So, you’ve put in the work and are now officially a certified Salesforce professional! Congrats! Now it's time to dive headfirst into finding your dream job!
When transitioning into any new career, one of the first things that probably comes to mind is a traditional resume. Besides, having a quality resume has been the number one tip for job seekers since the 1940s. If you consider how many resumes a hiring manager combs through on a daily basis, you'll instinctively know how crucial it is to find a way to stand out. We are going to show you to do exactly that.
In this article, we're going to walk you through how to craft the best Salesforce resume for the market in 2022. We're also going to tell you why your resume isn't nearly as important as you think it is, and help you better understand where a traditional resume fits in the modern job market.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Why Your Resume Isn’t as Important as You Think
There are a few basic considerations that should go into crafting the structure of your resume for a Salesforce professional consultant position.
Key takeaways to consider:
- No one is going to read your entire resume.
- Keep it concise; 1-2 pages at the maximum.
- You don't need to be flashy.
- Make sure the first two intro sentences hook the reader and make an impact.
- If you have a career gap, list it and explain it.
- There is no need to list your high school.
- Do not list Super Badges if you are Salesforce Certified.
- Update any of your experience to have Salesforce lingo.
- Identify & draw attention to transferable skills.
- Make sure URLs are clickable in PDF format and easy to read/copy when printed. The most common URL would be LinkedIn & Portfolio.
The Best Salesforce Resume Format
A reverse chronological resume style is typically the best choice for most people. It lets you show off what skills you've learned most recently. You most certainly have improved your skills and gained experience over time - show that off by highlighting it to be front and center.
If the organization you’re applying to has a worldwide presence, and you want (or are willing) to relocate, be sure to include this on your resume as well. If you have this kind of flexibility, it can make all the difference in landing your dream job.
Keep to the tried and true traditional resume format:
- 1" margins
- Use 11 point Calibri, Helvetica, or Georgia font
- Keep it single-spaced and no more than 2 pages
Also, it's a best practice to send your resume as a PDF. Although Microsoft Word is ubiquitous, PDFs look cleaner, more professional, and can be viewed by anyone in HR.
Information to Include in a Salesforce Resume
If you've worked as a Salesforce professional consultant for more than two years, you'll need to develop a professional resume summary to include. In the first sentence, use a word to identify yourself and indicate how many years you have worked in the profession. Then, describe your responsibilities as a Salesforce consultant in one paragraph or less. Remember to also include all your previous projects to demonstrate the results of your efforts.
If you don't have prior work experience you'll need to write a professional resume objective instead. You may write up to five sentences explaining why your talents make you a good fit.
A tailor-made resume goal should be included as well. Be sure to incorporate all of the most relevant components of your past experience. In this specific scenario, you should write the intro after writing the rest of your resume.
The Salesforce Resume Body
Begin with your most recent training, certifications, or most recent position, and then work backward. Be sure to include the company, location, job title, months of work, and up to five bullet points for each item.
Be sure to avoid using passive voice when describing your work history. You'll also need to be able to demonstrate, in words, how you can make an impact in the firm; don't simply make vague promises.
Pro Tip: How far back should a resume go before it is too old? Simply put, if your work experience is relevant to Salesforce, you can go back as far as you’d like as long as it's all relevant.
As you craft your resume, consider the specific abilities and duties listed in the job description. Then, write about how you meet or exceed those standards.
Remember, experience isn't always as critical as it first appears to be. At Talent Stacker, we've found that when landing your first job as a Salesforce professional, about 30% is based on your technical skills and 70% is based on your soft skills.
Not exactly sure what soft skills you have and should highlight? We can help you identify and build out your hard and soft skill sets - which is what HR departments are looking for now.
Skills Over Degrees: Salesforce Certifications, Training, and the Truth About College Degrees
While it's great if you have a college degree to highlight, what recruiters and hiring managers are most interested in are your Salesforce-specific training and certifications. If you have a lot of expertise with Salesforce, you don't need to worry about whether or not you have a college degree to add to your resume. However, if you do decide to include education, make sure you include the following:
- College name
- Where it is located (including full address)
- Years attended (and the year you graduated)
- Your degree (BA, BS, MA, MS)
- Your major and minor (if applicable)
If you are new to Salesforce or have little on-the-job experience, add your education above your experience on your resume and highlight the following:
- How your education supplements your Salesforce Admin education.
- Hard skills such as programming, mathematics, statistics.
- Extra-curricular activities.
Effectively, you want to highlight your strengths in order. This way, hiring managers get a better snapshot of you and your talents.
Flesh Out and Polish Up
Now that you have the body of your resume built out, let’s add a coat of paint so it truly shines.
Each Salesforce job listing has a job description with specific skills that the employer is looking for. So, you’ll close your resume with a “Talents” section that highlights and matches the skills you have for the job.
Here is a list of the most important Salesforce professional skills:
- Technical skills that are necessary for the Salesforce platform
- Leadership skills (best to prove these with previous experience)
- Business analytics
- Superior communication skills (oral, written)
- Sales management (this can include entry-level sales jobs up to managerial)
- Collaboration skills (you play well with others)
- Problem-solving skills - like leadership skills, best to prove these through previous experience
- Business skills (accounting, finance, management)
- Data analytics (e.g., statistics, mathematics, modeling, warehousing, mining)
- Time management
- Ability to work independently and within groups
What Role Do Resumes Really Play in the Job Search?
Now that we've covered the steps to creating an impactful Salesforce resume, let's talk about the role it will play in the job search process.
Your Salesforce resume will typically be reviewed by the hiring team once you have already been invited to interview, and they might use it for reference while interviewing you...STOP and think about that! If you've already been invited to interview by a potential employer, what do you think they looked at to help decide whether or not you were worth interviewing? You guessed it - your LinkedIn profile!
In the current job market, if you're simply scrolling through job postings and submitting your resume by simply clicking "Apply Now", it's going to be pretty difficult to get noticed and land a job.
At this point, you might be wondering how you're supposed to get a job if it's not by submitting a traditional resume. Well, here are some key steps that will help you land a Salesforce job in 2022:
- Get certified - 76% of Salesforce job applicants are certified. So if you aren't certified, you're immediately in the bottom 24% of candidates.
- Make sure your LinkedIn Profile is INCREDIBLE - this is far more important than your resume!
- Do your best to get hands-on experience through volunteer projects or personal projects in your Salesforce Playground or Dev org.
- Apply for jobs on sites like LinkedIn, Indeed, etc. - you will submit your resume there.
- Go to LinkedIn, follow the company you applied to, and connect with some of the employees of that company.
- If you notice any employees on LinkedIn who look like they would work with the Salesforce team, send them a personal message introducing yourself.
- Start engaging with the companies' and employees' LinkedIn posts. Share their posts, comment, like, and engage so that they get to know you. Now when they see your name in the application stack, it won't be the first time they've seen your name.
- Prepare for interviews so that you don't fall flat at the finish line.
Why LinkedIn is Important & How You Can Learn to Optimize It
You'll see from the breakdown above that your traditional resume came up in step 1 and your LinkedIn profile showed up on step 5. This should speak volumes to you about how important LinkedIn is in building your Salesforce professional career. So how and why is LinkedIn so different from a traditional resume? Yes, both list your information and experience, but that's where it ends.
One of the most obvious differences is that your LinkedIn profile is available to the public on the internet. This means that when recruiters are looking for candidates, you show up in the search results they see. Most recruiters are on LinkedIn searching for potential candidates. So, if you don't have a high-quality profile, you aren't going to show up very easily.
Because LinkedIn is a professional social platform, potential employers can look at the types of posts you write, what you comment on, and how you interact with others in a professional environment. They can get to know you as a person before they ever meet you in person – a traditional resume doesn't do this at all.
LinkedIn is live and in real-time! If you keep your profile updated, it will show your most recent skills and experience. A traditional resume would need to be updated and re-uploaded to all of the job postings on a regular basis in order to to be up to date, and you would have to hope recruiters are seeing the most current version. We could go on and on, but by now you should be seeing why LinkedIn is so important in this new age of landing jobs - especially in the Salesforce professional consultant space!
Want to learn more about how to go from Salesforce zero to a Salesforce hero on LinkedIn? Try our Free LinkedIn Optimization Course Here!
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