6 Resume Trends to Watch Out for in 2020
As we enter a new decade, you can be sure the next 10 years will present new challenges for job seekers. For example, by 2025, it’s estimated that 75 per cent of workers will be millennials, who are known to value diversity, career progression, blogs like this, and environmental health. As companies and talent acquisition teams adjust their hiring practices, it’s only natural that you’ll have to change your jobseeking approach as well. Here are six hiring trends that you should watch out for as you apply for jobs in 2020.
1 . Talk About Your Emotional Intelligence
As we move into an increasingly technology-focussed world, it’s easy to overlook the flipside of this change: the added emphasis on emotional intelligence. AI can replace many hard skills, but the one thing it can’t replace is your people skills. Nobody comes home and tells their family, ‘Wow! My best friend in the office is the AI machine next door!’
If you can brighten up any workplace you walk into, you’re only going to become more valuable in 2020. Currently 77 per cent of employers think soft skills are important, a number that looks likely to rise as we head into the new year.
Emotional intelligence, however, is notoriously difficult to include in a resumé. It’s fine to list it as one of your skills, but it’s almost impossible to prove. An easy but roundabout way to suggest you have strong people skills is to include some relevant hobbies or interests with your resumé, particularly if they require collaboration or teamwork. This shows you care about the people just as much as your achievements and numbers.
2. Emphasise your technology skills
Along with emotional intelligence, your technology skills are more important than ever. Every field has different technology needs, so there are no easy answers. For example, in digital marketing, CSS, HTML and SEO are essential tech skills, whereas JavaScript and Python are key languages for web developers. They’re all free to learn online, but ‘free’ still requires time commitment. If you’re a budding executive with more on your plate than you can handle, it’s unrealistic to learn skills just for the sake of putting them on your resumé.
So what do you do if you’re not confident in your tech skills? The trick is to focus on getting better at the very basics—which may mean Microsoft Office and email. Then, instead of listing them in a Skills section, where they’re not going to be as impressive as someone with a genuine coding background, you want to weave them into the resumé itself. For example:
- Composed an Excel Macro that increased team productivity by 15 per cent.
- Created email template on Gmail to respond to 100 emails per day.
And there’s one more way to seem like you’ve got everything covered with technology. You can look to master social media, as we detail below.
3. Social Media is Just as Important as your Resume
As we head into the third decade of the 21st century, your resumé is no longer the end of the screening process. Recruiters and hiring managers will hop onto your LinkedIn and see if they match. If genuine inconsistencies pop up, you can kiss goodbye to your chances of an interview. (Online verification isn’t just limited to social media, of course. If you Google your name and find a full page of pictures of yourself getting drunk, hiring teams won’t be particularly impressed.)
Just as much as bad social media management can bite you, though, you can also leverage your social media expertise to elevate your application. If your social media pages look beautifully designed and structured, people are going to think you’re a tech-savvy professional by default. And if you’ve published well-received articles on LinkedIn, maintaining immaculate personal branding and curated comment sections, talent acquisition teams are going to be just as impressed as they are with your resumé.
Because social media is so imperative, Executive Agents doesn’t leave it to chance. We offer LinkedIn management here. If you’d like to know more, stay tuned for next week’s article, where we offer advice on how to become a LinkedIn thought leader.
4. Cater to ATS Software
ATS—or Applicant Tracking Systems—have been the bane of many jobseekers in the past, but unfortunately it’s here to stay. To summarise, ATS software scans all incoming resumés and does preliminary screening for the company. The primary screening method is keyword tracking, often cross-referenced with the job description. That’s why many people advise you to customise your resumé for each application, time-consuming as it is.
ATS software, by the way, is mainly there to tell which applicants aren’t qualified, while the qualified resumés must still be sorted by a real person. For example, as a recent graduate, I once applied for an executive job. ATS software is a good gatekeeper to fend off foolishly underqualified people like me.
ATS also scans through your template and ignores images. As such, it’s best to keep your templates basic, just in case the ATS is unable to read your text, and don’t use too many images. Luckily, Executive Agents employs both professional writers and professional designers to help you get through Applicant Tracking Systems, while never losing sight of the end product for the hiring manager.
5 . Write a Professional Summary
Objective statements have been dying for a long time, and in 2020 it’s time for the last nail to be drilled into the coffin. There’s genuinely no need for a line like ‘Looking to work in XYZ field where I can utilise my best skills.’ Consider your actual application as the ‘objective statement’; you applied for the job, therefore you want it.
On the other hand, Professional Summaries are in. Most applicants still aren’t using them, so it’s a great way for you to separate yourself from the pack. Not only do professional summaries help get past ATS software by cramming in a few extra keywords, they also provide an overview of your career history and your best one or two achievements. In a time where hiring managers infamously spend six seconds going through the average resumé, it’s exactly the Professional Summary that they’re going to be looking at.
Sometimes it’s not easy to know the difference between an objective statement and the Professional Summary. Here’s the easy way to split them apart: the objective statement is about your goals, whereas the professional summary is about your achievements. The first one is all about what you want (‘I want to become your next CEO’). The second one caters to what the acquisition team wants to know (‘I have 20 years of experience as a CFO’). See why the professional summary is much better?
6. Use Numbers
This isn’t a new trend, but it’s still almost certainly one of the most important. With competition for desired jobs rising, there’s one clear way you can elevate yourself over other applicants: by using numbers. Ballpark generalisations are usually acceptable, and the consequences for having no numbers can sometimes make or break your resumé.
For example, at Executive Agents we mainly cater to executives, and often they’re applying to work with prestigious firms. If you’re going for a CFO job at Telstra, where you’ll be managing the finances of a company with $25 billion in annual revenue and $2.1 billion in profit, they need to know you’re not intimidated by big numbers. In your resumé, you’ll have to show you’ve worked with significant numbers in the past.
Even if you’re not an executive, it’s your specific numbers that prove your abilities. Taylor Swift isn’t just a ‘very talented singer-songwriter’; she has 121 million digital sales and has hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with six different albums. If you’ve never heard of Taylor Swift before, you just need to hear her stats to know she’s really, really good.
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Perfect for people who want an impeccable CV, LinkedIn profile, and covering letters for powerful job applications.
LinkedIn Influencer? So What?
Becoming a LinkedIn influencer is an opportunity for career-driven individuals to build their network of contacts, share engaging content, and expound their industry expertise on a platform that offers an unlimited professional experience. LinkedIn is a powerful personal branding tool that is much more than an online job directory and digital resume.
As far as professionalism in the digital sphere goes, an aspiring influencer should ensure their reputation and trustworthiness are seamless upon first impression. It is much harder to convince your connections of your influencer status (as on social networking sites) if you do not have a professional profile that reflects this. Becoming an influencer will give you the motivation to make sure your public profile is up-to-date with a business-appropriate profile picture, a unique URL, and an appealing summary which will draw future connections and make your profile stand out. Ensuring your skills have been endorsed and your work ethic recommended by colleagues or industry professionals is also beneficial, smoothing the transition to LinkedIn influencer as you begin to portray an authentic background for users to subscribe to. This is a thoughtful and strategic process, and offers long-term rewards and opportunities to pinpoint what will set yourself apart from others.
To be an influencer is to also be seen as a contributor, content creator, or an advisor within your industry. Publishing original long-form articles which function as blogposts, or videos which examine a topic, are excellent ways to strengthen your personal brand’s scope. Additionally, more formal documents like white papers and infographics also serve a function to industry-specific segments of LinkedIn. Not only will this reflect your authority on a topic on a digital platform, but it will allow you to become a better communicator and thought-leader among your LinkedIn connections. Your passions may also be conveyed to others in the way you deliver your message by your stance on a topic, providing other users the excitement of engaging in a conversation, as well as alignment with your personal brand. As a LinkedIn influencer, you can wield your voice to interact with others on trending topics, bringing value to a targeted group of followers that attract more traffic and organic search results.
LinkedIn also functions as a middle-ground for distributing content on your personal blog, transferring your readership to an increasingly potent platform. LinkedIn influencers regularly circulate their content on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to generate further engagement, as well as posting to selective forums or discussion boards where insightful discussion can be made. Promoting your content is not the side-effect of becoming a LinkedIn influencer; it is a primary function, and the more effort you put in, the more ways you will be rewarded with a following that will be interested and responsive to your contributions. One of the key values of becoming a LinkedIn influencer is the human connection which arises through these interactions.
Considerable social and cultural profit can be made by becoming an influencer on LinkedIn as the business networking site continues to grow in users and functionality. Current LinkedIn influencers are experts in building relationships with like-minded professionals, and their stature within the platform suggests that authenticity and credibility are essential factors to increasing reach within your professional community. If you are uncomfortable with publishing long-form articles, utilise LinkedIn’s native video feature; if you are uncomfortable with recording yourself, share a short-form newsfeed post about a current event. There is significant personal value for anyone wishing to become an influencer who is willing to share their worldview and experiences.
Becoming a LinkedIn influencer is an effective way to build your confidence in the digitisation of professionalism, and many will find that building a supportive network through content and the celebration of achievements is reason enough to become invested in the platform.
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Perfect for people who want an impeccable CV, LinkedIn profile, and covering letters for powerful job applications.
Getting Hired When Over 50: Seven Steps to Take
Ensuring that you’re employable after age 50 does not require any unusual tactics, just some special attention to the skillset you possess and how you market it to an employer. In this sense, getting hired after 50 does not mean any drastic changes to the strategies you used when getting your first job.
How to Beat Applicant Tracking Systems
ATS systems are known to be inconsistent and ultimately inaccurate, making the job seeking process even harder for those who are unaware these systems are in place that allow businesses to fast-track their recruitment process. The chances of a qualified candidate being filtered out of the application process simply because the resume doesn’t align with the data that the ATS system is scanning for is as likely as the system rejecting an unsuitable resume based simply on how things are phrased and formatted.
Three things you need to know about LinkedIn’s Profile changes
As they say, third time’s the charm with LinkedIn introducing its third major change to your profile in as many years. The goal is to drive engagement, boost activity, and get members talking to each other. The changes might seem minor, but tweaking your profile to take advantage of the new algorithm could prove to be a move in the right direction for your career.
5 things you need to do to get a pay rise
Asking your employer for a pay rise is by far one of the most daunting scenarios for an employee, with less than 30 per cent of job seekers willing to negotiate pay at the interview stage, and less than 50 per cent of employees having never discussed salary negotiations throughout their career.
Effects of Applicant Personality on Resume Evaluations
Recent studies may suggest that your resume is not the only reason why you never received a call back or progressed to the next stage of the interview process. It could be a result of the impression your personality has made on your resume and how certain resume cues impact reviewer judgement.
Online Reputation Management (ORM): What is it and is it important?
Historically, to find out more about you, a prospective employer would read your resume and maybe if they were wanting to be extra thorough, they would call a few referees. Nowadays in the interconnected world we live in, potentially damaging elements of our past are ever easier to find and even harder to hide.
What is the STAR Method?
As a jobseeker you may have come across the term ‘STAR Method’ when asked to respond to a position’s selection criteria. For those of you who may not know, the STAR Method is a common way of structuring responses to selection criteria by linking your experience to the position you are applying for.
The whole branding process was fantastic and genuinely thought-provoking. The initial session was far more than a simple CV discussion, it was a deep dive into my career that helped me see the value of my own achievements in a new light. The team is incredibly skilled at asking the right questions and, more importantly, at listening. I was amazed at how well they captured my voice and my career. The final documents - CV and the candidate statement - were simply outstanding. They made me look great, and I am now moving forward with my application with a renewed sense of confidence. For any senior leader who needs help telling their own story, I cannot recommend this agency highly enough, the service and the result were exceptional!
I first worked with Executive Agents back in 2021 and they were instrumental in helping me secure an excellent role that ultimately led to my promotion to the C-suite. Their understanding of the executive market and ability to match candidates with the right opportunities is outstanding.
I recently engaged them again for a CV update and I'm thoroughly impressed with the outcome. They have a keen eye for presenting executive experience in a compelling way that really showcases your value proposition. The team is professional, responsive, and clearly knows what works in today's competitive market.
If you're looking for recruitment specialists who genuinely understand executive-level placements and can help advance your career, I highly recommend Executive Agents. They've been a key part of my professional journey and I wouldn't hesitate to work with them again.
Was really struggling with my resume for ages. Kept putting off job applications because I knew it wasn’t good enough but didn’t know how to fix it. Tried using AI to help write it which seemed like a good idea at the time but honestly wasn’t confident it was actually any good.
Eventually found Executive Agents online and decided to give them a go. Really glad I did! They knew exactly what was wrong with what I had and how to make it better. The person I worked with was lovely and explained everything properly without making me feel dumb.
My new resume looks so much more professional now and has all the right information that employers are looking for apparently. Already got a couple of interviews lined up which is more than I had before!
Should have done this months ago instead of stressing about it. If your resume isn’t working for you definitely recommend these guys. Made the whole process much easier and now I actually feel confident sending it out.
The team knew the Melbourne market well and gave practical advice on what recruiters actually look for. Instead of just generic tips, they tailored everything to my specific situation and the roles I was going after.
Been getting more interview calls since working with them. Worth the investment if you’re struggling to get noticed by employers.
Would highly recommend.
