Perfect Your Resume with these 5 Tips
Posted August 26, 2013 & filed under Job Search, Resume
It is no secret that writing the perfect resume is crucial to the success of your job search. The secret to writing the perfect resume, on the other hand, is not so evident. While the details regarding format may vary from source to source, tailoring the content to a specific employer is a golden rule that should never be omitted.
Your resume should not be a simple work history complemented by a list of your skills. It should be a brief, powerful sales pitch describing who you are and what you are prepared to do for this company. When selling a product, sales reps do not simply regurgitate the specs of a particular product. Instead, they make their target audience understand why they need this product or service in their lives. It is your job to make hiring managers understand why they need you.
Follow these resume writing tips to help create the perfect resume that will leave hiring managers wanting to know more about you.
Nail the objective, or eliminate it completely
Including an objective has recently been labeled an archaic way of kicking off a resume and has thus become a topic of controversy in the resume writing debates. Regardless of which side of the argument you fall on, an objective should be the most powerful sentence on your resume. If you are going to lead off with, “To find a job where I can utilize my skills and grow,” then you are better off skipping the objective and diving right into your skills.
It is obvious that you want to find a job, otherwise you wouldn’t be writing and submitting a resume in the first place. Stay away from statements that boast generic and obvious goals to hiring managers. Should you choose to lead with an objective, make it one for the record books. Make it something that is tied to the company’s goals, and trumpets how you will lead them there. This should be your brand, your tagline, the one line in your arsenal that is going to cause the hiring manager’s ears to perk up. He or she should want to read on after seeing this.
Keep skills and qualifications relevant
The skills and qualifications should always be something that can and will benefit this company. So you have multiple years of experience with Six Sigma, which is great if the company employs or plans to employ that type of methodology. If they don’t, then you just wasted time telling them that you are skilled in something that is irrelevant to their operations. Conducting research into the company is of the utmost importance because it will tell you which skills you should highlight.
Once again, you want to avoid generic statements that hold no bearing on the goals of the company. If you have to resort to placing “fluency in Microsoft Word” at the top of your resume, it’s not going to leave the hiring manager with much hope that things will get better as he or she continues down the page.
Ask yourself, “so what?” As this is what the hiring manager will be asking while reading each statement. If you can’t elaborate on how your particular skills can help the company, then purge them from your resume without prejudice.
Espouse your skills with solid work history
Once again, relevance is the keyword here. Unless you are lacking a strong base of employment history, an engineering firm is not going to want to hear about your time in a department store. This section should be filled with positions that will allow you to elaborate on the relevant skills listed in the previous section.
This is where the show, don’t tell rule comes into play. You have already laid out what skills you have, now it is time to demonstrate how they contributed to your major accomplishments with previous employers. Your job history should not be a simple retelling of the responsibilities held at your last jobs. It should be a compelling narrative of what you accomplished with each employer, and all the while it should remain relevant to what you can and will do for this prospective employer.
Simplify your education
Not much effort should be put into this section. Layout your alma mater, your major/minor, your GPA, and the dates you attended the school. If you are looking for an entry level position and do not have much work experience, then reveal some relevant courses or projects that you completed.
Finish strong with everything else
Side projects, volunteer work, memberships, awards, certifications, publications, and anything else that is relevant to what you will be doing for this company should be included in this final section. Just remember to keep it brief, powerful, and show how they will drive this company forward.
By Kevin Withers
