Thinking about a job change? It can be an exciting time, but also can be full of apprehension. You’re counting on your skills, experience and personality to help you get the job. However, before you get a chance to showcase your skills, you must land the interview. And that is the ultimate job of the resume.
Knowing this, the first step of the job searching process is always to touch up your resume to make sure it represents your experience and goals to the best of your ability. Beyond the basics, a resume should be the space to communicate your story and specifics on what you’ve accomplished throughout your career. Here are a few tips to consider:
- Keep it concise. They say the average hiring manager only looks at a resume for six seconds when considering how to move forward, so make those seconds count! A resume that is too long can look sloppy and can deter a hiring manager from a thorough review and serious consideration. Don’t include unnecessary information and try to keep it to one or two pages, depending on the length of your professional experience.
- Use a modern, professional format. Generally speaking, less is more when it comes to the formatting of a professional resume. Unless you’re in the creative field, your resume should be easy to read, in a traditional font (Times New Roman, Calibri, Arial, Verdana), with clear headers. Its also a good idea to bold section headers, companies or job titles.
- Make the important stuff easy to find. Starting with the header, include personal information such as your name, email, and phone number. You want to make it easy to see how long you’ve been with the company in total, as well as different positions you held within the organization and time you spent in each role. And don’t forget to include important information in a similar format for each role. This information could include, depending on your industry, the number of direct reports you managed; who you reported to; software used; special projects completed; sales numbers and quotas; short description of the company; etc.
- Tailor your resume to the job. If you’re active and “all-in” on the job search, tailoring your resume can be tedious, but it can also be the biggest difference-maker in landing an interview. An excellent best practice is to make a long master resume with every piece of detail you would ever want a hiring manager to know, and then make edits and remove parts that don’t serve the job you’re applying for.
- You should also tailor your resume to your industry. For example, if you’re in the marketing and graphic design world, your resume should be more creative and include hyperlinks to your portfolio. If you’re in finance, your resume should include numbers.
- Back up your skills with numbers. Its important to list your job duties under each job on your resume, but don’t take up valuable resume real estate by listing duties that a hiring manager would automatically assume you had responsibility for. Instead, use that space to back up your skills with achievements and proof! Instead of saying you helped the last company increase their sales, state how much sales increased due to your work. Numbers and metrics give validity to your experience and help to give color to your professional story.
- Proofread, and then proofread again. Hiring Managers don’t always pick up on spelling and grammatical errors. But when they do, they absolutely ruin your chances of ever landing a call back or interview (to be read in the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in the World” voice). Kidding with the quote, but not at all kidding with the underlying message. Its unprofessional and sloppy, so before you hit send on that resume, it’s imperative to make sure there are no spelling mistakes, typos or grammatical errors. Keep an eye out for any kind of formatting errors as well.
- A good rule of thumb is to have someone close to you that you trust (mom, dad, sister, brother, neighbor, etc.) to review your resume as well. It never hurts to have an extra set of eyes review something, especially if it can be the difference of landing an interview or being passed over because you spelled experience incorrectly..
If you want more information on how to have a great resume a, please feel free to reach out at info@omadasearch.com and one of our advisers will get back to you.
