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Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 12, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I don't have any experience in retail management, so I'm not sure I can give any real, tangible advice here. When in doubt, I look at the job description and try to match specific tasks/keywords from the job requisition posting.

I would personally add any tasks you did that had a tangible, positive benefit effect to the company you previously have worked at as long as that contribution is related to the role. I imagine that if I was hiring for retail management, those improvements are things that could make you standout over someone that just lists the tasks and responsibilities they had on their resume. You don't have to put the entire story in the resume just a single bullet point indicating what you did. You tell the story during the interview stage, usually the interviewer will use the resume as a starting point of discussion. You have at least an entire page for a resume, you can definitely add keywords and examples of your successes. A skills section is an easy way to dump in keywords if you need to fill up your resume. That advice is probably more relevant in tech industry, where you can list a bunch of programming languages (e.g. Python, C++, JavaScript), not sure how relevant this is to retail management. Depending on the company, they may have stuff like "Excel" and "PowerPoint" as keyword filters, those are stuff you can dump into a skills section.

Don't be humble in your resume, make yourself look as outstanding as you can. Your competition is most likely embellishing and even lying about their accomplishments on their resumes, you only hurt yourself being humble and honest. There are a lot of people getting to the interview stage who shouldn't even have gotten their because they're lying about their skills an experience, but at least they're getting to the interview stage, while it sounds like you aren't even getting there. As long as you get to the interview stage and haven't made any obvious, egregious lies that should greatly increase your chances of getting the job.

The best way to get your resume improved is to just post it online for people to improve. There are plenty of places online where people will critique and improve each others' resume.

Also it sounds like you have a college degree, if your school had any sort of alumni network you should leverage that. It's so much easier getting an interview if someone can vouch for you, or at least bring up your name. A lot of companies have referral bonuses for hiring so people are incentivized to try to refer someone, so even someone you never met personally is incentivized to help you if you reach out via some kind of alumni network.