How to Write A Resume That Doesn’t Suck
Your resume is your first opportunity to make a positive impression for a potential employer. A great resume is a tool for marketing yourself so that a potential employer can easily see how your individual experiences can contribute to a company’s success. You’re going to learn how to construct a resume that gets you an interview.
You’re going to learn
- How to ensure our resume doesn’t get filtered and makes it to a human being
- How to make your resume stand out when a person reads it
- What should we have on our resumes that shows we’re capable of doing the job
How to Write a Resume You Have No Experience
If you can write a resume when you have no experience you’ll be better at drafting a resume when you have experience.
Resume Writing Process
We rarely put our best resume together in our first draft. To make sure we market our best selves on paper we’ve got to follow a couple of steps first.
How to Make Sure Your Resume Gets to a Hiring Manager
Like we mentioned before the words and phrases the computer uses to push winning resumes to recruiters are in the job description. To have the best chance of your resume getting seen your resume needs to contain specific keywords that the computer pushes through a filter.
It’s hard to know exactly what keywords the algorithm is looking for on resumes but a good place to start is the required qualifications listed on the job posting. If a bachelors degree is required for the job but you don’t have a bachelors you’ll be filtered out. That doesn’t mean you need to be dishonest, but you should at least take the time to tailor your resume for the job you’re applying for.
How to Format Your Resume So the Hiring Manager Keeps on Reading
The average recruiter spends 6 seconds reviewing your resume before moving on. That’s right – you have 6 seconds to catch their attention before your resume gets thrown away.
The way you format your resume should encourage them to keep reading to learn more about you. If your resume isn’t easy to read or just plain boring it’s likely it’ll get tossed. Your resume needs to be well organized with clear headings and consistent fonts.
Why Having a Resume Narrative is Important
A resume narrative is a way of storytelling through your past experiences. Humans are wired to make sense of the world through the stories. Telling your authentic story in a way that creates a connection with the hiring manager, makes you memorable and intriguing, adds credibility to your accomplishments, and creates a desire in your reader to meet you and learn more.
Every good story has well fleshed out characters, which in this case will be you, a setting, conflict, plot, and resolution. A good way to chart your storytelling is to follow these 4 steps.
Context: What is the overall challenge?
Actions: What did you do to meet those challenges?
Results: What positive things happened as a result of your actions?
Strategic Impact: What was the big-picture impact?
The best resumes are self-marketing documents, and storytelling in your resume transforms it into that. Storytelling humanizes you beyond a list of jobs and education on a piece of paper and also creates trust and connects your value offering back to the employers’ needs.
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