Job hunting as a business analyst is a tedious and challenging process. It requires a lot of time, effort, consideration, and an outstanding business analyst resume. But if you were to ask me what the most depressing part of it is, my answer would be the situation when you apply for numerous positions through a job board, get excited and… hear nothing back. Then you go to a company’s website, apply again and… nothing again. You go to recruitment agencies, apply through them and… you get the pattern.
There are lots of tips and tricks to pass an interview. However, to start applying those, you need to pass the first test — getting selected for a chat. This is where a quality business analyst resume makes a difference. Will you be a sought-after professional, or will you get stuck in limbo?
The market statistics are that 24% of hiring managers spend fewer than 30 seconds looking at resumes before making up their minds. It gets even worse with recruiters, who may spend as little as 7.4 seconds before moving on to another one!
So, what do we need to focus on to stand out? Let’s discuss.
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Hard skills for a business analyst resume
Hard skills refer to the technical abilities you need to do the job. These are the specific skills that you will be expected to demonstrate at work. However, it may be a bit challenging to create a finite list of such skills for a business analyst. One of the reasons is that different businesses define the business analyst position differently. To hone in on the hard skills you need, let’s revisit the definition of the profession:
Business analysis is the practice of enabling change in the context of an enterprise by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders.
— BABOK(r) Guide
The specific skills come secondary to the main goal of the role, which is to enable change. One organization may need a BA to help with software implementation, which requires specific technical skills. Another will need a BA to redesign business processes or write a business case. This will also require a relatively narrow set of skills.
Conduct research into the company you are applying to
To begin your research, you can use these questions as a starting point:
- What flavor of a business analyst are they after? Is it strategy, business processes, software, or other work?
- Which key technology solutions or types of systems am I likely to work with?
- What is the organizational context? Are they likely to use agile? Are they likely to follow any industry standards, e.g., ITIL?
- What are the main responsibilities listed? Which hard skills will help me in performing them?
Once you have a clear picture of the role you’re applying for, check that your resume matches it. Make sure you know about the key skills and technology platforms they are asking for in the job description — you’ll need them. It may surprise you that a lot of companies are using automatic resume scanning systems to filter out the submissions that don’t match the job keywords. In fact, 99% of Fortune 500 companies use a system like this. So, do your research and make sure to include the relevant keywords in the body of your resume.
However, don’t try to over-promise with a wall of buzzwords
Including irrelevant technology stacks and methodologies does not present you as a more versatile professional. On the contrary, it leaves an image of a jack-of-all-trades who failed to specialize, or, even worse, of someone who has included all the buzzwords just to pass a scan. This will not play in your favor.
Make sure your resume tells the story of someone who has the right skills and knows how to apply them. Once you know what the ask is, it may be a good idea to introduce a section with key skills. But this is not enough; make sure you also refer back to them when talking about your experience. For example, if you want to showcase your Agile experience as well as display your knowledge of a particular technology platform, and talk about your business process skills, you could list them in the key skills section:
| Key skills: – Agile delivery, Scrum – Adobe Experience Cloud including Adobe AEM, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target – Business process modeling |
You can also expand on them in the work experience section:
| Job title — Workplace 2018/09–2021/10 Delivered multiple complex CMS projects based on Adobe Experience Cloud tech stack in an Agile environment. As a business analyst on the project, I took full responsibility for: – Modeling business processes – Identifying opportunities for improvement – Scoping business process optimisation initiatives |
