Following These Crucial Resume Tips Will Help Get You Hired

When it comes to writing a resume, there are a lot of things to keep in mind and any oversight can sink your chances of getting the job you’re seeking. Below is a comprehensive list of crucial resume tips that can go a long way to getting you hired.

Keep It Tight

While you don’t want to lie, exaggerate or mislead, your resume doesn’t need to be a court deposition. For instance, it doesn’t need to have every job you have ever held and every class you’ve taken.

A good approach is to think of your resume as a marketing document that sells you as a solution to the company’s talent-related problem. Your resume should be as short as possible while spotlighting your most relevant achievements and abilities. It’s perfectly okay to omit irrelevant skills and experience.

Avoid Too Much Jargon

You might be inclined to throw in a great deal of industry jargon so you seem like you know your stuff, but ultimately you need your resume to be easy to understand and the first person who sees your resume could be someone from HR, or even an executive, who doesn’t know the lingo in your line of work.

Quantify Results

Use as many hard numbers as possible in your resume when discussing your achievements. For instance, you should indicate the amount of money you saved a previous employer or your personal sales figures from a past job. When you put your achievements into hard numbers, it helps the hiring manager understand the degree of work or responsibility you are capable of achieving.

Show, Don’t Tell

Conveying soft skills like leadership or organizational abilities on a resume often comes across as a set of vague statements, like “showed leadership” or “organized files for an entire department.”

Rather than telling your reader about your soft skills, try to ‘show’ them by laying out a narrative. So for leadership, you could say: “Led a design team of 10 people to develop brochures, posters, business cards and digitals ads for an industry conference.”

Mix It Up

When you start listing things on a resume, it can get pretty repetitive and when you use the same words for each list item, it can be a bit tedious for your reader.

Of course, what you are trying to say should take precedence over the words you use but you have to be sure that you’re keeping things interesting for your reader.

Incorporate Keywords

Because automated applicant tracking systems are used this scan resumes for keywords and phrases, it is essential for you to incorporate popular terms from your line of work and the industry of the potential employer. For instance, if you are seeking an IT position at a food production facility, your resume should include both tech terms and terms related to food production.

A good approach to incorporating keywords is to make it the last thing you do when writing or revising your resume. Visually scan your resume and be on the lookout for opportunities to incorporate keywords more ever it makes sense to do so.

Find a Better Job with Career Concepts!

At Career Concepts, we often help job seekers fine-tune their resume and application materials. Please contact us today to find out how we can help you or check out our job board to see our open opportunities.