5 Insider Tips To Give Your Resume a Modern Makeover (with Examples!)

You want your resume to make the final cut to land you an interview for your dream job, and you know you need to up your game.

Like many people, you turn to Google for answers.

But when you search Google for tips on how to improve your resume, you find a lot of big promises, outdated advice, and conflicting information.

So, let me tell you the truth.

There are no magical tips, tricks, or strategies capable of turning a bad resume into a spectacular one. If you know your resume is bad, and you don't know how to fix it, the best investment you can make will be to hire the services of a professional resume writer.

But if you have an "okay" resume and want to take it from average to good, or even good to great, these 5 valuable insider tips can help make that happen.

Time for Your Resume Makeover

Making over your resume using updated resume writing best practices will improve your job search results.

It will help you get past the computerized applicant tracking systems (ATS), and more importantly will ensure you “wow” the person on the other end of that ATS.

It will give your resume a facelift, improving eye-appeal and making it easier to read.

The best makeovers will also take your resume content to the next level, compelling the reader to pick up the phone and call you for an interview, because you so clearly understand their needs and have the proven ability to meet them.

How can you makeover your resume in this way? Here are 5 easy changes that you can implement today.

#1: Be Clear About Your Resume Focus:

Do NOT include an objective statement. Objective statements are a thing of the past. However, the moment an employer picks up your resume, they must understand who you are, what you offer, and how you fit in their organization. How do you do this without an objective statement? Easy. Include a headline and possibly a sub-headline as the very first content on your resume following your name and contact information. A few examples:

#2 Include Results

Understand that an employer is making an investment when they hire you. Your resume must clearly and convincingly demonstrate how you will deliver a higher return on investment (ROI) than your competitors for that same job. Most employers are seeking ROI from their employees in terms of higher revenue, cost savings, efficiency or productivity increases, customer service improvements, etc. Fill your resume with quantified examples that illustrate how you have produced results in the past.

#3 Keywords are Essential

Keywords and key phrases are important, but the need for a separate keyword resume is another rule from the past. Assume every resume you send out will be put into an ATS and should be infused with keywords. In order to make it through the ATS into the hands of a human reader, your resume must include the keywords that are most essential in your targeted type of job.

Bonus tip: Find 6-12 job announcements for positions that match your target. Using a highlighter, go through each of them and highlight the terms describing the required and desired qualifications for the positions. These are the terms that will be used when searching the ATS for candidates. Make sure these terms are included within the text of your resume.

Write a keyword-rich summary section for the beginning of your resume:

Consider including a summary of qualifications to work important keywords into your resume:

Using keywords and key phrases to categorize your accomplishments is another good way to include more keywords in your resume:

#4 Don’t Date Yourself Unnecessarily

As a rule of thumb, when describing your experience, focus on the most recent 10-15 years. Avoid including dates on your resume that are more than 20 years in the past. Experience older than that is almost always less relevant, but if you have a strategic reason for including it, include a brief description without dates.

Just a simple statement of older experience, presented without dates, as shown in this resume, is all that is necessary.

#5 Enhance Eye Appeal

The need for a separate “scannable” resume is another rule from the past that many people are happy to hear is no longer necessary. Applicant tracking systems are far more sophisticated than they used to be and can handle most design elements with ease.

The ATS will skip over any graphic elements you have included, such as a chart or callout box and just move on to the text. As you've seen from the examples in this article, this gives you great flexibility in designing your resume to improve its appearance and readability.

Selective bolding or italics, strategically applied white space, discriminate use of shading, graphic lines, and bullets are all readable by today’s modern ATS and will greatly enhance the visual appeal of your resume.

Shaded callout boxes are an easy way to draw the reader to key information while improving your resume eye appeal.

Adding a simple graphic, shading, and conservative color can be enough to make your resume stand out and get attention in a sea of black and white resumes.

Learn to use the charting and graphing features in Microsoft Word. Charts and graphs are another great way to modernize the look and feel of your resume.

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