there's, you know, I like that process, you've talked about where here's our screening questions, and you're not going to make everybody fill out a big long application and tailor things and do all that. All that goes into getting to that point where you get the insti know, from, from the ATS.

David Turetsky  22:50

And by the way, I've actually heard lots of companies who've talked about using that database, the database of the rejections as a future, you know, bench strength, well, they're not really a bench strength, if you didn't keep them warm, they're not really your friend because you rejected them. So I'm not really a man, I don't really know why we'd be keeping that data around, because so it's also going to get stale. The moment that those people get jobs, or they, you know, move to another place, they're not going to be candidates anymore. So reaching out to them is kind of not really possible.

Robynn Storey  23:22

I did a post on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago, and I talked about how in 1994 1995, the average job search took about five week. In 2024 the average job search takes about five months. Back in the 90s. The average job search interview was one, maybe two, two and a very, very high level, the average number of interviews a candidate goes through now is six, back in 1995. The average tenure of an employee in a new role is four years in 2024. It is also four years, nothing has changed about people's loyalty, or about their tenure at a job despite the fact that we are interviewing them to death. We are beating interviews over the head with a bat. I have clients and very high executive levels that have been on 15 1617 touches for one job. Now when we are getting to that level. There are some things systematically are systemically broken within an organization that doesn't feel empowered to make a job offer after talking to somebody three or four times. That's where the issue is. So in the job search function, this is where I don't think that technology has been our friend back in the day. We didn't have such a thing, right? And if anybody is old enough to remember, you know, you sent a resume somebody called you on the phone you went in for an interview, you had a conversation they sort of judged you engage whether or not that you were going to be a good fit and you have great personalities, great experience, whatever. And then they made you an offer. Everything was pretty Quick give was pretty easy. And you know, a lot of times at least 60% of the time, it was good fit, right? It took a couple of days, everybody left happy, and you stayed in that job for a couple of years, it is said that 40% of hires are bad fits. So in 25 years, we've learned nothing. We've invested hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in technology to help us improve candidate experience, candidate selection, and people still are not staying very long. And it's still around 60%. But it's a good fit and 40%. But it's not. So obviously, it has not improved on our ability to pick people that are fundamentally always right for the job.

David Turetsky  25:38

Yeah, but Robynn, we could actually have an entire podcast, maybe even an entire presentation done for multiple people on the the problems that may arise and all that, that you just described, because that in and of itself is one of the real reasons why there's something structurally wrong with not just the hiring practice. But with the management of those new hires and the management of the entire world, the entirety of the processes. Seems like it's just freaking broken.

Robynn Storey  25:39

Yeah, I mean, you know, I don't know, most job seekers, I think when they were young, whether they got out of high school, or they were fortunate enough to go to college or whatever, you know, they expected that they went into a job that someone was going to be training them somebody smarter than them had an idea of how to make them capable of doing this job. And I don't know that that's happening as much today as it needs to be.

David Turetsky  26:27

Well, that all gets pointed to whether it's managers, or the lack of training, or the lack of good training resources. So totally hear you there.

Robynn Storey  26:35

And also, when you factor in sort of the age thing, you know, where companies are very sort of hot to get rid of folks that are older, been with company a long time, they're costing a little bit more, the amount of knowledge and wisdom and experiences flying out the door is at a record level today. And these are folks that we really need to be tapping into, to say, hey, train, these young professionals have helped to build programs to get these folks up to speed. I tell this funny story all the time. And I actually talked about it in my book, there was a family that lived down the street from me growing up and they had five kids, for the kids are engineers, the daughter is a school counselor. And the dad worked for the water company, he was a laborer for the water company. And we grew up in a very rural area. And every Friday night, when you know, all of us kids in the neighborhood got together, the parents would take turns driving them, you know, to wherever they were going to we're going with roller skating or to the mall or whatever. And anyway, so when this guy, this dad worked for the water company, and he'd be taking us to a baseball game, or he would be driving through the countryside. And he would say, you know, back in 1978, I remember we dug out that filled and you know, we laid out water there, and those people all have wells. And you know, this is a problem that we ran into, you know, there's on clay under that dirt here on this farm. But you know, this farm is really good. There were mines that were here. So we couldn't drill through that. And everywhere we went in his brain off the top of his head, he knew when we drilled there for water or sewage, we were successful, or we weren't successful, or we ran end up, you know, rock, but we ran into this or whatever. And I remember thinking to myself, I hope somebody's writing this down, like it says written down anywhere. Because this to me seems like pretty valuable information. Is this on a blueprint somewhere. And that's what I think that we need to be thinking about in companies, the things, the experiences, the knowledge, the insight, the wisdom, is any of this stuff being gathered, is it being used? Is it being leveraged or utilized in a way to help to grow generations behind? And that's where I think there might be a real disconnect here.

David Turetsky  28:43

They call it institutional knowledge that just let go when those people get absolutely yeah.  Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, Man, I wish I could talk to David about this? Well, you're in luck. We have a special offer for listeners of the HR Data Labs podcast, a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast, or whatever is on your mind. Go to Salary.com forward slash HRDLconsulting to schedule your FREE 30 minute call today.  So let's talk about the third question, which to me is one of my favorites, which is let's talk about what your resume says about you. How do you actually focus on the story on how to build it and how to capitalize on what each person's individual story.

Robynn Storey  29:31

Yeah, I mean, so yeah, that Corey story has to be rooted in success and what success looks like to you or to someone else, or even to the the client that we're working with. It may not look like that to us, right. So even if you weren't someone who feels like you failed in a particular job, or that you didn't, you know, do as much as you could have. Our job is to craft a narrative that shows why that is. I call it the shit show approach. Though if you're a professional and every professional has had this in their experience where they walked into an organization or a job, they've inherited a mess from someone else, maybe they didn't see it all the way through to the end, maybe they didn't turn around and make it a stellar success. But maybe they touched parts of it, maybe they were able to shore up the team, maybe they were able to go in and help to stave off the loss of customers. Not every job in your career is going to be a smashing success, right. But we need to figure and focus on the things that were for you at the time. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing is that you always always, always want to have clarity, that people that are most successful in their job searches have an idea of where it is that they would like to go. So the days of you creating sort of a general resume and throwing it out there. And then someone on the other end, looking at it and saying, Wow, you know, I really think David would be great in this role, or I really think Dwight would be phenomenal. And so Robynn would be a really great addition to this team. That doesn't really happen so much anymore. It seems like we're in a churn phase where we're always trying to fill positions, we're laying people off, and then we're bringing people back and we're trying to build up, there seems to be no real time or availability for that kind of brain power, right. So you want to make sure that your resume is speaking in a clear language, clear direction, and you've got to focus on the kind of job that you want to go after. And then everything in that resume should align to it. So the first thing I'd say is that no one ends up where they started out. So you might have started off in marketing, and then you got into sales. And then somehow you fell into human resources. And now you're, you know, executive operations director to nonprofit, right? Everybody's experiences are different. And we didn't all start off being in marketing. And now we're, you know, marketing officers, life doesn't work that way. Neither do careers. But anything that we're telling from those experiences, those stories, they need to be rooted in success and results and outcome. And they have to kind of flow the language has to flow and it has to align with the job that you're after. So those are the most important things truly in a resume is to make it clear to make it easy. Can someone look at your resume and make a quick correlation between the jobs you've had and the job that you want? And are you make it easy? Are you making it easy for that person call you on the phone? Like that's a lot that has to be a logical choice in their mind. So that's so important.

David Turetsky  32:22

All right, I got asked this question. Yep. Format matter. We spent so much time formatting the crap.

Dwight Brown  32:27

Oh, my God. Yeah.

Robynn Storey  32:29

I mean, format definitely matters. So we use what we call a presentation style resume. So you know, our resumes were very beautiful. I mean, they look like, you know, presentations, basically, because it's celebration, right? It's a celebration of your history, your career, whatever. This is the format that you're going to use when you're emailing it to someone, when you get called in for an interview, you know, people still print out a copy, and they take it with them or for they take a young boy copies for the people that are going to be in the room, this is the beautiful thing that you're going to use, right? This is the one that you're going to use for that. Now, we also give you what I call the ugly resume, it's the ATS version, it's that text only version, it's you know, 90% aligned to most ATS systems, that companies are using, not always, it's not always a shoo in, because a lot of systems parse differently than they used to, and they keep tweaking them and changing, it's almost like they're trying to make it a little bit harder for you to apply. So there's your ATS version. So you need to know the difference. And then we also, of course, whatever word document, or Google Docs, or whatever it is that people use, got someone that you're going to, you know, tweak, you're gonna change, and you'll save it as a PDF or, you know, rewrite an ATS, but you kind of need to know from the tech perspective, from the type of document perspective, how you're getting that content, how you're getting that information to your end user, and you can't really use your LinkedIn profile. So let me just do I know you didn't ask me this question. But a lot of people say what's the difference between your resume and your LinkedIn? Resume is for a captive audience. So you know, when we go back and talk about going into an organization or position and you took over that maybe was a little bit of a mess. Maybe it wasn't, as you know, great as it needed to be, you can tell that story in your resume. You can't go on a public forum, like LinkedIn and tell that story. So you know, there's what I call the dirty laundry kind of stuff on your resume where you took something that was really screwed up, and you turned it around. But on LinkedIn, you're not really gonna say that. That's why you need them both

David Turetsky  34:20

Make sense. Well, last question. I had Dwight. I don't know if you have any more. But the last question I had is, is two pages too much. Do you keep it to one? I mean, I have 35 years experience. So I'm not going to do five pages or six pages with every single publication that I've ever been in. But what's your advice about you know, the length?

Robynn Storey  34:38

Yeah, I mean, you should always have a one page resume if you've got five or six years of experience. Once you start getting into seven 810 1520. Always two pages. People need to realize that a two page resume is the gold standard. It's not like the root of all evil. And in two pages, you have enough time and space to create those tales to come. read those stories to build that content that's going to ping those ATS. So the more you know, like in a resume, we might repeat a certain keyword 234 times, right? We're doing that for a reason not because we've run out of words, right. So you know, the more content that you can get into a resume. And so make it consumable. I mean, you know, I had a resume open yesterday, and the font was so tiny on blowing up the, you know, the zoom on my screen, just to read it, nobody wants that, right. You want to make it look nice. You want it to be readable, it should flow, it should have some whitespace. You know, all those things. But yeah, I mean, two pages for anybody with any real experience, you know, multiple jobs and, you know, moving you know, up in your career, that's the gold standard.

Dwight Brown  35:43

Generally, what you're going to kind of articulate on the resume. 10 years, 15 years, like me, I've got 30 years experience, but my resume might only reflect the last Yeah, yeah.

Robynn Storey  35:55

So really like between 15 and 20. So it depends on the person, right. So you might be a person that worked for company for 20 years, and you have two jobs, we're not going to hardly talk about the first job that you had, because the majority of your spirits last 10 1215 years has been in this job, that's going to take the majority of your resume. But say you have had seven jobs in that period of time, then we're going to break them down back to like the early 2000s. But, you know, going back 20 years, like I always joke it, because we work with a lot of people in technology, in technology, sometimes what you did last Tuesday is no longer relevant. That's how rapidly that industry changes, right? So certainly going back to when you were using cobalt, that's not something that we would cut. Alright, so we kind of tried to keep it as relevant as possible. Okay, awesome.

David Turetsky  36:51

Robynn, thank you so much. You're awesome storyteller. You're an awesome resume person. I encourage everyone to go we're gonna have it in the show notes to look up Robynn's book. And for those of you who are looking for a new role, reach out to storyline. But thank you so much, Robynn, you're awesome. Take care. And thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Robynn Storey  37:10

Thank you so much for having me. It was great. Thanks.

David Turetsky  37:13

It's our pleasure, Dwight. Thank you.

Dwight Brown  37:14

Thank you. This was great. A lot of good ideas.

David Turetsky  37:17

Don't, Don't you get any idea. You're not leaving anybody!

Dwight Brown  37:20

Yeah I don't like that.

David Turetsky  37:22

Right now. All right. Well, thank you very much, everyone. Take care and stay safe.

Announcer  37:27

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