How to Create a Love Start-ups Resume

Let’s face it, start-ups don’t typically review resumes in the same way that large companies do. The person who reviews her resume at a large company is often a recruiter, however, the person reviewing her resume at a startup is often the co-founder and trust me they are more invested. Unfortunately, this was news to me.

Setting up your “6 second resume”

No news here, but the founders are busy. And when they are acting as recruiters, going through hundreds of resumes, chances are they only spend 6 seconds on yours. Therefore, in order to excel, you must be very specific with your accomplishments and areas of expertise. You should also speak in terms of end results.

Here’s what helped me land a remote job with Hubstaff, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that helps small businesses increase the productivity of their teams. I’m not guessing this either. It’s what Dave Nevogt, the co-founder of Hubstaff, told me when I asked him why he ended up reaching out to me …

I’m sure this was the reason other founders reached out to me as well. After all, they want to grow their businesses and showing – and not just saying – that they have helped other companies grow is very attractive to them.

To attract the attention of startups, I am going to share with you several tips using the current resume that helped me land my sweet performance with Hubstaff. In fact, the same study that found recruiters spend six seconds on their resumes also found six areas they spend the most time reviewing. These areas include your name, current title/company, previous title/company, current position start/end date, previous position start / end date, and education.

Basically, they’re looking at everything at the top of your resume except for your education.

In addition to hitting these obvious areas, I recommend spending time on six key areas that I have found to really resonate with entrepreneurs. When these areas are built correctly, you will have them pounding a path at your door.

Tip 1: Create a slogan that leaves some founders scratching their heads

I didn’t get interview opportunities with SaaS startups, because I said I was a content marketer. I got them because I said I was a content marketer for SaaS startups. This catchphrase is more likely to confuse or disable founders in non-SaaS startups, but that doesn’t matter. Because I narrowed my focus, it actually became extremely attractive to my target employer.

To find out your motto, look at your past experiences and match them with your present and future passions. For example, although I hadn’t necessarily worked for SaaS start-ups before, I had worked for startups, and I had worked for IaaS businesses, and I was a content marketer. Creating my motto around this helped me get a job with a type of business that I was passionate about – SaaS.

Tip 2: Summarize what you do – not what you want

While a lens might work if you’re inexperienced, a summary of what you’ve specialized in over the years is much more powerful. My summary is probably a few words too long, but it tells people exactly what I’m doing. They don’t have to assume anything. This is important.

As for including your years of experience, I recommend only adding the year number if it is two or more. While a year of experience is invaluable, putting the number “1” on paper does not make your experience fair.

Tip 3: Results on responsibilities

In traditional resumes, bullet points in past and current jobs indicate the responsibilities an applicant had / has in a company. This is boring. As Dave mentioned in his email to me, what the founders want to see are the results and by this, I mean the numbers. They want to see how your work has contributed to their bottom line and your resume should communicate that bottom line.

For some of us this is easier than for others. For example, I’m in marketing, and in marketing, we track everything. The numbers are easy for me. But for someone like, for example, a personal assistant, this is a bit more difficult. But again? I am a firm believer that there is a way to make something interesting sound and this often requires partnerships.

For example, a personal assistant could add a bullet that says something like “Helped businesses with ARR of $ 2 million to obtain financing of $ 1 million at 20 percent by monitoring the financing proposals sent to the president. . ” This is an example of associating your success with a big, juicy number tied to the company or a department within the company. (I did it at bullet point 3 in my first position saying that I helped the sales team get past $ 50,000 for a new signup goal.)

Tip 4. Link to samples of your work

If you don’t currently have a professional website to publish portfolio pages, I suggest you take a look at a site I built that shows how to create one

Regardless of which option you choose, when you have a site create a portfolio page for each company you have worked at and then link to it under the bullet points for each company on your resume. When the founders click on these links, it buys you more of your mindshare.

Suggestion 5. Add Testimonials as social proof

If you have LinkedIn recommendations from your colleagues, add one or two of them to your resume, as this helps validate what you are saying in other sections of your resume. Because some people tend to exaggerate their qualifications on their resumes, testimonials put founders at ease.

Tip 6. Although less important, keep Education, because some worry

While many founders care far more about experience than education, the 6-second study mentioned above found that the education section was the only thing recruiters paid attention to in the bottom half of a resume. So even if you are confident in your background and think your education has nothing to do with the positions you are applying for, the research says to leave it at.

Bonus Tip: Add Talent and Get Insights

While there are some interesting ways to design your resume, few of us have the interest or time to do something like turn our resume into a video game. But we can create a resume that looks pretty good – without any design skills.

The content was strong but it didn’t stand out, and it made me look smooth. He knew he could do better. If I could put a design on par with my accomplishments, I knew I would see more opportunities. So, I did some searching for resume design services.

First, I looked for freelance designers, but unfortunately, I soon realized that the really good ones were out of my budget at a cost of around $ 300. Then I looked for professional resume design services, but I did. What I came across was mostly a bunch of corporate BS. I spent hours researching these things and couldn’t find anything affordable and worth my money …

And then it hit me: There’s a SaaS product for just about everything today. Surely there had to be one for resume design. After finding it I immediately signed up for the service for free (you can also here). Their basic templates are great, but their premium templates are even cooler, so I signed up for a paid subscription.

I started applying for jobs in early November and am still getting a lot of attention – and offers – to this day.

In addition to seeing stats like this, I was also able to see where my resume was being viewed from. This feature is great if you are applying to a non-remote location that has a headquarters.

Applying to jobs and finding the one you want takes a lot of time and effort, but when you have a great resume, it’s much, much easier.