Spring Clean Your Resume With These Tips
The annual tradition of spring cleaning shouldn’t just apply to your home. Take that sprucing-up attitude to your resume as well. Use the season as an excuse to upgrade your stale resume and jumpstart your career advancement.
Spring always represents a time for renewal and reflection. Flowers bloom. Newborn creatures skitter around the yard. It’s a time to clear out the attic and clean up the closets.
This year, the instinct will be even more intense. With the coronavirus and social distancing leaving most of us stuck inside for days at a time, it’s the perfect time for improvement projects. That includes refurbishing your resume. You can update your old document, and create something fresh and inviting – the perfect tool for the next stage of your job search.
With that in mind, here are few tips to get started on your resume spring cleaning:
Streamline Your Focus
It may seem like the more information you include on your resume, the better off you’ll be. After all, you never know exactly what skill or experience will spark an employer’s interest.
However, this strategy can backfire. Include too much data and HR staffers can’t find the relevant information. You end up drowning your best qualities in a sea of unnecessary filler.
Avoid this issue by focusing on your key points. Strip away meaningless positions and secondary responsivities. That way, your truly impressive qualities will shine through.
Consolidate Your Work History
Don’t just streamline the descriptions of the jobs you held. Drop some of these positions from your resume entirely.
People often note every position they’ve ever held. It can make your resume unwieldy and difficult to read. Plus, most of your oldest work doesn’t have much relevance today.
Only include your most recent positions. Use the extra space gained by cutting your older experience to include more details about the items that remain. This will keep your resume lean and topical.
Upgrade Your Language
For the most part, a resume represents a straightforward document. It’s not like you’re crafting a sonnet or even a killer tweet. As a result, people don’t often think much about style.
However, this can be a mistake. Just because you’re writing a resume, doesn’t mean it has to be dry or boring. By upgrading your use of language, you can turn a mundane resume into a dramatic, eye-catching one. As with higher forms of expression, word choice and variation can help engage a reader.
Read through your resume with an eye on style. If you find yourself repeating the same words and phrases throughout the document, look for alternative ways to describe certain situations. Use action words. Get rid of the passive voice. These seemingly small upgrades will lead to higher levels of engagement and, as a bonus, show off your skills as a communicator.
Add Evocative Details
Employers aren’t just interested in what jobs you’ve had. They’re interested in how you performed those jobs. For obvious reasons, hiring managers will gravitate towards candidates that can excel in their positions, rather than those who just show up and do the minimum required.
Therefore, you need to provide evidence of this in your resume. Punch up your job descriptions with ways you went beyond the call of duty. Add quantitative measures of success to emphasize your points. These details will enrich your work history and improve your chances of getting an interview.
The purpose of a resume is to leverage your past experiences to get new opportunities. A top-flight staffing firm, like SmartTalent, can help you achieve the same goal. They can put you in a perfect position to maximize your talents and build out your resume for the next turn in your career.
Contact SmartTalent today to learn more.
