A resume is your professional highlight reel - presented in an easily understood and standardized format.
Your resume needs to solve a problem for employers (which is why they’re hiring). It is your most important tool to landing an interview, and ultimately a job.
There are three standard resume layout types.
Which type of resume layout is best depends on the situation. For each job application, choose the layout that best represents you in the context of the job you're applying for.
Long gone are the days when recruiters and employers sit in uninterrupted silence and carefully read multi-page resumes from cover to cover. Nowadays, interruptions and distractions are the norm, and recruiters' time is increasingly crunched.
90% of large corporations use Applicant Tracking Software that to manage their recruiting process, which means you need to get through an automatic screen before your resume is even seen by an employer. If you make it past that step, studies have shown that recruiters spend 6 seconds on average reviewing a resume.
Studies show that recruiters spend on average 6 seconds looking at a resume.
They need to quickly pull out key facts, and make a split second decision that could decide your future. We think there are two key resume guidelines you need to keep in mind when building your resume.
Does your resume pass the 7-second test? Recruiters only spend 7.4 seconds reviewing your resume before moving it to the 'YES' or 'NO' pile.
If you pass the test, you still need to hold their attention to make it to the next steps. Your resume needs to be sharply focused, compelling, and entirely relevant.
If you're unsure about your career objective or haven't quite settled on a goal, you'll find that writing a powerful and effective resume is extremely difficult.
Remember, your resume must present just the right mix of meaningful information relevant to your goal.
Without a goal, you don't know what information to include, what skills or successes to highlight, and what details to omit. You're forced to include everything, and the end result is usually a resume that does not capture interest because it's not focused.
Have a clear goal before writing your resume. Employers want to know what you want to do; it's not their job to figure that out. Take the time to define a goal (or multiple goals) before writing your resume.
Once have a clear goal for your resume, move on to the next step.
In the context of your resume, "who you are" usually refers to a job title.
Are you a Software Engineer?
Corporate Finance Executive?
Customer Service Representative?
Be sure to include this critical information right up front, as a headline or in the first sentence of your introduction. Your goal is to immediately communicate to employers the essential information that creates the context for everything else they will read in your resume.
For example, if you define yourself as a "Sales Professional," employers will be looking for key qualifications such as sales results, communication skills, relationship-building abilities, territory management experience, and so forth.
If you define yourself as an "Accountant," they'll be looking for something entirely different accounting and finance experience, knowledge of accounting software, attention to detail, and strong analytical skills.
By defining yourself up front, you establish expectations and help readers better appreciate and absorb the information that follows.
Study the job description and decipher what problems the employer wants solved. Employers don’t care about you. They care about solving their problems. This is the only reason why they are posting a job. Get into their heads, and try to understand their pain.
Why are they posting this job? Who is the ideal candidate for the job? Which skills does the ideal applicant have?
Write down a brief description of the ideal applicant in the third person, all the way down to what they’re wearing. This will help you decide how to represent yourself when creating your resume.
Having defined your "ideal self," consider what information you can place "front and center" on your resume to support your claim. What credentials, qualifications, experiences, knowledge, and accomplishments do you possess that will prove you are, in fact, an effective Marketing Management Professional?
Your goal is to create a "snapshot," a capsule portrait that conveys the most essential information to your readers. In essence, you want to quickly portray that you are an ideal candidate for the types of jobs you are pursuing.
In your job search, you will need to create a distinct resume for each job application. This enables you to do the following:
To make this easy, start by building a Master Resume to work from. This will be an ever-evolving resume that contains all your work history, accomplishments, and skills that you can tailor for each application.
Let's start building a Master Resume.
