There are three things that every resume should aim to do, regardless of your level of experience, or which industry or position is at hand. These are tools which will help you maximize the way employers and recruiters scan through your document, ensuring you can get as much information across in as short of an amount of time as possible.
This quick video will walk you through each of these tips!
If you're ready for more information, here are two related blog posts with more resume tips, or reach out for a free consultation to ask questions specific to your situation:
When you're writing your resume, there are three things you want to do, regardless of what industry or position you're applying to. Those three things are to start with strong action verbs, be as results-oriented as possible, and quantify when possible. In this video, I'll go into more detail about what I mean by each of those things.
The first tip is to start with strong action verbs. I highly recommend using bullets on a resume instead of using the paragraph format when describing experience due to employers only may have time to give your resume a very quick scan. Using a paragraph format is really, really dense to read.
When using bullet points, start each experience listed with one strong action verb. Phrases you want to avoid using are, responsible for or assisted because they lead the employer to assume you're about to give a laundry list of unimportant information, or that you didn't contribute much assistance at all. If you used the word “assisted” because you weren’t the only one working on the project, you can add you were doing the task with a team or in collaboration with a colleague.
Starting with a strong action verb will give the employer the opportunity to get valuable information in a short amount of time. If you have trouble thinking of action verbs, a lot of career service offices have resume guides, with a whole laundry list of strong verbs to use. When in doubt, don’t forget to utilize a thesaurus.
The second thing every resume should have is the tendency to be result-oriented. If you scan through your resume as it is now, I guarantee you have what's called a “so what” bullet. A “so what” bullet is where you're describing something you did, but the reader is left wondering,
“so what” was the point of that? What was the intention or goal? What impact did that have on the place of employment?
Be sure to add a lot more value by talking about what the purpose or the intention of your activity was, and what it was used for. Another important thing to note here is that some people have bullets like this because they left an employer or a job without seeing the project through. And that's okay! You can still add value by talking about what the intended goal or result was, and what your actions were used to contribute to. I invite you to look through your resume and look line by line and see if there's any room to add a bit more results-oriented context to your experiences.
The third thing every resume should do is quantify when possible. Numbers really stand out in a resume, and they can also show more of a description or more gravity to what you're doing. For example, if you delivered presentations to classes talking about X, Y and Z, that's great to list, but it has a lot more impact if you say something like “I delivered presentations to up to 500 attendees discussing X, Y, and Z. Understand it's not always possible to add numbers, but if you've been in a sales role and you exceeded goals, brought in a certain amount of revenue, or worked on deals, those are all places where you can add some of these numerical pieces of data to showcase to an employer the scope of your work.
And that's it! Those are the three biggest things you should do on every resume, regardless of what industry field or type of role you're applying to. If you have other questions about resumes, feel free to leave me a note in the comments below. And if any of your friends are working on their resumes or job searches, feel free to share this video with them as well.
