A resume is one of the most important and most effective instruments when you are looking for a new job. However, it is impossible to create a perfect one. How so? Every candidate is unique and every job description is also unique. Writing a universal resume for every job position is not the best idea — the HR specialists will not even read it.
A good resume must help you to win the position with a higher salary than you had before. In this article, I’m going to tell you about 6 tips that will help you to build a better resume and possibly win your competitors. Try to implement them, and you will have a great advantage over others.
1. Show the recruiter your success
Your resume is not a set of separate blocks about your work, education, and training. A million-dollar resume is a resume that is built into a success story. What is a success story? It’s when you understand how your education, career path, all sorts of training and certificates, personal qualities and the position you’re looking for are connected. If there is no logic in these elements, the recruiter will skip your resume.
Your CV must include your progress (achievements) for each job. If it is not clear from the names of the positions and companies that you have changed, it should be seen in the description of responsibilities and achievements.
A good resume is a resume that has been written and rewritten. In its entire history (from the first to the last job), a resume can be rewritten up to 20-30 times. Besides, a first-class resume is a resume, where each phrase adds value to it.
2. Use only business language
I always pay a lot of attention to the language of my resume. It should consist of simple words and expressions, there should be no formalism (the same words copied from your job description), your phrases should be written by you and not copied from the Internet. All sentences should be short enough, without complicated and complex structures.
3. Unite many working places into one
The norm is if a person has been working for the company for 2-3 years. If a person changes jobs more often, he or she may be called a job hopper. Recruiters do not like such people, as about 70% of customers refuse to consider such candidates. And this is quite natural.
A person after a year of work is only beginning to benefit the company. Of course, everyone has the right to make a mistake, and in a good resume can be a couple of places where the candidate has worked 1-1.5 years. But if this is how a resume looks like, then its value is very low.
However, it often happens that a person changed several positions in one company or moved from one company to another within the holding structure. Or he was involved in project work, in which he changed several employers.
In such cases (and wherever possible), I recommend that this is one place of work, with one name and general work dates. And inside this block, it is possible to show change of positions in a way the recruiter could not get the impression that you changed the work very often.
4. Tell about your personal qualities
Now more and more attention is paid to the personal qualities of the employee when selecting candidates. If you analyze what you will be evaluated at the interview, you will most likely be so:
40% — professional knowledge;
40% — personal qualities;
20% — motivation (the desire to do exactly this job in this company).
Personal qualities include energy, openness, teamwork skills, initiative, proactivity, and so on. And it’s not just words anymore, you will hear such a question more and more often at the interview: “Tell us about the situation in which you had to take responsibility and how you coped with it”. This is called a competency-based assessment.
Therefore, your personal qualities, especially if they are similar to those required for the job, are very important. And if before it was enough to list them, now it is not enough. Now it is necessary to confirm them, so I recommend that you write them in the following way (of course, you give your examples, a mandatory rule: they should all be real):
Initiative: I developed and implemented the crisis exit strategy of the department when the head left the company.
Energy: my sales volume was 30% higher than the average for the department.
Stress resistance: I successfully negotiated with a client who refused seven managers and entered into a contract with him.
Leadership: conducted five pieces of training and trained 10 workers.
Here it is important to write not many qualities, but qualities with examples. That is, the examples here are more important than the quantity.
A good resume is key to professional success and career growth. Think over every detail going to include in it. Only in that case, you will achieve your goals.
ALEX MELNICHUK
I build and maintain relationships with clients and key personnel within customer companies. I always want to ensure clients are satisfied with their products and services. I am interested in presenting and delivering information to potential clients about our company and our business strategy at client meetings. I love to communicate and to help passionate start-up guys with technical teams.
Website: https://ncube.com/author/melnichuk
