It’s not often that a single piece of paper can alter the entire course of your life. However, a resume is just such a piece of paper, which is why it is imperative that you craft a resume that truly gets you noticed and helps to gain access to a job you genuinely want.
While a resume doesn’t guarantee that you will be hired, a great resume can ensure that you gain an interview and are taken seriously by the hiring team. When you begin writing your resume, keep the following tips in mind.
1. Keep It Error Free
A hiring manager or hiring team won’t be impressed by your resume if it contains spelling and grammar errors. Even a single spelling error demonstrates your inability to pay attention to details. When resume writing, take care to do a thorough edit to ensure that there are no careless mistakes on your resume. It’s also wise to have at least two other people look over the resume and search for areas of concern.
However, it’s not only these spelling mistakes and grammatical errors that can cause problems. If you incorrectly list a phone number or email address, this can kill your chances of being hired. Obviously, if the hiring team cannot contact you or get hold of your references, this seriously limits your chances of getting hired.
2. Keep It Professional
Resume writing is different from other types of writing. When you are writing a letter or perhaps chatting on social media, you can be funny and casual. A resume is a serious document, and you need to write it with a professional tone. Don’t try to liven it up with a bit of humor. Hiring teams are looking at hundreds of resumes and want documents that showcase your skills, experience and education, not your fun and quirky personality. If you want to be taken seriously, you need a serious resume.
3. Keep It Polished & Organized
Too often, people mistakenly believe that a clever design will grab the attention of a hiring team. However, it’s far better to keep the design as simple as possible. Don’t use a wide variety of fonts and don’t use quirky, creative fonts. Use fonts that are crisp, clean and easy to read. In your resume it is the content that truly counts. If you are applying for a creative position, you might be asked to submit examples of your work. Let the work speak for itself and keep the resume simple.
It’s also wise when to think about organization. You will want a section that introduces you and provides contact information, a section detailing work experience, a section detailing specific skills, a section for education and a section for references. Use the same font and style for each header and the same format for each bullet point under the headers. Keeping the same style throughout the document makes it easier to read and more pleasing to the eye.
4. Keep It Dynamic
Anyone can list a bunch of information on a resume, it’s the way you go about your writing that counts. For instance, we’ve seen resumes where a person stated that they were “responsible for 25 employees,” with no further explanation. A better option would be to write that you “managed 25 employees, created weekly schedules and handled payroll tasks.” Be specific and explain briefly what managing 25 employees meant.
Another example would be someone who “worked on a wide variety of projects.” Instead of this weak type of writing, you might state that you “created and implemented sales strategies and marketing strategies for more than 100 clients.” This explains the types of projects and also showcases your ability to work for many different clients.
Obviously, everyone has different experiences and abilities, and your resume might not include these aforementioned examples. When writing your new resume, brainstorm a list of tasks for which you were responsible at previous jobs and write them in such a way that they truly showcase your unique skills and abilities.
5. Keep It Short
Generally speaking, the best resumes are those that are short and to the point. Rarely do you want a resume to run longer than one page and definitely no longer than two pages. After all, if you were a hiring manager and 200 people are applying for a job, reading and evaluating all of these resumes is a huge task. If these resumes are multiple pages, this task becomes even larger. This is why resume writing experts typically recommend that you limit a resume to a single page and perhaps a cover letter.
Resume Writing is a bit of an art, and it can be a good idea to simply compile all of your information and hand it off to a professional resume writing service. Our professional writers have been crafting resumes for decades and we know what employers want to see on a resume. We also guarantee that if you haven’t been hired within 45 days of ordering one of our professional resumes, we will refund your money, rewrite the resume and give you $100.
