Baishakhi Connor had been working for seven years — first in tech and then investment banking — when she was laid off during the peak of the financial crisis.
Around the same time, she married an Australian and decided to move to Australia. Connor had prior work experience in India, the UK, and Hong Kong, and she decided to try to find work in her new home country, too.
“At that stage, despite having quite a significant global career, it was very difficult for me to break into the Australian job market,” she told Business Insider.
It took her over a year and a meeting with a professional resume consultant to land a job in Melbourne.
“Reflecting back and now leading and building teams myself, I can understand why I perhaps didn’t put myself forward in the best way for this job market,” she said of her job-application process.
Her resume followed a format popular with Indian Institute of Management students: It was one page long and written in font size 8. It starts with an “academic qualifications” section before moving on to experiences and internships.
Here is the resume she used to apply to jobs in 2009. She has since changed her last name.
Resume mistakes Connor made
Roughly 15 years later, Connor reexamined her resume and said she would do several things differently.
“I literally cringed,” she said. “If I got that resume today I would not have called that person for an interview.”
Here’s what she would change:
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Add a summary: “This was a missing summary or a profile,” Connor said of her resume. Recruiters today often open multiple positions at the same time, and having a summary, which is a two-to-three-line pitch on who you are, allows them to help place a candidate, she said.
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Experience first: “I had been in investment banking and tech consulting for a while,” Connor said. Despite having seven years of experience, she started her resume with academic qualifications, and had sections on research papers and leadership positions she held in college. “It just seems like a very new university student kind of resume in hindsight.”
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Translate your achievements: “IIM is very difficult to get into, it’s very selective. But when I came here people did not know what it was,” Connor said about the Indian university where she pursued her masters. If you’re applying to a job overseas, help a foreign employer understand the scale or prestige of your background. For example: “Translate to say that it is a $10 billion turnover company or it has 50,000 employees to give people the idea of the size or complexity of the organization.”
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Cater to local employers: “Each country has its own lingo,” Connor said. In retrospect, she would write “Career Highlights” instead of “Work Experience,” because in Australia, “work experience” is something school students do for free to understand the industry, Connor said. She added that employees in Australia prefer multi-page resumes.
Once Connor revamped her resume with a summary and highlights of her professional experience, she said she began landing more interviews and got her first offer three months later.
Connor went on to work with large businesses within consulting and consumer goods before taking on her current role as an executive at a retail chain. Connor also runs a career-building consultancy that reviews resumes.
Her top tip for resumes is to focus on the next story you’re trying to write for yourself.
“I think a lot of people use resumes to just collate what they’ve done in the past, whereas the bigger job for a resume is to market you for the future,” Connor said.
