This Halloween season, if you’re on the job hunt, beefing up your resume should be all treat—and no tricks!
It can be easy to get dragged down by some common resume pitfalls, however, which could put your profile at the bottom of the list—and that dream job just out of reach!
Looking to make your resume stand out? We have decades of experience helping job seekers find the best roles for their skills, experiences and goals—and that has given us some scary good resume tips! Here are a few of the best:
Keep it succinct
When trying to explain previous jobs or projects, it can be easy to dive into the details—but recruiters and HR managers don’t want to read a 10-page resume! Try to keep your job summaries as straightforward and simple as possible.
Highlight your impact
While you don’t want to go overboard on word count, you do want to zero in on how your work made a difference. Did a particular project you were involved with help increase company revenue? If so, state just how much! Were you part of a team that helped get a new project off the ground in record time? Include those details! Numbers, dollar figures and timeframes are all helpful at demonstrating your impact.
Make word choice a priority
There are active verbs and passive verbs—and resumes should include the former to really catch the reader’s eye. Instead of “did,” try “achieved”; instead of “started,” go with “created.” Your resume shouldn’t exactly read like poetry, but you definitely want to excite the employer about your potential.
Tailor your resume to the job
While it may crowd your cloud or desktop, you shouldn’t just have one standard version of your resume; instead, you can make small tweaks to it to better align with an individual job. Thoroughly read the job summary and tailor the resume you submit to what the employer is looking for. For instance, if it’s a clerical job and you haven’t held that title in a decade, move that job experience up to the top so the reader sees the relevance. In your objective, you can even use specific phrasing to describe your attributes and experience that line up with (though aren’t identical!) to what the employer is looking for.
Edit yourself!
Recruiters often have a lot of resumes to sort through—and they may cast yours right aside if there are glaring spelling or grammatical errors. These certainly can happen but take the time before submitting your resume to a potential employer to carefully read through the document, word for word. You can even pass it along to a friend or relative to have another pair of eyes look out for any errors.