Transcript
Description:
In this video, Harrison Barnes is looking at an attorney's resume, which provides a good impression. From being a full-tuition scholar to being a refugee caseworker. It is a good resume for him, but he has a couple of suggestions to improve the resume effectively. These are the ones listed below.
- Avoid putting different colors to prevent being taken out of context.
- Take your achievement off being on the dean's list unless you had consistently been one.
- Remove long irrelevant descriptions.
- Diversity is important but avoid overusing it.
Transcript:
Okay, so this particular person, this is good. I liked the full tuition scholarship. That's good. I like the research assistant.
I don't know what the student attorney is. I don't think that's necessary. I don't know that having pro bono hours on there is necessary. But you certainly could talk about that. Let's see German. Commitment to diversity award certificate. Maybe a black law students association put that on there if you want.
That's fine. Dean's list 2013. I would take the Dean's list off because if it's only one a year that actually doesn't look that great. Cause it shows, that you were only doing really well one year I don't know, unless the commitment to divorce, varsity recipient is something that's a really an important reward award there.
I tend to remove that. I don't know how necessary it is. So I would think about that. It may be something. That that, I don't know what the reward is about. So it may be something that is important, but as a general rule, I wouldn't give it too much weight. If it, unless it's something that's important, just like the Dean's list.
I don't like it many times when people put on things that may not be that relevant here. There's a couple things that I would be careful about with your resume. I don't know that certificate in commercial and corporate law. I don't know what that means. So I would take that off.
The problem is when you start putting all this stuff on here you start going in different directions and so you have, this research assists in actually. And family law than immigration and corporate loss. You have three different branches of law on there. And and that's okay.
But what it looks like is you don't know what you want to do yet. Now you're certainly not expected to know what you, what what you should be doing yet. But I would be very careful. I would also take you have BA in international affairs, BA in German on two lines, I would put this just BA in international affairs double, double a BA.
And, and just put it on two lines of safe space. And I'm going to talk about this and I'm not trying to offend anyone here, but I wouldn't be very careful about anytime you start using different colors and so forth on your resume.
It's just not a good idea. It shows that you can't color between the lines. Found out once I got rejected from a college, because I wanted to put a bunch, I wanted to write more than the space they gave me. So I actually crossed through align with a whiteout and typed over it, which is, shows you can't be managed.
And anything that you try to make yourself look unique? Can be taken sometimes out of con context. And would work on that and so I would try to be very careful about using different colors but just because you're a law clerk yeah. Had a law firm, it sounds like you did a lot of stuff there.
But I don't know. Even, we're where this is really showing w there's no there's no really there's nothing that, that is There's no consistency to any of this. So it doesn't look like you're, it looks like here you are doing kind of tax-related and legislative work you're doing.
So this person's done just a lot of different things, but now they're actually a law clerk at an awesome firm is a very good firm. So I would maybe put that there and then, and I don't know that you need to do that. And then I would do this and then I would do. This, this is how I would handle it and I'm not saying to me it was the right thing.
And then I would do this and then maybe this. And then and then this is this is cool. The refugee caseworker. I liked that. And these are non-legal jobs. Yeah. Non-legal jobs. So you could do something along that way. Not make the jobs. Or something like that if you want, so that's how I would handle that.
I will say, and then everything's in black and white and and then I would and you don't need to count the numbers of cases. No, one's going to know what that means. And then and so this resume has a lot of stuff about diversity and LGBTQ and all this stuff.
And that's perfectly that, that stuff is all definitely in demand and people, and there's I worked very hard to find diverse attorneys and law firms want diverse attorneys, but you need to be careful sometimes about about making that come through too much because you want the value to be In your achievements outside of the diversity and diversity, by the way is extremely important.
80% of Biden's cabinet is diverse. So it's something that law firms really want, but at the same time how you go about advertising that and bringing attention to that is up to you, but you need, I recommend a lot of times being very careful about it.
Most of the time, especially if you're in law school, you don't need to tell firms that you're a member of a ethnic group association. The law firms will actually communicate that to the employers, if you're doing on campus interviewing and so forth. So this resume, you can see we made it. We took it from being a very long one to a very short one.
Some people do want to advertise all this stuff on their resumes, and that's up to you, my experience, and this is in, 20 years of doing this is. Anytime you start putting a lot of stuff about diversity on your resume. It actually ends up hurting you. So sometimes, less is better. And I don't know why it hurts.
I don't know that maybe people resent it that are reviewing your resume, that aren't diverse. It's going to help you. I don't know. But you have to be very careful about that. And just as people want to hire diverse people. They want to hire them because. They want diversity, but they don't want, it's not like they want to bring it out in the open.
Like we're hiring you because you're diverse. They want to, they want people to feel like they're getting hired because of their background and their skills. And this is actually a very skilled attorney that clearly wants to practice law has had great experience is interested in the subject matter.
Did this before law school and so forth and And you can see how we made the there's so much shorter and I hope this person gets a position. If they were out of school, I certainly would represent them, but you can see it too. How they cleaned up the resume. This is what it looks like now.
And then all the changes that we did, the four, it was like three pages. You want to be very careful and I'll any, anybody that has questions about this stuff too. I will answer it. And this is obviously going to be a, not a short webinar, and I'm glad everyone's sticking around because there was a lot of good information and I will look at your resume today.
