How to Improve your Resume

Overview

In the highly competitive job market, a resume is not just a career document, it is your professional marketing resource. This makes it essential that you keep on enhancing and improve resume from time to time. It represents your professional identity and serves as your initial impression in front of your potential employers. A professional resume can open doors to new job opportunities while the one that is not well crafted can hinder your success. We will explore strategies and techniques to improve resume and ensure that it not only meets but exceeds your expectations of effectively showcasing your skills, experience and qualification.

What is the purpose of resume?

Before going to the resume improvement techniques, we should understand the primary purpose of this career document. Your resume is not just a chronological order of your work history, it is a marketing tool that is designed to sell your professional value to potential employers. It should clearly depict your skills, accomplishments, and your contributions towards your potential employer’s success.

Important Elements of a Professional Resume

1. Contact Information: The basics of any effective resume is the accurate professional contact information. You must include your full name, phone number, email address, and link to your LinkedIn Profile and ensure that the mentioned information is up-to-date.
2. Resume Objective: Consider a well crafted opening statement for your resume. The resume objective should be a quick snapshot of your career goals and should depict your the most relevant skills and qualifications. You should customize this section to match with your specific job role that you are applying to and the highlighted skills and experiences should portray you as an ideal candidate.
3. Professional Experience: This is the most important section of your professional resume. You should organize this section in the reverse order, so that the recent position is on the top. You should also take care to highlight your accomplishments in place of just listing your job roles. Use action verbs, keywords and achievements to showcase your results.
4. Education: Showcase your educational qualifications that includes your academic achievements, degrees, graduation dates, and institutions. Mention your achievements, works, and courses that shows your commitment and excellence.
5. Skills: This is the dedicated section to mention your relevant skills that include technical and soft skills and ensures alignment with your aspiring job requirements. This section is the quick reference for your potential employers to asses you for the role.
6. Training and Certifications: Industry-specific training and certifications are a major boost to your professional image. It enhances your job profile and demonstrates your commitment towards professional development and sets you apart from the crowd.
7. Projects and Achievements: Highlight your previous projects, initiatives and related accomplishments for your detailed portrayal as an ideal candidate. This leaves a great impact of your success in previous roles.
8. Professional Memberships: List out any valuable memberships in professional organizations related to your field. This shows your commitment to staying updated and informed and indicated your active participation in the professional community.

Customize your Resume to your Job

Customizing the professional resume to meet the specific requirements is the most important aspect of resume improvement. We list out some of the important tips to customize and improve your resume:

1. Keyword Optimization: Analyze and identify the keywords from the job description. Strategically include these keywords in context naturally throughout your resume. This ensures that your job application easily passes the checks of application tracking system (ATS) and reaches to the hiring manager.
2. Customize Resume Summary: Indicate your interest in the job position and align your resume summary in view of company’s mission and job requirements. This indicates that you have understood the needs of your employer.
3. Highlight Experience: Showcase your experiences that directly relates to the job position your are applying for. Highlight the important keyword and points strategically. Also, de-emphasize less important roles to maintain eyes over the important information and qualifications.

Quantify Achievements in your Resume

Job Applications are saturated with resumes and so quantifying your achievements sets you apart from the rest of the applications. Data and numbers add credibility to your achievements and leave a greater impact while providing tangible evidence of your contributions. Vague statements are not liked by the hiring managers.

Use statements that indicates numbers as the following examples:

• “Increased sales by 10% in the first financial year.”
• “Managed a team of 4 Software Developers and 3 Graphic Designers, resulted in 20% increase in efficiency of the team.”

Quantified achievements provide concrete evidence to the employer and captures the reader’s attention.

Make your Resume aesthetically appealing

Visuals of a resume play a crucial role in attracting reader’s attention. Format and design your resume to give it a polished look of a professional document.

1. Choose a clean layout: Choose a clean and easily readable layout with consistent fonts and formatting. Avoid cluttered and over styled look that may distract from the main content.
2. Use action verbs: List out your job responsibilities with strong action verbs to convey a sense of responsibility. This emphasized active approach and makes the resume engaging.
3. Consistent formatting: Maintain a consistent format for every element in your resume. It makes readability easier and gives a cleaner look to your resume.
4. Appropriate Length: Keep your resume detailed and concise to fit in not more than a page or two while focussing on quality of the content.

Proofreading and Editing your Resume

Eliminate any possible errors before submitting your resume. Undergo a thorough check and ensure professionalism, accuracy and authenticity. Consider checking some of the basic errors:

1. Grammar and Spelling: Grammatical and spelling errors are signs of unprofessionalism for your resume. Use tools or verify manually for possible errors in your resume.
2. Consistency: Ensure consistency in similar elements of your resume i.e. formatting, grammar and language. These inconsistencies may leave an impression of carelessness and distract from the original message.
3. Ensure easy readability: Make sure that your resume is easily readable in a zoom by using proper formatting, language and proper organization of information. Busy managers often initially just skim your resume, so easy readability is essential.

Utilizing Action Verbs for an Impact

Use of action words leave a greater impact while effective conveying accomplishment. Instead of just filling out generic terms, choose vivid verbs to actively describe your responsibilities.

For example,

• “Successfully implemented new project management system”
• “Achieved 10% increase in sales through targeted marketing”

By incorporating these words, you create a sense of active participation and success through result-driven approach.

Conclusion

Crafting a professional resume is a time-taking process that requires attention, self-reflection, detailed analysis and commitment to continuous improvement. The strategies mentioned above can help you improve resume and transforming it to a powerful personal marketing tool that brings new opportunities and success.

You should keep in mind that your resume is not just a document, it is the reflection of your professional identity and important element in your journey towards success. As you build your resume, remember that quality and authenticity is crucial. Build a resume that is compelling and not only showcases skills, education, and achievements but portrays you as an invaluable asset to your potential employer.

In the highly competitive job market, a well-crafted professional resume acts as a catalyst to your career success. Take time and build a document or improve your resume that can position you differently in the crowd.