Your resume is the first and most powerful impression you make on a hiring manager. And if your resume isn’t pristine and a clear representation of your skills and experience, you are truly doing yourself a disservice in your job search. Most people focus on making sure formatting is professional and the document is free of mistakes, but you might need to expand your editing focus in order to catch employers’ attention.
If you have a few years and a number of different projects and skill sets under your belt, chances are your resume can start to get a little cluttered. The best resumes are clear and concise. We know that you are committed to representing yourself as well as possible, and we at All-Star Personnel are committed to helping you do just that. So today’s article focuses on a few key tips to help you clean up your resume while making sure you keep enough relevant content to get the job.
Step One: Focus Your Career Objective
Many people are used to including a career or professional objective at the beginning of their resume. While this practice is a little outdated and many would recommend cutting this information from the document itself, the act of writing down a clear goal will help you focus you resume and define your target market.
A vague resume is an unimpressive one. Hiring managers are looking for the types of candidates who hit each and every one of the requirements they list in a job description. Knowing how your skills meet the needs of your prospective employer will help you fine-tune your resume to attract and maintain the reader’s attention. A good tip is to limit the focus of your resume, or even create more than one version if you are interested in a variety of different opportunities. Aim your resume at one to three industries at most, as this will help focus on the most relevant content.
Step Two: Consolidate Education
Your education section is an easy place to reduce your content, particularly if you are not a recent graduate. Detailed information about specific courses, honors, and extracurricular activities can be informative but they also tend to weigh down a more experienced resume. If you have at least four years of experience, you can focus your resume on your professional accomplishments and pare down the education section to the most important pieces of information, namely your degree and where you graduated from.
Step Three: Highlight Your Skills
It’s really too easy for your skills section to turn into a laundry list of seemingly random qualifications. That wall of text will rarely do you any favors in a job search because employers want to see how your skills resulted in specific accomplishments. If you feel compelled to list your skills on your resume, keep it brief and make sure that your work history explains how you put those skills to good use.
At All-Star Personnel, we connect you with the best employers throughout Tennessee in temporary, temporary-to-permanent or direct hire. Contact us today to work with one of the top staffing agencies in Tennessee.
