Top 5 Things to Change on Your Resume Before You Hit 'Apply'

Has it been 10+ years since you've looked at your resume, let alone updated it? Recently impacted by the wave of tech layoffs and wondering how to stand out among a sea of highly qualified candidates?

If you're stuck on how to start tweaking your resume, consider these five top tips. I often find myself repeating them to resume clients as I work through my reviews, so I thought sharing them briefly here would be useful for folks currently , in order of how they'd normally appear on your resume.

Take 30 minutes to do these, now:

1. Include a link to your LinkedIn profile.

Add your LinkedIn profile to the top of your resume, near your email address (and make sure your LI matches your resume content or otherwise complements it in some way!). To create more white space, you can cut your home address or city/state. Stick to phone number, email address, and hyperlinked LI profile.

I also have lots of LinkedIn tips, but too many to list here! Here's a great Forbes article from a couple of years ago with really relevant ideas from career counselor Robin Ryan.

2. Build out a stellar Professional Summary.

Add a "Professional Summary" at the top of your resume that outlines in 2-3 sentences the main reasons employers should hire you, along with a summary of your experience (e.g., "A motivated marketing and sales professional with X years' experience who has done Y and Z, looking for ...).

Pro tip: When you're applying to jobs, save/store all those links to ads so you can refer to them for keywords or phrases! You can sprinkle these throughout your resume as applicable (without lifting content), such as borrowing a well-written description of a job duty you performed and using it in your Professional Summary, Work Experience or Skills.

3. Keep your Work Experience concise and impactful.

I edit a lot of current/former journalists' resumes, and while we've likely written thousands of ledes and nutgrafs, you'd be surprised at how long it takes to get to our own point when we're talking about ourselves! But maybe that's also just me.

Keep the bullets on your Work Experience to a maximum of five. Lead with your impact and include metrics (at least one) in every role. This could be exact or estimates (e.g., "Increased productivity ~10% over 6 months"), but also doesn't always have to relate to achievements if you don't have specific examples but it's still worth sharing (e.g., "Led a team of 8+ direct reports"). Just start to think of numbers, and include them. Every experience should lead with a strong action verb, and once you've reached a point where anything else feels unnecessary to include outside of an interview or it's older than 10 years, move it to your LinkedIn —?it's endless scroll, just like Google SERP results right now (har har, marketing joke).

4. Add more Skills.

If you think you have enough, you probably don't. If you list "Communication" as a skill, remove it. Everyone should be communicative, collaborative and detail-oriented (they aren't always ...), but soft skills like these can live in your Professional Summary instead if they're a natural part of your work personality and authentic self. My Professional Summary should probably highlight my "impeccable organization skills," but I don't want people to think I'm incredibly rigid or not fun to be around (another bad joke).

Pro tip: Don't forget to look at job ads for keywords where they include skills, and incorporate them as applicable in your Work Experience or Skills sections! Seriously, do this.

5. Stop using a PDF.

I know, I hate this, too. I had a really pretty resume I designed in Canva once, in my favorite color (teal), but had to ditch it after applying to hundreds of jobs after being laid off and not hearing back from nearly as many as I should have.

Never apply to a job online with a PDF — always use a .doc format, as PDFs aren't often adequately read by Applicant Tracking Systems, which are used by 95% of Fortune 500 companies. You'll likely see responses from employers go up just with this simple change if you're currently still tinkering with a PDF version of a resume. Save it for emailing the hiring manager or others directly if they ask for it! I also have referred people to work at my company using an online referral system and .doc format, then sent their nice PDF resumes directly to the hiring manager for them.

Do these tips resonate? Anything else you're seeing out there? I'd be remiss if I didn't give credit to Indeed, where I've learned so much the past two years reading and editing hundreds of articles on our Career Guide for job seekers worldwide. A lot of these tips also were generated from my personal experience applying to jobs over the years, especially after a layoff right before the start of the pandemic and working contract roles in tech.

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