How to perfect your resume
Your resume gives your hopeful future employer a snapshot of who you are, ultimately helping you land an interview. But with hundreds of resumes and applications being sent in for the same internship or job, how can your resume stand out? Here are 6 tips to perfect your resume to take it from good to great:
1. Make sure that your name and contact information is clearly listed.
Make it big, make it bold, front and center, list it twice. This might sound obvious but the goal of your resume is to get an interview so you want to make sure that they have a really easy way to get in touch with you.
2. Keep it to one page.
You’re awesome and have so many accomplishments to list but whatever you do keep your resume to one page. You might have to be choosy but make sure that you include only the most important and impressive accomplishments that best reflect who you are and why you would be a good intern or employee.
3. Use power verbs.
Click here to find some great descriptive verbs to use so your prospective employer is impressed with your experience.
4. Focus on your hard skills.
How many hours have you spent working in InDesign for one of your classes? Are you fluent in another language? These are examples of hard skills that employers love to see that will put you a leg ahead of the competition. Avoid relying on soft skills such as organization and time management skills. As a successful college student these should be skills you should already have and don’t need to brag about. This is the time to bring out the big guns.
5. Add in the impact that you made.
A lot of the lines of your resume will tell what you did and how you did it – but don’t forget to include what happened
because of what you did. This is the most powerful representation to how successful you were on paper. Try to include statistics whenever possible! For example, your resume might say, “Contributed four Facebook posts each week to increase following by 100 people.” That’s great but don’t forget to tell what impact those extra 100 followers made. In this example you could add in
“…resulting in an 20% increase in views and reach.” Using this technique will really elevate the meaningfulness of work that you did.
6. Create a personally crafted cover letter.
Read through the company values, missions, and philanthropic interests. This is the core personality and culture of the company. You’ll want to tailor your cover letter to not just parallel the job description they have listed but the values of the company. There are many qualified technical candidates, but companies want to make sure you’re a good personality fit, so why not start before they even meet you?
7. Save your cover letter in the same PDF as your resume.
A lot of times person who first reviews your application, resume, and cover letter are not the people who hire you. They scan through to make sure that you are qualified before passing on your resume. Your cover letter says more about who you are personally. Save your cover letter in the same PDF as your resume that way your future boss is guaranteed to learn more about you.