Building A Better Resume In 3 Easy Steps
Olivia Attwood
Certified Professional Resume Writer ● Career Coach ● Executive Resume Writer ● MBA, BEng, CPRW, CPCC
Your resume is the most powerful tool you have in the competition for a much-coveted job title. The more polished your resume is, the better it is for your chances of getting hired.
With our 10+ years of experience in the professional resume writing service industry, we have come across thousands of resumes that fall short of the mark due to certain errors.
Before you send out your resume one more time, you should sit back and take a moment to ponder whether your resume really has what it takes to win the competition.
If not, these tips can certainly help you make your resume better:
Your resume must be a narrative of your amazing achievements, not a list of boring job duties
A majority of hiring managers agree that the work experience section has the biggest sway over their decision to hire a candidate or not. Sadly, most resumes we have received over the years lack a well-written work experience section.
When it comes to listing your work experience, everything including your wording, the content, and the formatting matters. Most applicants simply list piles of job duties they’ve performed at previous jobs and call it their work history.
The thing is, when you apply for a particular position, employers generally assume that you know how to do things. However, no employer is looking forward to hiring a person who can barely get the job done. When they look at your resume, the employer wants to feel assured that you will get the job done perfectly, with impeccable results.
What better way to prove your worth than use your professional achievements to write the work experience section of your resume? Use specific sentences that show the employer the results you achieved and the skills you used to achieve them.
Want to go a step further? Wow, your readers by mentioning the awards and recognition you’ve won while at each job title of your career history.
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Treat your resume as the storybook of your career journey
What makes a book an informative book is its content and writing style. The same goes for your resume. Your resume will be considered a good read by the employer when it allows them to have a glimpse into the best of your professional journey.
Never let your resume sound inhuman and detached. Allow it to voice your thoughts and qualities. We have noticed that most applicants tend to write resumes that seem entirely robotic, without even a trace of the individuality of its owner.
If your resume only lists a couple of technical qualifications, educational qualifications, and professional skills, your employer does not stand much of a chance to get to know the real you before they decide on hiring you.
When writing your resume, you must always let your best qualities shine through the words and impress the hiring manager.
A resume is useless if it is not highly specific to you
We believe that you must never add a sentence to your resume if the same one can be used to describe 5 other people in the applicant pool. Why waste valuable resume space repeating cliched sentences that have been uttered a million times before?
Instead, focus on making your resume the most specific description of your career that an employer has ever read. Don’t just say that you got results. Say how you got the results, what the result was, when you got it, and why you got the result. This allows the employer to see many other talents that might go unnoticed otherwise.
Numbers play a significant role in making a resume specific to an applicant. Don’t simply use dollars saved on the resume, also talk about how big of a percentage it was and how you could direct that money elsewhere to make more profit for the business.