Crafting Resumes That Get Calls, Not Just Glances

In our recent Job Challenges Survey (report), we uncovered the five most formidable hurdles job seekers face today:

1. Preparing for interviews (part 1 and part 2)
2. Finding suitable job openings
3. Crafting a compelling resume and/or cover letter
4. Juggling your current job responsibilities while actively seeking a new job
5. Handling job application rejections or non-responses (i.e., managing stress)

This week I want to share with you how to solve problem No. 3 - Crafting a compelling resume that results in more interview invitations.

If you’d like to read previous articles, click on links No. 1 and No. 2 above.

Introduction

Your resume is not just a piece of paper. It's a marketing document that can help you stand out from the crowd; you just have to follow some simple steps to optimize it.

First and foremost, we must acknowledge the tremendous pressure recruiters face - they can get several hundred resumes within 24 hours of posting a job.

So, our primary goal with resume writing is to make it easier for recruiters to "see it" in the tidal wave of other resumes.

Think of it this way: the perfect scenario would be hiring the first person to apply for the job. It would make the job of recruiters and hiring managers 10x easier.

Unfortunately, there's no such thing as perfection, but we can always work toward it and help our recruiters as much as possible.

The primary purpose of your resume

Your resume has one goal - to get recruiters to want to call you.

It should demonstrate as clearly as day why you are the best candidate for the job within 5 to 7 seconds. That's how long recruiters can afford to look at a single resume before deciding if the candidate is qualified.

To accomplish this, your resume should be more than a list of your previous roles. Let's talk about 7 simple steps to turn your resume into an unignorable attention grabber.

1. Clean, Clear, and Simple Formatting

Remember the primary goal of your resume: to help your recruiters find the info they need and to call you for an interview!

Furthermore, the ATS system is designed to parse text from your resume, and it cannot do that if you have complex formating with pictures, graphs, or strangely-positioned text.

That's why you need to keep the formatting simple. I recommend a single column layout with the following sections in this particular order:

1. Contact info (city/state optional)
2. Summary - about you (optional but highly recommended)
3. Skills
4. Relevant work experience (or projects)
5. Education

If you are a new grad, your education should go first, but as soon as you have professional work experience, you should move the education down the list.

2. Keeping It Concise: The One-Page Rule

Keep your resume to a single page max. No one has the time to read an essay. It's okay to start with 2 or 3 pages but continuously revise until only the most powerful ideas are left and everything else is filtered out.

The simplest way to do this is to focus on your responsibilities (not those of your team), highlight the impact and metrics of your work, and talk about a background that shows your unique skills, talents, and interests beyond the workplace.

3. Focus on your achievements

Your recruiter and hiring manager are not interested in your team's accomplishments - they want to know your achievements!

In fact, your future employers genuinely care about what you can do for them if they hire you. The only way they can reach that conclusion is to look at your past accomplishments and try to project that into the future.

The best way to help them is to show your proud achievements and be unafraid of using the word "I." For example, instead of saying:

"We delivered our project 2 weeks ahead of schedule," you can say, "I worked on optimizing the ABC aspect of our project, which resulted in delivery 2 weeks ahead of schedule, a 30% increase in customer satisfaction".

If you are uncomfortable using the word "I" too often, simply omit it without changing the rest of the sentence like this: "worked on optimizing ABC aspect of our project..."

4. Quantifying Your Impact

You probably noticed how I included a "30% increase in customer satisfaction" above. That's one of the most important pieces of information in your resume because it shows 3 things:

1. Ownership - you act like an owner and care deeply about the results of your work
2. Impact - you understand the product and its metrics even after you finish working on it and move on to something else
3. Customer-oriented perspective - you care about the impact your work has on the end customer

Combined, these 3 traits are extremely rare and valued by employers because they show you are trustworthy - if they trust you with a project, you will deliver the results without causing headaches.

If you don't have these metrics, make the best estimate possible and back it up in an interview. You should never lie on your resume, but making an honest estimate is okay if you can explain the logic that helped you derive the numbers.

For example, "My company had 300,000 customers, and we estimate that about 30% of them saw the new feature based on the historical activity of our page".

Every project has a quantifiable impact, but sometimes, we must remember to ask for those metrics before moving on to another project.

Next time, ask around and find those metrics, and remember to include those numbers in your resume (without revealing company-sensitive data, of course).

5. Optimizing for Resume SEO

Your recruiters rely heavily on searching for skills in your resume; therefore, resume SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is critical to the job application strategy.

List your skills in your resume, even if you think you are "rusty" in certain areas. For example, if I ever worked with a tool or a piece of technology, I would list it in my resume, even if it's been years since I last touched it.

If my interviewer asks about that particular skill, I would honestly explain, "Yes, I used XYZ before, but it has been a while, and I would need to refresh my memory."

You can list your skills alphabetically or rank them in the order of strength, whereby your strongest skills go first, and the skills you know the least go towards the end. Look at the example above to see how I organized my skill section.

6. Final checks

Before you export your resume to PDF, make the final checks:

Is all of the spelling correct? Do one more read-through, or use Grammarly, ChatGPT, or another writing aid (plenty of those to choose from)

Do all of the links work? For example, if you have a portfolio website or any other website - click on those links and make sure they work. You don't want your recruiter to click on a link only to land on a non-existent page.

Is formatting okay? For example, are all of your fonts the same size? Are headings aligned with each other? Are margins the same? Little things like these show professionalism and obsession with details.

7. Use Google Docs or MS Word

You should write your resume with Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or another well-known text processing tool. You should avoid using image processing tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, or Figma because the resulting PDF may no longer be searchable.

I speak from experience: I once reviewed a beautiful resume created in Photoshop but couldn't search that document for text. It behaved like an image - there was simply no text to search for! Everything worked as intended after we re-created that resume with Google Docs and exported it into PDF.

Remember - recruiters and ATS systems rely heavily on keyword searching your resume. If you take that ability away, what will your chances be of passing to the next round? That's right - close to zero.

Conclusion

Crafting a resume that stands out requires a blend of strategic content, thoughtful formatting, and attention to detail. To turn your resume into an unignorable attention grabber, you should focus on the seven steps:

1. Clean and simple formatting
2. One-page max
3. Your own achievements
4. Impact and metrics
5. optimizing for SEO,
6. Final checks
7. Using a well-known text editor

Your next job opportunity could be just one standout resume away. Make it count!