How to create a resume that will have recruiters jumping for joy

If you want to maximize your chances of landing a job interview, then you need to make sure you have a results-focused resume , tailored to the role, that looks attractive to the eye. Recruiters typically have 100s of resumes to look through and will only spend 10 seconds or so glancing at your resume before deciding whether or not to read it or throw it in the bin.

It sounds harsh to say this, but even if you are the best-qualified candidate for the job, your application is only as strong as your resume. If you don’t sell yourself powerfully (and immediately), you will have missed out on another great job opportunity.

The three key things to consider for resume success are content, appearance and relevance.

1. RELEVANCE

Your resume needs to be tailored for EVERY job you apply for. A generic resume will sometimes work for jobs in the same sector but can you really afford to take this chance and face missing out on the job of your dreams?

Tailoring your resume doesn’t take too long. Firstly, take a careful look at the selection criteria by reading through the advert or job description. Make a note of everything that the job highlights as important – be it technical expertise or personal qualities. These are the crucial elements that you need to make sure are somewhere in your resume.

Work out where the best place to highlight your suitability for this criteria would be. In the case of technical expertise, a bullet point section may be sufficient to highlight programming skills or familiarity with a particular piece of software. For most other criteria though, it is going to be specific examples that will demonstrate your suitability.

Here are some examples of what I mean:

• If you want to demonstrate leadership, you could just say that you are ‘a strong leader with experience of managing teams’ but wouldn’t it be better to be more specific and say that you ‘led a technical team of 6 in the planning, management and maintenance of a network infrastructure that supported over 500 agents in company A’s contact centre’.
• Similarly you could say you have experience of growing revenue and working with renowned clients or you could say that you ‘played an instrumental role in helping company ABC to grow business from $20k to $2 million whilst managing clients that included World Vision, Visy and Fujitsu’.
• What about where you need to demonstrate how you meet the job requirement for business process improvement and efficiency? You could be generic and vague or you could say something like ‘implemented a ‘paperless program’ by removing around 12 manual processes and replacing these with a suite of automated business processes that eliminated 75% of all printing costs’.
• Or, if you need to show off your policy skills, would saying you having skills in policy formulation be as powerful as say that you ‘worked closely with a member of parliament on a range of policies over 3 different election campaigns, utilizing legal and policy expertise to draft speeches and produce marketing materials’.

2. CONTENT

The previous section reinforced the important of creating tailored content whilst at the same time highlighting some key ways of structuring what you say. It is important to always try to be as specific as possible on your resume so that someone reading it can really understand the skills, knowledge and experience you have.

One way to help with this is to start off every sentence with an action related to what you specifically did and end it with the outcome or business benefit that resulted from your actions. Two examples here are:

• Conducted exploratory studies for three new radio stations, identifying information related to audience habits and music preferences – all three grew audience numbers as a result, including one radio station that gained 4 million listeners following launch to become the most listened to station in Singapore.
• Grew sales of a new drug (xxxx) to over $5 million in just 12 months by engaging extensively with large hospitals to demonstrate the medical benefits of the drugs for patients across the region.

Other action words include: led, managed, devised, delivered, spearheaded, co-ordinated, assisted, oversaw, pioneered etc

Make sure that you try and quantify your results whatever your industry. You may not work in a sales role where you can provide quantifiable figures demonstrating success, but you can think about the business benefits that resulted from you work. Did your actions improve business performance, drive up client numbers, contribute to enhance efficiency or help deliver an important project? Ultimately there must have been some positive outcome or there would be no point in a company asking you to do the work in the first place.

3. APPEARANCE

Getting the content spot-on so that every element of the resume provides value is important. Equally though, presenting this in a way that stands out and is easy to read is also important.

Simple things like using bullet points, boxes and appropriate spacing can ensure that the content is well-presented and easy to read. If you really want to stand out from the crowd though, consider applying other more sophisticated touches like a splash of colour, capitals and underlining for an even greater impact – check out the resume samples in my linkedin profile for some examples of what I am talking about here.

For a free review of your resume, send your document to me at steven@careerlicious.co.uk. If you are interested in boosting your job prospects and learning more about tips for success, feel free to connect with me or follow me on Linkedin.

Contact me today: hello@topjobcv.com