Time to Give Your Resume a Spring Cleaning
Spring naturally lends itself to decluttering and cleaning up messes. Homeowners start working in their yards. Apartment dwellers throw out useless stuff. Spring is an excellent time to clean up your house, but it’s also an excellent time to clean off your desktop or smartphone by getting rid of those useless apps or videos you never watch.
Spring is also a good time to do some housecleaning on your job search. You can start by cleaning up your resume. Here’s how to do it.
Spring Clean Your Skills
Your resume is still the point person that can open the door to a job or slam it in your face. You have about 10-seconds to get the attention of the recruiter, and that’s after you’ve survived the culling by their applicant tracking system database. Your resume needs to be neat, concise, and sharp, but also exciting and easy to read.
That’s a lot of points to hit in just a couple of pages!
Start by spiffing up the first 25% of the first page, which is so very crucial to the initial hiring process. Do not lead with a lengthy overview; we promise the recruiter already knows you’re looking for a job. Make the overview or summary under your resume header snappily concise, with no more than two sentences. Skip the idea of an objective and instead focus on your results. Lead with things like:
- Boosted revenues by 25%.
- Created a new initiative to improve the supply chain that’s still in use today.
- Led a team to complete a project on time and under budget by $10,000.
Rethink your resume as less than a listing for your experiences and more as a way to get the interview. To do this, you must showcase the results of what you’ve accomplished. Don’t clutter your resume with a picture or use a lot of industry jargon that doesn’t mean anything.
However, do use keywords, which you can cull directly from the job you’re applying. Using keywords (don’t oversaturate, just use a little pepper, not the whole shaker) is essential. The recruiter will use their database to search for resumes that fit within the parameters of the job description. You want to be sure your resume is picked up and placed (virtually) in front of the recruiter.
As you’re cleaning up your resume, make sure you cover the basics, like spell checking and formatting the document. Grammarly.com is an excellent free tool for spell checking that extends beyond the basic spell checking in Word or Google Docs.
You should also eliminate older skills. Generally, anything past the 10-year mark is outdated. If you’re a more experienced candidate, an eight-page resume that goes back to 1992 isn’t necessary. Go for a solid two-page 10-year resume that highlights your most modernized skills that fit the job. To save space, skip the “references available upon request.” The recruiter knows this already.
Need Assistance Cleaning Up Your Resume?
One great way to spring clean your resume is to send it over for a no-obligation review from a Custom Group recruiter. We help candidates highlight their best skills to land interviews with top employers. Call on us today.
