For recruiters, your resume provides a summary of your career and is often a determining factor in getting an interview. If looking for a job is a trip, the resume is your passport. To help candidates update their resume with best practices, we have put together five tips that will make your resume work for you.
Cover the Basics
The purpose of a resume is to better represent your relevant skills and achievements, and there are several ways you can do this successfully. Thus, every resume requires four basic elements:
Relevant educational degrees or certifications and/or degrees:
The importance of your educational background varies depending on the position or industry in which you are interested. If you have many certificates, include only those that are most relevant to the job description.
Relevant work and voluntary experience:
Most people choose to list their experiences starting with the most recent work. Do not include everything you did in your previous work. Instead, focus on achievements over responsibilities.
Contact information:
Your full name, the city where you live, your email address and phone number. Because this personal information is confidential, you should be cautious about who you share your resume with.
Relevant Skills and your domain level (eg “familiar with Microsoft Excel”, “fluent in other languages like French and Spanish”
It is worth noting that the basics do not include references. It is recommended to leave this out of your resume because this way you save space and also preserve the privacy of your professional contacts.
1. Explore other resumes for inspiration
It may be helpful to see how others have written about your skills and experiences. www.resumeinventor.com has hundreds of sample resumes on the global site to explore. Choose the category and post that are relevant and discover stronger ways to describe your experiences.
2. Use as few words as possible
Employers need to quickly understand their work experience. Format your resume as a list of short, verifiable instructions instead of writing dense paragraphs. It is best to summarize a maximum of two pages, so make sure that all the information you include is essential. If you cannot decide what is essential, ask yourself if what you are including is relevant to what the employer is asking in the job description.
It is also important to consider the type of work you really want to be hired. In other words, do not include previous experience in tasks you do not enjoy doing. Keep the experiences you want to keep building and match what the employer is looking for – this meets the definition of essential information to include in your resume.
3. Quantify your accomplishments wherever possible
Numbers and data bring your work experience to life and help recruiters predict the potential impact you could have on your organization. When you can, present your achievements with real data to increase your credibility and add informative details to your resume. For example, “I achieved 180% growth year after year through strategic content marketing initiatives.”
4. Use keywords that employers are using in their job descriptions
When recruiters see their own keywords reflected in their resume, this reinforces the idea that you are a strong candidate for the position. And if your resume is posted to an online job database, the correct keywords are key to being found by employers.
Carefully read the job postings that interest you and take note of the terms and phrases that employers are including there. You may begin to notice common points and may include some of those words or concepts in your resume if they apply to your experience.
5. Check multiple times for typos and spelling mistakes
Unfortunately, a single typographical or spelling error is sometimes enough for your resume to be discarded early in the game. Review your resume several times. Reading the content from the end to the beginning – however bizarre and time-consuming it may seem – is a great way to detect small mistakes that you would not otherwise perceive. And an outside perspective is always a good idea. Ask a friend, mentor, or family member to review your resume before beginning to send it to employers.
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