Every hiring process requires employers to review the applicant’s resumes to know more about them and how they fit into the vacancy and the company’s culture. Your resume must be well-written because it goes to the employer before you and can create a good or bad impression of you before them.
Your resume must reflect crucial details about you, such as your education, relevant skill, and work experience. You should also consider having numerous resume versions tailored for the kind of roles you’re applying for. Here are a few tips you must use to write a compelling resume that can help you land a job.
- Make the resume direct and concise
Professionals at the best resume writing service would tell you that the first rule of resume writing is to keep it concise and direct to the point. Generally, your resume shouldn’t exceed one page unless there’s a special reason to make it longer, such as having several relevant work experiences or an extensive career.
To keep your resume concise, ensure only to add recent and relevant information. Even if you learnt a lot from your first jobs, you don’t have to add all the details in your work experience to make the resume shorter.
- Include keywords from the job posting
To write an excellent resume, start your preparation from the job posting you read and are applying for. You must tailor-make your resume for each application, including adding relevant keywords from each job posting so that you’re viewed as an ideal candidate.
- Use a professional email address
Your resume’s email address is crucial information since it’s how the company will contact you. It’s a part of your contact information at the top of the resume, so it’s highly visible. Hence, you have to make it very professional. Don’t use nicknames or play names such as ben4all@gmail.com. Your email address must be professional and include your full name, such as Benmaguire@gmail.com.
Unprofessional email addresses and funny usernames shouldn’t be near your professional resume. Use your first and last name to create your email address with modern providers such as Gmail.
- Use short bullet points
Using bullet points to highlight crucial information on your resume is important as it directs the reader to a themed list and makes the resume more readable. Given that recruiters have to go through hundreds of resumes daily, they don’t have time to read through a block of texts. Make sure they can see the most important information in one glance of your resume. They only spend a few seconds scanning through each resume, so it’s for your good that your information is easily readable. Instead of paragraphs, use bullet points to highlight relevant skills, accomplishments, and experience.
- Put the relevant information first
You may have an extensive list of work experience or educational degrees, but when writing your resume, ensure that you include only information relevant to the post you’re applying for and put them in their order of relevance. Remember that a hiring manager will not spend several minutes reading your resume. Experts believe that hiring managers only spend 6 seconds on each resume. So if you include old and irrelevant information in your resume, you’re unlikely to get the job. You’ll only be distracting them from the main point of your resume.
- Use numbers to demonstrate results
When writing about your past work experience, you should use numbers to quantify your accomplishments. Using metrics gives the recruiter an idea of how much impact you had in your former workplace. For instance, if your former role as a sales representative, you can write your accomplishment as “Secured 5% conversion rate from over 50 daily cold calls.”
- Include months to the employment dates
When writing the date, you started and ended work at an organisation, ensure to add the months to prevent any suspicion in the hiring manager. For example, saying 2014-2015 doesn’t tell them how long you were at that workplace. It can be a month or two years.
Adding the minor detail of months makes your resume better. Saying January 2014 – October 2015, let the recruiter see that you were there for almost two years. It appears suspicious if you hide the months, so you should always add it.
- Check for grammar and spelling mistakes
You’re competing against hundreds of people for one role. It’s wise not to get disqualified over something very little. So, make sure that there are no spelling or grammar errors in your resume. Most hiring managers write the candidate off after spotting these errors.
Writing a resume requires you to be meticulous in your approach to getting a job. Read through the resume as often as you need to and give it to others to read again. You can’t be too sure until you’ve sent it to the recruiter.
Conclusion
Without a solid resume, it would be difficult to land a good job. So you must learn to write a good resume by following the tips in this article.