Job applications - creating a better CV

Hello, I’m Doctor Andrew Holmes, one of the research staff developers on Prosper based at the University of Liverpool. I’d like to welcome you to this Understanding CVs session. In this session you’ll gain a better understanding of the differences between academic and non-academic CVs. You’ll put your skills inventory to use. You’ll employ storytelling techniques to showcase your skills and experience. You’ll use an appropriate design and structure in your CVs. To get things started I’d like to ask you a quick question: how long is your CV? How long is the CV that you used to apply for your current role? By CV here, I mean the document you’ll have probably attached or uploaded as part of your application and labelled it something like your name, CV. Take a moment to recall the length in pages of your CV. In the live version of this session the answers to this question ranged from two pages to CVs that were six pages or even more. These answers illustrate that even within academia we can mean a lot of different things when we talk about CVs depending on our own experience, training, research discipline and the context of the CV. There are one-page CVs and there are CVs more than ten pages long – and everything in between. Before we go any further, a quick note on terminology. These documents may be referred to as a CV or as a resumé. It may depend on the country you’re applying in, the sector or even the specific preferences of the employer. The term CV tends to cover all of these types of document, whereas resumé is generally only used for the one or two-page variants. We’ll use the two terms interchangeably in this session. There is no getting away from it; the difference between academic CVs and CVs for roles beyond academia is huge. They’re in worlds of their own. Academic CVs tend to be much more exhaustive and detailed than a CV you would use beyond academia. This is why we’re characterising the academic CV as something like a library or inventory. The result is that an academic CV can be as long as needed, although often a maximum of six pages tends to be a good target to aim for. Your academic CV may contain many, all or potentially more of the subsections on the right here. The most important will be: education, research employment, publications and funding. References are almost always included in an academic CV but are never included in a non-academic CV. The Vitae website has several example academic CVs. Here’s one of them. You’ll see that everything is organised in the sections from the previous side and expanded upon in detail. There’s a side-and-a-third given over just to publications and conference presentations alone. It continues on to pages three and four with teaching experience, outreach and other training, with the references going on to the fifth page. If you are applying for academic jobs then you’ll likely want your CV to be as exhaustive as this is, listing your many achievements and outputs. Hopefully you’re relatively comfortable with the academic CV. We’ll revisit them later in the session, but for now let’s move on to CVs beyond academia as things are very different. If the academic CV is a library holding all your achievements, a non-academic CV is a curated window display of your relevant achievements. You want to be piquing your potential employer’s interest enough they’ll call you for interview. Think of the CV beyond academia as your ticket to the interview. Ruth Winden is a careers with research consultant at the University of Leeds and founder and CEO of Careers Enhanced Limited. Her Tweet gets to the core of the CV’s role. ‘As a hiring manager I have a problem. Show me that you are the solution to my problem. Your wish to have job security is understandable but it is not my priority; it’s yours. Lead with what you offer, always.’ Assistant Professor Tina Persson is the CEO of Passage2Pro, a careers coaching company for people with PhDs as well as the author of the ‘PhD Career Coaching Guide’ and host of the PhD Career Coaching podcast and the PhD Career Stories podcast. Professor Persson has shared her experience with Prosper a fair amount when it comes to CVs. We’ll be hearing from her a few more times during the session. Here she is describing the non-academic CV as a branding or marketing document that shows your professional achievements and what you want. You want to help employers get an idea of the value that you could bring to their organisation. You aren’t going to do that with an exhaustive and specialist academic CV. Robert Dolan, assistant director of career services at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has published a few papers on converting an academic CV to one suitable for beyond academia. In his 2017 paper he points out that CVs served three purposes: as a marketing tool to get you an interview, as a way to strategically direct an interview by showing how you map against the job description, and after the interview as a reminder to the employer during the decision-making process. He also points out that your CV should convey enough information, clearly enough, to impress following a ten-second scan. Recruitment takes many forms and this won’t always be the case in all roles across all sectors. But recruiters dealing with hundreds of applications for a job will be doing initial screening very quickly. Professional careers company, Ladders, conducted a study in 2018 with recruiters using eye tracking software. They found that the average initial screening of a CV clocked in at just 7.4 seconds. To make things worse, your CV may initially be scanned by a computer. If uploaded online resumés are often first scanned through an applicant tracking system, the software is looking for keywords, including the number of uses of those words identified by the hiring manager as critical to candidate selection. Whilst all this may sound disheartening, please don’t be put off. Knowing how your CV might be treated can allow you to design it appropriately. All CVs value presentation but it’s fair to say that academic CVs have a focus on content over style, whereas CVs beyond academia value both content and style. As we’ve mentioned before, to create a CV for beyond academia you’ll need to reduce your CV length down to a maximum of two pages. Make sure to work in whole pages, as part of a page suggests that you’ve run out of things to say. With such a relatively brief CV structure you’ll want to ensure that your strongest selling points are clear to the reader. Robert Dolan’s 2017 paper from the previous slide asks what four-to-five things do you want employers to know about you? Make those four-to-five things easy to spot. You may also want to consider using a headline and a summary in your CV. The headline – sometimes referred to as a CV title or CV header – is a short snappy sentence at the top to show your experience and skills. Indeed defines it as a concise sentence that showcases your profile to a potential employer. The headline can include your primary strengths, experiences and skills. Examples could be: system engineer with more than three years’ experience with cloud-based technology. Or, back-end developer familiar with PHP, Java, Python, Ruby and Rust. Indeed defines a CV summary as an abstract of a candidate’s professional background at the top of their CV. A CV summary is a statement at the top of a CV that outlines a job candidate’s professional experience, skills and background. It’s typically a short and concise paragraph, around four-to-five sentences long. It contains a candidate’s most impressive relevant qualifications. You can use a CV summary to introduce yourself to potential employer employers effectively. Already we’re seeing that converting an academic CV to one suitable for beyond academia isn’t necessarily an easy or quick process. Leave yourself plenty of time. Tina Persson recommends leaving up to four weeks to create a new CV; the time being used to fully examine the job advert, learn about the employer, match yourself against their requirements and then build your CV. It’s sometimes a lot easier to start from a blank document rather than modifying your existing academic CV. There are plenty of templates online you can download or copy, so make use of them for inspiration if nothing else. You’ll also need to translate your academic achievements and outputs so that someone outside of academia can recognise their value. Tailor your CV to the job itself, remembering to highlight the skills that are most relevant and show the employer the value that you would bring to the role. Even if they are presenting the same person, no two CVs should look alike if they are for different jobs. A CV is always working with the same raw material but its shape shifts to suit the needs of the goal. Tina Persson recommends building a portfolio of CVs that you can tailor as required. She suggests having a one-page CV, a general two-page CV that you can tailor for specific job adverts, your full academic CV – or master CV – that contains all your experience that you can draw examples from. Then depending on your sector and needs you may also have a portfolio, a web page or a business card. By having a number of different formats you’re building a suite of tools to market yourself. Even if you don’t ever need to use one, creating a one-page CV is a useful exercise. As the amount of content decreases it helps you really identify your absolute strongest features; the ones you want employers to know about over all others. Being aware of your skills is essential for building your CV and also for your LinkedIn profile. As a quick refresher: a skills inventory or a personal skills audit is a comprehensive document or list containing all of your educational qualifications, professional skills, professional abilities and attributes. It’s essentially a list of ingredients which you can select from for job applications. It doesn’t need to be polished. It just needs to be practical for you to easily keep updated and use. Where can you use your skills inventory on your CV? The short answer is: everywhere. All the content of your CV should be informed by your skills inventory. Map your skills and attributes against the job requirements and then clearly demonstrate this alignment in your CV. You can put your skills in your headline. You could definitely put them in your summary. As we’ll see in a moment, some CVs have dedicated skills sections that clearly list relevant skills. You should be thinking about how your skills can be highlighted in your descriptive text and bullet points throughout. These are two examples from Tina Persson that we’ll see a bit later on in the session. You’ll see that they’ve both got a bullet point skills section circled in red. For each of those skills listed they should already have examples and evidence from their skills inventory to back up their claims in an interview setting. What’s more, in their experience section they’re also highlighting their skills. In the example on the left the applicant is clearly highlighting phrases like market research and project management, whilst on the right they’ve got phrases including deal structuring and value creation. A CV for beyond academia is a document to present yourself appropriately to employers to allay their fears, to reassure them that you’re a good fit for this role. But whilst you know just how impressive your experience, outputs and achievements are, for someone who’s never been in academia they can be a bit meaningless. They’ll recognise that you’ve done lots of stuff but not appreciate how it relates to the role they’re advertising. You’ll need to translate your outputs for them. As an example we’re going to discuss publications. The number of publications you have will vary with experience and discipline but as we saw earlier, you could fill pages just listing them. An academic would be impressed but a page of publications won’t necessarily speak to an employer beyond academia. Take a moment and think about your publication list and every item on it. If you don’t have a single publication yet that’s okay; think about your presentation list instead. Now that you’ve got your publications in mind take a moment to think about how they make you feel. What are the emotions, positive and negative, that come to mind as you think about your publications? Pause the video now and take a moment to think about this. We’ve asked postdocs this question before. You may find that some of their answers shown in this word cloud are similar to your own. Things like feeling proud, accomplished, successful and a sense of achievement are very common. But then so are some less positive feelings such as unsuccessful, inadequate or even lacking. Continuing the library analogy from earlier, the library is still complete even when you can’t see all the books at once. You can never see all the books at a glance in a good library. Publications are hard evidence of all your hard work and undoubted talent. Your feelings about them may not all be positive but you should absolutely be proud of your publications. It can feel unsettling to realise that the publication list may do absolutely nothing for your CV beyond academia. It may in fact harm it by taking up valuable space. Your non-academic CV may only have a small subsection of your publications – or even none at all. Taking that step to removing them from your CV can be tough. Doctor Shona Jones is an IP commercialisation manager and former postdoc. She points out that your CV will look different depending on what you’re applying for. A list of academic publications was not necessary for a job in technology transfer. But experience in drafting patents and working with patent agents was key to include, so out went the publications. At the start of 2021 we asked Academic Twitter: how did you find taking your academic publications off your CV? Did you use any strategies to make the process easier? Dan Holden is a former chemistry postdoc and now a leadership development manager at Key Group, a retirement finance company. Dan replied to say that for a long time he didn’t take his publications off his CV because he was proud of them. But then he realised the whole point of a CV is to act as a tool to highlight how well he could do the job that he was applying for. Endless pages of citations just muddied this. Doctor Alison Moulds was a postdoc on the Diseases of Modern Life Project and is now a workforce policy manager for the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges. She talks about repurposing rather than completely removing academic achievements, distilling them to the skills rather than the specific content. A long list of publications becomes a bullet point mentioning being published in a range of academic and other journals. Alison continues to say how a publication list can be misleading of your achievements, even in academia, due to the different timelines of publishing compared to looking for jobs, and that reducing her six-page academic CV to a two-page one made her want to cry – but that it’s also quite liberating and much easier to maintain and proofread. Doctor Chris Jeffs was a postdoc in ecology and is now an engagement and outreach manager at the British Ecological Society. He talks about how it’s a big shift to switch from celebrating academic achievements on a CV to reframing them for his CV beyond academia. He condensed his publication list to being published in four scientific journals, X number of papers. See Google Scholar. Doctor Georgina Key is another former ecology postdoc and now an environmental scientist and research manager at the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board. She says: you’d be surprised how few people care about how many publications you’ve got. Very much an academic thing and shouldn’t be the main thing that makes up your CV. Whilst it may feel difficult at first, you could consider translating your publication list into a phrase like this: author of X number of peer reviewed articles in journals of international significance. You could do something similar with your publications list or even identify a highlight from it as: invited speaker at, and then provide the name of a conference or meeting that will translate beyond academia. Natalie Lundsteen, assistant dean for career and professional development at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre, has provided us with some other examples of phrases you could use either alongside a shortened publication list or instead of one. I particularly like one former postdoc’s phrase: 13 submitted publications including 9 peer reviewed, 3 of which were first or co-first author, and 4 review articles. How much detail you provide about your publications and other academic outputs will depend on the role you’re applying for. A little more detail might be suitable for jobs that are academic or research adjacent, which value the fact that publications and presentations are part of the output of research. With other roles you may feel that a phrase like relevant professional publications would be sufficient. Using storytelling techniques can be a very effective method for conveying your value in a CV. We’re now going to hear from Tina Persson about some useful storytelling techniques and how they can be used when writing your CV.

I think storytelling is an absolutely brilliant way to just very shortly not only have for elevator pitches and for your motivational letter, but also for a little headline for the summary in your CV or resumé – just shortly – so you learn what the STAR and the PAR technique is, that you actually can use them to write a short headline or a short summary. Use it because remember: a good story is always remembered. In your case I would say that you should start to write your small stories, define yourself a bit unique. Train yourself to look above not only the technical skills but how you apply your technical skills or apply your transferable skills. Choose different situations. Colour them with your competencies, with the person you are, what you did and how you more elaborate around the situation more – not only on hardcore facts – but more in the situation itself. That will become a much more complete picture about you as a person. To do that will sharply help you to create that headline to sharpen your little profile or summary in your resumé. It is not only technical skills; it’s about your persona, it’s about your competencies and how you use them – and maybe even what you learned from them. The STAR technique is about: situation, task, action and result. The PAR technique is: problem, action and result. If we just take PAR technique as an example I would say you start to define a problem; a problem that you solved in a certain way. What you then do is that you describe the actions you took and then out of that, the outcome, the result. The next step is what you learned from it. Let’s say that you are applying for jobs that are very much into sales and marketing, if you now just take that. Then you can start to think about: what have I done in the past that could help me in the headline in the summary, indicating that I actually like to transition to a bit more of action, taking initiative, more enterprising? A good example, for example if you have been part of organising an event where you were responsible for taking contact with companies for example, you can define a problem associated to that where you show initiative. You solved a problem indicating that you are a good choice for the job you actually are applying for. There you can use your PAR technique to help you. In order to be able to use storytelling, the START and the PAR technique, it is super important that you do understand what the job is about.

These techniques allow you to craft bite-sized stories. They’re great for allowing you to pinpoint the key information you want to get across. They can be useful in CV summaries and when you’re providing details of your experience. You can include them in a headline – although normally headlines are too brief to make them truly effective unless there’s something very specific which perfectly aligns with the job you’re applying for. The two techniques Tina discussed are the PAR technique – problem, action, result – and the STAR technique – situation, task, action, result. When writing your mini stories it’s important to use action verbs to make the story and your actions appear more engaging and dynamic. When it comes to writing your CV you don’t necessarily need to keep to the order prescribed by the PAR or STAR techniques. Frequently you might find leading with what you did works better. For example, you could write it as action, result – with the problem left implicit, such as: coordinated international conservation Project resulting in the recovery of the UK fen raft spider population. You could even write it as result, action, problem as in: successfully applied for £3.5 million to tackle the UK’s postdoc careers crisis. Alternatively you can use these techniques across several bullet points. This is an example from Indeed. Bullet point one: used my role as a home insurance agent to identify customer turnover. Situation and task are combined here. Bullet point two: developed a digital survey to collect data from existing customers. Action. Bullet point three: worked with agency president to lead a new customer service initiative. Results. You can also tell stories in more detail, perhaps summing up a job you’ve had in a brief paragraph. This is an example from Indeed about a teaching job. You’ll see that the extra space lets you be a bit more personal and makes the story and impact a little more engaging. But it’s at the cost of a block of text and space. As with everything to do with CVs it’s about finding that balance. When I started teaching at Golden Apple the room was disorganised. The resources were hard to find. Only two of the students were performing on a grade level with mathematics. Less than half were able to read. I established a set of classroom goals and routines that the students could manage. By the end of the year 80 per cent of my students showed proficiency in reading comprehension and 70 per cent were proficient in maths. By the end of my time at Golden Apple my students enjoyed coming to class. Their parents were grateful for the guidance and structure I provided them. Storytelling techniques aren’t just useful for CVs beyond academia. In fact there are movements to make academic CVs less exclusively focussed on publications and funding, broadening them to include other ways in which academics contribute towards research. This started in October 2019, with the Royal Society launching its ‘Resume for Researchers’, which is intended to be a flexible tool that could be adapted to a range of different processes that require a summative evaluation of a researcher, recognising that their relative importance will be context specific. A couple of years later UKRI started following the Royal Society’s example, announcing UKRI’s ‘Resume for Research and Innovation’, a content-rich alternative to the traditional CV which supports applicants to show how they have made a difference, which will allow people working across the research and innovation sector to evidence a wider range of activities and contributions. Whilst we’re yet to see how widely implemented this will be, UKRI have already tried it out with a few funding calls and have plans to do so with more. As a quick illustration of what the ‘Resume for Researchers’ is all about, here’s the current breakdown of the resumé, with space for blocks of text to answer each section. In addition to providing traditional details such as education and experience in the personal details section, applicants can demonstrate how they contributed to the generation of knowledge, the development of individuals, the wider research community and to broader society. Applicants are also expected to provide a personal statement reflecting their personal work, goals and motivations, and are able to document things that may have affected their career progression such as career breaks, secondments, volunteering, part-time work and other relevant experience. Being able to use storytelling techniques will allow you to provide engaging and impactful answers to these new sections should you encounter these new types of academic resumés in the future. We’re just going to very quickly touch on identifying keywords and using them in your CV. It can be a very effective technique of getting your CV noticed. Remember the applicant tracking system software that scans for terms and words specified by the employer? You can, and should, strategically pull out important words or phrases from the job advert and include them in your CV in some way. Just make sure you don’t overuse this practice. Also ensure that any keywords are placed within a proper context, as employers will spot when you’re putting them in to trick the system as opposed to it actually being relevant. Tina Persson recommends highlighting words and phrases in the job application to help you realise what you need to focus on in your CV, and to ensure that you’re using commonly-used words and phrases in your CV. Different colours can be used to highlight different aspects of the advert. For instance in this example, greens are skills or experience that are easy for you to evidence. Blues are about working style and unusual skills that you have and may help you stand out. Yellows are transferable skills and values, whilst reds are essential requirements that you might not meet exactly, but you could have indirect experience of. Once you’ve highlighted these you can then ensure that your CV showcases them in the right way. We’ve talked a lot about content, but let’s finish by looking at style, design and structure. I wish I could tell you exactly what you need to do, but there’s no set format or style. Do you use a photo of yourself? Do you use colour or keep your CV black and white? How much text do you use? Is everything in bullet points or are there paragraphs? It’s all a combination of personal preference and knowing what the local and industry expectations are. The length and amount of personal details and format of a CV can all differ between countries and sectors. Look up CVs online and find out what’s typical for the type of job you’re applying for and where it is. We’re now going to hear from Tina Persson again as she discusses various CV designs and structures and how they can be effective in communicating your value.

I will show you some CV resumés. There are some examples of them, how you can show some very clear headlines and how you can show the sections in a very clear and defined way. I want to remind you that there are many, many ways of designing your one-page CV or two-page CV. These are just an example of what you can do. I also want to emphasise that if you think there are photos, if it’s black and white or there are colours, I want to remind you that you don’t have to add a photo. In certain countries they prefer not to have a photo. So, please before you start to apply, check what is the policy in the specific country that you apply for; it’s actually different. It also covers for the colours that are used that I show here, or showcase in this presentation here. You don’t need to use colours if you don’t want to. Just so you are aware of that; then I’ll show them, so let’s start. I hope you will enjoy it here. This is just to show you some very simple resumés and CVs. The first one here in the blue, it’s a two-page one, whereas the more greenish here is on one page here. I hope you notice here directly having a look on them how different they are from the academic one. You can see that they clearly highlight the key skills or the skills, they have sections, they have headlines. They show the competencies, they show the skills and they can even use some pictures or small art figures, if I put it that way. On the right one you also see there I’ve written up the career goals. That is something you don’t have to do, but also if you know what you want to do and you know that is tailoring and matching to the job ad that you are designing it for, it’s perfectly fine to do. In one of them there is a photo. In the other one you don’t have a photo. However it’s important that you very clearly show where you are living so we actually can reach you, headhunters and recruiters, when they try to contact you. Just briefly go through in more details, having a check here on Alejandro’s resumé. This is a one-page resumé. On the top below the name you very clearly see the headline. That’s a very impactful headline: PhD applied microbiology, interested in R&D, commercialisation of life science projects – clearly indicating an expertise in STEM, life science, but wants to transition to something that’s much more directing to sales, marketing or application scientist. You can also see here in the next circle here that in the bullet it’s very clearly written and showing the transferable skills and what he has really done apart from the technical skills: designing, executing experiments, techniques in microbiology, supervising, coordinating, scientific report and writing. It’s very clearly written, short, concise, not long sentences and again tailored to the job ad which he will apply for. I would say that this is a very clear resumé showing what he wants to do. On the next one here we talk about performance, risk management. You can have a section where you write in bullets very, very clearly that I have a portfolio management, I have change management, budget planning, etc. This is another way of very clearly catching the eye for the recruiter and the hiring manager so they very quickly realise and understand what you are interested in or the value that you can offer them. You’ll also notice on this resumé here all the small bullets. It’s a lot of air, it’s a lot of not full texting but it’s easy to read. You have subheadings that catch the eye. This is another way here to show your skills. You can nicely write it so it’s separated from the general text that you have. You can also see how he’s pointing out his language skills. Skills like leadership, teamwork, investment strategies, strategic planning, creative problem solving, highlighting. This is about catching the eye and highlighting. Further below you’ll see the inspiration text here. Different people that this person considers to be inspiring him or her in his career development or in life in general. It shows your value a little bit. Then we go for the next section here, which is a powerful way of writing and wrapping up your academic merits; that you have a section which says other experiences. Here you have scientific achievements, three publications, or write poster presentations, design and communication of poster presentations. Wrapping up for example product management and leadership in a way. Leadership is, for example, teaching, tutoring. You have been teaching, maybe, or you have been supervising master’s students. You have maybe had responsibility for technical assistance. That is leadership. Then project management, that is the projects that you have delivered and organised and planned during your PhD or as a postdoc or as a researcher at the university. Believe me, you have much more of that than you think. Then the honours and awards you can put in a small section if you want to – but you don’t have to. You can also put that in your portfolio. Instead of writing all your articles, all your – so to speak – conferences and poster presentations, you’ll wrap it up very shortly. If then the employer wants to have more detailed information, you can write further down in the CV or resumé that upon request you can send the portfolio with the articles and the rest of the information, or for a full CV. It’s also fully okay in a resumé to right below: upon request I can send the references. As you notice here I have not included the references in the CV – and they shouldn’t be unless they ask you to write them in the CV or in the resumé. Otherwise you leave them out.

Tina has also provided Prosper with some general design tips. Make sure that you let your CV breathe. You want it to be easy to navigate. Cramming two pages with text isn’t going to do that. Make your CV easy to read. Draw attention to important sections. Make sure you use relevant headings and subheadings without going overboard. Where possible, use numbers to demonstrate your achievements and experience. For example, if your research involved coordinating with stakeholder groups, then how many stakeholder groups were there? If you refined a research method, then by what percentage did you increase its effectiveness? Use your online presence to your advantage. You don’t want to cram your CV with links but you could include one, or perhaps even two, that lead to your personal web page or LinkedIn profile where further information can be found. If you really don’t want those publications to disappear entirely, have a page on your own site or use a Google Scholar link. The most important thing is that your CV communicates your value. It demonstrates that you are the solution to the employer’s problem. In response to the Tweet I showed you earlier, Eleanor Dumbill shared this amazing data-driven solution to CV creation. Doctor Nick Strayer is a visual data scientist working for RStudio who has created an R package for building a CV or resumé from a spreadsheet of information. As Eleanor says, once you’ve set up your Google Sheets correctly, you can then select what to include or exclude. The R package generates your CV for you. The Europass CV Builder is something similar: once you’ve entered your information you’re then able to create CVs by selecting what you’d like to be displayed from your saved information. So what next? Well, if you’ve not yet viewed the building your skills inventory session and haven’t started actually creating your own skills inventory, I’d recommend starting with that as everything will then feed into your CV. You’ll have an exhaustive repository of examples of all your many skills. You should also try out the PAR and STAR techniques for yourself. Write a headline and summary either for your current role or for any role beyond academia that’s taken your interest. You should try applying storytelling techniques to demonstrate skills and experience within the main body of your CV. Once you’ve come up with your problem, action and result try writing the same story as a single bullet point across several bullet points and as a small paragraph. You should also have a go at making one and two-page CVs. Force yourself to condense your academic CV into the shorter format. Translate your academic achievements and outputs into experience and skills that are relevant to employers beyond academia. You can then share your CVs within your buddy groups or with friends, colleagues or even your PI. Ask for feedback or ask them to identify the four-to-five take-home messages you were trying to get across. Do they pick up on the same things you were aiming for? Thank you for watching.

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Hi and welcome to the workshop, a synchronic workshop by me, Tina Persson. We’re going to talk about how to write the perfect CV or resumé, but I’m also going to show you how you think and the strategy behind tailoring a resumé to a job ad. So I will focus a lot about looking for keywords, understand the keywords, understand how important your transferrable skills are, drive, motivation and the work style of the job. So let’s start with film number one here. Just shortly about me, I’m not going to stay here for very long. As you see, I show a bit about who I am. I’m a fitness, I do CrossFit. So it’s a lot of energy, a lot of outdoor activity, a lot of action. I have a fairly multiphase background, but for you it could be interesting to know that I worked as a recruiter and head-hunter for eight years, so I hope to share some really valuable tips to you in this workshop here today. It’s not rocket science. It’s just to unlock and understand the job ad and that can take some time. Many, many jobs at the moment out there on Indeed and Glassdoor, LinkedIn. So take the time and plan carefully. So having a look here, how to attract hiring managers and recruiters. Some basic understanding how it works and the world that recruiters are working in. When I worked as a recruiter, I could have – in one job, I had over 100 people applying for a position. With that said, I didn’t have a lot of time to read each resumé or CV, so the shorter and the conciser you write, the better. The most common mistake is that you have a sloppy, if I put it that way, structure and layout. Many people today are not native English speaking, as I am, I’m from Sweden. So there can be some typos and grammatical errors. Many recruiters or most recruiters today understand that, though it doesn’t mean that you put them there and that you have many of them. So please spellcheck and check. So it’s a clear layout of your resumé. What’s also striking is that when you apply for a job, you need to tailor it to the job ad. So I understand – or let’s put it this way. You make it easier for me to understand why you want the job and what you can add, the value you can add to that specific job because the recruiter’s job is to sell to you. They’re going to sell you to the company or to the organisation. So they need to dissect your resumé in a fairly short time period to get an idea of whether they should call you or not. If a recruiter have up to 100 job ads, their job is to start the pre-selection and that pre-selection is super fastly done. They come up with a shortlist, maybe up to ten to 20 different resumés and then they start the next selection round. That could then include a screening interview where you get a couple of questions you have to ask. If you pass that, then you come for the real interview. In some cases, you go directly to the company and they take over the process. Hiring managers, they look for the keywords, where you come from, your background, your drives, whether you’re going to fit to the job. So please make it easy. One of the biggest challenges when people straight from academia apply is that the resumé, CV is still very academic. The English, the language is not translated to the corporate language or to the industry language, or for that matter, any other organisation. I’m going to show you one of those resumés here today. The language, when it’s not an academic position, is fairly different, so please pick up the trendy words as well. Take your time. This is, I would say, the vastly most important in many ways, and that is take your time because if you have never translated your academic CV or resumé to an industrial or an organisation for NGOs or any non-academic job, if I put it that way, it will take time for you. When I coach my clients, I advise them, you know, take one to four weeks. Start to think about things like what you like to do, what drives you, what people you like. Reflect on the job you have or had in the past. What kind of specific tasks did you like to do? What tasks did you not like to do? So you sort of get an idea of already then what job field you’re interested in. That way it will be much, much, much easier for you to apply for position and to tailor every resumé to the job ad or CV to the job ad. In the beginning, it takes time, but after a while you get very, very skilled and in the end you more or less just change the subheadings or the bullet points or the heading, and a bit in the prior file. That, you will do very, very quickly. So this timeline here is to show the importance of don’t be too quick and don’t expect from yourself to make an overnight application and you succeed and you get the best resumé ever. If you do, that’s wonderful, but don’t be disappointed if you think it takes just a little bit longer than you think because it does. First though, I will repeat what I said in the first workshop, CV design workshop. I wrap up the six strategies. Look for keywords, even the trendy ones. Make your resumé easy to read, so I get it and I very easily find your skills. Important bullets, important subheadings Help me with the headline so I understand what you’re looking for. So draw attention to important sections. Include only relevant information. You could have maybe a six-page academic CV, please shorten it to maximum two pages. Remove things in your fantastic background that is not relevant for that job you are applying for. That goes also for only including the relevant subheadings. Then it is to communicate the value you offer to that job. Coming back to that, I’m going to show that clearer when I show you the different job ads and the CVs. This is a print screen. Today, there is so many downloading pages where you can go and you can download CVs and resumés from the net and please do so. You don’t have to sit and design everything from the beginning. It’s perfectly fine to go there, buy it and download. As you can see in this picture here, they almost look the same, these two resumés here, but they are different, small, small details. It’s perfectly fine to look what do they call the headlines? What is the different names and the structure of the resumé? Either you download it, as I said, or you design it accordingly yourself in PowerPoint, in Canva or in Word, of course. I’ll just show you the vast variation of resumés and CVs today. You can have a plain one, black and white. You can have a colourful one. You can have with or without a photo. You can have the infographic one, and you can have the one that is kind of half academic if you prefer that one. Today, there’s so many different resumés and CV templates so you can choose the one that you like. You can choose the colour you like. So don’t hesitate to do that. You don’t have to invent everything from the beginning. The first time you design it could actually be fairly smart to buy a template so you can follow the structure and the wording of it. This picture here just shows what you need to prepare to make it easier for yourself. When it’s easier for you and you have a strategy, you most likely also help the recruiter and the hiring manager. Understand what’s behind the job, the work style, whether you’re going to travel, if it’s a more extroverted job, is it a more detail-oriented job? Is it a creative job, investigative job? Is it a practical hands-on job? That defines the work style, the drive and motivation in the job. Then they ask for a certain sort of personality and we are all different. Whether you’re outcome focussed, you’re more people focussed or you’re creative or you’re very detail-oriented, you’re kind of the person that’s very cautious, you want order, structure, planning, or if you’re more the big picture, spontaneous person. That could indicate that we prefer to work in a certain way and maybe in a certain position. Also, whether you like to work in the corporate world, small, medium enterprise companies, NGOs, organisations, governmental positions. That is something I would like you to carefully evaluate before you start to design your CV because otherwise, you most likely will have to redesign it and rewrite it so people can really learn to know you, who you are. So by reading it, they know. So when you come into the interview, they say, ‘Oh yes, this is you. We reckon you from the resumé.’ That’s my tip.

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Hi and welcome. Tina here again. I hope you enjoyed the first film and the first part of this workshop. Now it’s time to go through the second one. So just some general strategies and how you practically tailor and what you pick from the job ad and how you put it into the CV. I will be very clear here now that the CV that I have designed here is a very plain CV, so I wouldn’t recommend you to write that one, but that is to easify for you to see what I have written and where I have put it in the resumé. I would recommend that you write exactly the same thing into one of those earlier CVs and resumés I showed in film number one. We are going to look for the key skills and transferrable skills, soft skills, work style, etc., in the different CVs. This is a course coordinator job advertised in UK. As you see, what I’ve done here, I have started to colour it. I love to do it in this way, and I still do it. I use different colours depending on what I’m colouring if I speak so. The yellow one is sort of a mixture of values, transferrable skills and work style that’s really good to know when you write the job ads. I highlight it so I easy can see it and translate it into my CV. The green part is what I say, I have it. That’s what I have. That is a master degree I have. I have, as you can see further down, a PhD and professional doctorate, I have. I’ve done course and programming leaders. I have been doing teaching. I have my teaching qualifications. I have it. Then the blue one is something that, oh wow, that’s maybe not everyone has in academia, but I have it, network with relevant employees in industry sector. That is something that I should highlight a little bit extra because I think that’s a little bit extra important. Anyway, we go back from the start here and I will take it step by step in the approach here. The first I take in yellow here is leading the course and from supporting the programme and partnership. This is a job where you’re going to lead courses and support programmes. So it’s already clear here. It’s an administrator job and supportive job. I’m wrapping up. You’re going to like to work with undergraduate, postgraduate courses, foundation courses. You’re going to lead programmes, I take it, again here. You’re going to develop, probably manage courses and programmes. You’re going to monitor. You’re going to have follow up, probably a lot of web service. It’s administrative and you’re going to report to the academic director. As they also write, you’re going to work closely with the academic director. It’s also enhancement of existing and development and planning of new awards with colleagues. So it’s a fairly academic job, but in the administrative part at the university. You’re going to like to work with policies and regulations. You’re going to – feedbackings, web service, as I said before. It’s very good if you’re familiar with the different processes and systems at the university, including e-learning resources. So I would say any sort of experience you have with web service, the CRM systems, typical academic support systems, various e-learning or digital platforms, going to be super, super important for this sort of job. Also, that you like the fact to support and help students in their projects, help them in their academic training as PhD students, also postdocs, is something that is good to have in your work style. So just having a look on the above one here, and then you take the transferrable skill. These jobs goes under what we call in drive and motivation, administration and support, organisation, planning, executing projects. Initiating but also executing is a valid drive to have. Also that you’re interested in university regulation and policies, and that you can work in a top down, which usually universities are, in the way of taking order and follow up in the academic environment. That’s the yellow part. Of course, teaching, if you like teaching, that’s a bonus that you have that behind you. The rest is fairly clear. So you have a PhD preferentially, or desirable, so you don’t need it, but it’s desirable. Any experience in teaching and course programmes is going to be super important, that you like to network and that you have been networking, interacting with people beyond academia is a very good asset to have in this position here, and to highlight and bring in to your resumé. So now I’m going to show you how I put that fairly clearly, I hope, in the resumé. As you see, this is very plain. So I would say this is not very attractive from the layout, but it’s easy for you to see what I’ve been writing here. So you can take the text and then you use the design as I described in film number one here. So I start with the profile where I write, ‘I am an ambitious and curious PhD in humanities who gets energy from leading and coordinating projects to support organisations, stakeholders in administrative matters. I’m actively looking for a position where I can utilise my interest in undergrad and postdoctoral affairs within the university. My most valuable asset is that I see solutions in challenges like solving problems. I have excellent planning, organisation skills. To that, I have, for the last two years, been involved in postdoctoral career activities, supporting their career transformation from academia to a non-academic career.’ You can write this very differently. I just want you to take a look on the essence, what I’m writing here. I’ve tailor it to the job ad, and I explain I like to work with an administrative job. I write that I have worked a bit with postdocs, organisations, within the university. So any sort of activity as a PhD or postdoc is a huge asset for you in this application as it shows that you know what the job is about. So therefore, when you say you’ll most likely like the job, they trust you there. So this is just an example what you can write. You can most likely do much better than this, but this is one way of doing it and how to write it in the profile. A common question I get here is that do I have to write this in the CV? Can’t I just write it in the cover letter? I say it’s very clever and very smart to write it in the resumé and CV, in case the cover letter is, you know, maybe not attached to your resumé when they send it around, to make sure they don’t miss your drive and your interest. Going a bit further down, what I like is that you put an area of expertise. That is that you just highlight key words like project management, digital communication, university administration, web service, e-learning, postdoctoral affairs, career development, social media, teaching. So it’s very easy for the eye to just highlight your skills and area of expertise. It helps the recruiters and hiring managers to catch the eye on something that they know you need to have or must have in the job. Experience and achievements, I call these sections here. Here, I’m writing in that this is the person, Lisa here. She had a volunteering time. We know that any volunteering jobs and internships meanwhile you do your postdoc or PhDs is valued very, very highly for most recruiters and hiring managers. So here, Lisa has been an advocate for postdocs and also career event coordinator. University of Liverpool, very clearly and then in bullet points, and I like these bullet points because when you then tailor this job or a similar job in the future, it’s easy for you to change the bullet points so you can match and tailor to the next job ad. One way of writing it could be coordination and management or web service connected to career activities, created and developed researcher blog programme, collaborating, attracting external stakeholders to postdoctoral events. Implementation of career events in collaboration with internal stakeholders at the university. Human resource directors, professors, and support the postdocs in career related matters. This clearly shows that you have been working with it. You have been reporting to directors, internal stakeholders at the university, so you, in some way, have some insight to what the future job or the job you apply for might actually involve. The postdoc time you write a little bit like this here. Planning and execute on scientific projects within behavioural science. Here, I wrote planning and execution because in the course coordinator job, you’re going to execute a lot and you have executed a lot as a scientist as well. Driving and submission of ethical correspondence with ethical board at the university. That means you, again, you collaborate and know the routines within the university. Writing scientific reports, submission of scientific articles, development and facilitated e-learning platform connecting undergrads to improve communication proficiency in English. Shows here that you have been involved with different sort of platforms at the university. If you have that, that’s a super asset to this job here. Then presenting my science at international conferences, shows that you’re trained how the academia works. Then of course I will not go through it. You write also in your work experience that you are PhD and you’ll write it in a similar way as I’ve done above. I will not show you further, but education qualification is important. You write down courses if you take them. You can write any course like support, teaching, administrative tools, university course that are relevant for the job. Also, language skills, social media skills, software system, CRM system, web design, surveys and teaching tools that are relevant to the job. Language, you can write down. Lisa actually is multi-language here. Then IT skills or any technical skills as I’ve done here. You’re very welcome to write, because in this case here, most likely they’re going to like that you know and have an asset of them. Interest, I get a lot of questions about. Write only if it’s relevant, and if you do it, maybe you don’t write it in text. You can have it as small, small figures. That would do, I would say. So now we will go to the next job ad and that is a sales job. It’s an inside sales job, and it’s going to be Brian that applies for that one. This job is very different from the previous job and it’s connected completely different drives and motivation. I will show how a postdoc and a PhD in this case, Brian is a brand-new PhD, can apply to a job where he has absolutely no experience, at least what it looks like when you read the job ad. This one here is fairly interesting because they are writing very clearly. They are looking for someone and experience might not be super important. Anyway inside sales, representing and sequencing, and real time PCR. It’s already written in the headline that any experience in sequencing and real time PCR is the key. Leading, but what about the company? Now we’re first going to read – you know, this is Thermo Fisher and this is leading in serving science. They help people and customers finding cure for cancer, protecting the environment, making sure our foods is safe and moving forward with thousands of important projects that improve millions of lives. Here, the company show the values. Don’t hesitate in your cover letter to write that in. You don’t write it in your resumé, CV, but don’t hesitate to really take a close look on that. So you’re in the beginning of your cover letter, mention that, why you want to work for this company. Do you want to be part of a journey in the future, and you say, absolutely, I want to be part of your journey. I’m passionate about to make a difference in life science. Again, write it in the motivational letter. They also write that this is a job for a recently or newly graduated bachelor, master and PhD within the life science field with some sales experience. I’m coming back to what some sales experience could be, looking at transferrable skills, drive and motivation. Then they write a lot about you as a person. Guarantee an interesting and challenging position in an international – so this is a challenging, they will challenge you in a way, and it’s international. They will give you training. It’s very clearly written here. So you get an insight and will learn about Thermo Fisher’s product portfolio and you will also get some selling skills training. So when you feel that, or if you feel, ‘Yes, but I don’t have any sales,’ they will train you. Then they describe about the job as an inside sales representative. You’ll be using the telephone and digital aids as your primary tool. So this is a person applying for this job must like to speak up, to use the phone and contact people, approach people. You can’t be shy here. So it is for sure a person that can take the initiative. So just by looking on this yellow, where the yellow is drive, motivation, transferrable skills, sort of, personality and soft skills, it’s clear that this is an enterprising job. An enterprising job with a bit of supportive in. Now I take the blue ones, that, the technical skills, here, sequencing and real-time PCR and qPCR is something that you should have. So if you have that, write it very, very clearly on the resumé. I put the green in it because what they are writing here is that experience from academia and know how academia works is an asset. So you will work with a variety of clients. So in any case, if you have, during your PhD or postdoc also worked, so you have contacted biotech companies in different career events or internships or in any other kind of activity, it is hugely, hugely advisable for this position. Also, the fact that you as a PhD know academia that make you – that they could be – make you attractive, sorry, for this job here. Key responsibilities, and now I just write it down very, very briefly. Look at the wording that I’m highlighting, manage, service, coordination. It doesn’t mean that you must like sales because you don’t have that experience but manage, coordination, databases, any CRM system. They’re going to use Salesforce CRM. You have maybe used other CRM systems or software tools at the university that could be an asset for you. Written and verbal communication. Communication with research scientists, that you communicate science within the scientific community is, here, equally good. Coordination, guidelines, supporting again, trying to work with programmes or coordinating programmes, manage and close. So you start, you manage, and you execute, and you close things. The experience, minimum bachelor. So it’s minimum bachelor. That means that they can take a PhD, but when they write it like this, it could impact the salary. That could be depending on the country here. Excellent written and verbal communication, and in this case, interesting enough when I saw it, it’s in English but also in Swedish, which means that any Swedish for a person here applying is a super asset. So this is also something that many forget, that the language, don’t forget your language. High-performing team. It’s high tempo, high pace, it’s action and energy, and that you can prioritise, you know what to put on top and what can wait till the next week. Then shortly about some computer skills, PowerPoint and etc. I know that this is Thermo Fisher, so it’s a big global company here. Now I’m going to show Brian’s. Again, it’s very plain, and as you know in this case, I think you should add one page and you should have more infographic one. Those templates I’ve shown you in the previous workshop and you can download from the internet here. What I have written here, now, in the profile is something like this and you can absolutely write it differently, but this is highlighting certain things that could be good to have in the profile. ‘I am a PhD in molecule biology with solid experience in real-time PCR and qPCR.’ I write that on top because that is super important that I have PCR, that you have real-time and qPCR. Then you write, ‘I am actively looking for a position to combine my interest in life science, sales and marketing.’ You are indicating there that you will not work behind the bench. You want to go to business; you want to go to sales. ‘I’d like to work in an environment supporting lifelong learning and with colleagues promoting high-performing activities.’ Now you explain what you like. In the job ad, that was learning, quickly learning new things, and you’re indicating that’s what you like. You also say that, ‘I like to work in a high-performing, energetic environment. My most valuable asset is that I see solution in challenges.’ This is good to do in sales and marketing. ‘I want to solve problems and have an excellent planning and organisation skills.’ This is also important in sales and marketing. ‘In addition, I have been responsible for career-related networking events at the university.’ So anything – now you can write, you can say that you’ve been responsible for coordinating companies at the university or anything. Anything that could indicate that you have reached out to external stakeholders. Then we go into the area of expertise and, again here, I take project management, life science, molecule biology, qPCR, real-time PCR, sequencing, networking, career event coordinator, travelling grants, teaching. I write travelling grants because there, you have attracted funding that can show some initiative, that you’re actually good in writing and to attract money to your science. In sales, you should be good at that, but of course, you reached out to clients differently. This is one way of showing some transferrable skills. Career event coordinator, your interest of doing other things at the university that’s connected maybe to external stakeholders, where you like to organise, but at the same time be with people. There, it gives you a possibility in an interview to express your interest in doing that, and there, you can get the networking in and other activities indicating or showcasing that you are a fit for being a future sales representative. We go to experience and achievements. Now, this is a PhD student in BioMed molecular medicine. When I take in bullet points, here are common things that most PhD students have when at work in life science at any university. All right, design and execution of scientific project shows that you can execute, you can start things. I highlight very early on that you used qPCR. Writing scientific reports, submission of scientific articles. Communicating scientific results at international conferences. Initiate collaboration with biotech companies, attract travelling grants for international conferences or teaching undergraduate level X and X. Supervision of master students, coordination of undergrad courses. You know, there’s many bullet points, supervision of master’s shows that you’re interested to help and to support people. That’s part of sales as well. Attracting travelling grants, as I said, shows your interest to get money in. If you have done anything with external stakeholders, you put it down in the bullet points here. Now you might wonder whether I don’t have more skills in life science, and you should have in the skills section. There, you can write down other of core skills that you learned in molecule biology apart from PCR and qPCR, but that can go directly to the technical section. I haven’t included that in this example here, but this is just to highlight how you write those sections like achievements and the profile. Then, again, I’d like to highlight that any sort of internship or volunteering, don’t forget to pull that down, because this is my experience that you do a lot at the universities, but you forget everything you’ve done or you don’t put a value on it. Please do so. So for example, there we have a PhD student, been doing some networking at the internship of HUB, responsible for attracting companies to the internship programme or designing web page, development of communication channels to connect the university with external stakeholders, responsible for budget. So you’ve been active at any sort of student activity programmes, please add that in as a volunteering activity. Then the rest I don’t have to go through, education, qualifications, this is clear. Any courses connected that could be important for the job, absolutely. Teaching, administration, university courses etc., language and etc., as in the previous job here. Then, of course, language, and then you put down the IT skills, as you noticed here and then interest if it’s relevant. In this job here, in the sales job, it actually could be relevant in the sense that you show that you are energetic, that what sort of activities you have on your spare time. It shouldn’t dominate, of course, but why not have some figures showing that for you. Then, you know, as I said, this is just a very plain, so easy file for you to see here on the film and on the computer how to highlight the certain sections. You should, of course, in this job add more skills than just qPCR and PCR, but I think that’s fairly obvious. So that was it. I do hope that you have got some important tips and tricks, how I take the job ad, dissect it and then move it over to the CV in the sections of profile, results and achievements. You know, your position, your work experience and your achievements connected to it. So thank you very much for listening. It’s absolutely a pleasure to share my knowledge with you and good luck with your applications. Take care.

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The title of the workshop is ‘How to Get Your Resume and LinkedIn Profile Noticed by Recruiters; Networking, Communication and Strategies to get an Interview.’ Shortly about me. I will not talk long about that. You can read it yourself, but I think it’s relevant for this workshop here is, I have an academic background and I have been working as a recruiter for different companies, both Manpower, Kelly Services. I have also worked for Randstad. In those days it was Proffice, as you can see here. I have fairly good insight into how the recruitment business is working. Number one that I like to share with you is that recruitment today compared to for ten years is that recruitment is a global business today. Many of the companies that recruit, they maybe are placed in London but they recruit people and placements to Barcelona, even to Stockholm, Sweden. You can also notice that more and more of the American companies are looking for prospects and talents on the European platform. I think this is something to have on mind, that with the digital development and with the globalisation, candidates are looking for jobs all over the world. It’s also so that companies can consider, because one fact has become extremely clear lately if you read the job ads, and that is companies say it’s okay to work remote. That means that the recruitment platform from which companies can recruit talent has increased enormously. To you as a candidate this is an opportunity, but it’s also so that you need to be prepared for, that these recruiters, whether they are recruitment companies or they are internal recruiters in companies, they can contact you from all over the world. They maybe don’t have the local knowledge. If you, for example, are living in London, the recruiters may be sitting in Stockholm or sitting in Berlin. They might not know how local it works where you are living, and therefore help the recruiter to understand your business. I just want to highlight this, because this is something that’s going to grow dramatically in the next years to come. When it talks about recruiters today, we’re going to look a little bit on how you can tailor your resume, what’s important for the LinkedIn. Of course, networking is something that comes into it. It’s no way that we can’t talk about networking and communication, how you can reach out, and how you can reach out on LinkedIn and take the first step to the recruiters, and connect with key people and try to get referrals. Recruiters love referrals. If they get a tip they love to call you up, and I’m going to tell you why a bit later on here. What recruiters are really looking for. They are looking for passion, that you show passion in the company, in the product and in the position. They look for motivation. Self-motivated people they love. If you take the action, they’re going to love that. Teamwork. Of course, today a single person is not stronger than a team. It’s always going to be the team that’s going to beat the individual, and companies today, they work very, very team based and that can be both on-site and remote. They of course check your competence, communication skills, how flexible you are, whether you are a problem-solver. They love problem-solvers. This is a wonderful PhD skill. Integrity, likeability, which means your personality, and your ability to understand other people, the ability of you to show empathy, your ability to show interpersonal skills written here. That means that you can work with people both being like you, but also people not being like you. It’s also feedback. There’s nothing harder for a manager to have people in a team that have a hard time to take feedback. That also goes into interpersonal skills. Of course, can they trust you? Are you reliable? Recruiters’ day-to-day work involves a lot. I would say, try to understand the business of the recruiter. I made a word cloud out of what I remember I was doing, and also called around and chatted with some of my recruiter friends. Their day is a lot. They are calling, they are prospecting, they are sitting in meetings with clients. They’re sitting in meetings with internal key account management departments. They are managing the lists. They are searching. They are searching on LinkedIn, looking for candidates, prospecting, tagging top talent, and they interview a lot. It’s a lot of emailing and calling, I tell you. A day for a recruiter moves very, very fast. When we are looking for a job, we can be very, very impatient if we don’t hear from them. Don’t worry. If you are a great candidate, they will come back. Also, they are grateful if you contact and get back to them. You know? I remember one of my clients sending a Christmas card, and the recruiter was so happy and called in for an interview. Help the recruiters to help you. That’s a very strong tip. Try to understand their business. It’s also to understand the role of the of the recruiter here. They are a mediator between you and the company, and they are paid by the company. That means that it is in the end the company, they’re going to pay the recruiter for a successful candidate. Don’t be angry on the recruiter. Instead, try to help the recruiter to understand, ‘Send me to the company for an interview because of…’ It’s again, help the recruiter to understand the skills you have. Also keep in mind that not all recruiters understand your proficiency in life sciences, or in social sciences, or humanities. They have maybe not the same background that you have. Here, your communication skills, your social skills, and your relationship skills come as a top, top skill when it comes to building a relationship with the recruiters. Remember, they have a lot to do. When you call and you say, ‘Do you remember me from two weeks ago?’ they might not remember you, but I promise you, if you continue to stay in contact with them, the question is rather, ‘What can you do?’ They remember you, so you stand out. I can tell you, when I worked as a recruiter, some candidates, they were brilliant on standing out. They could show themselves on LinkedIn, or they didn’t hesitate to actually write me an email or to call me, or reaching out in some way and say, ‘Hello,’ always in a very nice way, ‘I’m still available. I’m still interested. What’s going on at the moment?’ Not pushy at all. Just showing interest. Understand, rule number one, understand that the recruiter is a mediator paid by the company to find the perfect fit. Also important is that recruitment is a people business, which means there is not a right and a wrong. It’s a huge grey sign, because in the end, what is a perfect candidate? In the end, when they have candidates, going to fall back on some sort of fitting into the team, having skills that complements the team. Some of these skills are measurable, and some of them are not that easy to measure. In the end, I’d just like to say that recruitment is a people business, and it’s never about right and wrong. It’s more about building relationships with people, learning about the company, learning about what they like to have and how you can add value. That’s the key. Also respectfully, if you are declined, say, ‘Thank you for the interview. Thank you for showing interest here.’ You’re still open minded, and that you are looking forward to the next interview.

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Hello, Tina is back here and now it’s ready, I hope you’re ready for film number 2: how to be headhunted on LinkedIn. That is your LinkedIn profile and LinkedIn strategy. I will not go into depth about the algorithms; it’s too short of time to do that, but I will give you really $10 million tips here, and then also why you should be active on LinkedIn. I have some good tips to pop up and be recognised on LinkedIn. I can give you already now a little secret here. Several of my coachees, if I put it that way, placed in London started – even though she is very introverted – to be more active. She’s started to comment on things. She didn’t share anything on her own on LinkedIn but she started to comment. Only that led to an informal interview where she somehow showed herself. We start with the first slide here; that is about keywording, job titles and technical skills. I have talked about this here for Prosper both when I talked about deep learning CV and CV design. I just give it here now from a different perspective. LinkedIn is a super powerful platform if you want to be recruited. But you are not recruited automatically just having a LinkedIn profile. If you have a LinkedIn profile and you don’t use the skills, you don’t use the terminology the industry or the organisation is using, people will not really find you. We have to understand there are hugely many profiles on LinkedIn; I think there are up to 750 million profiles on LinkedIn. I would say that you can use LinkedIn – and you should use it – as an opportunity to be found. For that you need to keep LinkedIn as an agile approach. It’s never perfect and it doesn’t need to be perfect. You can constantly change by changing job titles and words until LinkedIn is kicking back both job ads and people to your profile. LinkedIn has many possibilities and I am summarising some of them here. Show your future career, show your passion, show your skills, show your personality. Interact with professionals, call for discovery calls, contacting and connecting. You can follow people. People want to be followed; that’s why they are there. Learn about new career paths; I think it’s super important. Super important in the way you should goose people, you should follow them and goose them and check them and open their profiles, and imitating is really good. Find raw models, people that you admire in companies and you check what they’ve done. Those people you can also reach out to, so LinkedIn is a lot. Recruiters, they are all over here because they also have big networks. Usually they have big networks. That is their job to have networks, so connect with recruiters. Click on the connect button, say, ‘Hello, I’d like to broaden my network in London, Liverpool or Manchester or UK’ – whatever. Or if you want to leave UK, you have of course to build a network where you are going. It doesn’t help that you have a huge network in UK when you’re going to Berlin, Germany. Then you need to connect with people on the German side. Calling up for discovery calls, yes, I’m going to give you some tips a little bit later here in the workshop, how you can do that. Starting with the easy thing here, it is: this is what I see. I see a picture of your profile, a background profile and under or below your photo you have a tagline that is the headliner. This headliner is super important. When I’m scrolling and I maybe have 120 candidates with skills that I am interested in, the only thing I see is your picture and the headline. The headline here is: bioinformation, data science, digital health, researcher at Science for Life Laboratory. That is what I see. You have to make an impression there so that needs to reflect both what you have and what you want. You can use these brackets to make it easier. What you use there could be your field, it could be skills, it can be job title. When you write that and I make a search as a recruiter and I tag that specific skill, that will end up very high up in the search. So, the impactful headline is strategy and very, very important. In order to write a very good and impactful headline you must really know what you want. You need to understand at least the job field where you are going into. Create a powerful headline, make it easy to click on your profile – and now I have clicked so now you see here this is what I see. If I am not interested here, if you don’t make an impression here I will not open up your profile. Having a profile doesn’t mean I find you. If you have an academic profile most likely you will not be found unless I have got a tip or a referral that you are a great candidate, or I know that your university and that specific department generates impactful candidates or top talent for the field I am looking to headhunt people or recruit people. Maybe to AstraZeneca or any other kind of company. That is the only reason that I maybe find it, so I want you to take another look here. This is what I see. If I don’t understand your headliner I will scroll further. Most likely that is what I will do. Use the keywords and the job titles. I get common questions around, ‘Yes, but I can’t lie. If I have never worked as a data scientist I can’t say I am.’ There is a big difference of saying, ‘I am’ and using the title. You can do that in a very nice way so recruiters and hiring managers in companies understand this is what you want. I think what he has done here, if you look on Michel’s profile – because that’s a former client of mine – you have researcher/data scientist. Then he declared that he is from academia, he has been using data scientist tools, and he expressed in what way. He is not lying here. He is not lying, but he needs to put data science somewhere in the job title so he increases the possibility to be found. My tip – and my strongest tip here – is: job titles need to be according to the job field you are interested in. You can use double job titles, you can use brackets; that is okay. Explain your experience in the summary or in bullet points in your achievements or in the work section. Help the recruiter to understand what you are looking for and the value you can offer – even though you are not a 100 per cent fit, because very few candidates are a 100 per cent fit. Write a short and concise summary. I have read many summaries and they are too long and too academic. It doesn’t help. We really don’t have the time to read your whole life story, so make it short and concise. Here is an example of where I say: experienced researcher, project manager and coordinator with a demonstrated history of working in environmental change on a global level. Passionate about stakeholder engagement and collaborative working. Skilled in sustainability, climate change, data analysing, biodiversity and project management. Professional with Master of Science degree from the University of Liverpool. You could add a PhD there, of course. Contact data very, very clearly and then you can list some of the skills selected for the future of your jobs. Select the important skills you want to use for the future, so you have to deselect. Make it easy to contact you. It’s unbelievable how many candidates I, in the past, have scrolled and there were no contact data. I send an email and they never checked the email so they actually missed an opportunity. Then they could be angry that I didn’t call them. I said, ‘I don’t know your phone number’, so please don’t do that small little mistake by hiding so we can’t reach out to you.

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Hi, again. Are you ready for film number three? Your CV is your marketing material. I talked earlier on Prosper about CV design and specific details. I also talked about deep learning and writing CVs. This film here will be very, very short, but this is from recruiter perspective. Though I want to be clear that all recruiters think differently, they are different and they might have different opinions but one thing recruiters have in common is that they don’t have much time. They commonly don’t have the time to spend on average from 7 to 30 seconds per resumé. If it’s too unclear, unstructured and they have no clear what you want, they most likely will put you in the reaction pile. So, whatever you do, spend time on your resumé, showing what you want in the future, not what you have done, so that you help the recruiters to understand where you are going. For that, you need to figure out at least the job field. The more you can help the recruiter, the better. Whatever you do, your resumé should be clear, concise and easy to catch the different headlines and sub-headings. I will show you one resumé or CV that is very, very clear. First of all, there is a very, very clear headline. This guy shows he has a PhD in life science and he wants to combine his life-science background with his business background. Then, below that he has, in the work experience, bullet points. In the bullet points, he writes in a way so he also clearly shows that – not probably go to the lab… He shows his transferrable skills, how he can apply his drive and motivation. This young man, he was interested in a sales job and, particularly, he wanted to be an application specialist or application specialist support or application scientist. In fact, that was also the job that he nailed. This was his first resumé, so it’s far from perfection but he shows very clearly some of the skills and his drives and motivation. Another way of showcasing is, of course, to have very clear bullet points with your skills so it’s easy to see if I’m looking for something very, very specific. It could be a programming language. It could be a CRM system. It could be – yes, well, whatever. Extremely important that I very easily can find it. By writing it in this way, you make it easy for me. It’s under a subheading and I know it’s very calm and you start to write all these words in the text. Remember, then it’s much, much harder for me to catch the eye. In both these resumés, it’s easy to find the skills/technical skills/interest area and what you want. That, recruiters like. If you, then, can show passion by writing a short summary about your passion in the product, you don’t have to write a whole pitch about that. It’s good enough to write an impactful summary in less than five sentences. You don’t need… If you want to know more about that you go for the deep learning film where I talk about CV and I’m digging into on how to write a summary in a nice way.[END OF TRANSCRIPT]

How to connect with recruiters, and you can include here key people or key professionals in companies. If they find a candidate, they usually contact the internal recruitment department in companies. It’s connecting strategies and how to write an InMail on LinkedIn. Connecting and asking questions. This is what we’re going to learn here. Effective questions to ask recruiters. An opportunity always is if you ask clever questions, it’s always an opportunity for a spontaneous interview. Questions you can ask is do you have time for five to ten minutes? I have three questions. That shows very clearly that you’re polite and you understand that they are busy. Thanks, they say. What competences are you looking for at the moment? What are companies looking after in this region where I’m looking for a job? Could be Liverpool, Manchester, or London. What advice would you give me if I’m interested in a particular company or organisation or governmental position? Considering my background, what could be my next step? Considering my background, what would your advice be? I’ve done that and that. You could be very curious, ask if you have a PhD like me, what usually is a step-in job? Any advice would help me. If I want to leave academia, what could be a good fit for me? The first step, entry job. These questions will, for sure, help you to get information from the recruiters because they have a lot of information. This is what they do. This is their job, this is their expertise. Taking advice from them about the labour market, what companies are looking for. Their advice about what you maybe should have in your resumé, what skills you should highlight, could be essential. Now remember that recruiters, there are many recruiters on the market, and they will all have opinions and ideas. The more you talk the more you learn, and finally you figure out a red thread in all of it. Ask questions and learn. Then, of course, if you start to ask questions to the recruiter, the recruiter will most likely start to ask you questions. It could be good to prepare the following. What do you want? What are you looking for? Why did you start the PhD and a postdoc? What are you interested in? What do you know about the market? What companies are you interested in? What jobs do you find interesting? How can I help you? By contacting recruiters, you will also learn what questions they ask to you. It’s okay in the beginning to say, ‘Do you know what? That is a very good question. I really don’t know. When I know, maybe I can come back to you’, or, ‘Do you have any ideas how I can figure out what I want?’ ‘Maybe you could explain for me what that job is about. That would help me a lot.’ This is the moment you should start to contact people in companies and say, ‘Do you know what? It seems you have a fantastic, interesting job. Could you help me to understand what the daily day looks like when you’re working? Why do you like your job?’ That will also help you to figure out things. Remember, there is only person that can help you in the end, and that is yourself. Asking questions is a wonderful way of learning. Finally, we’re going to talk about how to write LinkedIn InMail templates. The trick is to use templates. I’m looking to broaden my network in the life science industry in the UK. I hope to connect with you. All the best. A wonderful way just to send a short message when you contact them. You don’t need to know the people. This is an opening phrase, it’s very, very polite. Then if you want to follow up, and you want to get in contact with them, you can start, ‘I’m a researcher at Liverpool University, looking for new opportunities in the pharmaceutical industry. I can see that you successfully transitioned to a position.’ This number B here is for a person maybe working in a company, so you are interested in learning about a job. Before you start to figure out whether this is a job or not, you talk with that person. When you have a contact, then you can continue and ask questions, what positions they would advise you to take as an entry job. That you can use as a motivation later on when you talk and speak with recruiters. Fairly smart, isn’t it. This is how you get information, information and interviews. Then I have some more lines here that you can go through. Pleased that you’d like to chat further, thank you very much, and you can contact me on my email or we can plan a short chat in my calendar. If they are busy, be nice back. They say, ‘I don’t have the time’, ‘It’s really not up to me to answer these questions’, or whatever they come back with, always stay super-polite and write, ‘I completely understand and I hope to connect with you in the future maybe. In case you have the time, you can write something, I attach my resumé’, because it could be that when they realise what person you are, they still get interested and forward your resumé to someone else. Stay polite. Don’t be sad, don’t be irritated if they don’t have the time, just stay super-polite. Then if you are reaching out to someone there it could be noticed, your LinkedIn profile, that you are a recruiter at the best recruitment, and are looking for competences in data science. ‘You might find my background interesting, could we arrange a discovery call?’ If you have something relevant for data science, you can write that too. Don’t attach your resumé this time because you want to have a discovery call. If you attach your resumé there’s no need maybe for the recruiter to get back to you. Here, now try to get a call before you attach your resumé. The Must Go Plan is less is more on LinkedIn. If you don’t know where you are going, write less. Then after a while, when you learn where you are going, then you add information. Marketing your skills for the future, not the past. Select skills matching your future field. Figure out skills and job titles companies are looking for. You need to start to learn and understand the market you are going to. This is an investigator job. Add even the trendy ones, that means that they realise that you have been studying the field for a while. If you find this very difficult and you need help, ask professionals for help. I know that you at Prosper have fantastic help. Take the help, take the advice because you’re going to save a lot of time. Then finally I would say stay active on LinkedIn, please. You don’t have to share your own stuff, but you can like other posts and you can comment on things. You can start to like because in that way, you start to change the algorithm. LinkedIn is pushing back both blogs and articles and job ads that LinkedIn realise that you are interested in. That won’t happen if you don’t start to train down on it. It’s like Facebook nowadays. That was it. Thank you very much, and don’t hesitate to check and listen to the podcast PhD Career Stories or read my book. You’ll find a lot of valuable tips and tricks in that one. Thank you very much, this was it, and this was Tina Persson from Passage2pro, working with fantastic Prosper, which I’m very proud of. Good luck in your career in the future. Take care, bye-bye.

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