Use Similar Terms And Address Every Required Qualification
Your experience needs to address every required qualification in the job announcement. Hiring agencies will look for specific terms in your resume to make sure you have the experience theyre seeking.
For example, if the qualifications section says you need experience with MS Project you need to use the words MS Project in your resume.
Demonstrate Your Worth With Numbers
Hiring managers and human resources personnel love numbers. If you can highlight specific results with percentages throughout your resume, do so. If there’s any particular story or relevant experience that you can expand upon, your cover letter is the ideal place to do it. Consider your resume a sneak preview into your cover letter details.
Heres how to do it:
- Add numbers and percentages where you can
- Expand upon impressive results in a cover letter
- Dont forget volunteer work
Resume booster: When offering specific percentages or numbers to show off your results, be as specific as possible. For example, you might cover how you implemented a new system that improved data accuracy by 30% during a 12-week experiential learning opportunity.
Tips To Make Your Resume Stand Out For A 2021 Hiring
Talk to a MedCerts Education Consultant Today
Here at MedCerts, we love preparing students for real-world careers. Part of that process includes career exploration and finding the perfect job position to apply to once you have your new skills. And, if you’re planning for a new career path in 2021, now is the time to start getting your professional documents in order.
The first place to make changes? Your resume.
Taking time to edit your resume and add relevant experience can put your application on the top of the candidate pile. Since you won’t be there in person to share all of your marketable attributes the first time a hiring manager sees it, your resume has to do the talking.
Here are seven tips to make sure your resume stands out:
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What Should A Resume Look Like
December 3, 2020 | By Arseny Kaluzhinsky| Reviewed by Howard Davies
If your resume looks good, its more likely to catch the attention of hiring managers and be examined more closely. Use these tried-and-tested tips to create a resume that stands out for all the right reasons.
The example in this infographic shows you what a resume should look like. If youre still unsure how to transform your resume into one that looks like this, heres how to do it:
Which Resume Categories Do I Include
Organizing your resume is just as important as formatting it. Many resumes are put together by job seekers who arent sure of how to organize their information, resulting in a resume that lacks focus.
You always want to make sure that your categories are well defined and organized appropriately for not only who you are, but the type of resume that youre using .
Here are the categories that you need to include on your resume:
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Tell A Clear Story Of Your Career Path Even If Its Non
What many job seekers dont realize is that hiring managers read resumes to get a clear picture of a candidates career path. They want to know why you want the job.;
So, before submitting your resume to job boards, read over it to see if your career path makes sense. Have a friend do the same. See if it makes sense to them that youre applying for the roles youre applying to. If it doesnt make sense, I try mirroring some of the language in the job descriptions youre applying to. Ask yourself how your experience would make you great at those jobs. If youre able to communicate that, that your resume will make much more sense.
Your Resume Should Employ A Dash Of Color In 2020
;The most powerful resumes of 2020 selectively use color to distinguish core personal brand elements.
As an example, this Healthcare CEO and COO resume uses a single deep-blue tone to set off important blocks of information, coupled with shades of gray and some gold for contrast.
Straightforward in design, it allows for simple navigation through a highly technical career.
Not sure where to use color?;Start by changing one facet of the resume, such as your headings, for a fresh look.
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Why Is Resume Format So Important
As any good Interview Guys;student will tell you, a resume is a document used by job seekers to quickly and easily let a hiring manager know what skills they have, what their work history is, and any accomplishments they might have.
Seems simple, right?
Well, it is, but only if you know what youre doing. The tricky part of writing your own resume is its a deceptive document.
No, not deceptive as in you use it to lie to an employer about what you can do , but deceptive in that it seems like it should be really easy to write.
Trust me, its much easier to write a bad resume than a good oneand there are a LOT of bad ones out there, which, believe it or not, is a good thing.
Wait. Its good that there are bad resumes out there? That doesnt make any sense!
Yes, and the reason is, when a recruiter or hiring manager has to slog through a mountain of bad resumes, seeing a good resume is like a breath of fresh air. It stands out!
And if you follow our guide, that breath of fresh air resume is going to be yours!
But first, we need to figure out what type of resume format you need.
Use A Simple And Readable Design
To keep your resume readable for an employer, include some design elements in your resume that make it simple and easy to scan. You can easily achieve this by clearly marking the headings, using bullet points, keeping the paragraphs short and highlighting certain words by bolding or italicizing them.
Use a clean, professional font. For example, fonts like Times New Roman, Georgia and Tahoma are usually easy for most people to read. Make sure the font you choose has consistent spacing and looks good both on-screen and printed. Keep the font size between 9 and 12 points in order to maintain readability and presentation.
Use color strategically to make your resume visually appealing. For example, you might use a different color for headings and monogram the rest of the resume. You can also use color to draw in the reader to a certain important point. However, use additional colors sparingly. Selecting one color to use with a primarily black and white resume should be enough.
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Spelling And Grammar Mistakes
Always proofread your resume before you send it out! This includes double checking your contact information. It wont do you any good if you have the perfect resume and employers who want to hire you if they keep calling the wrong number or emailing the wrong email. Double check! Thencheck again!
Similarly, dont forget about punctuation! According to the Cawley Career Education Center at Georgetown University, be consistent in your use of punctuation throughout the document. For instance, either use periods at the end of all your bullets or not. Great advice!
Shy Away From Buzzwords And Humor
Stay clear of terminology that might be understood within a firm where you worked previously but has no meaning to an outsider who reads your resume. These include jargon and acronyms. And if the skills you used in a former position arent transferrable to the one youre applying for, dont give them space on your resume.
Oh, and humor? Its best not to take any chances of coming across as unprofessional or immature. Hyperbole and colloquialisms may not translate in a resume. A summary at the top like this I need a job, pleeeeease may get an E for effort, but nothing else.
If you’re wondering what hiring managers consider red flags in resumes, read Things That Make You Go Hmmm.
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Past Achievements For Your Professional Summary
On the third line of your Professional Summary, you will list three to five phrases that describe your demonstrated past success. No need for numbers here as youll dive into that in detail in your work experience section, so here youre sharing the how of your High Scores. Any type of achievements or attributes for which you have received recognition are appropriate, and those that best demonstrate your mastery of your prior roles are best.
Summarize the three to five most important achievements of your recent career to make a concise case for why past success is indicative of future results.
Examples:
- FDA Review Expert Acquisition Identification Received 17 Patents
In 2020 Your Resume Can Use Custom Headings
Wondering what else your resume should look like in 2020? Dont forget the often-ignored section headings.
You can custom-design these headings to represent your OWN brand. For example, sales wins could be shown under Sales & Market Share Results. If you lack formal education, you can still include an Education section titled Professional Development and Training. The idea is to explain your value-add with these descriptions.
If you are applying to online postings, however, submit a resume with standard headings , then follow up by sending your innovative resume version to a hiring manager.
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Use A Header To Present Your Contact Details
Begin your resume with an eye-catching resume header to ensure the hiring manager notices your application and can quickly find your contact details. For example:
Just having your name in bold at the top was acceptable in the early 2000s, but resumes should look more stylish nowadays to increase their chances of success.
To make sure your resumes information is presented well, use a resume template that features a good-looking header and a modern layout.
Your resume header should include your phone number and a professional email address. However, theres no need to include your mailing address on your resume. Hiring managers today contact candidates exclusively by phone and email.
Only add a local mailing address if your previous jobs were in other cities, and you want to reassure the hiring manager that youve moved permanently to your new location. In that case, pair your resume with a relocation cover letter.
Your Resume Needs Keywords To Pass Ats Systems In 2020
What else is important for your resume in 2020? You must appease BOTH the human reader and Applicant Tracking Software systems;with keywords matching your desired jobs.
To do this, gather several job postings that interest you, then extract each skill you possess from the descriptions . Aim for at least 30 skills, particularly those you see repeated for each job.
Add keywords by blending them into your job descriptions and achievement bullets to help draw attention .
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When To Use A Functional Resume
If you have one long gap or multiple employment gaps in your resume in the past five years, are a first-time worker or are drastically changing career paths, then consider a functional resume. By highlighting skills that transfer across industries and your most relevant accomplishments, you can emphasize the right qualifications for the position you want. This also prioritizes the information thats most important to a recruiter rather than focusing on a work history that doesnt align with the job.
In some cases, a functional resume might be too limiting. If you have some experience and few or no gaps in your employment history, a combination resume might be the right choice.
Make A Resume That Shows Impact
To prove youre worth a hiring managers time, highlight recent examples of what you bring to the table. Statistics that build upon your skills section are most impactful bonus points if they show a track record of growth, revenue, and profitability, Leavy-Detrick says.
If youre drawing a blank, she suggests adding resume skills that can help solve a problem area for the company youre applying to.
Impact doesnt always have to be measured by metrics, she says. Cultural improvements, special projects, customer growth anything that showed success can work.
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Add Your Remote Work Skills
Remote working skills became at once desirable in March of 2020, when COVID forced offices nationwide to close. Now that many employers are embracing remote work, its a good idea to include any work-from-home skills on your resume. Look closely at the job description to see if the company mentions any remote work collaboration tools like , Asana, Trello, etc. Include these keywords on your resume where applicable.
Titles And Employment Dates
Nows the time to be precise. No tall tales, fibbing, or fish-that-got-away stories allowed. Because youre dealing with history, you need to be rigorous with your presentation of the facts.
For each job, list your actual title, as it appeared in your offer letter or subsequent company promotion. It is quite important to be precise, as you are representing that you held this title at this company at this time. Small inflations can come back to bite you promoting yourself to regional sales manager;when you were, in fact, an account executive. Among the few things that companies review during background checks are titles, so it is both ethically and procedurally necessary to ensure that your resume matches the companys records precisely.
The common practice remains to include both month and year in the date. Personally, Ive long felt that year is enough, and we ought to drop the practice of including the month of your start and end dates on resumes. But the industry practice does not agree with my personal feelings on this, so you should stick with writing both the month and year for start and end dates. So January 2017 December 2020, for example, or Feb 2016 Apr 2020, both work.
Multiple jobs and promotions at one company require a careful presentation, both for the understanding of the people who will read your resume, as well as the software systems that will translate your resume into a storable version in the companys database.
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Choose The Right Formatting
There are three major formats to write a resume: chronological, functional and combination. Although most resumes follow a chronological format, the correct format may depend on the industry, your job title and personal preferences.
Restrict the length of your resume to a page or two. Depending on your work history, it may benefit you to focus on the most recent position you held and the most important educational qualifications you hold. Keep the descriptions about older jobs and less relevant qualifications as short as possible.
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Do Legal Resumes Have To Be One Page
Lawyers often ask how long their legal resumes should be. Many attorneys insist resumes can only be one page; others equally insist a lawyers resume cannot be longer than two pages. For most law students and junior lawyers, that means a onepage resume. For most lawyers, that means a two-page or three-page resume.
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What Is A Good Headline Or Summary For A Resume
A resume headline should be one brief phrase; it should not even be a complete sentence. The goal is to concisely state your value as a candidate; anything longer than a phrase defeats the purpose of a headline. Use keywords. Use keywords that demonstrate your skills or experience as related to the job application.
Social Work Resume Sections
You cannot write the ideal resume for social workers if you dont know what to write in your resume in the first place!!
Here is a list of all the sections that you should mention in your social worker resume:
- Header
For a highly detailed blog on resume sections, read Hiration’s 2021 Guide to sections in a resume.
Perfect your resume with Hirations Online Resume Builder to stand a high chance of getting shortlisted for the social work job that you have always wanted.
Our Resume Builder comes with a huge library of pre-filled social work resume template and many social work resume examples & social work resume samples that you can learn from.
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Social Work Resume: Profile Title
When you write your resume for social workers, there are some hard and fast rules that you should follow. We have mentioned them below:
- Your resume title should be written in the range of 14-16 font size
- It should be the second largest text in your resume after your resume header
- For example: If you are a social worker, your profile title should be written as Social Worker in 14-16 font size
Our below-mentioned social work resume example is the perfect example of what an ideal profile title should look like in your resume:
Work Experience: Show Your High Scores
From our experience at Ladders, the most successful resumes all have one thing in common: they display the past successes of the professional. One common resume error seen in less effective resumes is a reliance on listing job descriptions, duties, or staff size.
The High Score Resume approach to resume writing is to make each bullet a High Score. That means sharing, with numbers, how well you did at that part of your job. And it means bringing a players enthusiasm to how to you retell it.
A bit tongue-in-cheek, but when youre telling your friends, or if you were trying to join a team, you wouldnt say this:
But you might say this:
All high scores have numbers its easier that way for people to understand how good you were at Tetris, tennis, or tax strategies. Same for your past experience let your future boss know how good you were at the role, by providing your score. The High Score Resume constructs each bullet of your work experience with a success verb and a number whether it be units, a dollar sign or a percentage. Thats the most effective way to convey your past successes.
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