Resumes are hard. Always have been, always will be. It’s hard to write and talk about yourself. It’s even harder to boil years – or even decades – of experience and accomplishments into a few short pages of text and visuals.
This guest post comes to us from Argentus Supply Chain Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and Procurement.
You’re probably more focused on your job than keeping a resume updated, and if a few years pass in between the times when you need a resume, you often find that resume trends have changed, and it’s hard to know how to format it, what to include, and what to leave out. It’s easy to feel lost because, of course, resume writing is one of the toughest tasks of any professional.
Let’s revise that slightly: it’s easy enough to write any old resume, but it’s difficult to craft a document that actually boosts your credibility.
A recruitment firm like Argentus is something of a resume clearing house. We see them all: the good, the bad, and the ugly. We see resumes that have up-to-the-minute style, as well as resumes where we have to brush off the cobwebs as we double click on the attachment in our inbox. We’re frankly bored of the latter. That’s why we’re doing a new miniseries on the Argentus blog, called The Quest for a Better Resume. We’re going to dive into some key aspects of resume writing and give examples to help you craft a resume that wows hiring managers and, hopefully, us!
In the first installment of this series, we gave some tips for boosting your resume’s style, which is something that sadly doesn’t get enough attention in fields like Supply Chain and Procurement.
Today, we’re going to dive into the Content side of things and help answer: if you’re a professional in Procurement, Supply Chain, or any of their related fields, what exactly should go on a resume and what doesn’t belong there?
Read on to hear our advice!
Resume Content:
Supply Chain and Procurement professionals make their careers by extracting relevant insights from complex sets of data. So it makes sense that they’re often skilled at loading their resumes up with valuable content – even if their resumes lack visual panache. The resumes we see tend to be stronger from a content perspective than an optics perspective – but there are still common shortcomings in terms of what people choose to write on a resume.
So when it comes to content, what does a bad resume look like?
Obviously, the worst resume is one that doesn’t show that the candidate has any relevant experience, or one that misrepresents that experience. But let’s take it for a given that you’re a professional with a solid background, trying to communicate the breadth of skills and work experience that you’ve accumulated:
A bad resume tends to be overly stuffed with buzzwords. It tends to talk a lot without actually saying anything, full of words like “self-motivated,” “detail-oriented,” “team-player” – qualities that you shouldn’t have to put on a resume. These kinds of qualities are “table stakes” for getting an interview. They should be self-evident when the hiring manager speaks to you in person – on a resume, they come across as empty.
It might tend to contain irrelevant experience, or show a lack of focus. This flavor of resume tries to be all things to all people – the resume equivalent of the job seeker who applies to every job we have, without tailoring their resume to one particular niche. We get that often people do have a wide variety of experience – some professionals at the director or VP-level have touched on every aspect of the Supply Chain, from inventory management to procurement to distribution. But you should tailor your experience to the role for which you’re applying.
It talks about “duties fulfilled” instead of accomplishments. We’ve blogged a lot about how important it is to create an accomplishment-based resume. Bad resumes tend to read like job descriptions instead of describing what the person has delivered to their employers.
It has extra info that isn’t relevant. Trends are always changing in terms of what info your resume should (and shouldn’t) include, and it can be hard to keep up. But as of late 2017, headshots, marital status, personal info, and links to multiple social media profiles are distractions from what’s important.
With these common shortcomings in mind, what approach should Supply Chain and Procurement professionals take when trying to write a resume that impresses?
Show, don’t tell. This old writer’s adage is also the best rule of thumb both for avoiding buzzwords and packing your resume full of impressive accomplishments instead of squandering the precious few seconds that a hiring manager will dedicate to your resume. Don’t just say that you’ve “increased cost savings,” show the amount of money that you’ve saved, and how you did it. Speak in terms of numbers: how many people did you oversee? What size of budget were you responsible for? Don’t just say you have “exceptional communications skills,” show it by presenting a resume that’s concise.
Include the meat, not the fat. As recruiters in Procurement and Supply Chain, there are a few pieces of vital information we’re looking for when assessing a resume – beyond the accomplishments we mentioned above: if you’re in Supply Chain, what aspects have you touched on? (e.g. inventory management, logistics, warehousing, distribution, sourcing). What software do you have experience and skills with? (e.g. SAP, ARIBA). If you’re in Procurement, what categories have you purchased in? (e.g. raw materials, information technology, marketing, etc.) This is key information that sometimes gets lost within long bullet-pointed lists of “duties.”
Less can be more. Similar to how white space is important from a visual perspective, concision is key when it comes to content. Try to write your resume with more action verbs and fewer adjectives.
If you’re like us, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of the resume advice floating around the internet is distressingly general – shouldn’t it be obvious that resumes need to avoid typos, grammatical mistakes, and incorrect contact information? So hopefully these tips give a bit more detail about how to approach a resume’s content in a blue-sky way.
Email is one of the most utilized tools in your marketing toolbox, but marketers need to continuously develop their email practices to keep up with the rapidly changing interests of audiences.
Email marketing is a powerful tool for growing and developing your business. You probably get hundreds of marketing emails from all kinds of companies you patronize (and even those you don’t) every day. So you know as well as anyone that not all email marketing is created equal.
Especially in B2B culture, there is a right way — and many wrong ways — to do email marketing. Our blog hit on many best practices in 2017 that are important for B2B marketers to keep in mind as they create marketing emails.
Here are the top 7 email marketing posts for 2017.
1. 7 Email Marketing Tips for Manufacturers and Industrial Companies
Here are seven tips for manufacturers to improve your email marketing strategy in the manufacturing and industrial sector. Many manufacturers and industrial companies are still stuck in the one-off batch and blast mode of email marketing. That strategy is not likely to work very well in industrial marketing, where most of the purchases include complex products with long sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, and stakeholders are involved. Read more.
2. 7 Techniques for Personalizing Marketing Emails and Boosting Engagement
Personalizing marketing emails increases open rates, click-throughs, and revenue, but it takes so much more than addressing recipients by name. Marketers can use information they have about subscribers to tailor email content for individuals, based on who they are or where they are in the buyer’s journey. Read more.
3. 4 Email Marketing Stats that Prove You Spend Too Much Time Creating Emails
Email marketing can be a challenge — to say the least. The constantly changing email landscape, marketing trends, and privacy regulations can make staying on top of your email game very tough. Take a look at these 4 statistics and why streamlining and automating certain aspects of your email marketing program might free you up to focus on factors that can make a difference. Read more.
4. Increase Revenue from Marketing Emails by 760% with This One Trick
Email list segmentation is the one of the simplest and most critical practices to improving marketing email performance. Marketing emails are an important part of lead nurturing: They can make or break whether a lead becomes a sale. So marketers spend a lot of time and money thinking about how to perfect their messages. Read more.
5. 5 Biggest Email Subject Line Mistakes to Avoid
Email marketers, beware: If you’re tasked with writing compelling emails to capture online customers, the subject line — the headline of your message — is the first and main spot to grab the viewer’s attention. But, while a cleverly written subject can boost open rates and click-throughs, a poorly written one can have the opposite effect. Read more.
6. Three Marketing Email Crimes to Avoid
Are your marketing emails annoying your customers and prospects? We’ve all felt it: the visceral annoyance on opening an email — because it’s the fifth one from the same company in two days, or because it’s packed with hyperbole or an off-putting sales pitch. As it turns out, recent research has shown that this reaction is only too natural. We’re predisposed to view the tone of email more negatively than it was written. Read more.
7. Mobile-Friendly Emails: 6 Tips for Success
Use these 6 tips for more mobile-friendly emails to improve recipient engagement rates and to promote profitable customer action. When a majority of your audience is reading your marketing emails on their mobile devices, it’s imperative that you’re creating emails that are optimized for mobile viewing. Here are 6 essential tips for creating mobile-friendly email campaigns. Read more.
Marcus Tober, Searchmetrics founder, suggests three key ways to make your content more relevant and to improve your SEO visibility.
We talk a lot about the importance of content, like here and here. Content is everywhere, and companies are working hard to continually produce new content. But not all content is created equal.
Searchmetrics founder Marcus Tober discusses how data is changing the relevancy of content in his conference talk, Mastering the World of Deep Learning: How Big Data Is Making Content More Relevant in Search. As a pioneer in search-analytics software, Tober has watched search engines become more advanced at figuring out which web pages people will find relevant. Through years of research, Tober offers three lessons to make your content more relevant.
3 ways to make your content more relevant
Develop your content niche.
“Experts are not called upon because they are the smartest person in every room; they are called upon because they are the smartest person in a specific room.” John Gordon
Find your area of expertise, or niche, in your market and focus your content around this topic. Instead of writing broadly about various subjects relevant to your industry, your writers should tackle tough questions and introduce cutting-edge thought leadership in one key area that defines your company’s strength.
Marcus says, “This means that if you specialize in something and make it really good because you understand the user, you can have great search performance” compared with a huge site that produces content about everything.
Through this valuable and focused content, your company will stand out as a leader in your industry. Audiences will know how to categorize you, which sounds like a bad thing, but isn’t. When they have a specific question, they know to turn to you as a specific expert.
Get rid of ROT.
ROT (redundant, outdated, and trivial content) can sink your website. “Think about your house. We’re all a bit messy and a bit lazy. Likewise, I can imagine that you have a lot of content that maybe you should get rid of or should merge with something else you have,” says Tober.
Many companies keep older ROT content because of the volume of posts they want under their belts. Tober worked with a German company, Pflege.de (similar to care.com), which was afraid of cleaning out its ROT because of the internal links and the possibility of older posts still bringing in traffic.
On Tober’s recommendation, Pflege purged ROT and lost 95% of its content. 95%! The content the company was left with was more relevant and ranked higher with search engines. Pflege’s SEO visibility grew 240% within a few short months.
Update remaining content to address user intentions.
It’s not enough to just get rid of ROT. You also need to keep an eye on older content and make sure you continue to update as needed. “You have to make what’s left really good,” Marcus says.
Big data can help brands track their older content and make changes to address audience questions and relevancy. Tober’s company, Searchmetrics, is an example of a data service that helps companies take an in-depth look at older content and how it addresses user intentions. When brands update content to address specific wants and needs, it can boost online visibility and reveal new potential for older posts.
Improving your company’s SEO visibility can be easier to achieve than you think. Using these three steps, you can get ahead of search engines and place your brand in front of untapped audiences.
Use these strategies to help your business generate revenue with content.
One of the biggest challenges inherent to content marketing is measuring how writing blog posts and posting on social media equals a revenue stream. I know I write over and over again in this space about how content marketing is one of the most effective strategies for growing business and generating revenue. But many in the supply chain industry still struggle to understand the connection.
I highly suggest listening to this podcast interview with Content Marketing Institute founder Joe Pulizzi. He talks about monetizing content. In summary, businesses need to be about more than just their products and services — they need to be a valuable resource for their customers. This is why content marketing works. It’s a move away from the promotion of products toward branding oneself as a source of knowledge.
But back to monetization. Here are some key takeaways from Joe’s interview about how to generate revenue with content.
Revenue models
Once you’ve established your outlets for content distribution (blog, podcast, YouTube channel, social media platforms, or other publishing outlets) and built an audience, how do you go about generating revenue? According to Joe, there are 10 different revenue opportunities.
The traditional opportunities that most companies think about are:
Selling products
Selling services
Keeping customers longer
Increasing yield
Selling different products
But Joe says that there are five additional revenue-generating activities:
Sell advertising on your site
Create a sponsorship deal
Launch a conference or event
Sell premium content
Ask for donations
Joe advises that business new to these ideas not try everything at once. “Try one revenue model every six months,” he suggests.
Rethink your marketing department structure
Chances are, your marketing department is set up far less efficiently than it should be.
Joe sees a trend of businesses setting up their marketing departments primarily as an opportunity for the sales team — in other words, they are leading “product-first.” “Yes,” he says. “Selling products is important. But you can’t lead product-first anymore. The only competitive advantage people have today is communication.”
It’s time for marketers to refocus on making markets and creating opportunities for organizations. It’s about creating and developing trusted relationships with your audience, and monetizing those relationships by doing more than selling products. Adopting a new vision for your marketing can turn it from a cost-center into a profit-center, with marketing being “profitable in and of itself.”
I repurposed some of our popular content into a video using Lumen 5, a video automation tool.
Have you heard of Lumen 5? It’s a cool website that turns your blog posts into videos in a matter of minutes. You simply enter a URL of an existing post, and it automatically selects text and creates slides with relevant photos. You can edit the text as necessary and swap out photos from a vast library, then select music to go along with the slideshow. And you can even swap colors and add your logo for a little bit of branding.
Super user friendly. Really quick. Did I mention that the most basic functionalities are free?
Video and automation: Two of my favorite words!
I’m always looking for ways to repurpose some of our best content or just present it in a new way. So when my colleague came across Lumen 5 the other day (true story, they are not paying me for this plug), it seemed like an easy tool for doing so.
If you read this blog regularly, you know that I believe all businesses — even supply chain and logistics businesses — should be considering video as a part of their content marketing strategies. Most don’t have the time or budget to do something professional. So automation tools like Lumen 5 offer an interesting opportunity to delve into video without a big investment.
Something else we’re big on at Fronetics? Automation. It’s tricky with marketing because marketing requires a lot of strategic thinking, analysis, and creativity, which really can’t be automated. So any tools that do help automate any part of your creative or editorial processes are a good find.
All this being said, I did do quite a bit of editing and perfecting of the video below. But I was pretty impressed with the original video that Lumen 5 created from my post before I started working on it, too. Features like the text select and image suggestions speed up the editing process, so all in all, I probably spent 20-30 minutes making a video. Not bad!
Video: How Often to Post on Social Media
For our inaugural Lumen 5 video, I decided to use one of our most popular posts, This Is How Often B2B Companies Should Post on Social Media. It’s a question that we get all the time, and I felt the content worked in both the more robust blog post format and the hyper-shortened (about 1 minute) Lumen 5 video format.
Here it is:
What do you think? Do you use any video tools that are free/cheap and fast?
