How To Fix Up Your Resume

Failing To Use Enough White Space

“The notion of white space is often overlooked as we try to cram all of our accomplishments onto two pages. You may even be guilty of playing with the margins and the fonts to fit everything in. But this only makes it overwhelming for the reader. Bear in mind that your resume will be skimmed over in just a few seconds before the hiring manager decides if they want to give it closer attention. Make it inviting and readable. Less is more.” , communication consultant and coach

How To Build A Resume

To build a resume in USAJOBS:

How Should I Handle Employment Gaps

You can use a variety of approaches to explain gaps in your employment history. Consider highlighting unpaid internships, skills you gained while managing your household and family, freelance roles you took on, or even online classes and certifications that you took up. If you tried managing your own business while unemployed, you could also include this in your resume. Just remember to make your resume and LinkedIn profile consistent to avoid any embarrassing questions or suspicion from prospective employers.

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Add Your Linkedin Profile

In its place, add a link to your LinkedIn profile, as well as any other relevant social media handles . Caveat: Never include Facebook, no matter how clean you keep it.

Dont want to drop your whole ugly LinkedIn URL onto your resume? Create a custom URL to your public profile using simply /yourname . .

Toss The Snail Mail And Boost Your Social Profile

An active online presence speaks volumes to your potential employers. In fact, a recent study by the Society For Human Resource Management found that 84% of employers recruit via social media, and 43% of employers screen job candidates through social networks and search engines. Include links to your personal website, blog, and social pages. Just make sure that people who are searching for you online will like what they find.

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Resume Margins: Standard Sizes & How To Set Them

Want to make sure your resume catches the hiring managers eye? Read our tips on how to use your resume margins to make your application stand out .

Resume margins are an important part of formatting a resume.

Make sure your margins are proper and professional, and youll increase your chances of landing an interview.

In this article, youll find out:

Drafting A Detailed Resume And Cover Letter

Next, your Tasker fills in the other sections of your resume. For work experience, this will include the past 15 years and the most relevant roles. Each bullet will have your job title, location, dates employed, key responsibilities, key achievements , and keywords. Dont forget to tell your Tasker about any awards or extracurricular activities you did. The skills section should include hard skills and soft skills . Your Tasker will include only the skills that are relevant to the job youre after.

You may want to include other items on your resume such as hobbies, interests, volunteer work, internships , awards and certifications, languages, projects, and publications. After your resume is done, your hired cover letter writer can proceed to write the cover letter and summarise these details while highlighting your milestone achievements.

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How To Tailor Your Resume For A Career Change

Youll want to follow the same process of leading with keywords from the job description in your career change resume. Chances are, many skills from your previous career will be transferable to your new one. Just be sure to provide context and translate phrases to match the job descriptions preferred terminology when needed.

The summary section of your resume is going to be your best friend when seeking to change careers. This area of a resume is your opportunity to explain your expertise and how your existing skills will make you a great candidate for this new career.

Choose The Most Suitable Format

Before you start writing anything, the first step is to decide on the right format for your resume. There are three basic resume formats used by job seekers today: reverse-chronological, functional, and combination. Each format has advantages and disadvantages based on how the resume sections are arranged:

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Additional Resume Tailoring Tips

• A generic resume is about you while a tailored resume makes it about them
• Using bullet points instead of big paragraphs on your resume will make your matching qualifications more skimmable
• Corporate recruiters prefer to see skills in context. If they see a skill on your resume, they need to understand how and why you used it
• Describe your accomplishments using data when possible with dollar amounts, percentages, or other measurables to prove your effectiveness
• Tailoring your resume is also about removing information that distracts from your top skills. Look at every line on your resume through the lens of, Is this necessary to prove Im a great fit for this job?

Should I Always Include A Cover Letter With My Cv

Yes. A cover letter is essential as its a way of formally introducing yourself to the company where you want to apply for a job. This works like a preview of your work history, qualifications and skills. The most effective cover letters also make it easier for recruitment specialists to contact you. If crafted well, this can put you on a shortlist of potential candidates.

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Fill In Your Personal Info

I vote making a professional Gmail thats purely dedicated to job hunting and LinkedIn aka professional things. Some employers reverse google search your email to see what turns up. Yall dont want them to see your wild party pics, angry Twitter rants, or embarrassing song covers. Trust me. Fix your online presence ASAP.

Personal Info Checklist: email, cell phone number, LinkedIn URL

Thats literally it. Nothing else. No address. No height or weight. No single, married, in an open relationship. Nothing irrelevant or too personal. Fix up your resume to reflect only the basics.

Failing To Identify And Delete Irrelevant Work Experience

“One resume mistake many people make is that they feel obligated to include every job, including part-time work, that they’ve had since college. For example, including that you were a Subway sandwich artist for three months is superfluous if you’re applying for a technology job unless, of course, the company’s technology improves the sandwich-making process. Including information like this shows laziness and a general lack of understanding.” Joshua Goldstein, co-founder of Underdog.io

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Why Do Resumes Get Rejected

Generally a career expert spends from 5 to 9 seconds reading your resume before making a decision. If your resume gets rejected it’s because it doesn’t showcase how you match the position you are applying for. Poor formatting, the inclusion of non-essential information or too much information, and grammatical and spelling errors are other typical reasons for rejection. This is where getting help from a professional resume writer makes sense.

Small And Powerful Ways To Update Your Resume

When was the last time you did a full review of your resume? If youre like many people, this document only gets an update when you switch jobs or apply for a new one.

Thats understandable: A total overhaul sounds daunting and time-consuming. Fortunately, making a few tiny tweaks to your resumethe type of adjustments that take just minutes to completecan have a surprisingly big impact.

Here are some suggestions for small yet powerful updates you can make to your resume.

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What Separates You From Other Resume Writing Services Out There

One thing that really sets us apart is our writing team. We set the highest standard for ourselves and only accept the most qualified and talented resume writers on our team. We also only assign 1-2 clients to each of our writers every week. This enables them to really put their all into focusing on your particular order and making sure nothing is rushed.Finally, we perform our own experiments and studies to try and determine the most effective resume writing strategies out there for landing more job interviews and offers.

Ready to fix your resume and secure more job interviews?

Cover Up Your Weaknesses

To deflect the attention from your errors even further, you can also enhance the updated version with a coupleof reworded or added bullet points that relate to the position. And if you are eventually invited to an interview, be sure to bring the properly formatted resume with you.

If you feel the need to be honest, however, you may as well get away with something short and light like this:

Dear :

My perfectionist nature would not allow me to overlook the fact that the resume I submitted contained a small mistake. Im now attaching an updated copy of my resume. Please, refer to this version when you review my qualifications for the job.

Thank you,

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Put On More Information About Your Education

When graduates start their job searches, they usually have a lack of experience to put on their resumes. So, if you dont have enough practice, your task is to persuade a recruiter that you know enough theory.

Mention all courses youve finished during your years at university. You can also write the topic of your last thesis or dissertation, and do not forget to mention any languages you speak.

Use Lists To Write A Resume

Write a resume as a list. You can use such a format to mention your educational courses, your achievements, traits, and expectations from the job you apply for.

First of all, it will be much easier for a recruiter to read this type of resume and quickly pick out the information they need. And such a trick will help your resume look very informative and solid when you dont have many hard facts to mention there.

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Should I Use Free Cover Letter Templates

We dont advise using these templates. Many recruitment specialists have seen them and can tell if youve used them. This may simplify things, but it speaks less of your writing ability. Try to write a cover letter and express your desire for the position and why youre perfect for the job, then shorten it to one page. If you dont feel confident about writing this yourself, you can hire the service here on Airtasker.

Try A Functional Or Hybrid Resume

Probably the most commonly used resume format is chronological. But it’s not the only option you can also create a functional resume, which emphasizes your skills and accomplishments. A combination resume marries the two formats so that employment history is listed chronologically, but accomplishments and qualifications are also prominently highlighted.

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Recruiters Weigh In On The Most Common Deal

• Resume mistakes, at best, give a bad first impression at worst, they’ll cost you the job.
• Approximately 70% of employers say that certain resume deal-breakers would cause them to reject a candidate before they’ve even finished reading the application.
• When it comes to lying, not all fabrications are treated equally employers are more likely to react to lies about your education than your skills.

For ultra-keen job seekers, there’s nothing more patronizing than being advised to double-check your resume. Yet anyone in the recruiting industry will tell you it’s shocking the number of résumé they receive that are either rife with errors or openly flout the job posting’s instructions.

Part of that may be a mismatch in resume advice and recruiter expectations. We can assume you already know to use proper spelling and correct grammar, but who knew that using a Microsoft Word 2003 program could be the mistake that’s landing your resume in the trash?

How To Fix Your Resume

Changing your resume to present your best first impression doesn’t necessarily mean making drastic changes to your current version. Even if your resume is already strong, there may be small alterations you can make to increase its effectiveness. Review these step-by-step sections and tips to see if you can apply any fixes to your resume:

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How To Tailor Your Resume To The Job Description

Open up your resume. Compare it to the job description. Go line by line through the description and ask yourself these questions:

• Does my resume clearly state that I can do this?
• How quickly can I point to this skill from the description in my resume? Test yourself.
• Am I using the same language found in the job description?

Chances are, you might find several different or missing skills and keywords in your generic resume when going through this process.

A Tailored Resume Is For People And Technology

Not only does this help overloaded recruiters and hiring managers to do their jobs, but it also optimizes your resume for the technology they use. Applicant tracking systems are used by 99% of Fortune 500 companies and help recruiters sort, filter, and search incoming resumes.

For example, the most popular ATS, Taleo, has a feature that automatically scores and ranks your resume based on how well it matches the job description. And most systems have search functions in which recruiters can plug in specific skills and experience to identify applicants with the qualifications they value most. If you applied through an ATS, theres a strong chance your generic resume wasnt even read.

How do you know which skills will help you score well on applicant tracking systems or come up in a search?

Its all in the job description.

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When Resume Lies Are Uncovered

It’s easy enough for a candidate to lie when pinging off their resume via email. The interview process, however, can bring such lies to light, especially when the candidate finds themselves unable to speak in detail about the things they’ve lied about.

“In addition, background checks and reference checks often expose a resume’s lies,” said Augustine. “Lying about your education is pointless, because it’s simple for an employer to call the institution directly for verification or to use a service, such as the National Student Clearinghouse, to confirm details of your educational background.”

Getting caught in a lie won’t only cost you the job, but it may lead to further repercussions. Worst-case scenario, you’ll get blackballed from your desired industry.

“Some job markets are small. If the lie you told was egregious, you may find it has spread beyond the office walls of this prospective employer,” said Augustine. “Also, if you are working with a third-party recruiting agency, there’s a good chance they may cut ties with you. Lying about something that’s easy to catch also speaks to your judgment or lack thereof which can be a deal-breaker for most employers.”

Additional reporting by Marisa Sanfilippo, Dave Mielach, Jennifer Post and Chad Brooks.

The Smooth Resume Editing Process

Genie Resume has been enjoying tremendous recognition in US for offering the smoothest resume editing process coupled with unrivaled customer service of optimized end results. The process is incepted by understanding your academic qualifications and professional experience to craft a mind-blowing resume for the candidate. We do so to reflect your abilities and potential to the recruiter. You might be an individual owning plethora of knowledge, experience, and a well-defined resume making it harder to catch flaws in the document – but that is not the case for us! Our resume editors and proofreaders handpick the mistakes, even if they are the smallest ones. The team also dedicates their time to maintaining a professional tone and adopting a formal style for your resume to sync it with perfection and professionalism. Delivering you maximum benefits through our service is one of the major aims of Genie Resume. We make sure that the end results are worth every penny. Ping us with your brief and take a seat back.

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