Working on your resume!

A resume is strategic documentation in this era of auto-shortlisting.

A resume is not a mere piece of document. It is documentation of your work and it is essential to do justice to the same for getting through the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that most companies use these days. More than 98% of the fortune 500 companies use the ATS. Here are some tips to tackle the ATS and have a robust resume:

1. Keep it simple: Use a simple template that a computer can read instead of the one with figures and pictures, keep the creative one, for face-to-face interviews.
2. Header: Name should be bold and clear followed by your contact details (email, phone, LinkedIn profile link, another profile link -blog, kaggle, etc)
3. Headline (optional): Should have your job title, years of experience, and a hook. For example Business Development Executive in FMCG, achieving 10% of my company's monthly revenue for the past 3 years.
4. Profile Summary: For those with some years of experience, include a profile summary. Showcase your experience, achievement, and your expertise. Try to tailor it to the Job Description you are applying to.
5. Career Objective: If you don't have much experience, including a career objective instead of the profile summary. Focus on your skill sets and how they are relevant to the Job Description you are applying for.
6. Work experience:

• Follow reverse chronological order while writing your experience.
• Use Bullet points.
• Present tense for the current role and past tense for previous roles.
• Use action verbs to begin the bullet point.
• Highlight your achievements and quantify them wherever possible. Example: Instead of: 'I look after the social media handle of X'. Write: 'Attained a 10% increase in traffic by the heightened customer resolution process.'

1. Education: Include the type of degree you have, your specialization, the name of the school, its location, and the year of graduation. In case you don't have much to write in the experience section then you can write about the courses you have done while completing that degree.
2. Skills: Perfect place to beat the ATS. Add the soft and hard skill keywords that were missed in the entire resume here. Aim to focus on skills that the employer is looking for by reading the Job Description thoroughly.
3. Additional Sections:

• Hobbies: Keep relevant hobbies. If it is chess then it showcases your ability to think, if it is music then it showcases your creativity, if it is collecting stamps then it can showcase your management ability.
• Certification: Put only relevant certification. If applying for an analytics role while you are a certified career coach may not make much sense.
• Key Projects: In case you are a fresher or do not have relevant experience to the firm that you are applying to then you may showcase the relevant skills by portraying the projects that you have worked on.

?There is no hard and fast rule on the resume length, but try to keep it under one page.