Pair Your First Job Resume With A Complementary Cover Letter
If youre writing a resume for your first job, youre likely writing a cover letter for your first job too. Knowing how to write a cover letter is even more important for you than experienced job seekers, because it gives you a chance to really pitch your application on grounds other than work experience.
To complement your first-job resume, use your cover letter to showcase your passion for the position. Explain how your skills, certifications, and relevant life experiences make you the perfect fit for the role.
Ideally, your cover letter will present you as a hardworking, loyal, and personable employee, justifying the investment the company made in hiring you.
Creating a good cover letter is straightforward:
- pick a professional cover letter template
- address the hiring manager by name
- explain why youre passionate about the role
- include at least two body paragraphs that show how your experience makes you the right person for the job
- conclude by repeating your contact information and requesting an interview
Augment It With Linkedin
Create a LinkedIn profile and link employers to it in your cover letter.
This will help follow ups, and might even get you a job in the later years. The more people you know, the better!
How is your job search coming along what stage are you at? If you have any further resume tips to add, share them in the comments below!
Meanwhile here are some related articles that may be of interest:
Your Resume Must Work Whether The Reader Has 5 Hours 5 Minutes Or 74 Seconds
Based on an eye-tracking study in 2018, recruiters typically spent an average of 7.4 seconds skimming resumes for details, before making a decision on whether an applicant is suitable for a role.
This is where writing succinctly and formatting will be key.
You have to be interesting to keep the reader going.
Your formatting should also be clear so that if a reader only has a minute to scan, they can get the main points from your section titles.
Bolding and bullet points are your friends. Long paragraphs and sentences are not.
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List Your Relevant Work History And Major Accomplishments
The experience part of your resume is the main course, if you imagine it as a luxury meal. It contains the elements that are most crucial to include in a resume.
The earlier sections served as the appetizer now, before continuing, fill in your employment history and prior accomplishments.
Let’s now go over the various job history elements of the ideal experience section on a resume.
Include Contact Information With A Caveat
Include all your contact information so that employers can easily get in touch with you. Give your full name, street address, city, state, zip code, phone number, and email address. If you have a LinkedIn profile or professional website, include those links as well. Under some circumstances, you might want not want to include your entire mailing address, but it is generally good practice to do so.
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Slip Past The Software Bots
Some tips get you further than others. Resumes these days are often read by a machine before a human sees them. These quick and easy-to-do tips can help get your resume past the screening systems. A few simple tweaks can make the difference between getting deleted or getting read.
Research websites in your industry, they will most likely be optimized for software crawling. Recent example resumes of upper-management will have been optimized as well, and are a good resource overall on which to model your own resume.
Dont Put Everything On There
Your resume should not have every work experience youve ever had listed on it. Think of your resume not as a comprehensive list of your career history, but as a marketing document selling you as the perfect person for the job. For each resume you send out, youll want to highlight only the accomplishments and skills that are most relevant to the job at hand . Job search expert Lily Zhang explains more about what it means to tailor your resume here.
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Dont Worry Too Much About Gaps
One of the questions that Lees and Heifetz get asked regularly is how to account for gaps in a resume, perhaps when you werent working or took time off to care for a family member. If you were doing something during that time that might be relevant to the job, you can include it. Or you might consider explaining the gap in your cover letter, as long as you have a brief, positive explanation. However, the good news is that in todays job market, hiring professionals are much more forgiving of gaps. In a recent survey, 87% of hiring managers said that they no longer see candidates being unemployed or having an employment gap as a red flag.
How To Fill The Gap Left By The Covid
The first thing to know is that COVID-19 has disrupted the career plans of thousands of students and you’re not alone. As a result of the pandemic career-boosting activities such as work experience, internships and volunteering have been postponed or cancelled. If this has left you worrying about the corona-shaped gap on your CV let us put your mind at rest.
Employers understand the challenges caused by lockdowns only too well and they won’t expect you to have completed a period of work experience in this time. That said you could still demonstrate to potential employers how you used this time wisely – showing yourself to be a proactive, dedicated and resilient candidate.
You could mention:
- details of online courses or Massive Open Online Courses you’ve undertaken or webinars or online events you’ve attended
- the acquisition of new skills, such as learning a language or learning to code
- volunteering work such as checking in on and shopping for vulnerable neighbours or caring for young siblings or elderly relatives
- charity work – perhaps you got involved with fundraising or raising awareness of a particular ogranisation.
- new hobbies such as starting to vlog, picking up a sport, learning to cook or setting up a community book club.
Remember – you’ll need to relate these to the job you’re applying for so focus on the skills these activities taught you and how/why they’d be useful.
Read our example cover letter explaining a gap in your CV.
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Technology And Psychology: Ats Checks And Recruiters
Weve covered a large portion of the important fundamentals you need to understand when composing a job-winning, attention-grabbing resume.
But theres still two vitally important aspects to making your resume that perfect professional key: interacting with Applicant Tracking Systems and understanding how a recruiter views your resume.
Applicant Tracking Systems have become ubiquitous for large and medium-size employers in most developed countries around the globe. With the amount of applications and potential employees coming in each month, human specialists cant always keep up.
So, instead of expanding recruiting departments to ludicrous sizes, employers are using automated systems to help with hiring. The task of an ATS is to analyze, filter your resume based on keywords.
A study by Preptel shows that, in general, 75% of resumes are never seen by human eyes. Automated filters can become a resume black hole. So, understanding how the ATS works is important.
One of the big reasons for using online tools instead of text editors is that ATSs are often inflexible. They process your resume based on a specific algorithm. A huge percentage of resumes get filtered out regardless of their professional contentdue to formatting errors, images, , graphs, bugged out headerinformation etc. This is why using tested tools that produce a clean resume without hidden formatting pitfalls is so critically important.
Tip : Formatting And Making The Resume Look Professional
Believe it or not, the appearance and organization of a resume can greatly affect the response. The first hurdle for any resume is to get the employer to read it. An attractively presented, concise resume is easy for a recruiter to pick up. On the other hand, if a resume is 5 pages, written in 6-point font, a prospective employer may not think that it is worth the time to find a magnifying glass and read it. In most cases, a resume should not exceed one page , which has a few key sections that are separated from one another or clearly delineated.
Here are some suggestions to make the format stand out positively:
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Craft A Career Snapshot
More recently, career experts have urged job seekers to do away with the old “objective” statement and instead consider including a brief summary, called a “career snapshot,” at the top of their resumes.
“With the career snapshot, you present a branding statement that briefly explains your unique value as well as your skills and qualifications,” said Tomer Sade, founder and CEO of FACTORE. “This would then be followed by a few bullet points that highlight your experience and your accomplishments. Whatever you list here should be relevant to the position you’re applying to.”
“The top third of your resume is prime resume real estate,” added Lisa Rangel, an executive resume writer and official LinkedIn moderator at Chameleon Resumes. “Create a robust summary to capture the hiring manager’s eye.”
Think of your career snapshot as an answer to the question “how would you describe your work experience in one sentence?” The summary is an opportunity to sum up your most relevant and important skills, experience, or assets right off the bat.
What Is A Resume Profile
A resume profile is a concise overview of your qualification for the job. It can include your goals, education, experience or skills, but also information like marital status, places lived and even childrens names and ages.
The intent of a profile is to provide a snapshot of the persons life, not to persuade a recruiter to call for a job interview.
The main difference between a professional summary and a profile is their purpose. A professional summary is constructed with a recruiter in mind and is designed to attract their attention. On the other hand, a profile briefly lists titles or positions held, which can serve as an introduction to prestigious roles the person occupied.
While the professional profile only mentions a single achievement, a resume summary highlights multiple quantifiable achievements. A profile contains fewer details about actual work experiences and more personal information which could be helpful.
Since its not necessarily targeting a specific position, a profile is great when uploading your resume to job search sites and networking resumes.
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How To Choose A Resume Name
November 16, 2021 | By Pauline Delaney| Reviewed by Conrad Benz
While it might seem unimportant, a clear, professional resume name helps employers easily identify your application. Learn how to choose a clear and professional resume file name.
The name you choose for your resume may seem unimportant. However, getting it wrong can make your resume seem unprofessional.
In a competitive job market, hiring managers often have hundreds of resumes to sift through, which means that every part of your application matters. Paying attention to detail and making sure your application and resume are error-free will help increase your chances of securing a job interview.
So, when youre thinking of how to write a resume, you also need to learn the best resume file naming practices.
Dont Forget Your Education
If youre still in school or just graduated, your education can go at the top of your resume, but for pretty much everyone else, this goes near the bottom. Most people include their school, graduation year , major, and degree. Brand-new grads might also write in their GPA, honors and awards, study abroad, thesis, or other notable achievements. But keep this section super simple, as you dont want it to take up too much space over your work experience.
Its possible you have unique education experience, such as taking an online course or certification. If you did this specifically as a way to boost yourself within your industry, definitely include it. Again, list everything more or less reverse chronologicallyso a grad school degree would go above an undergrad degree, and a more recent relevant online course would go above that.
Learn more about the ins and outs of listing your education on your resume:
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Make Your Font Size 10 To 12 Points
Another factor in making your words clear and readable is setting an appropriate font size. Generally, you should stay between 10 and 12 points. If you have a shorter resume and are trying to fill space, select a 12-point font. Anything larger might appear unprofessional. If you have a lot of information on your resume, start with a 10-point font and increase it if you have space.
If your resume is still more than one page with 10-point font, avoid reducing your font further. Instead, see if there is an opportunity to make your ideas more concise. You can do this by removing any irrelevant or extraneous information, combining ideas or making your ideas briefer with shorter sentences and fewer filler words.
For example, heres a sentence in a resume that can be shortened:
Performed inventory audits every month and discovered issues with over-ordering executed an organization solution across all teams which resulted in a 10% increase in revenue over the next two quarters.
Make your ideas concise and remove filler words to include only the core value of your statement:
Performed regular inventory audits, identifying and solving over-ordering issues to achieve 10% revenue increase.
Here are a few other ways you can use to make a shorter resume:
Related:Q& A: How Long Should a Resume Be?
Final Points On Writing A Dental Front Office Resume
Hopefully, you’ve found the information we’ve published above helpful in writing your dental front office resume. Whether you’re applying for a direct receptionist position or office clerk who schedules appointments, the key is writing your resume to address that specific position you’re hoping to receive.
When you know how a resume should be formatted, which sections to include, and the key phrases or skills to include in each relative section, customizing the master resume for specific jobs is easy. We strongly recommend using Lisa’s document as your template but personalize it for each admin position you apply for.
For a quick recap, here are some specific tips to remember.
- Make sure the resume reads and flows easily.
- Always write your resume on a plain white background with black font.
- Edit the document SEVERAL TIMES through Grammarly.com and visual inspection.
- Ensure its well-spaced, organized, and professional.
- Finally, read it aloud a few times before you’re ready to paste the content into a resume builder or template.
Of all the bullet point tips listed above, editing your content in Grammarly.com or another high-quality editor is the most important. Don’t be afraid to use a dental receptionist resume template like the one in this article to ensure it’s clean, neat, and organized.
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Consider An Online Supplement
Cant figure out how to tell your whole story on one page, or want to be able to include some visual examples of your work? Instead of trying to have your resume cover everything, cover the most important details on that document, and then include a link to your personal website, where you can dive more into what makes you the ideal candidate.
Section #1 List Your Contact Information
A dental office is a healthcare facility, which means you’ll be working with people with private information that you’ll have access to. There are HIPAA regulations in the medical industry that all employees must follow. As a receptionist, you’ll have to showcase your ability to pay attention to details. You’ll have an opportunity to prove this when you start with your resume in the contact information section.
For a resume, you’ll want to list your full legal name, complete mailing address, email address, and mobile phone number. The most important item to remember is to match 100 percent what you listed on your application. If you write a cover letter, your personal contact information on that document should also match the resume.
How to Format this Section
When using the master resume, write each item listed above separately. This will make it easier for you to copy and paste into a resume builder or template such as the one we used to create the sample resume above.
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Choose The Best Resume Format
Several basic types of resumes are best for job openings. Depending on your personal and professional circumstances, choose a chronological, functional, combination, or targeted resume. Decide on one that best fits your work experience, educational background, and skill set. Take the time to customize your resume it is well worth the effort as it won’t seem copied.
How To Pick The Right Resume Format
There are three types of resume formats: reverse chronological, functional or skills-based, and a combination of the two. The choice depends on the type of job you are applying for and your level of experience.
The 3 resume formats are:
1) Reverse chronological resume format – This is the most popular resume format and is ideal for people with plenty of work experience that is relevant to the position theyre interested in.
2) Functional/skills-based resume format If you lack relevant work experience because you are a student/recent graduate, or you are looking to make a career change, the skills-based format is a better choice.
3) Combination resume format The combination resume is a great choice for job-seekers with a very diverse skill-set. Its useful if youre applying for a role that requires expertise in 3-4 different fields, and you want to show all that in your resume. Say, for example, youre applying for a senior management role, and the requirements are expertise in Management, Sales, and Software Development.
So, which one do you go for?
In 90%+ cases, youd want to stick to the reverse-chronological resume format. This is the most common one, and most HR managers are used to this. Hence, in this guide, were going to focus on this specific format.
If youre a recent graduate, or possess a diverse set of skills & work experience, you might want to pick one of the other 2 formats. Check out our guide to resume formats to learn how to write either.
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