Your resume lands on a desk, it’s 3pm, and the hiring manager about to review your document is experiencing a mid-afternoon energy slump, is counting down the minutes to 5pm, and has another 299 resumes on her desk that look just like yours. Fancy your chances?
One of my recent resume writing clients told me that she was about to sift through 300 resumes to find 4 or 5 potential candidates for a customer service role in her department. How do you stand out in a sea of resumes? It’s tough! One way to guarantee you won’t is by submitting a document that looks like everyone else, sounds like everyone else, and to all intents and purposes, may as well be anyone else.
Three major errors people make with their resume:
1) Reliance on internet template designs / resume writing software
2) Too much telling and very little selling
3) Spelling errors / grammatical mistakes / font size
Most documents I have encountered would tick all three boxes. The design of the document is central to making that all important first impression. To be clear, I’m referring to the actual layout and casing for your content, not the need to adorn your document with shooting stars, furry animals or pretty butterflies!
If a resume is too hard to read, it will meet acquaintance with the corporate shredder in short order. A smothering of block text, tiny font sizes, and content that does nothing more than list duties, contributes to a hiring manager’s decision on whether or not to trash your document, shred it, or crush it up into a tiny ball and throw it over their head!
A winning resume is focused, concise, elegant, and has the power to articulate the extent of your previous professional contributions in such a way as to make your value added potential plainly obvious to the hiring manager.
What are you waiting for? Get on it, and make sure your resume is as unique as you are, or at the very least make sure you ‘SELL’ your skills instead of merely ‘tell’ us about your duties.
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