5 Golden Rules for Perfecting your Resume
Your resume is often your first point of contact with a potential employer. In most cases, a Human Resources Executive like myself will spend about 30 seconds going through your resume to see if you’re a good fit. 30 seconds! Having looked at thousands of resumes over the past two decades, I’ve found there are a handful of easily correctable mistakes that stand between a candidate and their dream job. Here are my 5 golden rules for perfecting your resume.
Make sure your resume matches the job ad – This is especially important now since many companies use automated keyword searches to whittle down the number of potential candidates. Go through the job ad line by line and make sure the keywords, experience, and requirements that the company has listed are on your resume. This might mean tweaking your resume slightly for each job application, but it will be worth it when you start getting called in for interviews.
Sell yourself – This is true for both your resume and cover letter/email intro. Give details, specific examples, percentages and numbers of all of your relevant major accomplishments. Instead of writing that you’re a great salesperson, say that you increased revenue by 25% in one year. List the major clients that you’ve serviced and note that you’re consistently ranked within the top 5% of highest grossing salespeople in the company. Don’t just say you’re good… prove it!
Less is more – Make sure that every word on your resume has real value. Since a recruiter or hiring manager might spend only 30 seconds on your resume, you have to make sure that the important stuff is easy to find. For example, if I were applying for a recruiter position, I wouldn’t put a lot of emphasis on my experience with benefits and payroll. Also, you don’t need to explain jobs like restaurant server and barista. Definitely list them when you’re just beginning to build a resume or if you trained staff and had management responsibilities, but don’t take up space with unnecessary bullets. Same thing with internships; don’t list that you went on coffee runs or distributed mail. There are much better ways to fill up your resume, which we'll discuss in rule number 5.
Appearance Counts – We make decisions with our eyes, so the appearance of your resume is very important. Your tabs should be lined up perfectly and the spacing throughout your resume should always look the same. Give yourself at least an inch for all of your margins. It shouldn’t look like you’ve jammed a ton of experience onto one page. You also shouldn’t have a resume over 3 pages (in almost all cases.) Remember, less is more! It goes without saying that your grammar and spelling have to be perfect. A mistake I see often is that people don’t change the tenses when a current job becomes past employment. Your current job is the only thing that should be in the present tense. Everything else should be in past tense. Don’t let your great experience take a back seat to bad appearance, spelling or grammar. Have several detail oriented friends look over your resume before you send it out into the world.
Highlights – There are lots of ways to highlight your skills outside of the typical job history. List out your volunteer activities, especially if you’ve been on a board or committee. Specifics like being an athlete, RA, or holding a position within your fraternity/sorority are great examples of your strong work ethic and ability to be a team player. If you’ve won awards or graduated with honors make sure they find a place on your resume. These are great little details that will have you shining like the star that you are.