A highly seasoned information security job candidate recently asked a few questions that I thought more than one person might appreciate seeing the answer to. His questions focused on resumes, the content and length specifically.
Security Resume Writing Questions
I am an experienced worker with age and experience on my side. How many resumes should I prepare to begin my job search? What might be two key elements to include in my resume and how long should my resume be?
Many times I look at resumes belonging to security professionals who have 20-25-30+ years of professional experience and fail to get excited because there is no focus in the resume. In an attempt to capture everything a 30 year experienced security professional has accomplished, they end up creating diluted resumes that fail to demonstrated focused accomplishments more often than not.
What I mean is that if a deeply experienced security professional tries to cover 25-30 or more years of experience on one resume and they try to give each subject matter topic the value it deserves, there simply isn’t enough space to focus on everything such a deeply skilled person has to offer.
The solution for many highly seasoned security professionals is to write several different resume versions. Seasoned security professionals can usually write somewhere between two and four different resumes, each one offering a different expertise slant. This level of effort likely sounds like a lot of work but hang on and I’ll share the advantages of this approach.
For example, since I know the person who asked the question and I know his professional background covers nearly 30 years of total experience working in the security profession, I know that this person could write an entire resume focused on bank information security. He could write a second resume focused on Nuclear Industry Cyber Security. A Third resume could focus on his IT Audit and Regulatory Compliance consulting background.
Each of these highly targeted resumes will be more potent in describing this person’s value to an organization in a specific area of security subject matter expertise and compliance subject matter expertise than if he tries to fit all of this experience into one resume.
The one resume approach can occasionally work but more often than not, will end up as a diluted document where attention grabbing focus is missing. Having several resume versions available will increase one’s odds that they have a resume that more closely matches the requirements of the security jobs they’re responding to when they offer a resume.
Resume Length
I’ve written many resumes for highly seasoned CISOs, CSOs and other security leaders who possess 25 or more years of professional experience. These resumes have all come out to be 2 ¼ to 3 pages in length. There isn’t a hard rule driving me to create resumes of this length but as a busy reader of security resumes, I know that my own attention span starts to fall off after reading a resume that is longer than three pages.
Resume Structure
Think of your resume as a piece of real estate. The first page is the busy street corner where thousands of cars drive past every day. What would you put on the street-side sign if your business was on a busy street corner? Make sure the first page pops with bite sized executive summary style statements of accomplishment and not long drawn out paragraphs. Entice the reader to want to go to pages 2 and 3.
Summary
There is no one way to properly write a resume. When writing a security resume, keep in mind who will be reading your resume. Will it be a senior executive who is overburdened and doesn’t have time to read? Is it a busy human resources person who is doing the job of several people and doesn’t have time to read? Will your resume fall into an applicant tracking system and only see the light of day if it has the proper blend of keywords and buzz words?
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