5 Surefire Ways To Enhance Your Professional Resume
When trying to achieve your dream job, the most crucial tool you'll need is your resume. Your resume will serve as your advertisement, which you'll use to sell yourself to different hiring managers and recruiters. It must include sufficient information regarding your educational background, personal details, work experiences, and other skills for the job you're trying to get.
Meanwhile, if your resume fails to convey enough information about your skills or doesn't meet the hiring manager's requirements, you can expect that you won't be shortlisted for an interview. And so, keeping your resume up to date is essential. Your resume should highlight unique details about you that will surely grab the recruiter's attention and possibly earn you a spot for the interview.
However, the hiring process can be competitive, so you need to find ways to ensure you stand out among the other applicants. To boost your chances of landing more interviews, here are five surefire ways to enhance your professional resume.
1. Highlight The Skills And Expertise The Company Needs
You may have already highlighted all the skills, capabilities, and experiences you have in your previous resume. But when incorporating these details, you need to ensure that these skills and experiences are relevant for your chosen job to apply. For instance, if you've experienced volunteering and offering help in Tanzania or other countries with volunteer work, that may be relevant, especially if you're applying for a position in the medical and healthcare industry.
Meanwhile, if you've experienced working as a part-time bartender or waiter, that skill may be relevant in the hotel and restaurant industry. If you're bilingual or multilingual, that may be beneficial for the tourism industry. Showcasing the right skills and achievements will surely make yourself unique and impressive for the hiring managers. To help you understand which skills to highlight, take your time to understand the company's requirements.
2. Streamline And Improve Its Readability
Aside from the content, the overall style and structure of your resume will also affect its presentation. Despite showcasing your relevant skills for the position, submitting a messy and unstructured resume will only give an impression to the recruiters that you're a disorganized and unprofessional candidate. Thus, you need to ensure you're paying equal attention to how you present your resume and how you structure its layout.
To do this, make sure you use margins, indention, and formal font style, and font size. See to it that the font size isn't too small or too big. It's also ideal if you use headings and subheadings to organize your content effectively. For the content, avoid using terms or phrases that are considered informal or inappropriate inside the workplace. Lastly, when putting your content together, see if you're putting repetitive information, as this could make your resume look like an essay.
3. Remove Unnecessary Information
When you were creating your resume for the first time, it’s understandable if you’re trying to fill its space with so many irrelevant details due to the lack of experience or skills. Perhaps you’ve packed your resume with unnecessary information like hobbies, social media profiles, religious beliefs, or political leanings. Considering that you have a few years of experience or skills, now’s a good time to go through your old resume, remove irrelevant details, and make yourself more employable.
Getting rid of any details you know won’t be helpful for the position you’re applying for. Moreover, it’s also recommended to eliminate those cliché phrases like ‘can perfectly work under pressure’ or ‘passionate and sales-minded person.’ Remember, you must keep your resume one page long, especially if you have low experience. If you have five to seven years of experience, a two-page resume should suffice.
4. Focus On Facts And Figures
If you wish to show the recruiters how valuable you are as a candidate, you need to add more facts and figures to your resume. Some good examples would be:
Trained fifteen interns during my work as...
Graduated second in my class..
Elected as ‘President’ for the organization...
Supervised 300 employees during my role as...
Sold over 500 products for...
To strengthen these facts and claims, bringing certificates and other relevant documents can also help recruiters see you as a unique and standout applicant.
5. Always Proofread
You’ve probably heard these numerous times, but you might be surprised how there are still many people who get their grammars and spellings wrong in their resumes. No matter how well-structured your resume is or how much experience you have, your incorrect grammar and misspellings could break your chance of getting an interview. Grammatical errors will instantly give them an impression of your unprofessionalism and sloppiness.
So, always take time to re-read your resume numerous times. Moreover, don’t just rely on online spellchecks as they cannot catch and correct everything. Better yet, you can let someone else proofread and re-check your resume for you, as different perspectives can help catch mistakes easier.
Takeaway
Every day, hundreds and thousands of applicants are searching for jobs the same as you are. Taking the time to enhance your resume with these five surefire ways can help boost your chances of getting hired and landing your dream job. So, start updating your resume today!
