Resume Tips That Will Help You Get Hired

A strong resume is one of the most important things that you can do to get an interview and get the best job for your skillset. The right resume will grab the attention of the hiring manager by highlighting your relevant skills and experience. 

Crafting a good resume will take time and you may need to work through a few drafts of the resume to help you get the work done. Some of the best resume tips you can use to help you get hired include:

1.     Only Use the Relevant Experience

You can have some flexibility with the resume as you create it. But keep in mind that it is a summary of some of your most relevant experiences and skills. This means that you may need to leave positions off the resume, especially ones where you were not with the company for a long time. 

For those who have worked for years in an industry, you can stick with the last 10 to 15 years of experience. These are the most relevant to the new position anyway. For those who have a shorter work history, you may need to put more information down to help showcase your skills. 

The goal of the resume is not to list out everything though. It is meant to be a synopsis of your work employment to give the hiring manager a look at some of the things you have done in the past. They can then determine if that experience is going to match up with the position they hire for. 

2.     Use Keywords

Recruiters do not have the time to go through every resume that comes their way. They will instead choose application tracking software to help filter out all the applications they have to find the perfect candidate. This can be even more prevalent for jobs that have hundreds of applications. 

A good way to make sure that your resume gets to that final round is to know which keywords are important and then add them to the resume. Review some of the keywords that are used in the job description and then include a few of them in your resume. 

The best way to make this work is to look at the tense and the format that a potential employer will use to describe the role and keep that same form in the resume. For example, if the employer used the term “project manager”, you could still get passed up if you use “project management” instead. 

3.     Limit to One Page

You do not want to make the resume too long. Hiring managers do not want to sift through pages of information to learn about you. If you can’t get the information on one page, it is time to make some cuts. 

Keep the resume as concise as possible to do this. There are very few times when you will be able to use more than one page and not drone on so make that your goal as you work on your resume. 

4.     Put the Relevant Experience on Top

Since the hiring manager potentially will only look at the resume for a few seconds, you do not want to hide the important information at the end of the resume. It is important to put some of the best accomplishments and experiences at the top. 

If there are certain skills or work experiences that you would like to show off, then you should put those as close to the top as possible. This should always find its way to the top third of the resume to help make it easier for a hiring manager to find it. 

5.     Use Strong Action Words

Be careful about using weak or passive words in the resume. And some overused phrases can turn off the hiring manager and make it hard for you to get the work you want. This means avoid those terms like utilized, oversaw, and hard worker. 

A better option to use here is to find strong action words. This helps to show that you are confident and may add a more decisive tone to the whole thing. Changing up some of the wording in your resume could be the trick you need to get things done. 

6.     Manage Gaps in Work History

If there are short gaps in your work history, then you need to manage this in an effective way. It can look bad on a resume to have these gaps, no matter what the original reason was. A good way to deal with this is to use years rather than exact dates for each position. 

For example, if you list one job as working there from January 2016 to October 2019 and the next job is listed as January 2020 to Present, you can see that there was a gap of a few months. If you list a job from 2016 to 2019 and the second job from 2020 to present, it is harder to see when the gap would have happened. 

7.     Use a Professional Resume Writing Service

Writing a resume on your own is sometimes a challenge. If you have applied to some jobs but are not seeing results with calls back for an interview, then it may be time to work with a professional resume writing service

These services can provide you with all sorts of help with your resume. They will take a look at your current resume, giving you advice on what is working and what may need some improvements. With a little bit of help, you can create a resume that will impress any hiring manager. 

Writing the Best Resume

The tips above are meant to make it easy to create the resume that you need to finally get that dream job. It is hard to beat out the crowds on some of the good jobs, but when you write a strong resume that showcases all of your skills, you can get the hiring manager to notice you above all the rest. 

Adam Hansen
 

Adam is a part time journalist, entrepreneur, investor and father.