A resume is a key job-hunting marketing tool that can get you the opportunity you need to explain what you can offer to your prospective employer.
It’s a statement of facts designed to sell your unique mix of education, experience, accomplishments, and skills to recruiters.
Employers receive volumes of resumes for every job they advertise. Most large enterprises or recruitment agencies use robots to sift out the great from the good before they manually find out who is awesome for the job.
A solid resumé can make all the difference right from the early stage of analysing CVs. You have to win recruiters over fast. You probably have less than a minute to impress most recruiters. Make it count.
You may have the right credentials. But if you can’t package those achievements the right way to catch a hiring manager’s eyes, you will apply for almost every job in your industry without success.
Don’t compromise on Formatting
Organising your resume in a way that convey the right and specific information is insanely crucial. Employers that use applicant tracking systems analyze keywords, dates, titles and other pertinent information on every applicant’s resume at the screening stage.
Designing an elegant resume can be time consuming. Use tools like Seeveeze, a professional online CV editor, to redesign a stunning resume in a few minutes. And it’s free to use.
Use bullets and lists when inputting your information. Bulleted list of qualifications and skills make it easier for recruiters to scan and find the most relevant data they need.
Add your online profile (preferably a link to your LinkedIn profile) along with your contact information. Recruiters are likely to Google you anyway. Give them a reason not to guess or mistake you for someone else.
Use web-standard fonts such as Arial, Tahoma, or Verdant. Do make sure your resume is machine-readable. Don’t use fancy formatting. And don’t use abbreviations. Customise it specifically for every position you apply. Don’t use the same CV for all related applications.
Scrutinize employer instructions carefully to see which format is preferred for any given opportunity to submit your resume. Don’t take submission preferences lightly.
Related: Career Options: Getting A Job You Can Actually Like
Get the summary right
What is the one thing you want to convey to the recruiter about who you are and what you capable of as a professional. Tell your future employer how your value translates into his specific needs with a compelling summary statement. This should be a section at the top of your resume.
The idea of a summary is to pull out your most relevant and impressive qualifications in your career and highlight them where they can be appreciated at first glance.
In approximately three to five sentences, explain what you’re great at, most interested in, and how you can provide value to a prospective employer. It pays is to keep it clean and short.
Lose the objective. Objectives is a waste of the most valuable real estate on your resume.
Quantify your impact
Right from the header to the last sentence of your resume, keep thing simple. Stick to the facts and the numbers. Be clear about successes, results, and accomplishments — and quantify whenever possible. Focus on your achievements, not the usual generic job responsibilities.
If you are a writer, don’t say “I wrote articles on business and technology”. That’s weak. Show the numbers in the most concise way possible. Say “I wrote 5 articles on business and technology, generating 75,000 page views, 4,015 likes, and 2,178 tweets.
Answer questions such as: How much money did you manage? How much sales did you make for your previous employer? How did you contribute to the growth of the business or project?
In summary, your goal is for your recruiters or prospective employers to have a sense of who you are, what you have achieved, your unique talents, how you accomplish your goals and what you could do for the company.
Summarizing those things in a unique and simple way might be the game changer your résumé needs to stand out. Given how competitive the job market is, you need to give yourself every advantage to make a lasting impression.