You will hear many recruiters and hiring managers complaining of how they get a lot of poorly written resumes today. You should have a resume that is going to attract more interviews and not something that eliminates you from being considered for a given position. The tips below will go a long way:
- Formatting Your Resume in A Way That Makes it Easy for Hiring Managers to Read
No matter how good you write your resume, it is not going to get a thorough reading the first time. The average time a hiring manager will go through a resume is 25 seconds. If your resume is hard to read, then it will be even harder to scan. This is why it is important to have a resume that is properly organized, easy to read, and doesn’t exceed two pages.
- Choose a logic format that has wide margins, clear headings, and clean type – remember your resume must have a crisp employment summary.
- To guide the eyes of the reader, use italic and bold typeface
- Use of bullets when calling attention to key points (e.g. accomplishments)
- Identifying Accomplishments and not Just Job Description
When going through applications, hiring managers are going to look for candidates that are going to help them in solving a problem or satisfying the needs within the company, especially for technical fields like engineering. There is no way you are going to show that you can be the solution to their problem without letting them know how you managed to solve a similar problem in the past.
Focusing on what you were doing at your job and not the job you had there
Including a one or two top lines that describe the job then listing accomplishments
Before you include a given point, ask yourself what was the benefit of what you did
Try having accomplishments that were unique to you and not what everyone else did
Stay away from generic descriptions of previous jobs
- What common mistake do many people make when it comes to resumes?
- The use of too much industry jargon that doesn’t add any value and general claims. The work of a resume is to market a job seeker by selling their strengths and skills, not providing the bio of the candidate.
Your resume needs to highlight the specific achievements you were able to get in the past positions.
You should try quantifying achievement because it will capture the attention of the hiring manager because he/she can see the actual number.
Another approach is working backward in quantifying your achievements, you can ask yourself, what would have happened if I had not done X?
- Catering Your Resume for the Industry
Some industries will be impressed with your creative resume design, but technical fields like mechanical engineering are not interested. If you are applying for a job in the field of design or advertising, then you can impress the hiring manager by creating a distinctive resume design.
Try to be conservative when it comes to style
Have the resume list your achievements, be grammatically-correct, error-free writing, and clean. This is all you are going to need to impress.
- Have “Career Summary” instead of “Objective”
This section s there to provide an overview of who you are and what you do. If you go through most resumes, you will notice that most of them sound the same; I am looking for a challenging and interesting X position that will need my X, Y, Z skills that will help in achieving the goals of the company. Not telling at all.
You should try grabbing the attention of the hiring manager from the get-go keeping in mind you only have about 25 seconds to make an impression.
Take your time and come up with a summary that will get the attention of the hiring manager, and powerfully and accurately describing how you are the solution to their problems.
- Networking
You should make handing out your resume a full-time job if you are unemployed. One fact that will motivate you to network is that many mid to senior-level positions are usually filled through networking. This is why it is important to network as much as possible. Networking can involve;
Business contacts, people who you have worked with or for before
Sales representatives and vendors you have dealt with in the past five years
People in the alumni directory, but you must be alma mater
