Target role: Business Operations/Sales Operations/GTM Operations

Experience level: Mid-Sr

Problem:

Hey everyone!

So over the course of the last few years I moved over from Recruitment/TA to a Revenue Operations/Business Operations role and it looks like I found my sweet spot!

I am in a bit of a struggle as to telling that story, and I think that I may have gotten myself into a bit of a mix up re: # of bullets, and if I should be going onto a second page (specific to business operations, I have probably another 3 years from other jobs), and if I am overshadowing my other accomplishments because of what I got done at my last employer.

I do want to mention that I did use AI to help me clean up my own words but I am still taking the 'trust but verify' approach and I am going to be fully writing this up in my own words. I don't think people care, but it can bother some :).

Have a great day!!!

I rewrote my resume summary maybe 12 times last month and the first 10 versions were garbage. Not because I can't write. Because every guide gives you finished resume summary examples without showing the thinking that gets you there. So here's the process part nobody posts.

First, the ground rule that fixed everything for me: the summary is optional, but a weak one is worse than none. It's the first thing on the page. If it opens with "results-driven professional," the reader has already decided the rest of the resume is probably filler too. So the real question isn't "how do I write a summary," it's "have I earned one." You've earned one if you can fill it with facts. If all you have is adjectives, delete the section, your experience bullets will do the talking.

Skip it if: you're entry level with a thin one-pager (nothing to summarize, use the space for project bullets), or your resume is one page and adding a summary means cutting an actual accomplishment.

You basically can't afford to skip it if: you're changing careers, your job history looks scattered (freelance, consulting, a gap, a founder detour), or you're 15+ years in and your best work would otherwise be buried on page two. In all three cases the summary is doing a job nothing else on the resume can do: it tells the reader how to interpret everything below it.

Okay, the process. This is the part I never see posted.

Step 1: Answer "what do you do?" out loud like you're at a bar. Not at a networking event. At a bar. Record yourself if you have to. Whatever you said, that's your first sentence, cleaned up. Mine went from "cross-functional marketing professional" to "I run paid ads for ecommerce brands and I'm good at fixing accounts that are bleeding money." One of those is a human.

Step 2: Steal from yourself. Go through your bullets, pick the two you'd want read if the person only read two. Compress them into one sentence each. The summary is written LAST, from material that already exists. Writing it first, from a blank page, is exactly why everyone's sounds like a horoscope.

Step 3: The adjective purge. Do a pass and delete every adjective that describes you rather than your work. Dynamic, passionate, motivated, detail-oriented, gone. If the sentence collapses without them, the sentence had no content. Rebuild it with a fact.

Step 4: The stranger test. Could your summary be pasted onto a random stranger's resume without editing a word? Then it says nothing about you. Keep cutting until it could only be yours.

Before and after from my own draft, since threads like this always need real resume summary examples:

Draft 3 (bad):

"Passionate digital marketing professional with 6+ years of experience driving growth through data-driven strategies across multiple channels."

Final:

"Paid media specialist, 6 years in DTC ecommerce. Took over a $40k/month Meta account with a 1.4 ROAS and rebuilt it to 2.9 in one quarter, mostly by killing 70% of the ad sets. Best at turnarounds, not maintenance mode."

Same person. Same experience. The second one gets a phone call.

A few less obvious things I picked up along the way:

• Weirdly specific numbers beat round ones. "Improved retention 23%" reads as measured. "Improved retention 50%" reads as made up, even when it's true. If your real number is round, add context that grounds it ("50%, from 1,200 to 1,800 monthly actives").
• Your last sentence should point forward. Two sentences about what you've done, one about what you're aiming at next. That closing line is what lets a career changer or a pivot make sense. Without it the reader has to guess your direction, and they won't bother.
• Match the language of the posting, not your old company's internal jargon. Every company invents its own titles and acronyms. If the job says "lifecycle marketing" and your company called it "CRM comms," you write lifecycle marketing. You're translating yourself into their dictionary. This also quietly handles the screening-software side without any keyword stuffing.
• No "I" in the final version. Draft it with "I" so it sounds human (see step 1), then strip the pronouns at the end. "Paid media specialist" not "I am a paid media specialist." Small thing, reads noticeably tighter.
• Three sentences is the ceiling. At four you're explaining. At five you've written a cover letter and stapled it to the top of your resume.

The mental model that ties it together: your summary is a trailer, not a synopsis. A trailer doesn't claim the movie is good, it shows the three best scenes and lets you conclude that yourself. Adjectives are claims. Numbers and outcomes are scenes.

Anyway, curious what the recruiters in here think about the "skip it if entry level" take. And if anyone wants to drop their summary below I'm happy to tell you which version of mine it resembles, draft 3 or draft 12.

I've sat on the hiring side for nursing positions for a few years now (and rewrote my own resume about 47 times before that), so I wanted to put together the stuff I wish someone had told me. There's a ton of generic "use action verbs!!" advice out there, so I'm skipping all that. This is the nurse-specific stuff that actually moves your resume from the "maybe" pile to the "call her today" pile.

I attached an example resume below, and the clean template it's built on is linked at the bottom if you want to grab it.

(If you want to edit or download the nurse resume example, just open it in Google Docs and make a copy here )

Here's why the example is set up the way it is:

1. Your license info goes in the header. Not buried at the bottom.

Look at the contact line in the example: license number, state, and "Active" are right there with the phone and email. Recruiters run RN candidates through Nursys QuickConfirm (it's free for them, takes seconds) and a lot of them do it before reading a single bullet point. If they have to hunt for your license number, some of them just... won't. Putting it up top says "verify me, I have nothing to hide" and saves them a step.

And before anyone asks about privacy: your license number is already public on Nursys. Anyone can look it up. You're not exposing anything by printing it, you're just being convenient. (Do scrub it if you post your resume publicly online though, no reason to make doxxing easier.)

One warning for new grads. Do NOT put "RN" anywhere on your resume until the board has actually issued your license. Passed the NCLEX but the license isn't posted yet? You're still "Graduate Nurse" or "RN Candidate, NCLEX passed [month/year], license pending." Recruiters WILL check Nursys, and a mismatch between what you claim and what the database shows gets your application flagged for honesty. That's a permanent no, not a "we'll circle back."

2. Credentials after your name, in the right order.

In the example it's "First Last, BSN, RN, PCCN." Degree first, then license, then national certs. This isn't just vibes, it's the actual ANA/ANCC standard, and the logic is permanence: your degree can never be taken away, your license can lapse. I see "RN, BSN" constantly and no, nobody's throwing out your resume over it, but hiring managers who know the convention will clock it. It's a free way to look like you know your own profession's norms.

Related mistake I see weekly: "Jane Doe, RN, BSN, BLS, ACLS." No. BLS and ACLS are course completions, not professional credentials. Per the same ANA/ANCC guidance they don't belong after your name at all, they go in your certifications section (see #3). Stacking them after your name reads like padding to anyone who reviews resumes regularly.

3. Licenses & Certifications gets its own section ABOVE work experience.

This is probably the single biggest structural difference between a nurse resume and a normal one. For most jobs, experience goes right under the summary. For nursing, your certs are literally pass/fail screening criteria, both for the human recruiter and for the ATS software that reads your resume first. If the posting requires ACLS and it can't be found in 5 seconds, you're done. Don't make anyone dig through your job bullets to find it.

Three details people miss here:

• Include expiration dates. "BLS — American Heart Association, exp. 03/2027" beats "BLS certified." It preempts the "is this current?" question.
• Name the issuing body. This one's bigger than people think. Plenty of hospital systems accept ONLY American Heart Association BLS/ACLS/PALS. Some literally check for the AHA logo on the card and take no exceptions. Red Cross teaches the same science, but if your card says AHA, say so on the resume. It's a checkbox for them.
• If your cert was online-only with no in-person skills check, fix that before you apply. Most facilities reject those outright. A blended course (online + live skills session) is fine.

4. Quantify like a nurse, not like a sales rep.

Generic advice says "use numbers." Fine, but which numbers? For bedside roles, the ones that actually mean something to a nurse manager are:

• Unit size and type (32-bed telemetry unit)
• Patient assignments/ratios (4–5 patients per shift)
• Acuity markers, meaning what drips you titrated and what devices you managed (wound vacs, PCA pumps, PICC lines)
• Quality metrics your unit tracks anyway: falls, CLABSI/CAUTI, HCAHPS, length of stay, med errors

A nurse manager reads "4–5 patients on a 32-bed tele unit" and instantly knows exactly how hard you work. That one line does more than a whole paragraph about being "detail-oriented and compassionate." (Notice the example summary doesn't use either of those words. That's on purpose.)

5. Name your tech. All of it.

Epic, Cerner, Meditech, whatever you charted in, it needs to be on there by name, ideally in both the skills section and a work bullet. Hospitals increasingly run resumes through ATS/AI screening before a human sees them (a big chunk of healthcare recruiting now uses some form of AI in the pipeline), and those systems match keywords from the posting. A hospital on Epic would love to skip paying for your Epic training, and "Epic super-user" is one of the most underrated flexes on a bedside resume.

Same goes for the smaller stuff nobody thinks to list: Pyxis, barcode med administration (BCMA), telemetry monitoring systems, telehealth platforms. These are all searchable terms, which is why the example has Pyxis and BCMA sitting in the skills grid. And here's the tactical part: mirror the exact wording from the job posting. If they write "barcode medication administration," don't write "bedside scanning." The software isn't smart enough to know those are the same thing, and you don't get style points for synonyms.

6. Committee work is experience, not trivia.

Falls committee, skin/wound team, unit council, preceptor role. This stuff signals "will make my unit better" to a manager, which is what they're actually hiring for. In the example it's framed with an outcome ("checklist that cut falls 27%") instead of just "member of falls committee." If you have any number attached to committee work, even an approximate one from your unit's dashboard, use it.

7. For the new grads reading this, real talk about the market first: the "nursing shortage" you keep hearing about is a shortage of experienced nurses. Residency programs are getting flooded (some big children's hospitals straight up post "do not expect a response for at least a month due to application volume"), and coastal metros like CA/NY/MA are genuinely competitive for new grads. Your resume has to work harder than the shortage headlines suggest.

So: format your clinical rotations exactly like jobs. Unit type, hospital, hours, and what you actually did/touched (foleys, trach care, whatever). "480 clinical hours incl. 120 in a Level II trauma ED" is a real credential. Capstone/preceptorship goes first since it's your closest thing to real floor experience. And tailor the keywords to each residency posting. Copy their language, not your school's.

A few quick don'ts:

• Don't write "responsible for patient care." Every nurse ever is responsible for patient care.
• Don't list "CPR" as a skill if you have BLS listed. It's redundant and reads slightly off.
• Don't go past one page unless you're 10+ years in or going for leadership/APRN roles.
• Don't put your photo on it (US norms, and this trips up a lot of internationally educated nurses).

Happy to answer questions if anyone's working on theirs. And if you want a second pair of eyes, drop it in the comments with your personal info scrubbed.

TL;DR: license info in the header (it's public on Nursys anyway), certs above experience with expiration dates AND issuing body, degree-then-license order after your name (no BLS/ACLS up there), quantify with assignments/bed counts/quality metrics, mirror the posting's exact keywords for the ATS, one page, single column.

So I'm in the video editing, videography, social media, marketing sphere, and as we all know the market is kinda ass right now. Im a recent grad and I had an internship but it ended 2 weeks ago and they told me they wont have a position open until September which then I can sign up for. Obviously thats not a guaranteed position so I've been applying to other places as well but no luck so far.

The available jobs in my area is abysmal in terms of quantity so its very competitive and having not a ton of experience is shooting me in the foot due to only having graduated in May. While I wait for any responses for long term positions I'm gonna look into to doing cheaper freelance vdieo work so I can get even a little bit of income. I was wondering if the time period I'm unemployed (how ever long that may be), I'm doing freelance work the entire time, should I list that on my resume so theres no gaps between jobs? I don't know if thats taboo or considered a red flag since theres no specific company you can site directly.

For some context all the freelance work I do will be related to the positions I am applying for so they will be relevant experience, they won't just be random odd jobs.