If your goal is to make a favorable impression on a prospective employer, crafting a strong resume is essential. The sooner you work on your resume, the more time you’ll have to perfect it and ensure that it paints you and your experience in a positive light.
By following these resume writing tips, you can stand out from the crowd, get called for interviews, and land the job of your dreams.
1. Tailor Your Resume to Each Job
While tailoring your resume to each job may take some time and energy, it is often well worth it. You can create a master resume that outlines all of your accomplishments, skills, and talents and use it to craft a unique single resume for each position that peaks your interest.
2. Highlight Your Accomplishments
Although it’s great that you managed the sales department at your last position, listing this on your resume won’t necessarily get you noticed. If you want to catch the attention of hiring managers, it’s crucial to highlight your accomplishments. Accomplishments such as “saved $100,000 year over year,” or “exceeded sales goals by 15%” show that you are results-driven and can provide real value to a company.
3. Incorporate Keywords
In today’s world, hiring managers screen potential candidates digitally by searching for keywords. Therefore, it’s important that your resume is filled with keywords that are applicable to the position and industry you’re applying to. For example, if you’re applying for a marketing manager position at a tech company, you should use keywords like “market research,” “direct mail marketing,” “brand strategy,” and “product management.”
4. Ensure a Visually Appealing Format
Believe it or not, the average hiring manager spends 6 seconds looking at a resume. If your resume is unprofessional, cluttered, and hard on the eyes, it’ll likely get overlooked. Be sure your resume has bullet points and an appropriate amount of white space. It is recommended not to use fonts like Arial, Comic Sans, or Times New Roman. Instead focus on using fonts that are more up-to-date, such as Calibri, Lato, Garamond, and Verdana. The font size that is best for the overall text is 10 - 12 and for headings, 12 - 14.
5. Ask for Help
If you’re lacking confidence in your resume writing abilities and hoping for some professional guidance, don’t be afraid to ask for help. Doing so may mean the difference between getting ignored and landing an interview. A great place to start is reaching out to a career coach.
Check out REA’s Flexible Coaching Services to help you succeed in your job search!