Your Resume

Why aren’t people calling me back for jobs? This is a question that we often ask ourselves after throwing out our resume to a bunch of different job sites. This time can be very demoralizing and make you feel like nobody wants to hire you. As humans, we naturally want to feel excepted. This is even more true for those of you out there with college degrees. I have some advice for you job hunters out there. These tips will be on resume preparation. Some of you may have heard some of these tips, and for some this will be new information. Here we go:

1.      Tailor your resume to the position you are applying to. This is how a lot of potential candidates eliminate themselves from the position they are applying to. If you are applying to an IT position with a company you should have language specific to the IT field. An easy way to tailor your resume to the position is to look at the job posting and tailor your resume to the requirements. An example would be a job posting that has a requirement “Maintains daily and weekly statistics for individual direct reports.” A supervisor with experience would say on their resume “developed and update spreadsheet composed of employee metrics”. The job description talks the talk, now you must show that you can walk the walk.

2.      Ensure that you can speak to all the accomplishments on your resume. Often, I advise many clients on the language on their resume. For example, look at the example that I used in my first point. If you do now know what it means to develop and update a spreadsheet do not mention it on your resume. Think of your resume as a foreign language that you must translate for a visitor to your country.

3.      Do not spend more time on making your resume fancy. This is called formatting: the layout of your resume. Do not add fancy bullet points, or fancy fonts. Your resume should be easy to read in a basic font. You can highlight a few things by underlining something or putting something in bold lettering. Something simple to remember: Bold Bullets Win (BBW). A resume that is simple with bold and bullet points is a winning resume.

There are many other factors that go into putting a resume together, but these are some of the basics. We will continue to educate and provide advice to those of you out there who are trying to put together a winning resume. Good luck on your job search and remember slow progress is better than no progress!