Resumes

White Space

Today our topic covers a simple yet important point related to resumes:  White Space. Your resume serves a pretty simple purpose: to convince a hiring authority that you are worth interviewing. Generally, that means your resume needs to provide a hiring manager a clear sense of your education, work experience, and accomplishments. But just because someone sees your […]

Three Resume Dilemmas and How to Deal with Them

We’ve got resumes on our minds here at Alliance since we are deep into providing resume feedback to candidates slated to attend our November hiring conference. After having coached thousands of military candidates over the years, we thought it would be a good idea to mention three common dilemmas that many have asked us about, […]

3 Things You Don’t Need on Your Resume

Having spent the last 15+ years in the recruiting sector, I’ve seen countless variations to the resume.  When I think back to my own transition from the Army, I believe I worried about my resume more than any other single thing.  I was so accustomed to the Army’s way of dictating precisely how things must […]

Stratify Yourself

One of the items we encourage our military candidates to put on a resume is a stratification of their ranking among their peer group. We know that may not be possible if a ranking is not mentioned in a performance report (we would highly discourage you from doing so if it couldn’t be documented).  Including […]

Reflections from an Alliance Alum

Today we’d like to highlight a recent conversation we had with Dylan Allen, USMA 2018. Dylan is a former Army Engineer officer that came through the Alliance program and secured a project management position with Vulcraft. He took time to meet with Ryan Wilde to discuss his transition experience.

Approximation vs. Precision on Your Resume

This week’s message focuses on some best practices for reporting numbers in your resume. My experience is that most candidates realize the importance of using numbers to describe their responsibilities and achievements. As a leader, it’s probably been beaten into your head:  you gotta hit your numbers, you gotta hit your numbers. It’s generally understood that using numbers […]

Wasted Space

When teaching resume classes, I like to say that you should treat your resume like a valuable piece of real estate. But here’s the thing: it’s also a very tiny piece of real estate measuring at a mere 93.5 square inches! That’s assuming it’s a one-page resume, which we require at Alliance.  So given this valuable real estate, you […]

Resume Tip: Quantify – but within reason

Most people have heard that it is important to quantify things on your resume.  Numbers don’t lie.  Well actually they can, but that’s another story.  But the point is that quantifying a responsibility or result can help the hiring manager better understand the scale of your achievement. The corporate world is very numbers- and result-driven. […]

Resume Tip: How to Proofread a Resume

If we had better foresight we would have published today’s resume tip two weeks ago. That is, before the deadline for our April conference candidates to submit their first resume draft. If you are an Alliance candidate, we hope you will refer to this tip prior to your first submission because it will make everyone’s […]