A resume is as personal as an autobiography, if a little condensed. Whenever someone asks if I would review their resume, I ask their blessing to go adding my marks. I mean, “Who am I to pick and point at your life’s accomplishments?”
Having said this, there are some big differences between the feedback you will get from your career counselor and the type of attention your resume will attract from your prospective employer. According to Exceptional Resume Writers there are a few tips that everyone should know. Having worked with many recruiters here are some of the important insights I can pass on to you.
1) If your relevant experience, education, or skills are not easy to locate, your resume is sadly lacking.
Everyone wants to stand out from the crowd and add some “cowbell” to their resume, but getting experimental with InDesign is a poor start. The head of Google’s HR departments said it perfectly, “Unless you are applying for a job in design or the creative arts, your primary goal is to make your resume as clear and easy to read as possible.”
What does this mean? Avoid funky formats, fabulous fonts and fluff. It will be better to focus on maximizing the efficacy of that critical top half of your resume as this will get the most important inspection. One thing to do will be to make your resume a compilation of your relevant qualifications only. Or make a section at the top of the page featuring all relative qualifications and adding the rest of your pertinent information into a section marked “Additional Experience”. As long as you are trying to make the most of the traditional resume format, you should be fine.
2) If the experience you are describing doesn’t make your application’s intention 100% clear, no one will figure it out for you.
Whether you are looking for a whole new career or trying out for a “long-shot” position, you need to make your intention 100% clear with your potential recruiter.
Do everything you can to connect the dots for the reviewer. You probably have a clear idea of how your skills and experience can be transferred or why your experience level actually exceeds your time on the job, but this doesn’t mean the recruiter will make the same connections –– and you may never get another chance to explain.
The solution? Use a simple objective statement to set the scene. This is not a good idea when applying for a job where you are obviously qualified. But, if your experience doesn’t seem to line up well with the job you are looking for, you could provide a bit of an explanation –– this might even get you an interview.
3) If the substance of your message can’t be comprehended from a quick skim, your resume may be sidelined!
There is much debate about how much attention your recruiter will actually give any one resume, but most people agree that 20 seconds is the limit. Considering you only have 20 seconds to convince your recruiter that you have the right stuff, your resume better read clearly and easily.
This means making your font a fair size to be clearly read. It really doesn’t matter how many words you fit on a page –– if there are too many words none will be read. Furthermore, consider the length of those bullet points, nothing should drag into that third line. Confine yourself to two line, but understand it will probably be the first few words of the first line that will actually be read.
4) If you hope to get your resume to the hiring manager, it will first have to pass the HR barrier.
What does this mean? For starters, make your resume so simple and easy to read that anyone will enjoy it –– that’s right “enjoy” it. Complexities are tedious and hard to swallow. It doesn’t matter if you are calculating the cure for cancer or conducting cutting-edge chemical research, none of this will matter if your message is not clear and the relevance obvious to anyone. Instead, find every way to boil your message down to its very essence and then dumb that down a few shades as well –– this will ensure your resumes is a tasty and enjoyable delight that will be placed in the right pile.
So, side step all the technical mumbo-jumbo, provide plenty of context for anything obscure and focus on clearly understandable results. If you’re not sure which words to use, look on the job posting for keywords that allude to the ideal candidate. This will save your resume from hitting the skids in the HR department where they are making the preliminary elimination run.
5) If your contact info isn’t correct, nothing else matters.
Finally, there is nothing as pathetic as tripping at the finish line. Don’t be the person that nailed the resume, inspired the recruiters and then stole away into the night without leaving contact information –– or even worse, leaving incorrect contact information. You also can't forget to provide references upon request. It can make it a lot easier to provide references and find a job with Reference Pass.
You need to check, re-check and triple check every aspect of your resume for small errors and typos that can make your future recruiter doubt your attention to detail. But, do yourself a favor and make sure contact information is correct and up to date –– you know, so you get a call back!
