3 Keys to Building a Winning Resume
“The challenge of life, I have found, is to build a resume that doesn’t simply tell a story about what you want to be, but it’s a story about who you want to be.”
Creating a resume is easy. There are thousands of sources online to help you build a basic resume. In my career, I have hired hundreds of people directly and overseen hiring managers. I share this not to toot my own horn, but to let you know that I’ve sifted through a LOT of resumes. In this blog, I am going to explore 3 key differences between resumes that get noticed and resumes that do not capture a hiring manager’s attention. Here are the 3 keys:
Concise
Regardless of the amount of experience you have in your career or how many special awards you received in college, your hiring manager is going to spend less than 5 seconds reviewing your resume before deciding to invest more brainpower into your resume or move on from you as a potential candidate.
Keep your resume to 1 page only. The hiring manager will want to know if you have the degree, not if you graduated Summa Cum Laude. The hiring manage will want to know what jobs you’ve held in the past more than reading about the nuanced tasks you performed in each role.
Colorful
After looking through thousands of resumes, I can personally attest to the value of adding some color to your resume. There are some simple ways of doing this. Using online apps, such as ResumeBuilder can help to select a resume design that catches attention.
Another way to add color is to add your picture. Our brains are trained to immediately find images on a page, especially images with faces in them. In fact, images on social media sites with faces are 38% more likely to be viewed and 32% more likely to attract comments. Imagine the effect an image does on your resume.
You will hear some advice guiding away from sharing your image on a resume, but I would ask: what do you have to hide? You’re going to be interviewing with the hiring manager at some point. In my experience, resumes with color designs and images retained my attention far longer than resumes that looked bland and colorless.
PLEASE MAKE SURE YOUR PICTURE IS A PROFESSIONAL LOOKING HEAD SHOT. You can use the portrait function in your iphone for the shot, but make sure that you are dressed professionally, looking your best, and giving a natural smile.
Clear
“Clarity is kind.” A colleague quoted that to me one time and it stuck with me. The clearer you are in your resume, the more receptive your your hiring manager will be to reviewing your resume. Clarity is closely connected with our first point: be concise.
We live in a world were jargon is becoming a thing of the past. While many career fields may have unique language and acronyms found only in that field, write your resume as if the hiring manager does not know what jargon and acronyms you want to include.
For example, convert this statement “Experienced LMFT #1045 TN with certification in MI and TFCBT” to “Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with certification in Motivational Interviewing and Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.”
Another way to be clear is to create margin in your one page resume. Leave room to sell yourself in the interview. Notice on this blog how I formulated 3 keys into emboldened words and added space between brief paragraphs? I know how difficult it is to attempt reading a long, wordy paragraph, so I built margin into the blog as an example of how to use white space on your resume to attract attention.
Ditch the confusion and bland resume. Focus on a one-page, concise, colorful, and clearly written description of who you are and the value you can add to the prospective employers. If you would like help reviewing the language on your resume, can request a resume review by scheduling a FREE phone consultation with me.
