The 3-page Salesforce résumé
A practical guide to creating an eye-catching, concise document to help you land your next Salesforce role
Résumés seem to be trapped in a status quo. There seems to be a recurring format handed down from generation to generation that focuses, quite madly, on repetitive career summaries over 10+ pages of tiny, uninspiring, font.
Well at least that’s my experience after using a résumé template my dad gave me 20 years ago.
I believed at the time that my résumé should not be rocking any boats — be predictable — be all business and definitely not fun.
Looking back it’s amazing that I was ever offered a job.
When my career progressed to conducting interviews myself I realised how deeply entrenched a 10+ page monolithic career summary was. What I realised is that my résumé format was broken.
Your personality matters
As Dr. Seuss once said — why fit in when you were born to stand out. Spending some time investing in the format of your résumé will allow you to stand out amongst your peers. So get creative.
Luckily the internet has plenty of resources available to you to inspire your creative side. My 4 favourites are:
I spent some time looking at formats, colours, fonts and content to come up with a representation that could showcase my skills in the best way.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a Salesforce architect, administrator or developer here’s my opinion on an eye-catching Salesforce résumé.
The 3-page Salesforce résumé
Note that the following sample pages are examples only and completely fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
It’s your résumé — so make it unique and personal to you. The idea is that you don’t copy the template but use it as inspiration.
Page 1 — The hero page and career timeline
Goal — Someone should be able to interview you with this page alone. It shows contact details, career timeline, key skills, motivations and key traits (technical and behavioural) that make you a fit for the role.
Contact Details
Make your name and key contact details clear and bold. Give at least 2 options to contact you.
About Me
This is an elevator pitch. A quick summary of your motivations and what you’re looking for in your next role. Be upfront and honest about who you are, what gets you out of bed in the morning and what you’re looking for in your next role. The more authentic this is the better.
Personal Summary
How would you summarise yourself in 10 sentences? What qualities do you have that would help you be a fit for the role? What key experience do you have that is relevant to the role?
In preparation for a future interview write each point thinking about what experiences you could use to back up each of the statements?— think of specific examples
Skills
This section will depend largely on the type of Salesforce role you’re applying for. The headings and sub headings are yours to define. Include relevant skills to your experience and the role you’re applying for.
Remember to be honest. Over stating your qualifications immediately reduces your credibility to zero. You want to highlight your strengths and areas you’re developing relevant to the role. Any skills you list must be able to be backed up in an interview with concrete examples.
If you’re an administrator you might want to cover declarative skills like process builder, flow, validation rules. If you’re a developer perhaps you need to cover more of what’s in the example.
You get the idea. Make it your own and change the headings.
Career Summary
It helps the interviewer see your tenure, where you’ve worked and key roles you’ve had, over time, in an easy to consume way. You can simply expand the axis as your career progresses.
Page 2 — Career summary, education, awards and certs
Goal — Give details on key impacts you’ve had with each role. Spend some time listing key responsibilities and measurable results if possible. Showcase your hard-earned certifications in an easy to consume way.
Career Experience
This section is a summary of each role listed in the career summary on page 1. It should largely be 2–3 sentence bullet points on key achievements. Focus most attention on the last 5 years of your career and less time on anything older than 10 years ago. Janet Broz of Cameron Recruitment gave me a few suggestions on how to structure your comments:
Here’s an example of what not to write in the bullet points in this section:
An expert in process builder and advanced formula fields
You should focus on the impact your skills and experience had at that company. Some better statements might be:
Used process builder and advanced formula fields to reduce Apex use by 15%
OR
Reduced deployment issues by driving declarative processes from configurable custom metadata types
OR
Advocated for a consistent design for Lightning Web Components improving reuse. This was adopted globally by <insert company> as best practice.
Education
Key further education relevant to the role. What have you studied? Where did you study?
Industry Qualifications (Optional)
This is where I would list industry certifications. These are qualifications you might have that are not Salesforce specific.
Salesforce Certifications (Optional)
Okay this is where you can list your Salesforce certifications. I choose to put them on the second page as they don’t define me but support my experiences. They are optional as not everyone is Salesforce certified.
Salesforce Superbadges (Optional)
This is an optional section for those wanting to showcase their Trailhead Superbadges. This can be done in-conjunction with or instead of the Salesforce Certification section.
Page 3 — Career summary, awards and interests
Goals — Highlight company awards, interests and hobbies together with key achievements and a continuation of each company/role listed in your career timeline.
Awards
Here’s where you can list your industry or company awards. It’s a way to showcase your individual achievements inside, and outside of work. Have 124 awards? — wow that’d be amazing — but don’t list them all here. Pick the top handful that best summarise your achievements.
Publications (Optional)
Written blog posts? Presented at Dreamforce, TrailheaDX, World Tours or other industry events? List them here. They provide the interviewer an insight into your areas of specialty and build credibility. If you have too many publications to fit on the page then be ruthless and only include the few that you’re most proud of, or have had the most impact.
Interests
These are your passions. They’re conversation starters. Particularly passionate about a nonprofit? List it here. Like skydiving? List it here. People do business with people and it is good to have some conversation topics that can reveal some of who you are outside of work.
Summary
Hopefully I’ve inspired you to look at your resume in a new way. To focus on what’s important and to ensure your personality shines through. It could mean you stand out amongst your peers and might help you land your next role.
Bonus points for those who make it a 2-page résumé.
The document type you choose is also important. Ben Duncombe of Talent Hub recommends that if you’re interacting with a recruiter that a Word version is preferable to a PDF version. This allows the recruiter to reuse the résumé without altering the format. If you’re applying directly to a company then PDF may suit your needs better.
Download the template shown here in Word.
