What People Reading Your Resume Want You to Know
Resumes are highly personal documents and you probably feel like you want to convey a sense of who you really are. But if you focus on unnecessary frills or make your experience ambiguous, the person reading your resume will instantly throw it aside. Focus on clarity first!
This post was originally published on the Muse website .
In fact, whenever I go through a resume, I always ask permission before tagging it up. Who am I to edit your life’s work? However, I can almost guarantee you that the way your career counselor handles your resume is different from how it will be handled after you apply for a job. After speaking with many, many recruiters, I have learned some harsh truths.
Avoid overly flashy designs and focus on clarity
If your relevant experience, education, or skills are difficult to find at first glance, your resume may also be blank. It’s clear that you want your resume to look a little different from your typical resume, but getting creative in InDesign isn’t the best way to do it. As the head of human resources at Google states: “Unless you’re applying for a design or artist job, you should focus on keeping your resume clean and legible.”
In other words, no funky formats. It’s much better to take the time to maximize the top half of your resume. This could mean writing a resume with the most relevant qualifications, or perhaps highlighting all of your most relevant experiences in a separate section at the top of your resume and the rest in the Additional Impressions section. As long as you’re trying to maximize traditional resume formatting rather than doing something completely different , you should be safe.
Explain clearly why your experience is relevant to the job
If it is not immediately clear from your experience why you are applying, no one will connect the dots for you. Whether you’re changing careers or just applying for a lucrative position, if a recruiter’s first reaction to your resume is confusion, you won’t get far.
So, make sure you connect the dots for the reader. You probably have an idea of how your skills can be passed on, or why you are more qualified than your years of experience might seem. But, if you don’t put that on your resume, the recruiter probably won’t be able to piece the pieces together, and you’ll never get the chance to explain it in person.
One way to solve this problem? Using a simple objective formulation . While you definitely shouldn’t use an objective statement if you’re applying for a position that makes sense with your experience – or if it’s a cliché, “I would like to use my skills in an innovative, fast-growing organization” – if your experience is a little unusual for the job, which you are targeting, a short explanation may be exactly what will lead you to your interview. If there is an opportunity to better explain your intentions in the cover letter, then this is another option that should be considered depending on the circumstances.
Think what your resume looks like at a glance
If your resume is hard to read, it probably won’t be read at all. There is some debate about how much time a recruiter will spend reviewing a resume, but everyone agrees that it is less than 20 seconds. What does this mean for job seekers? This means that your resume should be as easy to read – more precisely, fluent – as possible.
Read: Don’t make the font so small that it is barely readable . It doesn’t matter how much more you can fit on your one-page pager if no one is reading it. And don’t let your bullet points drag on to that third line. Two is all you get, and most likely one is all you read. (Here’s a little more on how to make it easier to view your resume .)
Write for non-specialists, not specialists
If you are looking to get your resume in front of a hiring manager, you need to make sure you go through HR first. This means the layman can understand what you are talking about on your resume. It doesn’t matter if you’re managing complex supply chains, coding complex algorithms, or doing cutting-edge nanolaser research – none of your impressive feats will reach the appropriate hiring manager unless you can at least explain it that a non-technical HR representative can understand well enough. to put you on the right heap.
This means cutting down on jargon, providing proper context, and focusing on results. Use your job posting here to your advantage – find keywords and present your job the same way they do. I know the jargon can be quite fun to use and starts to get instinctive when you work with it long enough, but step outside your industry bubble for a little while and try to approach your resume as an industry outsider. The easier you make things for HR, the smoother the application process will be.
Always double check your contact information
Finally, don’t be the person who has everything a recruiter needs, but just can’t be contacted. Check, double check and check your contact information. Typos are always bad, but a typo in your contact information is probably even worse. It is very frustrating to notice the wrong email address a couple of months after looking for a job. Don’t let this be you.
5 Things People Reading Your Resume Would Like To Know | Muse