Let's Talk Fundraising

How Fundraisers Get Interviews: Resumes That Speak the Right Language

• Keith Greer, CFRE

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🎁 Enter the contest to get a signed copy of Scott Vedder's book, Signs of a Great Resume.

Seven seconds. That’s often all you get before a recruiter decides “no” or “maybe.” We brought in Scott Vedder—former Fortune 100 recruiter and bestselling author of Signs of a Great Resume—to show how to turn a duty-heavy document into a sharp story of value that earns interviews, especially for fundraisers navigating fuzzy titles and complex teams.

We start by reframing the resume as a leadership and career tool. Scott explains why writing like a job posting kills momentum, how to capture accomplishments while they’re fresh, and why a long master resume makes tailoring fast. You’ll learn what recruiters actually scan first, how to fix confusing titles with clear descriptors that pass the “moving sidewalk test,” and how to balance instant clarity with credible detail. We dig into his “signs” framework to surface exclamation-point moments, relevant experience, and numbers that quantify outcomes—without inflating credit or hiding behind group work.

For fundraisers and nonprofit pros, we cover showing influence without dollar signs, signaling leadership without a manager title, and formatting choices that create “duh” clarity even on non-linear paths. Scott shares when to use reverse chronological, when to lead with skill buckets, and how to make networking and referrals beat blind applying. We also tackle ATS and AI: how keywords really work, how to research what matters with open-source and human intel, and how to use AI as an assist to draft stronger bullets while preserving your authentic voice.

If you’re ready to move up, you’ll hear how to secure stretch assignments, document outcomes, and translate them into evidence a hiring manager will value. Plus: a signed book giveaway and free tip sheets you can use today. Listen, take notes, and share this with a colleague who needs a confidence boost. If this helped, follow the show, leave a quick review, and send us your biggest resume question—we might feature it next.

Enter to win a signed copy of Signs of a Great Resume by Scott Vedder. No cost to enter.

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Keith Greer:

So back in 2013, I was looking for a new job and was running out of time. I'd worked at a Fortune 100 early in my career, so I'd had some decent job coaching along the way. My resume wasn't terrible, but it also wasn't landing interviews. Job postings were closing as fast as I could find them, and my resume just wasn't getting traction. And that's when I realized something important. I was only working on my resume because I needed a job. And that's kind of the worst possible time to do it. Around then, I discovered that a former manager of mine had written a book about resumes. I read it once, tried to apply it, and honestly, my first rewrite was rough. But then I went back chapter by chapter and actually did the work. And that's when everything changed. My resume started getting attention, recruiters started calling, and it completely reshaped how I think about resumes. Not as paperwork, but as a leadership and a career tool. So if you're a fundraiser, whether you're early in your career, leading a team, or quietly thinking about what's next, this episode is for you, and it's one you're going to want to share. We're also giving away a signed copy of Scott Vedder's book. And you can enter with your name and email, and we'll draw a winner at the end of February. And details on this will be in the show notes. So I'd like to introduce my guest today, who is Scott Vedder. And I worked with Scott early in my career, and he was one of those leaders who kept things fun, engaging, and human while consistently elevating the people around him. Years later, his book, Signs of a Great Resume, became the single most helpful resource I've ever used in my own job search. Scott is also a former Fort Children 100 recruiter, the number one bestselling author of Signs of a Great Resume, as well as the follow-up Veterans Edition. And today he helps people translate their experience into language hiring managers actually understand. I'm a huge fan of Scott's work, and I'm excited to share his perspective with you. Scott, welcome to the podcast. Oh, Keith, you say all the nicest things. You're so good.

Scott Vedder:

You can do all my intros from this point out.

Keith Greer:

I love it. Well, you I'm happy to introduce a great person, but I'm really curious because you wrote this book a while ago. What made you sit down and write a whole book about resumes? Like what were you seeing that made you think people are getting this wrong in a predictable and repeatable way?

Scott Vedder:

Yeah, thanks for asking and for having me. You know, I think the number one driver of writing the book, uh, Signs of a Great Resume, hey, there it is. Look at that. I'm on a book, but I have hair then. I promise. Still me. Um, but the number one driver of writing signs of a great resume was frustration. I was frustrated, candidates were frustrated, and for different reasons. You know, candidates got a lot of conflicting information, or maybe they had read a book or written a blog post back in the day about resumes, and everybody seemed to have a different opinion about what to do on a resume, and nobody seemed to be asking recruiters what to do on a resume. So as a recruiter, I started jotting down my notes because friends of mine would just ask me, hey, what do you what do you do on a resume? What are you looking for? And I realized I was consistently looking for the same things, and maybe venting that frustration through something like a book was something that not only could uh be cathartic, but also help other people. And it really took off from there. I never dreamed I would be the expert on such a dreadful topic like resumes.

Keith Greer:

If we all turned our uh atrocities into books, we might have some really interesting reads out there.

Scott Vedder:

I won't ask what yours would be. Don't worry.

Keith Greer:

No, no. I think there's TV shows about it at this point. But what did uh when you were kind of going through the resumes, because I just went through the hiring process for about four different positions at my job, and I kept seeing atrocious resume after atrocious resume, whether people were uh entry level or they were even some more senior positions coming in, the resumes were just bad. What do you wish candidates understood about how recruiters actually use a resume?

Scott Vedder:

Yeah, so the number one mistake most people make on a resume is they write a resume that reads like a job description. So if you think of like a teacher, if a teacher just writes taught English classes, graded papers, tracked grades, well, yes, I went to middle school. I could tell you what teachers do, you know. I don't need you to tell me that. But most people were simply regurgitating their job responsibilities onto a resume. And if I just needed to hire a teacher, I'd stand outside of the school closest to me and go, hey, who wants a new job? You got one. That's not how this works. So what I realized was that people were not explaining the value that they bring to the prospective employer. That's really what the whole process is about. If you think at a high level, when somebody is hiring, it's a problem they have to solve. They're short-staffed or Jimmy quit, Jody got married, I should have known they'd never get far. But uh one way or another, they're shorthanded and they need to bring uh extra people on. And so that's the problem they have, and then the hiring manager walks into my office in recruiting and says, Hey, here's the things I'm looking for, find me some candidates, and I go to the market and referrals and other sources, and I say, Hey, who looks like they could solve the problem of the hiring manager? That they have the experience needed, that they have examples of how they have been successful in the past, and those are usually pretty good indicators of how you could be successful in the future, and most candidates were not doing that. There's a lot of candidates talking about their jobs or me, me, me, and look at what I've done, look at what I've learned. And the process is really not about you, the candidate, it's about how you can help the prospective employer. And just that mindset switch alone might be enough to get some people thinking differently. How can I solve the problem of the employer by showing, hey, I know you've got things you need to have done, and I've done similar things before. Here are some examples. Why don't you read more or call me in for an interview?

Keith Greer:

And I think that mindset shift is a really important one because it's a hard thing for us to uh maybe sometimes brag about ourselves or to even remember uh what we did three years ago when we started this job. And so I'm wondering, what's your take on how often we should be updating our resume? Should we be doing it only when we're searching for a new job or should there be a more steady rhythm uh that we should be updating regularly?

Scott Vedder:

Yeah, I feel like it should be like changing the smoke detector batteries. Like do it once a year and just set that date and at a minimum look at it and go, all right, is there anything I might add? What have I done over the last year? I I'd say just in general, the worst time to write a resume is when you need a job or when you're applying for a job or somebody sent you a job posting and you don't know when that posting closes or it closes in an hour and go, go, go. That's the absolute worst time to write a resume because you're not going to be in the most reflective place where you can look back and say, what is the most helpful information I can provide? And to your earlier point about, you know, people don't like bragging and things like that. I hear that a lot. Oh, I don't like talking about myself. I don't have that issue. Uh, but I hear that from a lot of people and I go, good. I actually don't want you to talk about yourself. What I want you to talk about is what you can do for me, the prospective employer. And you do that and you've been updating it all along, and writing your resume just becomes the an act of balancing what is the information you've recorded over the time, and what is any new information or a new angle to the information you might need for this potential job individually.

Keith Greer:

And so if somebody's updating their resume annually, uh, what are the three things that they should always capture while it's fresh? And should they be removing things as they kind of progress throughout the year, or should it kind of become like a running long master list of everything that they've done within this role? Because who knows when it's going to be uh relevant to the next career position they're looking for?

Scott Vedder:

Yeah, I I think you can and should have just your master resume. That's too much information, and you know it's too much, but it's all there. And then when you apply to a job or you're networking and meeting somebody who knows somebody, you can make little adjustments. You've probably heard the term tailoring your resume. Well, it's kind of like tailoring clothes. We don't wake up every morning to manufacture new clothes to wear, but periodically we reattach a button or shorten a hem or something. And that's the same case with the resume. You don't have a new story to tell each time that you're applying for a job or networking or changing careers. You've already lived the story of your experience or your education. Now it's just a matter of what chapters of that story, what individual plot moments might be most relevant to the person who's reading it. And if you've written a master resume with too many examples or too much data, and it's three pages long, don't make that a goal, but let's say it is three or four pages, then you just liberally use the delete key, and you're probably going to build a resume that's more relevant for the information that I'm looking for in this particular instance.

Keith Greer:

That's a great tip. And so you're talking about uh tailoring it to the reader. And so when a resume is working, what is it actually doing for the reader in the first minute that they're looking at it?

Scott Vedder:

So it's even less than a minute statistically. Recruiters look at resumes for somewhere between seven and thirty seconds before they decide no, or maybe How do they know anything about you in that short time? They don't. Um they're taking shortcuts. Now, one shortcut is certainly talent acquisition software or applicant tracking software or AI, whatever you want to call it, some kind of technology helping to whittle down the crowd of applicants into a reasonable pile or a prioritized pile of applicants for the recruiter to read. And then I think it was Career Builder did like an eyeball scanning study somehow of what do recruiters actually look at first. And the simple answer was job titles. And that kind of makes sense because it's the easy button to see is this a candidate who's following a career trajectory that I'm familiar with, and maybe they're the candidate I expected to see. So, way back in my youth, I worked at the town snack bar at the pool. And if I was, you know, the cashier and then I learned to be the cook and I was the assistant manager and I was applying to be the manager, well, that career path makes sense. So you might be a recruiter looking at jobs that somebody had an assistant manager or supervisory kind of job in food and beverage, and you can probably tell that from job titles alone. So if you were to sort people by what I think are the two basic reactions that most people have to reading a resume, it's either duh, of course I want to talk to that candidate, or huh? You you want me to talk to who? Why? I don't understand. And job titles are an easy path to the duh candidate. Whether you're a French fry cook growing up into management at a quick service restaurant, or you're the assistant director of HR and you're applying to be the director, or you're leaving career fields completely, no matter what you're doing in that moment of transition, you're probably one of two basic uh reactions that you're gonna get. And which reaction that is depends on how clear maybe your job titles are or your story is, and also how clearly you explain what it is that you can do for the prospective employer.

Keith Greer:

And sometimes, especially in the nonprofit world, job titles are not very clear. So, how do we kind of overcome that? Because for a lot of us, our titles are director of development, and it's like, what are we developing? Are we what what's the product line that we're managing here? And it's no, we're not doing any kind of that traditional development at all.

Scott Vedder:

Yeah, and to me, that sounds like career services out of college. Like, I don't know. But I think what many people lose sight of as we're applying for jobs is that when it comes to job titles, we kind of just make stuff up. And when we don't know what to call it, we call it operations manager if there's a thing that's running with a lot of people, or project manager if you're doing a lot of some things, but maybe not leading as many people. And I know there's operative terms for project manager in the PMP world, but it it doesn't matter what your job title is. I could buy a food truck tomorrow and hire you to cook, and you're my executive vice president of culinary preparedness. Yeah, it sounds like a big promotion. I don't know. It doesn't probably pay what you're used to, but hey, it's a startup, so give me a second. Uh but you know, job titles are confusing even within a single company. Like if you work at a big company, you may see another person somewhere on the org chart and go, what is like a specialized analyst for do? You're like, I have no idea, I don't work there. But somebody through some process decided what a job title should be, and development director in the nonprofit world, for instance, kind of makes sense. It's like business development, but it's development of relationships and maybe you're directing how those get developed. But I abandon the idea that you must put a specific job title onto a resume. And I think you can always do things that are helpful as long as they're also truthful. And it's really the one rule and the only rule that I have to resumes is that you must be truthful. Not a deposition. You don't have to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, in exactly the order it happened. So if I was thinking about a development director and what would be most helpful for someone else to understand, an easy way to get there is to picture yourself at one of the big airports somewhere. You know the moving sidewalk thing going the two directions in the airplane. Yeah. Picture your best friend from high schools coming the other direction on that moving sidewalk. And you haven't seen that person for 10, 20 years, maybe. And they go, Oh my gosh, Keith, what do you do? Whatever you'd say as you pass real quick on the moving sidewalk is probably okay to write on your resume, as long as it's truthful, and most if it's helpful. So I'll take a stab at it, I might get it wrong, but someone who's a development director or a similar role in a nonprofit or education environment, maybe you say something like, Well, I I'm the leader for fundraising strategies and relationship building at XYZ location or foundation. And your employer might have never called you the leader of fundraising strategies and relationship building, but if that's what you do a lot, that's pretty helpful. So maybe you just write that and the the red face test to make sure that you can say with confidence, yeah, this is what I do, is pretend you're gonna walk into your job and your boss's office, go, hey, I'm gonna tell people this is what I do here. I lead, you know, development of fundraising strategies and build relationships. And if they go, yeah, duh, that's probably good enough for your resume.

Keith Greer:

That's great. And I think that's a super quick and concise way, especially when recruiters are looking at it for seven to twenty seconds. Um but is there a way that we need to balance that clarity with the depth when we only get that brief look initially?

Scott Vedder:

Yeah. So that initial look is really just to like narrow down who am I gonna pay more attention to? And that maybe pile is like, all right, by job title or because they were referred, or I know them, or I've met them, maybe you're in the maybe pile one way or another. I'm gonna need a little more. So instead of just listing a job title, I do think there's a place for you to do a little bit of description of the kinds of activities you typically do, even if they're not specific to you only. So if you were to think back to the airport again, if coming the other way on that moving sidewalk, you'd say a couple words as your or a handful of words as your friend passes, if that moving sidewalk stopped and they said, Wow, leader of fundraising strategies and relationship building, what does that mean? What do you mean by that? If you could write, like, I'll call it a tweet-length explanation for lack of better term, or whatever they call those now, 140-ish characters, a singular sentence that says, in a nutshell, here's what I spend a lot of time doing, even if it's not everything. Well, I develop a five-year strategy on how we're going to raise funds for this and that program, and I work with a team of this many people, or I lead this many, and I do outreach through community events and um you know activation events at the location. Now your best friend is pretty satisfied with that information, and so would a recruiter be satisfied. Like they they would go, all right, I get like more or less what that person's saying. And well, at my company, we wouldn't call it a leader of fundraising, we'd call it a go get the money executive dot for, whatever, right? You know, like it would make it up. But I'd at least go, oh, now I understand where the equivalency is, the kind of scope this person has, and maybe some of the detail around the uh the kind of team and work you do, but that's really not where the magic comes to life. That's just that initial pass and a way to convey some of the context for your experience. The best way to convey why you're a great fit is to use what I call the signs of a great resume. You'll see over my shoulder here. Um I know they look like a curse words in a comic strip. They're not, I promise. Cursing is a bad idea on your resume, but they're a way to remember how to show the specific ways you have demonstrated success in your past jobs. So, what are those exclamation point moments? At what point did you gain the most relevant experience? And what are some of the numbers and dollars and percentages that might help to quantify and explain the value of your contributions over time? And if you're listening to this and not watching it uh with us, when you go home, all you got to do is look down at your keyboard, and above the numbers one through five on the left there, that's clever. I came up with that. Those are the signs of a break resume, and they're right in front of you when you're at your keyboard as a reminder. Ah, I need to be specific. What did I do that has been helpful for my past employers that might be helpful for the new employer?

Keith Greer:

That's such a smart way to go about it. I think that's one of the things that I loved so much about working through your books, it helped me put my accomplishments and the things that I did deliver into a perspective that shows the value of what I can bring coming into an organization. And when we think about our resumes, uh, they're really what kind of get us to the interview stage, right? They're not going to get us the job, but they'll get us to that interview stage. And if you had to name one mistake that keeps people from getting into those interviews, what do you think that is and what should they do instead?

Scott Vedder:

Well, I think the mistake people make when pursuing a job is they think, oh, I need a job, I have to apply for jobs, and that is not the only way to go about it. I'll tell you, as a recruiter, and I'm sure you can meet any recruiter who will tell you, it's much better when you have a relationship or a referral from a candidate of quality, in order for you to kind of pitch them to the hiring manager than to just, you know, have a bunch of people apply from all over planet Earth. And then the numbers start to stack up against the candidates and against the recruiter. So I think if most recruiters were polled and asked, Do you want to post jobs and have people apply? They'd say, No. I wish I just knew people and I knew where they might fit, and I could send a slate of talent to the employer or the hiring manager, and everybody'd be living happily ever after. In fact, including me as the resume guy, I wish I could abolish resumes as a thing. I don't like writing resumes, and I do this. So you can imagine it's nobody's favorite thing to do, and it's yet still a necessary part of the process for now. Yeah. We may figure out a different way. But if you think that the way to get a job is to click apply and say a prayer or something like that, that's never going to work in your favor because the reality of today's workforce is there's people all over the planet who can apply for a job. And at a competitive company, it's very common to see one, two, three hundred or more applicants for a single opening. No matter how good your resume is, those odds just are not gonna stack up in your favor, whether it's AI or eyeballs looking at your resume.

Keith Greer:

Absolutely. And one of the things that I'm really curious about is looking at high performers. Sometimes they are not necessarily uh the best at conveying themselves on paper. What accidents do you see them sell them making that makes them look more average than they probably are?

Scott Vedder:

Yeah, I think for many high performers, it it's in doing the work that they're showcasing their best abilities and not on writing it in little bullets on a resume. I think that's probably true for medium performers, for new employers, for new career professionals, and you know, anybody on the spectrum. Your best work is probably not the resume. Um, I think the mistake that people make is writing it like a job description. So they're not capitalizing on the good things that they've done. They're not sharing what makes them a good performer. And often I think it's also being too much in our own minds of, well, I did that, but yes, Sally was there with me. And oh yeah, I did that, but Maria, she had a bigger role, or I don't want to take credit because really it was Kenisha who was the lead, but I was, you know, helping on that part. So the way I like to kind of eliminate that concern is to ask a candidate, if I were to ask those around you, what is it that you did that made your contributions valuable or unique, or that made it a better process, or made you enjoyable to work with, what do you hope they would say? And almost think of writing your resume as if it was them talking about what had happened. And that might help get beyond some of the humility that I think a lot of people want to express. Uh, and again, not a problem I have, but uh also to really get a broader perspective than just our own. Because we know what we think was the valuable moment, but if you were to ask somebody else, they might tell you something else that you might have missed because of your own biases against you know what is valuable or not. So phoning the friend or polling the audience is sometimes helpful either literally or at least in your mind to go, all right, if I did ask my boss, what would she say was the really valuable reason why my contributions were helpful?

Keith Greer:

I think that's such a brilliant point because fundraising is not always a clean, single-owned outcome. Uh, we oftentimes, especially in large institutions, have teams of people working behind us. So if my role is a major gift officer, I often will have prospect researchers working on the back end, I'll have planned giving people working on it, and maybe uh because of the efforts of 10 or 15 different people, I was able to secure uh a two, three, five, ten million dollar gift. Uh, but that was not necessarily all thanks to me. So I think uh kind of do that, doing that phone a friend and be like, what would you say was my role in this? Or uh what impact could I have was really important. But for the people who are maybe not the direct frontline fundraiser on there, maybe they're the prospect researcher who did the research that led the person to go get that $10 million gift. How do they translate those numbers uh into numbers that matter uh when you can't necessarily claim those dollars directly yourself?

Scott Vedder:

Right. So the beauty of the signs of a great resume is that you do not need numbers and dollars to show value. In fact, the first of the signs is the exclamation point, because a lot of times the unsung heroes behind the scenes, the researchers, the analysts, the you know, professionals in finance and people that you don't see on the front line with the customer or your employees, many times they're the heroes. And the exclamation point contributions they offer are something like you know, assembling new research in a way that hadn't been done before to showcase opportunities around A, B, and C demographics of potential donors. There's no dollar signs connected with that, but if I'm hiring a researcher to figure out who we should go to to solicit donations or to seek grants or funds, I want to know that they think in a novel way. And I want to know how they got work done. And very often, although it's great to show the numbers, and you know, if you have certain contributions or donations you've you know been able to amass in an impressive number, great. If you could show the percentage of growth, fantastic. But if it's just the amount of influence you had, if it's just the context and the behavior that you demonstrated, that alone could be worthwhile to showcase because that should be pretty specific to you and very often is what we're going to pay you for. It's more the behavior you're going to do than the number attached to that behavior in most jobs.

Keith Greer:

Interesting. And so you're talking about the influence and how you're um impacting that. How do you write about influence without sounding vague?

Scott Vedder:

Well, I think you can be very specific in the way you went about it, how you researched it, the level of person with whom you influenced, and what happened with it, um, what might have been the outcome had you not done it or was historically the outcome. So if you know previously you had uh presented grant's um research that was not utilized, or they didn't pursue it and you went, we could have missed out on it, you know, identifying previous shortcomings or identifying opportunities from previous behavior and then figuring out what the good parts are that you did differently, that could be a way to show some of the unique way of approaching it or assembling different sources or even different people into the room that you might not typically tap into. Anything that you did that was like, huh, only Keith could say that. And that's a good barometer. Like if you cover your name at the top of your resume and reread it, if it could be somebody else's resume, it's probably not good enough. I don't just want to hire somebody else any more than I just want to hire some English teacher. I need to know what you specifically did that added value and is a potential predictor of what kind of value you can add for me.

Keith Greer:

Excellent. And if we're thinking back to kind of like those job titles, um, and we talked about rewriting them so that they're actually descriptive, because oftentimes our job titles might be overinflated in the nonprofit sector, or they could be completely inconsistent, um, or they don't even communicate the scope of what we did. So knowing that titles are imperfect and we're rewriting them to be more descriptive, how do we signal leadership on our resume?

Scott Vedder:

Well, I think you can claim to have led things, led people and led work or efforts without having the title of manager. Like there's many people who believe that everyone is leading in some way, uh, even if you're just managing yourself. So if you ascribe to that belief, then it's not out of the ordinary to say you led this part of an effort. If leadership is an important quality they're looking for, and is in this definition meaning people management, talk about how you manage the effort of a team even if you were not their manager, and how did you bring people together? How did you demonstrate some of the behaviors that you attribute to being qualities of a leader that you look up to? So things like coaching or development or training or helping the team stretch or being visionary and setting a long-term strategy, you don't have to have any particular job title to do all of those things. It's a matter of demonstrating the behavior in a way that is unique to you and adds value to the employer and a lot less about the job title in most instances.

Keith Greer:

And so when we're doing that um leadership, because it's not always just people and it's not always just projects, um, how do we distinguish on paper the difference in the scope of our work between things that I helped with and things that I led? And how should that language change?

Scott Vedder:

Yeah, uh I think more than not, we as the writers of a resume are going to be infinitely more concerned about word choice than anybody reading it. And we're more likely to go, gosh, is that managed or led? And I hear some people say, oh, those are two different things, management and leadership. Well, you're right. To you, and to other people, those are synonyms. So we don't know what people are going to think or how they're going to take it. We just need to be truthful. And as long as we're also being helpful, you can probably write it. So whether you're saying supported an effort that did X, that's one way to say weren't in charge of it, but you were, you know, playing a role. I think I'd go even further towards the I did side of things because whatever you accomplished, even if six other people also did it, it's still true about you, and then talk about the unique way that you did it. Even if you're working with peers on a team and there's one leader who isn't you managing that team, you can still say, I did this part and I did that part. Now, one caveat here, and this is weird, I don't know why it exists. We tend to write in the first person on resumes, but we don't use first person pronouns. I don't know who decided that way before Scott's time. So I like to say resumes are blind, they have no eyes, letter I. So, like you wouldn't say I led this project. You just say led a project, and it's shorthand, it's bad grammar, but it's what a lot of people have done, and I think is efficient because we imagine it's you writing the resume. I also tend to write everything in the past tense, because even if I just did it yesterday, the past is in the past, as our friend Elsa might say. So um that you can do the rest of the song in your head, but uh you know, the idea of keeping the language consistent makes it easy to update because if you're trying to write in the present tense for your current job and then you're going back a job, it just gets messy. So, first person, no pronouns, use the past tense and claim uh every bit of what your contributions were, even if they paralleled some of what other people did.

Keith Greer:

I like the looking to the past to kind of influence like what's gonna happen in the future. And we can we assume that what you did before is gonna be able to be translated into what you're gonna be doing for us? And so when we're looking at employees and fundraisers who are wanting to move up in their career, maybe from uh that entry-level role to managing their first team or from managing a team to uh leading a department or a department to an organization. When someone is ready to move up, uh what has to change in their resume so that it reads as them being ready to take that leap?

Scott Vedder:

Well, I would argue it actually starts a little before then. I would say, what has to change in your behavior in order to make you ready to make that leap? And then it's just a matter of on your resume describing the ways that you demonstrated that behavior. So if you think in your mind you're ready for this job, but you don't have any evidence to suggest that you could lead the organization or the department or a team of people, I would offer to you the idea that maybe you should get some of that experience through asking your leader for a stretch assignment or some kind of a project or asking if you can manage the work of a team even if you're not their leader. All of those things, that's the doing of stuff. That's the hard part. You know, that's difficult. Writing it down on a resume is actually fairly easy, and the language doesn't have to change dramatically because you're still just talking about things that you've done that have made a difference, that you believe might make a difference for the next step. Perhaps the emphasis will change and you'll be talking more about examples of how you've led people or developed your team or selected people or helped the organization grow. Well, that will be dependent on the job you're going for. So, to the degree that you can, try to do the behaviors of the job that you want while you have your current job. This, like the old idea of like dress for the job you want used to be a saying, right? So okay, well, act for the job that you want. Take actions that demonstrate you are ready, and as you do them, write them down so you don't have to worry about writing your resume later.

Keith Greer:

I think that's a really critical and important point. And it's one that makes me think about taking this next question out of the scope of uh resume writing a little bit and into actual on-the-job uh performance. But one of the things I hear from so many of my coworkers is oh, that's outside the scope of my role. Or uh, oh, if you want me to take on leading a project, you need to pay me more to lead that project. Uh and it's I always always thought of this as uh that's a a test of your own skill. It's an opportunity for you to develop so that you can get the next job. But there seems to be this kind of um pervasive ideology out there at the moment of if you want me to do more, you have to pay me more. What's what's your take on that?

Scott Vedder:

Well, maybe longer term, I agree. Like I don't like working for free. I don't think anybody should. Um, but also if there's an opportunity for you to stretch, to get a new assignment to work on something that is, quote, outside of the scope of your job, um, it's how you frame it in your own mind that matters more than anything else. So if you see these not as, oh, they're not paying me to do the next level thing, but I'm doing it, or you see it as, wow, they believe so much in me that I can do this, that's an investment in my future. Now, I'm not saying that they can just not replace your boss, make you do the work, and not promote you. That's a bad practice. I don't believe that is fair. And we should tolerate that longer term. But having a conversation with your manager or your department or whomever of authority in advance to say, hey, I might like to consider what the future looks like. I think I like what we're doing here and I want to continue to grow. Is there an opportunity for me to test the waters a bit? For me to get an assignment that mimics the behavior you would expect for a promotional opportunity, and could I work on that short term? And seeking those opportunities or reframing, oh, that's outside of the scope of my job, into oh, that's outside of the scope of my job. Thank you. That can be helpful. Just don't do it long term because you don't deserve to work for free or do your boss's job for less money.

Keith Greer:

Absolutely. And I think as a worst case scenario with that, it positions your resume so that you can go find the next job at that higher level if it's not available within your own organization.

Scott Vedder:

Yeah, if they're undervaluing you, don't stay. Like you can work anywhere, like there's no rules that say you have to stay where you are. Now, there might be factors outside of your control, like the benefits you have, or the geography you're in, or the retirement plan you're almost vested in or about to achieve, those might be outside of your control. But what you can always control is how you perceive what is going on around you. And the ancient Stoics talked about it, you know, the dichotomy of control. And the the simple uh way to put it is there are things in your control and those not, don't suffer the things that are not in your control. If your employer is not valuing your work and making you do work two levels up for years at a time, if you choose to accept that, that is within your control. If you choose not to accept it, you can't control their behavior, but you can control whether you stay or not.

Keith Greer:

Brilliant. I love it. The other thing that I want to get to is the kind of the resume format. Because when most people do it, they do the chronological reverse chronological order, where they do the newest job to the oldest job. When is that structure helpful and beneficial to you? And when does it bury the story that you actually need the reader to see?

Scott Vedder:

Yeah, so I think it's based on the reader's reaction, more so than any formatting rules that I have, because again, I have no rules to resumes. So you can do whatever you want. If the first advice you get from someone about your resume is about how it looks, what format it's in, what font you used, you probably ask the wrong person for advice about your resume, because really recruiters and employers don't care about that stuff. They care that they have speed and clarity. The speed to know quickly that very clearly this candidate is the right answer to my problem, which is somebody's quit or I'm growing the team. So when you're thinking about the way to format your resume, it's a matter of are you a duh candidate where job by job that makes sense. In my snack bar analogy, being the assistant manager is the top thing you see to get promoted to the manager, that might make sense. And the same is true. I work with a lot of veterans coming out of the military and in their transition. I've talked to thousands of them one-on-one. And for the pilots out there who are flying in the Army, Navy, Air Force, wherever they're flying, um, they're a duh candidate at Delta Airlines and they're a huh candidate at Wells Fargo if they don't want to stay in the cockpit. So even the same candidate could be either duh, you should talk job by job, or huh? Can you talk about what it is a pilot brings to an opportunity like business development at Wells Fargo? I was making that up. Um, and I had a lot of those candid conversations with pilots uh during the pandemic, you know, when the airlines weren't hiring and their decades-long plan of going to the military, getting their hours, then going to an airline was disrupted. That's just a microcosm of what all of us may see as AI takes hold of different careers and different functions that we do, we're all subjected to that disruption. So while today I would go, if you're a dentist, say you're a dentist and you're hired, tomorrow, I don't think dentistry is going to change fundamentally. Like I still got teeth, I still need to be taken care of. But there are parts of it that will. So if the formatting of your resume job by job doesn't make sense, think about starting with, I call them buckets for last lack of better term, buckets of skills, then organizing those with the bullets underneath them instead of having bullets underneath jobs. Because if you were to think of three qualities that I'll go back to my uh military pilots for a second, three qualities a military pilot brings to an opportunity at a financial institution and business development. Building relationships, pretty important as you're flying around the world, interacting in the cockpit, leading a team, and you could have a bunch of examples of building relationships right up front, which by the way is a critical skill to have in business development at a bank. And by the way, I did it as a pilot. So you it's not hiding the ball in a pure functional resume that only talks about skills and doesn't say where you've worked, it's kind of frustrating for people. And so if you say, oh, I'm trying to do a functional resume, you'll hear many people go, ah, I hate those. You say, why? A lot of people hide the ball. They don't tell me what they do. Well, I don't believe in hiding anything. So in this example I'm making up here, if that pilot talked about her skills in business development, in leading projects about whether that's maintenance or training or whatever, and in you know, driving some kind of efficiencies that she's figured out, if those were three skills being looked for in the new job, and she gives me a bunch of examples of those, and at the bottom of the resume, page two, wherever it is, she says, By the way, did you realize I got all that experience as a Navy pilot? You go, no, I had no idea that was a way you could get that experience, but I'm still interested. And also, bonus points, thank you for your service.

Keith Greer:

Yeah, and you had mentioned a couple times uh about artificial intelligence and it uh it either taking over our jobs or being used in some way to start scanning over some of these resumes. And I'm curious because I think a lot of people out there, and I don't think fundraisers are no exception, uh, they're stuck feeling between writing for humans and writing for systems that are going to scan and process your resume. How do you think about things like keywords and the ATS uh in a way that keeps the resume human uh but still findable?

Scott Vedder:

Yeah, I think many people don't realize we've been using something like AI and talent acquisition for decades. I mean, 20 years ago when I was a recruiter, we were using some kind of a computer software to sort through candidates, and today we just call that AI, but it's not hocus pocus magic and genie in a bottle stuff. It's the same whether it's AI or eyeballs looking at your resume. It's going to take the wish list of the hiring manager, compare that to what the candidates on their resumes are saying, and kind of prioritize who seems to be talking about the same stuff. So anybody who tells you there's some magic keyword hack to you know beating the ATS or overcoming the AI, I'd say, well, follow their advice if you're applying for their company. Maybe they're right. But if they're not a recruiter and you're not applying for them, take it as a data point and go back to can I demonstrate that I can solve the problems that this company is facing? And so if you were applying to work in a project management field in construction and you're talking about all the ways you were a dentist, I'd go, well, I I don't understand. Like you construct fillings, maybe you could make an argument, but that there's no amount of AI haggling that's gonna make that make sense. And if you somehow tricked the AI into looking at you, the second my eyeballs got on your resume, I'd go, what the heck is this one doing in here? Oh, AI, you're so silly sometimes. And I'd throw you away just like into the no pile because you're probably a terrible candidate for construction if your whole career has been in dentistry. Unless you also happen to own a home refurbishing business or you worked in your parents' construction business, and there's a different story than just your career to tell. And that's where the AI expedites our information seeking. And even if that's something you listed second for whatever reason on your resume, oh, by the way, I had this side hustle. AI could see that and go, hey, this person's got a decade of construction experience. It just happens to have been tooling around as a dentist for a while, but this is a random equivalency I'm drawing here, I know. Right. The point is that you can't fool the AI. It's always going to be smarter than you in terms of what it knows that the hiring manager wants. That's not to say it's smarter than humans. It's that it has inputs and information you don't have as a candidate. So the best thing you can do is to think about your in the military, they'd call it open source intelligence. So what is out there and available for you to see, like job postings, the company's website, other people's profiles on LinkedIn who have a similar job at that organization. And then human intelligence. What can you learn from people that you talk to, that you've met, you've networked with, who you went to school with, and share some commonality with. So you can mix those two together and figure out between a job posting and what you know Sally told me over there. I think I know that the main thing they're looking for is A, B, and C. Let me focus there, and the AI will be focused on the same things.

Keith Greer:

And so there's the two sides of the AI, because we've definitely talked about the recruiter side, and uh it has the inputs that we don't know about on the on the applicant side. Is there an area where you are seeing uh AI being genuinely helpful for candidates as part of their application process or writing their resume? Uh, and where does that show up and how are people using it in a way that's actually beneficial from the applicant side?

Scott Vedder:

Yeah, I think you're probably wasting your time if you're not using AI to help you as a catalyst for your own innovation and thinking and writing. So as a guy who's written a number of books, I will say it with some you know trepidation in my voice. AI can help a lot. And if I would have had AI 12 years ago, that would have been a lot shorter process to write in that book, because I could have you know told it things and said, hey, here's the tone I wanted and start me somewhere. Instead, there was Scott on a Word document going tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, word by word. So when it comes to writing your resume, an AI might be able to take things like performance reviews or your own reflection or something you dictate into it and construct it in a way that includes things we've talked about. Connections to a job posting, you marry that up, dump the job posting in with your last performance review and say, what are the commonalities? Make some bullets that might appear on a resume. Use the first person, but not the pronouns, write it in the past tense, and when possible, include specific uh exclamation point moments. I don't know if the AI is attuned to my way of thinking yet, uh, but numbers and things that quantify what makes my experience unique. You might be surprised that an AI can get you to a 60% solution, a 90% solution. You don't have to think of a word, and it's not always gonna sound like you. So that's where I go back to there's the biggest threat to your resume is not AI, it's M E. It's talk not putting yourself into it. If it doesn't sound like me, that's not the guy who's gonna show up to work. So why bother, right? I as an employer, I want to know I'm meeting the real candidate on paper. I want to know that same candidate is who shows up in an interview, and I want to know that same candidate is sure who shows up on the first day of work. So the the degree to which you can be yourself and talk like you and think like you and show what you can bring, AI can never fully encapsulate that. So use it as a catalyst, but always leave your own mark on it at the end.

Keith Greer:

Absolutely. I I think that's one of the things I talk about a lot on my podcast is use AI as the assist rather than as the replacement. Right. Um, but if you could give every fundraiser out there one mindset shift about resumes that would make them more confident and more effective, what would that be?

Scott Vedder:

I would suggest that you probably have the skill that is needed in the context of your job as a fundraiser. So if you think about what you're doing, and this is my rudimentary understanding as somebody who's periodically donated to nonprofits and schools, but you know, not an expert in your field, my instinct tells me that the way you influence people to commit is by showing the value they will get out of that contribution, or that maybe society or the benefactors will get, yeah, and connecting the action of donating to that benefit. Absolutely. You have that skill set, so I'm just saying apply it here. The value an employer gets by hiring you with your specific behaviors and experience, show them that value up front so that they can say, Yeah, you know what, I'd like to make a weekly donation to the Keats Paycheck Fund. Sure.

Keith Greer:

Yeah, yeah, I love a paycheck fund. That's great. Scott, thank you so much for being here today and for sharing all of your wisdom. And so, to anybody who's listening, if you're thinking I should probably update my resume, Scott actually has a free top five tip sheets. Uh that's a great place to start, and you can download it. We'll probably link into the show notes. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Scott Vedder:

Yeah, it's very simple. You know, it's just the five questions I get most often about resumes. It's a little piece of paper you're gonna print out, or it's a PDF. And I've got the same for interviews as well. Here's a sneak peek. The signs of a great resume are the signs of a great interview. By preparing and thinking deeply about what's on your resume, you're actually preparing for the interview. So if you go to scottvetter.com, you can get access to that. And there's both a civilian or military version of each of those tip sheets. Because I know there are different questions that, pardon me, are on the mind of our military veterans, and why not answer them? So um link with me there. You can catch me on LinkedIn. I've got a few articles on my LinkedIn page as well. I think I'm the only Scott Veter that does resume stuff. So if you find somebody naming me my name that's not that, it's probably not me. Look for the bald guy with a big smile and uh all the resume tips.

Keith Greer:

Perfect. And I want to remind everyone that we're giving away a signed copy of Scott's book. Details are in the show notes, and we'll drop a winner at the end of February. Uh and Scott, if anybody wants to get this book in their hands like right now, uh, and they don't they don't win the drawing or they don't want to wait for the drawing to happen because they're applying for jobs actively, where's the best place for them to get it?

Scott Vedder:

Wherever books are sold, and by that I mean mostly Amazon, but wherever you would like to go, um, and uh by all means, there's a digital version too, so if you're on the road and you're you know looking for that Kindle version, we have that available too. Um I just hope that you not only use it for your own benefit, but then pass along to others some of the things that you learn, because what I've heard from veterans and civilians alike is that when they see that other people struggled with this process, or some smart, really capable leader of theirs was like, gosh, what do I do on a resume? It gives a little peace of mind to know that everybody's kind of in the same position. And although I call it signs of a great resume, I really just want you to be okay ish at writing resumes and great at what you're already great at doing, using the signs of a great resume as the way to show people exactly that.

Keith Greer:

Perfect. Thank you so much for being here, Scott. Thanks, Keith.

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Keith Greer, CFRE

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