Episode 107
Why you’re stuck redesigning your UX resume and how to get out of a career rut
24 min listen
Episode 108
24 min listen

Listen to the Episode
Episode Summary
Tired of redesigning your UX resume for weeks or months without making any progress? Frustrated that your UX resume isn’t leading to interviews? This episode explores why chasing the perfect resume may actually delay your UX job search. Discover the effectiveness of aiming for a “minimum viable resume” and how this approach can accelerate your path to standing out and getting interviews.
Learn why relying on advice about UX resumes from too many sources can lead to confusion, conflicting opinions, and bad advice such as the 1 page resume myth. We’ll also discuss how to determine if someone is truly qualified to provide feedback about your UX resume and how you can help your resume stand out to both applicant tracking systems and hiring managers in the UX field.
The episode also sheds light on aligning your resume with your LinkedIn profile and portfolio to tell a cohesive story about your UX skills and professional journey. You’ll also hear the process we teach in Career Strategy Lab’s UX Job Search Accelerator to help people create a UX resume that leads to more interviews, including our detailed courses, coaching, and community support.
If you’re a UX professional looking to boost your job search success, tune in to learn how to stop spinning your wheels and create a resume that communicates your unique value effectively. This episode is packed with insights for crafting a resume that resonates with the right people and opens doors in your career.
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Discussion Questions About The Episode
- How would you approach the idea of crafting a "minimum viable resume" rather than chasing perfection, and what benefits do you think this mindset might offer in your job search?
- Reflecting on your own resume writing process, have you relied too heavily on external feedback? If so, how might you streamline the sources of advice you consider to ensure that your resume aligns with your career goals?
- In what ways do you think the alignment of your resume, portfolio, and LinkedIn profile can impact a recruiter's or hiring manager’s impression of you? How can you ensure these elements tell a cohesive story about your skills and experience?
- How does your approach to communicating your career "compass statement" or elevator pitch potentially influence the effectiveness of your job application materials?
- Consider a time when you felt stuck in a professional rut, whether related to resume writing or another aspect of career development. How did you navigate that situation, and what strategies from the podcast episode might be useful in similar future scenarios?
Episode Notes & Links
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Episode Transcript
Sarah Doody [00:00:00]: Your resume doesn’t need to show your personality. Your resume needs to communicate who you are and what you do in a very quick, clear, concise manner so that you get the attention of recruiters and hiring managers, and they feel confident that you’re enough of a match to the job description that they’re then gonna interview you. Hey there. I’m Sarah Doody, host of the career strategy podcast. Many professionals are seeking more impact, flexibility, growth, and let’s face it, getting paid what they’re worth. But how do you unlock this in your career? It starts with strategy. I’m taking you behind the scenes of what’s working for my career coaching clients. You’ll hear strategies and actionable, yet sometimes against the grain advice for how you can be the CEO of your career and stop Mondays.
Sarah Doody [00:00:54]: Ready to level up your career? Let’s get after it. Welcome back to another episode here on the career strategy podcast. Today, we are talking resumes. We are gonna talk why you are stuck and what you can do to get out of the resume rut. Now before I get to today’s episode, I wanna give you a quick heads up that from February 10 to 14 2025, I am running a 1 week resume sprint. Imagine we start on a Monday, we’re gonna end on a Friday, and by Friday, you will have a resume that recruiters and hiring managers will spend more than 6 seconds on, and your resume will be optimized for the software commonly called applicant tracking systems or ATS that is used in the hiring process. Because if that software can’t read or parse your resume, that’s gonna make it harder for actual humans to see you as an applicant. So we need to consider both the people and the software when it comes to our resume.
Sarah Doody [00:02:09]: So February 10 through February 14, we’re doing a 1 week resume sprint. If you just go to careerstrategylab.com/maven, that’s /maven. That will take you to the link, and I’ll link it in the show notes. Alright. So if you have ever said, I’ll apply to jobs when my resume is perfect, or I’ll join career strategy lab after I finish tweaking my resume and cleaning it up, then this episode is for you. Here’s the truth though, if you’re stuck in a resume rut of redesigning your resume, rewriting your resume, etcetera, you are wasting precious precious time. And you might be delaying getting hired, and here’s why. Because the longer that you keep redesigning and redoing your resume over and over and over and over, you’re not applying.
Sarah Doody [00:03:10]: And if you don’t start applying, you won’t know if your resume is good enough to get you interviews. And I could share case study after case study of people who’ve joined career strategy lab focused on minimum viable resume, not must be perfect resume, and they started applying. Because in the world of user experience and product development, we love a good experiment. Right? And we know it can be very valuable to not chase perfection and instead get something out there that we can test and see if it works while the same thing applies to your resume. Right? You might be able to get hired with a good enough resume, but you won’t know until you stop chasing perfection and start applying. So that is one of the big mindset shifts I hope you take away from today’s episode. So today, I wanna just break down why this endless resume tweaking and redesigning does not work, what you can focus on instead, and how career strategy labs UX job search accelerator can help you create a resume that will actually stand out, that will spark people’s curiosity and interest for you as a candidate, which then means they’re gonna spend more than 6 seconds on your resume, which means they might see bits and parts of your resume that really catch their attention and make them think, this person seems to have the skills that we’re really looking for. So they invite you to an interview.
Sarah Doody [00:04:51]: That’s how you get interviews. So let’s dive in to first of all, how do you get stuck in this rut of resume redesign? And I’ve seen this time and time and time and time again, where people come to me and say, I’ve been redoing my resume for the past 3 weeks, 3 months. And it just pains me to think, man, this person’s been working on their resume for 6 months. If they had just focused on minimum viable resume, they might have been already getting interviews or been in a new job. So the resume, right, you’re constantly redesigning it. You’re constantly rewriting it. And how do you even get into this trap? One of the big reasons you get into this resume rut is because you are relying on tips and feedback from too many sources. The more people you ask for resume tips or to review your resume, the more advice you will receive.
Sarah Doody [00:05:53]: Many times conflicting advice, right, such as one of my favorites, should your resume be 1 page or longer than 1 page? Spoiler alert, I do not agree with the 1 page resume. We’ll link it in the show notes below. I have a whole episode about why I disagree with 1 page resume and how that holds you back in your job search. But that is one example of how you end up getting in that rut because you work on your resume then you send it to your, you know, former co worker and they tell you to do something. Then you work on your resume again, and you have a meeting with someone from ADP list, and they tell you to do something. Then the next day or next week or weekend, you see something on LinkedIn. You watch a YouTube video. You see an Instagram post, and then you are just overwhelmed with advice, and, like I said, often conflicting advice, and then it takes you longer to update your resume because you spend half the time trying to figure out who to believe and who not to believe.
Sarah Doody [00:06:57]: Right? And that is really, really important to recognize if that’s kind of a behavior pattern that you’ve been stuck in. Because when you just start piecemealing, you know, what Jane said and then what Bob said and then what Gloria told you and whatever, your resume you’re not having a strategy for your resume. You’re just Frankensteining random feedback from a bunch of people, and then no wonder your resume doesn’t tell a coherent story about you. It doesn’t have what recruiters and hiring managers look for. Right? So we don’t want to do that. But one really important thing I want you to consider is the following. If you are going to go down the path of asking a bunch of people for resume advice and to review your resume, one thing you really have to commit to doing is asking yourself, what makes this person qualified to give me resume advice? Right? And I get it. Every time you log on to LinkedIn or social media, there’s a new resume expert or a new UX job search expert or whatever.
Sarah Doody [00:08:12]: But you have to ask yourself, how long have they been doing this? Have people that worked with this person actually got hired? Right? Or are they just sharing their opinion of hypothetically what they look for as a hiring manager but they themselves have never actually been involved in hiring? That’s really important, like what is the source of the feedback? Is that person qualified to give you feedback or not? Another thing I would really encourage you to do is when people give you advice, don’t be afraid to ask why. Someone says, no, your resume should be 1 page. Anything longer, you’re not gonna get interviews. So a lot of you just follow that, but you don’t say to the person, well, why? Why does it need to be 1 page? And to find out what I think, you’ll have to go listen to that episode. Alright. So let’s move on to how career strategy lab can help you get out of the resume rut essentially. And first of all, we have the word strategy in Career Strategy Lab for a reason, because we don’t just want you to give a checklist or a little recipe of things to do and you do it like a robot and just trust us, although I want you to trust me. We really focus on strategy.
Sarah Doody [00:09:43]: And so when you think about it, your resume is just one piece of the puzzle. Right? Getting hired and standing out enough to get interviews is not just about your resume. There’s an element probably of your LinkedIn profile. There could be an element of your portfolio. Maybe you have a cover letter. And so, we really, really love to start with strategy of communicating who you are and what you do and getting down that. We call it a compass statement. You could call it an elevator pitch or about me or whatever you want, but you need to have this very concrete vision for your career, and you need to be able to articulate who you are and what you do.
Sarah Doody [00:10:30]: Because if you’re not clear on that, then your resume might communicate, you know, that you do XYZ, and your portfolio might make it seem like you know you’re more a visual designer versus your resume. If you’re not clear your resume could make it seem like you’re more of a researcher, for example. And if a recruiter or hiring manager is looking at your resume and your portfolio and your LinkedIn kind of in the same couple of minutes and they’re not telling a cohesive story, they’re gonna be confused as to what your true skill set and experience is. So it’s very very important that we really really focus on locking in that compass statement or elevator pitch or value proposition or insert whatever word you want to use so that your resume can reflect that, your portfolio can reflect that, your LinkedIn can reflect that. Because as someone told me years years ago, when you confuse, you lose. Meaning, when you confuse people with your communication, you lose them. And it’s very very hard to get people’s attention once you lose them. So we don’t want to lose the recruiters and hiring managers attention.
Sarah Doody [00:11:49]: We want to have a clear message of who you are and what you do throughout all your materials so it’s crystal clear that you are a UX researcher and product strategist, let’s say, with 10 years experience in healthcare and fintech. That is very clear. So how does career strategy lab then help you streamline the process of creating your resume so that you don’t get stuck in this resume rut? Well, like I said, we need that compass statement elevator pitch. After we have that, then it’s really about leveraging the curriculum, the coaching, the community, and the critiques that we offer you. That’s 4 c’s. So if you join us in career strategy lab, we have built out very very very granular online courses, a combination of video and text based lessons, to walk you through every single part of your resume. And some of the feedback we receive consistently is that the granularity of how we have created these lessons is so valuable because it takes the guesswork out of everything. So, you’re not sitting down to work on your resume and thinking to yourself, What should I do today? What changes should I make? Where should I start? What feedback should I implement? You’re not thinking about that because you just follow the exact process that we’ve laid out.
Sarah Doody [00:13:18]: And for example, maybe you watch like a 3 minute video explaining a part of your resume, then you stop the video, you do the thing, and you move on and watch the 2 minute video that comes after that. And then you do the thing, and it’s very very very simple and straightforward. We cut through the noise, so you’re just focused on taking action. And we give you tons of templates and tools, and examples to reduce overwhelm, to help you not spend 7 hours messing around trying to make columns in Google documents, for example, to get your resume formatted correctly. We also tell you how to literally lay out and design your resume so that it can actually be read or parsed by the software that recruiters and hiring managers use. Because if you apply for the job and then your resume goes into that software, often called an applicant tracking system, and that software can’t literally read your resume because you use weird fonts or had too many graphics or whatever, then there’s probably not a high likelihood that your resume and application is going to be seen by recruiters and hiring managers because it’s almost like the software literally cannot process your resume. Right? And we don’t have time to go into all the details of that today, but we make sure at the end of our resume lessons that you have these two versions, the one optimized for the software and the one that is optimized for the people. Also, the coaching.
Sarah Doody [00:14:58]: So you want feedback for your resume, we will give it to you. And the beauty, like I said earlier, if you receive feedback from people, you want to think to yourself, what makes them qualified to give me feedback on my resume? Well, I’ve been doing this since 2017. I have trained my team on how to do this, and we see people get hired every single month. A couple of days ago, someone got hired at Apple. We had Whole Foods. We’ve had SimpliSafe. We’ve had America’s Test Kitchen. We’ve had UnitedHealthcare.
Sarah Doody [00:15:30]: There’s so many more, And that is the proof that my team and I need to know that the way we teach to create a resume is working because our people get interviews, And then, like I told you, many of them get hired. Okay. So we talked about the curriculum. We talked about the coaching. Let’s talk about the community. One of the ways that you get stuck in a resume rut is that you do it in a silo. You do it alone. And when you do things alone, you get stuck in your head, and you second guess everything.
Sarah Doody [00:16:05]: And when you get frustrated, you ruminate on that. And when you ruminate, you get stuck in the rut. So our community is very powerful because you are able to see the feedback that other people are receiving about their resume, which is very useful. And it provides you with a private place, not LinkedIn, where you can share your wins, share your frustrations, share things that might be holding you back and you wanna be vulnerable about with people who are going to get you. Right? And sometimes, that is what you need to help you get out of that rut and keep moving forward. Just last week, we had a few kind of very vulnerable posts in our community about people’s frustrations and things like that, and it was so heartwarming to see the support and how other people were being so encouraging to these people, and then they were able to get back on track. They didn’t let that derail them for, like, 2, 3 weeks or 3 months. Right? So, the power of community and not doing all of this in a silo will definitely help you not get stuck in a resume rut.
Sarah Doody [00:17:22]: And, of course, critiques. Right? We kind of talked about this goes hand in hand with feedback, but essentially a lot of times when you ask for feedback about your resume, it’s very surface level. It’s like, make the font bigger. Don’t use this style of bullet points. You know, design it more. You’re a designer. Your resume should show your personality. Your resume doesn’t need to show your personality.
Sarah Doody [00:17:44]: Your resume needs to communicate who you are and what you do in a very quick, clear, concise manner so that you get the attention of recruiters and hiring managers and they feel confident that you’re enough of a match to the job description that they’re then gonna interview you. But we don’t need to get all cute and creative with our resumes even though, yes, I know there have been some viral resumes out there such as the person that made theirs look like Spotify, that is the exception not the rule. So I wanna share a couple of kind of anecdotal stories of some people who have come into career strategy lab, followed our resume course, and had success. And this story repeats itself over and over and over. People have applied to 100, 200, 300 jobs. They don’t know what’s wrong and they’re not getting feedback from from the recruiters or hiring managers. And for one reason or another, they decide to join career strategy lab. And then guess what happens? They get clear on who they are and what they do.
Sarah Doody [00:18:51]: They create their resume, and they start getting interviews. And many of them have said, I didn’t even make it through the whole resume course, but I felt like it was good enough. And I applied, and I got the interview. This repeats itself over and over and over, and it continually blows my mind and makes me so proud of these people because they showed up and they did the work, and they didn’t chase perfection. They chased the minimum viable resume, which, as we spoke about, allowed them to experiment with their resume and see if it would lead to the interviews, but they wouldn’t know if they continue trying to perfect it for 3 months or something like that. So that is very important and also and this might seem kind of frustrating, but oftentimes people say to us like, I’m so thankful that I was able to redo my resume. And at the same time, I’m so annoyed with myself because I listened to so many people and followed all this bad advice that I just assumed was correct, but I never actually stopped and thought to myself, what makes that person on LinkedIn qualified to tell me that my resume needs to be 1 page? Right? Or insert other kind of myths out there. So lesson learned for them, but also they were able to finally actually have a resume that was leading to interviews.
Sarah Doody [00:20:18]: And like I said, we are confident that our approach works because of the testimonials we receive about getting interviews, about moving along in the interview process, getting offers, and getting hired. So let’s do a quick wrap up here. Number 1, you need to get out of the resume rut. You need to stop chasing perfection, and you need to start focusing on experiments. And by experiments, I mean, get your resume to a good enough place and apply. I have personally done hiring companies in the past have hired me to handle filling roles for them, and I’ve been on the receiving end of 100 of applications. And it is shocking to see the quality of resumes out there with spelling mistakes, with poor formatting, with bunch of different fonts, with fonts that are so small or that are super light gray or that have, like, graphics that clutter the whole thing. And if you focus on that good enough version, and I might add, like, boring and good enough.
Sarah Doody [00:21:33]: Right? Your resume is not meant to win a design award. It’s meant to be a communication tool, not an an opportunity to showcase your design skills and personality. Alright. Number 2, vet your sources of feedback carefully. Don’t get caught up in thinking that just because a post went viral on LinkedIn, it’s valid advice. So vet your sources. Think to yourself, what makes this person qualified? Ask them why. Don’t just blindly follow advice just because you saw it on the Internet.
Sarah Doody [00:22:03]: And number 3, if you want help with your resume, like I said, it’s one of the things we do in career strategy lab. In career strategy lab, we have five sprints. Resume is one of them, and we are doing something special February 10 through 14 where if you’re not sure that you want to sign up for the entire career strategy lab 3 month job search accelerator, you can do an accelerated version of just the resume sprint with us from February 10 to 14. So if you’re interested in that, go to career strategy lab.com/maven, m a v e n, or click the show notes below and there will be a link down there. If you’re listening to this after February 10, check our website we may have more events coming up, I just don’t know the schedule at the recording of this episode. Alright. So if you are stuck in a resume rut, I wanna leave you with this. Please, please know you are not alone.
Sarah Doody [00:23:02]: You’re not broken. You’re not a failure. You’re not a horrible professional. You are just stuck. And you’re stuck because this is stuff that they don’t teach you in school, that your boss doesn’t have time to teach you. And unfortunately, this is a topic that is so popular if you Google it and you’re gonna get an overwhelming amount of advice and opinions, etcetera. But just remember that many of those are just that, opinions. And you really want to be vetting who you listen to.
Sarah Doody [00:23:34]: So I hope that you can stop spinning your wheels and get out of this resume rut, whether it’s through the help of my team or someone else. And I hope that your new resume leads to interviews and hopefully offers very soon. Alright. Talk to you later. Have a good one. Thanks for listening to the career strategy podcast. Make sure to follow me, Sarah Dutti, on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. If anything in today’s episode resonated with you, I’d love to hear about it.
Sarah Doody [00:24:07]: Tag me on social media or send me a DM. And lastly, if you found this episode helpful, I’d really appreciate it if you could share it with a friend or give us a quick rating on Spotify or review on Apple Podcasts. Catch you later.