I feel embarrassed because I forgot to make my post yesterday and now I've lost my streak!
I started my morning off by addressing a small correction in self-sabotage, and that was me procrastinating with sending my friend Justin my resume. I'd mentioned to him a few days ago that I was looking for work, and that I would send my resume. I know myself, and sometimes, my anxiety stops me from progressing, but I pushed past it and emailed him my resume.
Creating An Industry Specific Resume
I was laid off in January and my goal is to transition into cybersecurity, but I had no idea how difficult it could be! I've sent out hundreds of resumes since January (around 350) and have received mostly scams, ghost recruiters and rejections. That said, I've gained so much knowledge about my strengths, weaknesses to work on and way too much about ATS. Recently, I did some research on ATS friendly resumes and also, how to make it easy on human eyes once it makes it through ATS.
I finally came across a Youtube video by Josh Madakor :
How I would Apply to Cyber Security Jobs as a New Person (Viewer Request!) - YouTube
🔒Hands-On Cybersecurity / SOC Analyst Training (REAL EXPERIENCE)🔒https://joshmadakor.tech/cyberIn this video, I go over the steps I would take to prepare m...
youtube.com
In the description, there is a link to an extremely simple resume template that I've used for a week now, along with some tweaks to my resume bullet points ( making sure that my resume bullet points do not just list what I do, but also what my tasks resulted in /helped with) and I also made sure to bold certain parts of said bullet points, so that it would draw the recruiter/HR's eyes to my skills.
Since then, I have had FOUR interviews and tomorrow I have an in-person interview (As I am writing this, I just got a call-back for another in-person interview). I would say that since last week, I've applied to maybe 45 jobs with the majority being Easy Apply, and I believe 15 of them were postings that I applied to directly on the company site. 2 of the 4 interviews were from applying on the company site, the other 2 were from applying on Indeed.
At the moment, I have a resume for transitioning into Cybersecurity and now I have a Customer Service resume, too.
What I Did To Make A Customer Service Resume
The general rule is to make sure that your resume isn't more than two pages, so for my Customer Service focused resume, I removed the Home Labs/ Project section and listed my most recent customer service position, making sure that if my title wasn't customer service representative, I had customer service mentioned once somewhere in my bullet points for that position.
At this point, almost every company is using AI, even if they aren't using it properly, so you have to start thinking like a robot if you want to get past one -- look at the job description bullet points and if it makes sense , find a way to integrate those words in there. Don't worry about having a million copies of the same resume, keep a sile of your original resume and then make a copy of that file, so that you can overwrite it with iterations or your resume. A large majority of these job postings are written by ChatGPT (you'll be able to tell the more you use ChatGPT, trust me), which tend to use the same verbs like : analyze, contributed, proactively, monitored, managed -- you get the drift. As you create new iterations your resume, you WILL learn what is worth changing.
Application Count of the Day
I filled out a whopping * drum roll * 18 applications. I know that is less than 50% of my goal, but to be fair, many of the postings that I went to apply to, I'd already done! Then there were the job listings that were conveniently reposted after a week or so ( don't bother re-applying, it's highly likely that they aren't really looking to fill the position). Although I wasn't satisfied, there wasn't anything I could do about it, so I let it go and planned for the next day.
I scheduled my SEC + Exam
I did take the time to complete more videos with Dion Training for the Sec + exam with the last section covering Audits and Assessments. There is so much that goes into making a company's assets secure and I respect the long process. But I especially enjoyed the convenient checklists they have to address any gaps in security.
To top off the night, I added some terms to my Sec+ flashcards, then went to take a nap, that turned into full-fledged sleep.
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