Think of your resume as an advertisement for you. What are you good at? What can you do for the company? And why are you worth the interview? Your resume needs to display all of these things, and with a limited amount of words.
So here are nine ways to improve your resume.
Highlight
You need to make sure that your experience and background are relevant to the job you are applying for. But highlighting the appropriate expertise, you take the guesswork out of it from potential recruiters. List your education, qualifications, and experience that meets the job description.
Your headline should also reflect that you meet the criteria.
Improve Readability
Human readers of your resume are going to skim read. It would be best to keep your resume as simple as possible, so it is possible to pick out the points you want to get across.
Bullet points, spaces, and short paragraphs will make this as easy as possible. Many companies are not using an AI system to scan resumes, and these will scan your resume and look for the keywords.
Always consider the readability of your resume, and format it to make it easy as possible.
Keywords
Keywords aren’t just prevalent in SEO and social media. They are now the desired part of your resume. Applicant tracking systems and AI resume readers will look for these keywords about the role that you have applied for. The keywords will be part of what highlights you being the right fit for the job.
Ensure that you have the modern terms related to your role on your resume if you aren’t sure what these modern terms, then do some research before you put your resume together.
First Impressions
There is a difference between a bright and bold resume in the right way and a resume that is hard to read and look at. The design does matter, and depending on your industry, you might have some more creative freedoms than others.
The summary part of your resume should grab the reader’s attention, enough for them to want to read the rest. This will involve highlighting your successes, best qualities, and expertise too.
It would be best to give a recruiter a crystal clear idea about who they are reading about and why they should consider reading the rest of your resume. Keep your most recent experience and success first, as these will be the most relevant to recruiters.
Visual
You must make sure that your resume is easy to read and that the color and design don’t impact picking out the vital information. Many resumes are read via a screen, and you can never be sure how someone else has calibrated their screen. So it would help if you considered that.
A good tip is to look at resumes that are for professionals within your industry. This will give you the green light on the interesting underscores and bubbles that you want to add.
Applicant tracking systems disregard graphics, so these are only really for human readers. The overall design mustn’t impact the text at all.
Fonts should be easy to read and well-spaced. The easiest fonts to read on a resume are:
- Times New Roman
- Arial
- Verdana
- Garamond
- Helvetica
And while some might consider them boring, they have fit the criteria for clean fonts.
Truthful
It is vital that you only tell the truth on your resume. It might feel like no big deal to embellish slightly, but managers will catch you in a lie. Telling lies on your resume will get you in hot water if you get found out. It would be best to highlight what you do positively, but embellishment or lying is wrong.
Positivity
Your resume should also be filled with positive words. You don’t need to highlight personal issues or if you were fired from your last post. It is better to explain why you don’t work there anymore.
Showcase
When it comes to your biggest achievements, add details like the details, the profit, the percentages. Any media the project was featured in and more. This is about showing the value that you bring with you. And that they can benefit from you being part of their organization.
Read, Edit, Read, Edit
And then proofread. Even those who are sticklers for details and preciseness can make a mistake. It will help if you proofread your CV. A recruit is likely to give preference to a candidate that appears to have taken time and care over their resume. Automatic spell-checkers can only do so much; after that, it is all on you.
When you take the time to improve your resume, you increase the likelihood that you will be invited to the next stage of the process.