Four Fast and Easy Ways to Improve Your Resume After your resume is completely written and polished as much as you can, here are four
additional things to check. These just may improve the chances that the hiring manager
will put it in the "to be called for an interview" stack.
As a hiring manager, I've ready thousands of resumes over the years and here are the top
four things that I believe will improve the quality of anyone's resume.
Read Your Resume Out Loud
You eyes can pass over the exact same grammatical error many times without seeing it
and you'll send your resume off looking less than literate.
However, your ears are less likely to deceive you. When you read your resume out loud,
bad grammar and awkward wording will frequently become immediately obvious. You
can then correct these things before you submit your resume and have them discovered
by the hiring manager.
Remember, if it sounds awkward to you when you say it, the hiring manager will likely
also find it awkward when reading it.
Be Generous With Bullets
Take a good look at your resume. Is it filled with paragraphs and sentences, with very
few bullets? As a hiring manager, when I see resumes like this I mentally groan to
myself.
The use of bullets not only adds white space – and thus increased readability – to your
resume, but it highlights the most important aspects of your resume in a way that the
hiring manager's eyes will naturally gravitate towards. It shows that you know how to
write in a tight, concise manner that is respectful of the reader's time. I love getting
resumes like this.
You should target for at least 50% of your resume to be bullets, not paragraphs. Your
resume will be one that the hiring manager will remember.
Include Keywords Specific to Each Job Opening
By "keywords", I mean the specific words used in the job posting to describe the job and
the experience and skills required. It's important to use these words in describing your
experience and include as many as possible toward the top of your resume.
For example, if you're applying for a job as a Network Engineer and the job posting
specifically says some of the requirements are experience with Active Directory and
Cisco Hardware, you should state exactly how much experience you've had with Active
Directory and with Cisco Hardware, by using those exact words.
If you're applying for a job as a receptionist and the job posting says that experience with
multi-line phone systems is required, you'd better specifically state that you've had
extensive experience with "several types of multi-line phone systems" (assuming, of
course, that it's true!).
Not only will this catch the hiring manager's attention, but in case that company is using
automated resume screening software, the more keywords relevant to the job that you
use, the better the chance you'll pass the initial screening.
Use Both a Spell Checker and a Grammar Checker
I can't tell you how many times I've seen resumes use the word "to" when it should be
"too", or "hour" when it should be "our". A spell checker will not catch these kinds of
words because they aren't misspelled, but a grammar checker usually (though not always)
will. Most word processors today have a grammar checker in addition to a spell checker,
so just make sure it's not deactivated.
Also, bear in mind that a grammar checker will not catch all grammatical errors or
awkward sentence structures. But if you've also read your resume out loud, as suggested
above, you'll catch most of these.
Good luck in your job search.
