10 tips on how to get your resume to work for you
Posted on November 30, 2017 by Karen Hennessy-Coles, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.
practical tips to make your resume look more professional.
I’ve probably seen 10,000’s of resumes during my working life. Resumes from people who are starting out in their career, with little previous work experience, to people who have retired and are wanting to continue their working life in a different position.
So here’s the reality, a recruiter may only spend a few seconds looking at your resume. Your resume needs to catch the eye of the person sifting for the role. This doesn’t mean doing anything overly crazy, this generally deters people, but it has to shout out that you have what they are looking for.
If you want to give yourself the best opportunity to stand out from the crowd on paper, read on.
Here’s a question. Do you have an ‘objective’ at the top of your resume?
The next question is What is that about? It seems that about 90% of people have their objective on their resume . It’s great to have a goal and an objective, I believe this is crucial in life. However a perspective employer does not need to read it at the top of your resume! Pop this in your cover letter if you must but please take it off the top of your resume, save yourself some space to write something which will matter to the recruiters.
Essentially an employer wants to recruit the best person for their vacancy. They want you have the right skills, experience, training and personality to do what they need done. A recruiter, whether this is HR or the Manager wants to find that person who matches what they need. Here’s a tip, understand what they need!
Ok, lets get down to business, here are 10 tips to improve your resume, the first 7 are pretty straight forward, the final 3 will take a bit more work.
Remove the objective! Instead of an objective add a summary, a paragraph which gives a short overview of why you are perfect for the role you’re going for. For example ‘An enthusiastic and creative marketing professional……. This will pull together the experience and traits that you want to highlight, the idea being that an employer reads this then they will want to know more about you.
Remove your home address. People will contact you via phone or email. Keep this private data private
Ensure your email address and phone number is clear and easy to find. If you look as good as someone else on paper and your email can’t be read or bounces back you may have just missed out.
Ensure there are no spelling or grammatical errors. Ask someone to read your resume, it’s hard to see it yourself. If you have errors it looks sloppy and unprofessional, you may be perfect but you will end up on the cutting room floor.
DON’T WRITE YOUR RESUME IN CAPITAL LETTERS – enough said!
Remove your references, if an employer wants to follow these up then they will ask you for details. It goes without saying that references will be requested – you do not need to write this on your resume.
Don’t have an email address you think is funny. What impression does it give an perspective if your email address is bigboy69@gmail.com?!
Before you can truly design the right resume for, you need to get clear on the job you want. Ideally you would have a larger career goal, but that’s for another blog! If you are putting yourself forward for a couple of different type of jobs, then have a different resume for each.
You want to detail your OUTCOMES on your resume, not purely what you can do. Take this example ‘Produced presentations for senior managers’, this doesn’t give any outcomes. You may have produced a presentation for senior managers, however it may have been awful and never used. Giving the outcome would work like this ‘Produced a PowerPoint presentation which enabled the generation $1m in sales’. This isn’t easy to do and will take some thinking about, however this will totally change the way your resume reads. Another way of thinking about this is to remember what your company is there to do. Increase sales, make money, improve the environment, make people feel good about themselves etc. Then think about how you contribute to making this happen. Make a list of how you contribute to this goal, make a list of all the outcomes from your successes, everything you can think of. Ask others what they think your successes are if you start to get stuck. Then run through your resume and turn all the statements you have into outcomes. Add any of the successes you may have missed out.
Become your biggest champion! If you don’t believe in yourself why would anyone else. Sure this isn’t always easy especially is you’ve been out of the job market for a while. But look back at your outcomes, what you are good at and what you have to offer. You are unique and special!
