Step 5

Creating Resume Versions

We recommend spending 30 minutes on this section

So you've come up with a punchy summary statement and condensed your career history into some concrete, specific, and relevant bullet points.

Are you done yet? Not quite! There's still one more step to building the perfect pivot resume, and that's customizing it for different potential employers.

The most important thing here is to conserve your time and energy. If you're going to be applying for multiple jobs, you don't need to modify your resume for every single one. Instead, concentrate on broad categories. For example, you might be applying to similar roles in different industries. Maybe you're applying to a mix of start-ups and more established companies, or to similar roles with slightly different focuses, like product management and product operations.  

Spend a few minutes looking over the roles you're interested in and see if you can identify three or four broad categories. Read the job postings carefully – this can help you pick out key skills and areas of expertise that you want to emphasize. For example, is there a version for industry type, company size, style of role (e.g. analytical vs not). Once you have those categories in mind, start tweaking your resume. This isn't major surgery – a few words here or there will do. If you have experience that's specific to a particular industry or type of company, be sure to highlight it.

Create and save a version based on these specific categories so that you know know the specific skills to play up based on the opportunity.