BSidesATL 2020 - Connect: How to give good resume and LinkedIn Tips

so Mike's going to be talking to us about our resumes and just a personal tidbit some of the best advice I ever got was to make sure that my resume is always ready um because you never know when your dream role will present itself and you don't want to be scrambling trying to put together your resume and let a week or two or a month goodbye I'm trying to give a resume of myself anyways and I turn over to you Mike feel free there you go and feel free to present yourself and floods or whatever else you would like to talk about so as I said advance business engineering it's my company I'm an IT recruiter I've got

over 20 years of experience recruiting been doing a lot of security and cyber security recruiting last couple of years as I said I'm a beekeeper this is the current state of my backyard with all of my hives and Thursday afternoon some of my hives swarmed and a couple thousand bees that I had to put up in a box and catch and I guess one of them was still mad at me last night when I was in the backyard and decided to sting me between the eyes so I woke up this morning with my face pretty swollen and my family picking on me pretty good so resume highlights and you bet you made a couple of good points this

morning that I was going to get to one of them is you need to work on keeping your resume updated I recommend people do it at once every six months or once a year I've talked to a number of people that have been caught in layoffs they hadn't touched their resume in a couple of years and they find it a daunting task to have to go back and figure out the various jobs that they might have been promoted from and up through and they find it a daunting job to go back and remember what tasks they had to do it also allows you that if you are caught in a situation like you that talked about this morning in her keynote

if you are caught in a surprising layoff it allows you to pivot rather quickly with your resume or if a new opportunity comes to you out of surprise it allows you to get your resume over someone rather quickly so to your vets points absolute keeping your resume updated is something that I recommend so resume formatting on the internet a lot of f-style reading has been talked about and that's what a lot of people do with their resume and it is a good way to format your resume you can look up F style formatting or reading formatting if you want to see what that's like so you need to use clear headings and subheadings that are bolded I recommend

objective experience education skills and bold those highlight those so resume readers know exactly where to go and find that information bullet points are an easy format they allow people to read very clearly and easily on all devices we're all looking at resumes and everything on all devices now so sometimes when people are tired if it's paragraph formatted it's just really hard to read on a smaller device straight to the point writing cut any kind of unnecessary clutter that bogs a reader down I think we all have been reading something and when you get to the end of a sentence or halfway through a paragraph you don't understand what you've read and you have to go back and

reread something or start over to see what somebody was saying so you need to make sure that you don't have any kind of clutter or writing that's going to bog somebody down they say you have about 30 seconds to grab someone's attention hiring managers that I talked to they need to hire they know they need to hire but it's something that they don't enjoy doing so if a manager is frustrated with your resume if it's not making sense to them they will pass on it and they will move on to the next person name phone number email address city and state zip code you do not need to put your physical address anymore and it'll also

help you save some space I recommend that you put an objective on your resume one to three sentences about the type of opportunity that you're seeking this does help if your resume is separated from a cover letter and if you're going into an applicant tracking system most likely you can on the fact that your cover letter will be separated from your resume and then that way if it's pulled up internally later someone can see what kind of a opportunity or objective that you're after I do recommend that everybody write a cover letter I do recommend that you write a cover letter to every single opportunity and you can't be lazy about it I get people that will send me a

resume with the cover letter and they've left the cover letter written to an opportunity that they were applying to previous to me if you do that to HR or if you do that to a hiring manager it just looks lazy and it is a very quick turn off it just doesn't say much about your follow-through and your attention to detail and I think in security you need to be attention to detail oriented and so you need to make sure that you are writing a cover letter for everyone and make sure that you're doing it correctly a skill section this can be very important for a couple of reasons number one you can highlight specific skills

hardware software tools that you want to bring attention to it can also act as a keyword database if your resume gets uploaded into an applicant tracking system or on the dice or anywhere you know indeed monster so that can also act as a keyword search bank experience you need to clearly lay out each job that you've had you need to put your employers name unless you need to keep that confidential which I understand that happens sometimes you need to put your title you need to clearly late your label your dates of employment you need to give meaningful content and an explanation of your job responsibilities and again as something that you've talked to this morning you only list

skills and experience that you can speak to in an interview I had a gentleman who must have put every single piece of security hardware tool and software that they ran in his organization managers started in questions he could not answer to half of them it really turned the interview negative on both sides because he felt like he wasn't doing well so please represent yourself as you are that way you just you can answer those questions you need to have are a cues in your experience and what are are a cues one is our as responsibilities what were your day-to-day what were your month-to-month and what were your annual responsibilities actions you need to give action to what you did to carry out

those responsibilities and Q is quantification and this might be percentages or numbers that give actions to something that you did measurable it could be the number of servers that you're responsible for the number of endpoints that were protected systems upgraded performance increase if you're a manager or moving up you might have budget responsibilities the team size manage quantification just gives numbers that people can sink their teeth into education obviously you need lists you're a college or university and the degree obtained do not put graduation dates you don't want to allow someone to age you it does happen it's really hard to get it out of your mind even for me when I try to walk away from it

sometimes you know younger managers want younger people on their team but when you see a date of graduation sometimes it's really hard but you do not need to give someone the ability to aid you so no graduation dates on there I'm also old school like I said I've been doing this over 20 years I only like to see a college and degree listed when you've obtained it I'm not fan of putting university on there because you took just some classes that has gotten me in trouble before it was my fault I forgot to ask somebody on their resume if they did finish their college education it came back on the employment check that the person did not finish

their college education and then I had to do a lot of explaining jumping around we were able to secure the job for the person but it was a lot of explaining to do why it looked like he had a college education and he didn't so I've just I'm a fan of not putting it if you don't have it certifications obviously in security all of your certifications that you have need to be listed and the ones that are relevant to you some of the ones people don't put on there that you know have expired or they don't want to keep up anymore that's obviously okay but if there is one that maybe you held in the

past that might be relevant to a job that you're trying to get now you can put that on there in my opinion I think it does help show that you've jumped through that hoop in the past spell check your resume I leave spellcheck alone on my word Docs and so when the resume comes over to me and there are a ton of red lines underneath words obviously it doesn't catch all spellcheck doesn't catch certain software and hardware and stuff like that and that's understandable but when it's throughout the resume in other places it's a pretty quick turn off a lot of the people that I work with in HR it's a really big turn-off for them

grammar check your resume whether you put it in grammerly or whatever you need to be reading your resume I say we reread and reread your resume for grammar and ease of reading again you have less than 30 seconds to catch someone's attention and so if it doesn't flow they will move on after you're done and you feel like you're pretty secure with your resume and happy with it have your spouse or your girlfriend or your boyfriend your friend your mom your dad somebody that was willing to read the resume have them read it be willing to take their criticism to heart and make the corrections that they suggest a lot of times would get really attached to

our work and we take criticism talk you're really hard but I think that other people's opinions would really really really help again a lot of people stress about their resume and I don't think it's something you have to stress about I say just make it a work in progress work on it a little bit each day again I talked to some people that have been laid off they've been in a company for 15 years or 20 years and it is a really daunting task to have to redo a resume so if you can keep it updated once or twice a year it really does help and it's not such a daunting task and it really will help you pivot to a new

opportunity if someone comes to you with one or if you're laid off length of resume is something that's pretty subjective to a lot of different people a lot of managers don't like long resumes they don't have the time to read them so if you have less than three years of work experience maybe three to five you probably should keep your resume to one page if you have more than three or five years of experience you can go to two pages in length I don't get offended if I see a three-page resume I'm okay with that person has had multiple contracts or has gone through multiple opportunities or maybe someone who is a senior level manager and needs

to show that progression of job experience I can see it going to three pages I don't really see any reason why someone needs to go past three pages it's just too long and people don't want to read that much so if you're looking for an internship and you don't have a lot of experience a lot of people say you know they just don't have work experience what should someone list and how should they do it I recently helped a friend of mine son who all he's ever done is work in an insurance firm as a clerk he was a developer he was coming out he was graduating from Kennesaw we put the insurance clerking on the bottom

then we moved his project experience up and we made his resume extremely heavy on the development projects and courses that he took at KSU and that helped him secure an internship then once we did that we were able to expand on the internship and put a lot of experience and depth around that and that helped him move into a new position which he secured by the time he was already done with his internship to a new company so I would draw attention to any kind of applicable courses that you have worked on or programmed in or done in security if you run a home lab I would put that on there whether you are a professional

or not that gives you some extra depth outside of work that shows that you do other things outside of work or it shows tools that you've worked with or projects that you've done a lot of managers like seeing if you've got home lab stuff on their side projects that you've worked on so moving over to LinkedIn since that kind of goes obviously with the resume and one of the things that a resume and your LinkedIn profile should do is they should complement each other you don't want them to be the exact same and again I know another daunting task of taking your resume and changing it over and putting it on a LinkedIn profile but

you've got to think of your LinkedIn profile as a fishing hook that's in the water constantly fishing whether you're sleeping whether your lunch wherever you are LinkedIn is out there fishing for that next opportunity for you so your headline should be an industry standard job title and what by what I mean by that is there are a lot of companies that will have specific job titles that are unique to the inside of that company if I am searching on LinkedIn or a security engineer or security analyst or security architect if you don't fall into that category you are using a job title that's unique to your company it is not going to help you be found on

LinkedIn so you need to go out to say indeed you can do a search come up with a job title that you can probably find 50 or more job titles or jobs of that job title and put that in on your LinkedIn profile as your job title that will help a lot a tag line is something that will catch a description or catchy phrase that might help you stand out from the masses so you could imagine as I'm telling you to put security engineer or security analyst if you do that there's going to be thousands of you of us here in the Atlanta area so you might come up with the catchy phrase or a

catchy description that says something about you or your skills or the opportunity you're looking for that might make someone want to click on your profile and come in and read a little bit about you your summary this is your elevator pitch this is where you're going to get on your soapbox and you are going to tell me about you it is different LinkedIn is different from a resume you were going to talk about yourself in the first first person you're gonna give me a summary of your skills and experience you might go so far as to tell me what kind of opportunity you're you're looking for if you're okay with your firm knowing or if you're already out in

the job market you can certainly tell me what kind of opportunity you think you might be interested in you need to kind of catch my attention and link some accomplishments at the top and your summary and you link those accomplishments back down to your experience you can consider this building your brand you are branding yourself as a strong engineer or pen tester or analyst or security architect this is building your brand so next I put certifications and the reason why I did this is if you did not know this you can reorder your LinkedIn profile certifications as it stands now come up on the end of your profile and you're hoping that someone is going to hang

around long enough on your profile or stay interested long enough on your profile that they're going to read all the way to the bottom I like taking certifications and moving it up under summary and before experience because this just really puts certifications right in someone's face and they know a little bit more about you right there education again college university major no dates you do not want to age date yourself your experience just like your resume except that you want to talk about yourself in the first person I was responsible for this I installed that I use xx tool to scan just talk about yourself and share that level of experience with me skills and

endorsements the way that LinkedIn has changed things you can have up to 50 but on your page without me clicking into more I can only see your top 3 you can reorder and bring to the top your top 3 that I can see and then if I want to click on it I can go into more but please put your top three skills on your skills and endorsements endorsements don't mean much but that's just the section that as it's called on LinkedIn I do recommend since you can have up to fifty skills I do recommend trying to fill that up skills is a section that is also a keyword section and so if I want to

search for someone by just keywords this is a great place to heavy load your resume with various keywords that I'm going to use to find you so I do absolutely recommend that you fill that up references I recommend references two to three you do not need more than two to three references people are just not going to invest that amount of time so don't bother a bunch of people I also like making sure that they are from a previous manager or supervisor we all know the people that would play golf with or play tennis with or go out and hang out with we know our friends are going to give us good references and you

can easily read through that so if you're going to take the time to put a reference out there make sure it's a previous manager or supervisor or someone that you did a project with someone that you may have done some installations with or something that can speak to how you are working with them as a partner or a peer it's always very important again content is king use phrases and keywords that you want to be found for a lot of times I won't necessarily search by job title I will search by keywords or phrases so keeping that in mind you might want to build your profile around those keywords and phrases that you would like to be found

for always keep it just like your resume if you're updating your resume try and keep in mind keep your LinkedIn profile updated again think about your profile as a fishing hook in the water that is always fishing for a new opportunity no matter what you are doing so make sure that you've filled it out and put a little meat on the bone so to speak so that people will know a little bit about you word clouds if you're familiar with the word cloud I recommend running your resume and your LinkedIn profile through a word cloud and what a word cloud will do you know anything about them is that the word in the middle are the words in the middle

that show up the largest they're the ones that you're using the most throughout your resume or throughout your LinkedIn profile they're the ones that you're using to describe yourself the most sometimes if you take a word cloud and you visually look at it then you'll see the words that you're using over and over and over is that what you want to be representing about yourself is that representing correctly so you know you might do that with your resume I did it previously with just my summary on my LinkedIn profile and then I did it overall with my LinkedIn profile and summary together they kind of presented differently and separately so I had to do some tweaking to make sure that it

came across the way that I wanted to there's a link right there ABC forward slash gains forward slash words and there's an underscore in there you can't see but word slash underscore clouds it's free go in and generate a couple word clouds and and play around with it and see if you're if you're presenting yourself as you like so I know I went through that pretty fast I didn't know I didn't know how it would go so if there's any questions maybe we could go over to slack this is me my LinkedIn profile you can send me an email you can that's my website you can connect with me on LinkedIn I'm more than happy to take a look at some

people's resumes since that's what I was going to be doing today at besides if anybody wants to email me or set up a time we can talk I can look at some resumes and make some recommendations I can also do the same thing for LinkedIn profiles if anybody wants to take time to do that he's Mike there's actually a lot of questions for you in slack I have a quick question before we let one of our sponsors talk and a little met but when I was doing recruiting at Purdue we see one of the things I saw often from you know going to various colleges is people add their GPA on their resume that's not something I ever did not

because I didn't have a good GPA I just when I was writing my resume I never did I didn't know how important that was adding to a resume for somebody coming out of college what do you think I mean I think personally it says something about you and your grades and your study habits so I don't think it's a bad thing I mean I've never had a manager say you know good or bad about it but it certainly it could say something about you as a person and your abilities but I don't know I don't I don't put a lot of depth into it myself either I guess I would say yeah and then let's say just

looking a few questions any tips for getting past the 80s just sometimes I see a lot of PDF resumes that come over with a lot of formatting that's fancy certainly when you're going to an interview and you take your resume with you I do think that you need to take your fancy formatted resume with you but they recommend that you have a text formatted resume that you submit to the ATS is ATS is don't generally like the pretty formatted with the bars and sections and everything they don't like them so you probably ought to have a text version of your resume that you're going to submit to applicant tracking systems okay and then another really key question

that I saw I have lots of personal friends who have been out of the workforce for an extended period of time what what advice would you give somebody like Bob I think more than anything right now is so for some people what I say is you know there's some people that are pivoting say from a different type of IT and they want to pivot over into IT security and what I tell people is you've got to use experience of where you were to build a bridge to where you want to go so if you can take that kind of experience and obviously we're talking about anything that you do you've got to be able to talk to an

interview and and it can't be lying or no but it'll build on experience that you have on where you want to go and see if you can help bridge that gap for those people that and and right now we're probably going to be facing that people that have been out of the workforce I think the only thing that we can do is try and get out like we were going to do it besides today and you've got a network and you've got to get a people's faces and you've got a network or see if you can find some people that will help Network on your behalf for you and see if that will help you very cool

all right well if you can go into the flood Channel and there's probably 10 or 15 questions they would love your attention okay um and I'll let you just work on those while I and we appreciate your time today this has been really helpful I actually wrote down several things from your talk that I'm gonna go back and touch up on my LinkedIn profile my resume so appreciate your time today all right well thanks for having me and yes I'm on the slack channel now so I'll go out there and start answering some questions alright thanks Mike thank you appreciate it have a great day