6 tips for an awesome UX content strategy resume

One of my very first jobs was being a recruiter for a mid-sized government contractor. I was completely new to the field. But my amazing boss (hi, Deidre!) took me under her wing and taught me everything I needed to learn about reviewing resumes, attracting great talent at our company, and eventually hiring new employees. I met hundreds of awesome candidates, did countless college recruiting fairs, and even got to make a few job offers in the process.

Although that was my first and last foray as a recruiter, I still get to review resumes, interview for open roles, and hire on the design team I’m on.

Despite not having held a recruiting-specific role since then, I found that writing my UX content strategy resume was a bit of an inside job. I knew what recruiters look for in a resume. I also knew that UX content strategy resumes call for clear, concise writing with a bit of storytelling, all to help my reader achieve their goal of deciding if they wanted to move forward with me as a candidate or not. Writing a UX content strategy resume is its own piece of content if you think of it.

I have six tips to keep in mind if you’re in the throes of building out your UX content strategy resume. Keep in mind, these are just tips that have worked for me in the past. If you have tips to add, leave me a note! I’d love to hear from you.

Great websites and digital tools have a clear hierarchy and help to drive users to different areas, depending on what the user’s goal is.

The same goes for a UX content strategy resume.

Pro tip: avoid the dreaded wall of text at all costs. By organizing your resume in a way that helps folks scan, you help your reader consume the content. Big wall of text? Well, let’s just say your reader is more inclined to skip the content altogether if it’s hard to scan.

It may come as a surprise, but I’ve seen more resumes in my hiring manager time that didn’t include any contact information.

Yeah, I was surprised, too.

I’ve also encountered resumes that wasted a heck of a lot of space giving me too much contact information. What kind of info was it exactly?

Here are a few things I’ve seen on resumes:
- A P.O. Box address (why?)
- A physical address (I’m not sending you mail.)
- Multiple email addresses (Just tell me which one you use the most.)

Most recruiters only need an email address and phone number. And, by killing off the unnecessary contact info, you’ll buy yourself more room in your resume you can use for bullets under your work experience.

Wouldn’t it be so easy to make a resume by going back to the original job description for your job and just dumping that content into your resume?

Suuuure, it’d be easy.

But would it be accurate?

Hard no, my friend!

Your work is more than just the every day tasks you do. Your work impacts your team. The organization. Maybe the world?

When you’re making bullets for each job, think in terms of achievements and impacts, not just the day-to-day tasks.

If you’re stuck, start with the task and continually ask yourself, “why?” or “so what?” until you get to the heart of the achievement.

Here’s an example of what I mean:
Job task:
Draft content for products (Why? So what?)

To make it easy for users to use our product (Why? So what?)

Because we know that customer service is overloaded and there’s an opportunity to save money (Why? So what?)

Because our new user setup is really confusing (Why? So what?)

We want to make it easy for users to self-serve so customer service reps can focus on tougher to solve problems.

Bullet that goes on your resume:
Overhauled all new user onboarding content for three different user personas to make it easier for users to self-serve, decreasing new user setup calls to customer service by 22% in 2020.

See the difference?

As fun as it is to read about your soft skills (Leadership! Collaborative! Keen problem solver!), it’s more fun to read about how you’ve applied those skills.

For example, say you earned a leadership certificate. How did you end up applying that? Highlighting that you’re a newly minted manager of a small team and showing how you applied those learned leadership skills gets you more mileage versus just listing out that you got a certificate.

When hiring managers are in the midst of hiring, they see a lot of resumes.

A lot.

I was taught in school that resumes should be Times New Roman and follow a very standard format (name/address in the top 20%, job bullets make up about 70% of the space, and then extracurriculars 10% of that). But holy wow, does that make for a boring resume to look at, especially if you’re looking at upwards of hundreds of resumes a day.

Think of your resume as your job application’s work horse. And if you’re just starting out in UX content strategy, maybe you don’t quite have a portfolio under your belt yet (which is ok!) to include with your application. If you happen to be applying for a job that simply asks for basic contact information and a copy of your resume, that puts a lot of stock into your resume being one of the few dogs you have in your career fight.

Here’s where your personal brand comes into play.

Your resume can take on unconventional formats. Personally, I go for the 1/3–2/3 column setup myself. You could try different hierarchies to pull up related work experience together and bucket other work experience below that. I’ve even seen someone use a quadrant-style for their resume that somehow worked well.

If you’d rather avoid that extra legwork with color research, black font works wonderfully for resumes, too.

I was helping someone with their resume and they couldn’t figure out why they weren’t getting calls back. My first question to them was, “well, are you editing your resume for each job you apply for?” Their answer was no.

If you’re not tweaking your resume for each job application and just sending in a generic application and resume, it’s hard for the recruiter to see how you could be a good fit with their org.

But I get it. Applying can feel like an eternity and a thankless job. But making those small tweaks, like adding in keywords, will help immensely.

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