How To Write A Great Resume That Stands Out In 2022
After submitting dozens of applications, youre wondering why you still havent gotten at least one interview invite. Weve all been there.
Competition is tough and more likely than not, youre competing with dozens, if not hundreds, of other job seekers for that same dream job. If youre wondering what you have to do to stand out from the crowd, the answer is simple: get your resume done right. Writing a killer resume can get you out of the job-hunting rut and significantly boost your chances of reaching that first paycheck.
Heres a guide on how to take your resume writing to the next level. Below are some of the sections covered in this guide, click any of the links to jump directly to that section.
Add A Resume Summary Or Objective
After your contact information, you have the option to include either a or objective statement. An objective statement quickly explains your career goals and is a good choice for those with limited professional experience, such as recent college or high school graduates. A resume summary is a short statement that uses active language to describe your relevant work experience and skills.
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Tip : Revision And Review
One of the most important steps to writing a good resume is having others you trust look it over. A small spelling or grammar error on a resume could cause problems by making it seem like you lack attention to detail.
You can start with standard spelling and grammar checking programs. However, while these programs are very helpful, they are not enough by themselves. For example, the programs may not flag errors with homophones . They also have difficulty with uncommon, technical, or foreign words that may not be in their dictionaries. In addition, they are not looking for formatting inconsistencies or at the overall appearance of the resume. While computer programs can help with many issues, there is still no substitute for the human eye.
Start by printing a copy of your resume and looking for errors and inconsistencies yourself. Then, present copies to others along with a description of the job or educational opportunity that you are applying for. When presenting your resume to others, consider at least two kinds of people: a peer, and an experienced professional or teacher. Each may identify different issues with the resume.
Ask the reviewers to provide two types of notes: technical revisions and feedback on the writing, organization and effectiveness of the resume.
A good resume can help you land an interview, but even minor errors can take you out of the running. Schedule an appointment with a counselor to ensure it will be effective.
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Do Employers Look At A Resume Or Cover Letter First
Employers look at a resume first. They typically look at the resume first to make sure you have the desired skills and experience before taking the time to read your cover letter. This is especially true in fields that require specific hard skills, such as IT and engineering.
However, in creative fields such as editing, journalism, and copywriting, employers may read your cover letter first to ensure that your writing skills are at the level they require.
Resume Contact Information Tips:
- Include a personal phone number, never a work number.
- You dont need to include your full address but do add your city, state, and zip code. Recruiters often search for local candidates first.
- Use a professional sounding email address. Consider creating a free Gmail account for your job search if you currently use a more outdated email service like Hotmail or AOL.
- Create a strong LinkedIn profile and be sure to include the URL on your resume.
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Technical Skills And Proficiencies
What technical platforms and tools are you proficient? List all that apply to your work. Be specific and as comprehensive as possible. This list can include anything from social media platforms to project management systems and computer languages. If you’ve worked with proprietary platforms, list those as well.
Need to brush up on a skill or tool that’s routinely popping up in the job descriptions you’re targeting? Check out edX, Coursera, and SkillShare for free or low-cost online courses.
Set Up Your Resume Formatting And Style
Start your resume by opening a new document in your preferred word processor . Then use the following resume formatting:
This formatting is the default in Microsoft Word, so you shouldnt need to adjust anything if youre starting with a new document.
Keep everything on one-page so you dont overwhelm the hiring manager. Only write a two-page resume if all of your information is relevant to the job, or youre applying for a senior leadership role.
Adding style to your resume
After formatting your resume, you need to land on a style.
Your resumes style includes all the aesthetic details like:
- whether or not you use a sidebar
- how you set up your headers
For formal industries like law, finance, or politics, you should stick to a simple, traditional resume style. Clean lines, no graphics, and dark colors like navy blue or burgundy are most appropriate.
However, if you want a job in a more creative industry like tech or marketing, you should use a more modern resume design. Modern resume designs include brighter colors, sans-serif fonts, and graphic details like visual skill levels or sidebars.
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Decide Whether You Need A Unique Resume For Different Jobs
Before applying, you should ask yourself, Have I made it as easy as possible for this employer to see that Im qualified?. If youre applying for a job that has unique requirements, you may need another version of your resume to fully demonstrate your qualifications. Decide on a case-by-case basis which resume to use.
Your resume is often the first step to getting an interview with an employer. Make sure you include the most relevant information on your resume, organize it to highlight the most important information and carefully review for errors. Once your resume is polished and finalized, it should help you get more callbacks, interviews, and job offers.
Related: How To Describe Work Experience on a Resume
In this video, Sinead explains how to include work experience on a resume, how to format your work experience section and what types of experience to include.
S To Writing The Perfect Resume
Your resume is only as good as the information you provide. Make sure you’re prepared with this list.
Are you struggling with writing the perfect resume? If the answer is yes, you’re not alone. According to a recent TopResume study, only 24 percent of professionals described themselves as confident in their resume-writing ability. This means that 76 percent of professionals are insecure about their resume and resume-writing skills as a whole.
With that said, whether you’re planning to use a professional resume-writing service or give it a go on your own, it’s important to take some time to prepare for your resume rewrite. Your resume will only be as good as the information you or your writer has to work with. Gather the following details ahead of time to craft a powerful document that effectively tells your story and markets your qualifications to help you land your dream job.
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Expressing Your Personality And Goals
A summary is also an opportunity to express some of your personality and your career goals, both of which a recruiter might consider in a hiring decision. Recruiters typically look for professional credentials but also want to ensure that any job candidates can integrate well with the company’s culture and values. You can write a summary that includes humour, shows determination, or showcases any of your best qualities to attract attention.
How To Write An Effective Resume
In this guide, youll learn how to create an effective resume.Youll learn strategies for tailoring your resume to the role youre pursuing, and how to effectively present your skills and experiencewhether youre a new-job seeker or a mid-career professional switching to a new field. You will learn about templates and formats and understand the structure of every core section of a successful resume.
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Your Resume Is The Key Piece Of Your Job Application Here’s How To Get It Right
- Employers look at resumes for an average of only six or seven seconds.
- Youll get the best results if you send your resume between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. within the first four days of a job being posted.
- Your resume should be clear, concise and tailored to the job for which you are applying.
- This article is for job seekers who want to improve their resumes to increase their chances of getting an interview.
With the current labor shortage and low unemployment rate, job seekers are at an advantage when it comes to applying for jobs. However, thats not to say that you dont need a professionally written resume. Employers still want to find and hire the best employees for each open position, and resumes are the first step in that search. There are several strategies you can use to make your resume stand out and demonstrate that you are the best candidate for the job.
Merge A Resume Pdf With Other Application Files
If you need to share a resume, cover letter, references, and portfolio all at the same time try the Merge PDF function in Acrobat to combine multiple files into one single PDF. You can easily reorder or extract pages as well. And if you have an image-heavy portfolio, the Compress tool will help you shrink the file size so it takes up less space when its downloaded.
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Keep Your Resume Short And Direct
The No. 1 rule of writing a resume is to keep it short and to the point. The general rule is no more than one page unless you have a very good reason for it to be longer, like an extensive career or a lot of highly applicable work experience.
An easy way to keep your resume concise is to include only recent, relevant experience. While that yearlong first job might have taught you a lot about the field, its not always necessary to include every detail from your entire career history.
Most experts recommend including jobs from the previous 10 or 15 years only, although this time frame may be shorter if you are new to the workforce. Including too many unrelated work experiences can make your resume appear too busy and draw attention away from your relevant qualifications. Your resume should be focused, clear and concise.
Tip: If you are an older job seeker, here are some things you can do to condense and age-proof your resume.
Tips On Writing Your Summary Section
- Highlight your most important and relevant skills.
- Feature the notable accomplishments that you intend to repeat for this new role.
- Show achievements that are quantifiable by using percentages, sales figures, and other quantities that provide a realistic view of your professional accomplishments.
- Make sure your resume summary statement briefly demonstrates and establishes why you are the ideal candidate.
- Be sure to include keywords from the job description.
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The Most Popular: A Reverse Chronological Resume
As previously mentioned, a reverse chronological resume is preferred by many coaches and HR experts, mainly because its super readable. When everythings in a clear order, its easy to skim and even easier to draw lines between experiences.
Who its good for: Just about everyonefrom students applying to internships all the way up to senior-level executives
The Vital Starting Point: Where To Write Your Resume
Well go straight to the golden rule, no beating around the bush.
Do not use basic text editors to write the final version of your resume. You can use them to craft your initial thoughts if you feel comfortable with them, but MS Word, Excel and similar programs have a host of potential problems that may hinder you.
These may include:
- A difficult and time-consuming formatting process
- Header/footer information not readable by other systems
- Poor and bland visual designs that get lost among other resumes
- Formatting that looks different in other programs
- Lost or corrupted files and so on
So, whats the solution?
The accepted standard for submitting most resumes is the PDF file format. The benefits are clear in most cases: universal formatting that doesnt change regardless of where you view it and readability by most software systems.
Use professionally designed layouts and tools that have been tested with hiring managers and applicant systems.
Use old-school text editors that take hours of work and are often incompatible with the employer’s software.
The ideal tools to produce clean, concise and beautiful resumes in PDF format are online builders.These web and/or software solutions are specifically made to be the perfect instrument for visually striking, technically functional and content-optimized resumes.
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Tailor Your Resum For Each Job
Employers can receive hundreds of resumés for one job posting. To make yours stand out, you need to put yourself into their shoes. What do they need, and what can you offer to meet that need? These tips can help you show an employer that youre the right person for the job:
- Learn as much as you can by reading the organizations website, researching labour market information, or asking others in the industry.
- Identify your most relevant skills and training to show how you can add value to the company.
How To Write A Resume After A Career Change
Career switches happen all the time. If youre in the process of breaking into a new career or industry, let your resume show why you still have the necessary skills and abilities that can translate to the new job.
The most widely used format for a career change resume is the combination format. This format allows you to display all your relevant and transferable skills with less emphasis on your work experience.
Here are the most important things to include in your new career change resume:
- A resume summary and headline
- A comprehensive skill section
- Any certifications or training you might have that relates to the job
- A modified work experience section that highlights every transferable skill under each job position
- Include information about every project that youve finished using the relevant skills that are required for the position
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How Long Should My Resume Be
Your resume should be approximately two pages long. If it is substantially longer, eliminate information that isnt relevant to the role or industry. For instance, look back at the key skills and attributes required for the job in question and then review your resume are you using valuable space to describe skills, attributes and responsibilities from roles that dont match up to the job in question? If so, remove this content or, at the least, simplify your language. On your resume, you must get to the point, so dont use ten words to say something you could say in five.
On the other hand, one page may suffice in certain circumstances. The main thing to keep in mind when youre writing your resume is that you must be able to demonstrate and articulate your skills, experience, and future potential to the reader. If you can do that well in one page, thats great. However, the average length of a resume is usually around two pages.
Keep Information About Your Education As Short As Possible
Include only relevant education information: the name of your college, your degree, and the year you graduated.
Susan Adams writes in Forbes that experienced workers should include their education at the end of their resumes. If you’re a new graduate, you should consider including a list of course work that’s relevant to the position you’re applying for.
And don’t even think about listing your high school education and activities unless you’re under 20 and “have no education or training beyond high school,” according to Tracy Burns-Martin’s book “Before and After Resumes.”
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Which Resume Type Is Right For You
Which resume type should you use for your job search? That depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. The goal of any resume is to show a hiring manager the applicant’s strengths, skills, and experience in as short a time as possible. According to one study, recruiters spend as little as seven seconds reviewing a resume before moving on to the next, so it’s in your best interests to put your finest qualities and accomplishments in a prominent position on the page.
In addition, functional or combination resumes may also be useful if you’re trying to draw the reader’s attention away from somethingnamely, large gaps in your work history or detours into unrelated fields.
List Relevant Skills And Keywords
Resume keywords are important terms of interest that recruiters look for whether skimming a resume or searching within an applicant tracking system . The more role-specific keywordsoften hard skillsyour resume contains, the better optimized your resume is.
99 percent of Fortune 500 companies use applicant tracking systems to sort, filter, and search applicants. Some ATS, like Taleo, can automatically rank your resumes content against the job description, allowing recruiters to focus only on the best applicants. Recruiters often also search their applicant pool for important resume keywords, like customer service, accounts receivable, or Adobe Photoshop.
Where on your resume should you include important skills?
Its crucial to incorporate important skills throughout your entire resume, beginning with your headline which should, when possible, include the most relevant keyword: the job title. You can also list skills in a dedicated skills section of your resume if using the hybrid resume format.
How do you find keywords to include in your resume?
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