The Watercooler

Resume Rework: Clean Up your Resume With These Quick Tips!

Your resume is the most important tool you have for professional growth. The effort you put into refining it is an investment in your future that will pay off when hiring managers consider you for the opportunities you desire. Clean up your resume with these quick tips: 

Read It Aloud

Go beyond silently reading your resume and actually read it aloud. Doing so can help you spot any misspellings or grammatical errors that you may miss just by skimming it. Plus, this helps you notice any clunky phrasing or overly wordy sentences. 

Review Older Information 

Your resume does not have to be a comprehensive document with every detail of your professional life – it is intended to be an informative overview for hiring managers to determine your qualifications for their roles. Review any older information and remove it if it is not closely relevant to your current career path, such as your high school education if you have a college degree or jobs from 10-15 years ago.

Add White Space

Hiring managers quickly glance at resumes to determine which applicants seem to have the minimum requirements before reviewing them more thoroughly later. Clean up your resume and add more white space for maximum skimmability. Ensure there are line breaks between sections, bullet points, short lines of text, etc.

Swap Out Keywords

Before human eyes ever see your resume, an applicant tracking system (ATS) software reviews it first to determine if it meets the minimum qualifications. Swap out any keywords on your resume that an ATS wouldn’t be able to identify as a match, such as only using acronyms or less commonly used jargon. 

Save the File Correctly

All the carefully curated formatting on your resume can be for nothing if you don’t save it in the correct format. You never know what program or operating system a hiring manager will be using to open your resume file, and some fonts and other formatting you use may not work for them. To ensure you know exactly how your resume will look to the hiring manager, save it as a PDF which will maintain the appearance of your document. Also, be sure when you’re saving it that you give it an appropriate, clear file name, such as “LastNameFirstName_Position_Resume” so they know what they’re opening and can easily save it without having to rename it for their own later use. 

Find the Right Job for You

Make your job search more successful with the help of PrideStaff Akron. We work with area employers to fill their open positions, from temporary to permanent employment. Search our current available jobs to get started. Â