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Anyone have tips for the job hunt/writing a good resume? I have a fairly shit work experience (a couple tech internships, 3 years of an aborted SE degree, 1.5 years at a grocery store, 1.5 more years of college to turn it into a BA in Business Admin, another 1.5 years at a grocery store) but I live in the Dallas area where it seems like basically every field is hiring and I feel like I ought to find something netting me more than $40k annually. I'm not picky on the field, but I've spent a month now shotgun applying to any opening I see that's a pay raise and all I have to show for it is a dozen "thank you for your interest but we've moved on with other candidates" emails (that's about a 10:1 application:any response at all ratio). Clearly I'm doing something wrong, or at least I hope I'm doing something wrong - the alternative is that to get a new job the realistic target for applications is about 1000 and that's a nightmarish prospect. Any obvious tips?
What kind of job/industry are you looking in?
The entire point of the resume is to get an interview, and many companies filter resumes through programs that parse for specific keywords/skills. So you'd have to tailor your resume for a specific industry.
You can put whatever you want on your resume, by the way, I wouldn't put outright lies such as saying you worked at Facebook but you can certainly embellish any projects/tasks you did. Just be prepared to talk about it if you get asked once you get to the interview stage.
Mostly retail management, for the pay raise. I'm also applying to some entry level technical positions (maintenance technician type stuff) that pays comparable or slightly less than what I make because right now I do not find my work fulfilling and I have the financial leeway to experiment with my career.
So most of what I have on there is my day-to-day tasks in keyword type format (i.e. perishable inventory management). Should I include some of the improvements I made, like beating the previous year's holiday sales goals in my department, or getting the perishable display sales trending upward over a 6 month period? Both of these things happened and I can explain how they happened but I never put them on my resume because I was trying to hit keywords.
I don't have any experience in retail management, so I'm not sure I can give any real, tangible advice here. When in doubt, I look at the job description and try to match specific tasks/keywords from the job requisition posting.
I would personally add any tasks you did that had a tangible, positive benefit effect to the company you previously have worked at as long as that contribution is related to the role. I imagine that if I was hiring for retail management, those improvements are things that could make you standout over someone that just lists the tasks and responsibilities they had on their resume. You don't have to put the entire story in the resume just a single bullet point indicating what you did. You tell the story during the interview stage, usually the interviewer will use the resume as a starting point of discussion. You have at least an entire page for a resume, you can definitely add keywords and examples of your successes. A skills section is an easy way to dump in keywords if you need to fill up your resume. That advice is probably more relevant in tech industry, where you can list a bunch of programming languages (e.g. Python, C++, JavaScript), not sure how relevant this is to retail management. Depending on the company, they may have stuff like "Excel" and "PowerPoint" as keyword filters, those are stuff you can dump into a skills section.
Don't be humble in your resume, make yourself look as outstanding as you can. Your competition is most likely embellishing and even lying about their accomplishments on their resumes, you only hurt yourself being humble and honest. There are a lot of people getting to the interview stage who shouldn't even have gotten their because they're lying about their skills an experience, but at least they're getting to the interview stage, while it sounds like you aren't even getting there. As long as you get to the interview stage and haven't made any obvious, egregious lies that should greatly increase your chances of getting the job.
The best way to get your resume improved is to just post it online for people to improve. There are plenty of places online where people will critique and improve each others' resume.
Also it sounds like you have a college degree, if your school had any sort of alumni network you should leverage that. It's so much easier getting an interview if someone can vouch for you, or at least bring up your name. A lot of companies have referral bonuses for hiring so people are incentivized to try to refer someone, so even someone you never met personally is incentivized to help you if you reach out via some kind of alumni network.
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