Resume Writing Tips to Get You Ahead in 2023

Writing a resume can be tedious. Deciding on the information you want to present can take time, but it can be your ticket to the direction you want your career to go in.


Your resume is quite possibly the only encounter that an employer may have with you, so I’ve given you some resume writing tips focused on being organized, intentional, and relevant so you can stand out in the sea of thousands of other people.

 

  • Keep it concise:

A resume should be one to two pages long, depending on your level of experience. For roles with more technical experience, it may be appropriate to have a longer resume. Don’t include unnecessary or irrelevant information, try to keep it simple. Not everything has to be explained in a whole sentence, many things can be condensed to bullet points to tighten up the length of your resume.

  • Be smart with your formatting

Try to organize your information in an easily digestible format so that potential employers see the information you want them to see. The formatting of your resume shouldn’t be the reason you weren’t considered. Take some time to look at resume templates or completed resumes to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t.

    • Do:
      • Use bullet points to break up information so that it is easier to review
      • Use formatting like bolding to bring attention to important information and establish some organic separation between sections.
      • Choose a clean, professional resume template. (If you have an existing Indeed resume, great! Move the information over to a resume template for a more attractive, professional resume.)
    • Don’t:
      • Present your experience in one big paragraph
      • Choose resume templates that have many graphics, unless your experience is relevant to their use.
        • You want to avoid a “busy” resume where there’s too much going on.

  • Tailor your resume to the type of work that you want

Before you start writing, take some time to reflect on your experience and identify what direction you would like to go in. Identify the skills and qualifications that are important for the type of work you are trying to get into. Make sure to showcase your strongest skills and accomplishments that are relevant to the position that you want.

A resume is not only a view into your past experience, but is also indicative of your future potential. If you have experience that success is measured in certain ways, be sure to include data that shows you know what you’re doing.

  • For example, if you have increased sales year over year, bring some numbers in to demonstrate your skill in a way that is directly relevant to employers.

Consider looking at a resume of someone who is in the job role you are seeking, to see what they considered important to highlight in their skill set, but also to identify any gaps in your experience.

  • Use keywords that are relevant

How are employers finding your resume? Employers use sites like Monster, LinkedIn, and Indeed to find potential employees.

To find you, they have to search for either Job Titles or keywords that describe your experience. Look at a job description for your desired role, and see what skills and information that are relevant to you that you can include in your resume. You want to be easy to find and a relevant candidate.

If you have used particular software or interacted with certain products for your duties, make sure to mention the program/product type in your resume.

  • Proofread

Great! Your resume is complete. Or is it? Check over your resume to confirm that you have

    • Correct information
    • Your contact information
    • Proper grammar and spelling
    • Clean formatting

Get another set of eyes on your final draft, someone else may see something you missed.

All done? Get out into the world and be sure to upload your resume everywhere you can.
You want to be visible where employers are searching resumes, so be sure to visit Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Linkedin and more.

Stay tuned for more tips!

What to put in your Resume in 2022

1. Don’t Put Everything on There

Your resume should not have every work experience you’ve ever had listed on it. Think of your resume not as a comprehensive list of your career history, but as a marketing document selling you as the perfect person for the job. For each resume you send out, you’ll want to highlight only the accomplishments and skills that are most relevant to the job at hand (even if that means you don’t include all of your experience).

2. But Keep a Master List of All Jobs

Since you’ll want to be swapping different information in and out depending on the job you’re applying to, keep a resume master list on your computer where you keep any information you’ve ever included on a resume: old positions, bullet points tailored for different applications, special projects that only sometimes make sense to include. Then, when you’re crafting each resume, it’s just a matter of cutting and pasting relevant information together. Think of this as your brag file.

3. Put the Best Stuff “Above the Fold”

In marketing speak, “above the fold” refers to what you see on the front half of a folded newspaper (or, in the digital age, before you scroll down on a website), but basically it’s your first impression of a document. In resume speak, it means you should make sure your best experiences and accomplishments are visible on the top third of your resume. This top section is what the hiring manager is going to see first—and what will serve as a hook for someone to keep on reading. So focus on putting your best, most relevant experiences first—and then check out these five other marketing tricks to get your resume noticed.

Using References in your Bellevue Job Application Process

Your job references are important in confirming the skills, motivation and attitudes included in your resume and demonstrated during your interview. Ideally, your referee is someone you have reported to in a professional capacity.

Choose a job reference who can confirm

  • Your employment and responsibilities
  • Your strengths and possible areas for development
  • The type of people you work well with
  • The management style that suits you best
  • Your ability to work unsupervised and as part of a team
  • Your capacity to take direction, and most important
  • Your suitability for the role you are seeking

Job reference tips

  • Always have your job reference’s permission before giving their contact details to a prospective employer. Your referee should never be caught off guard by an unexpected phone call, as this can work against you.
  • Make sure your referees know about the role you have applied for so they can focus on your relevant skills and strengths.
  • It’s good practice to contact your referees after the interview and let them know how it went. This way they can emphasise your key strengths or skills relevant to the job.
  • Every time you change employers, make an effort to ask for a reference from your manager or co-worker. This enables you to create a file of recommendations from people who you may not be in contact with in the future.
  • Keep your job references up to date and let them know where your job search stands. This keeps them on guard and be better prepared for a potential call. When you become employed, send a thank you note to anyone who provided you with a reference.
  • Keep your business network up to date, LinkedIn is a great way to do this. Maintain continual contact with your references and if you feel it’s appropriate ask them to write you a reference that you can post to your LinkedIn profile too.

You need a killer resume, make sure its ready for the job you want.

1. Find a Professional Font

As fun as it might look on the page, now is not the time to use weird fonts. Unless you are working in a creative field where you should be showing off your style, stick to something classic. Times New Roman is great go-to, or try a serif font with a little more individuality, like Book Antiqua or Lucida Bright.

2. Put the Good Stuff First

The real secret to a good resume is focusing your reader’s attention. In an ideal world, recruiters would read every word on your resume. In reality, that rarely happens. I’ve screened hundreds of resumes, and though I’m more meticulous than most, I’ve been surprised by how many I nearly tossed, only to find something truly interesting buried at the bottom of the page.

Also, the biggest mistake is to use chronological order. Why lead with “Babysitter in High School” when you could lead with “Strategic Planning Analyst?” Even reverse chronological order (which is more common) may not give you the flexibility you want to highlight your best and most relevant accomplishments.

3. Be Specific

You increased recruiting? Give us the percent increase. You raised money for charity? Tell us how much you raised! This can turn average-looking experiences into impressive head-turners and help distinguish you from other candidates. The flip-side of that is that specifics can also make some accomplishments look worse. If you only raised $150, you might want to think twice before including that—it’s unlikely to impress a billion dollar company.

Hint: This is true of your classes as well. Mentioning relevant coursework can help catch a recruiter’s eye.

4. Vary Your Verbs

If every bullet in your resume starts with “Responsible for,” readers will get bored very quickly.

5. Make Every Word Count

Unless you’re a tenured professor who needs to list every book and article you’ve ever published, your resume should be one page. While this limits the space you have to share your experience, think of it as a blessing in disguise: It forces you to focus.

You don’t need an equal number of bullets under each experience. You should be spending more words on your most impressive set of experiences. Moreover, if a job isn’t relevant anymore, take it out! You don’t need to prove that you’ve been employed since 1997.

Can’t make things fit on one page? Keep cutting it down. You can play with margins and font sizes a bit if necessary—but don’t overdo it. The point is to choose the right experiences, not squish them in. Plus, a dense resume is harder to read. And the harder your resume is to read, the more likely people will just skim it.

Hint: You can make the font size of the spacing between text smaller without losing legibility

6. Proofread

Grammar or spelling errors in a resume can be the difference between the “keep” pile and the “trash” pile. At best, you look sloppy. Enough said.

7. PDF, PDF, PDF

This one is simple: PDFs look the same on any computer. Word documents, on the other hand, can show up with wacky formatting or spill onto a second page if opened with a different version of Word or on a PC vs. a Mac. Make sure companies see what you wanted them to see.

12 changes to make your resume easy to read

1. Don’t Center Any of Your Text

Even your section headings should be aligned to the left. This improves readability because the eye naturally returns to the left margin once it’s ready to move on to the next line of text.

2. Align Your Dates and Locations to the Right

You can only fit so much different information (company name, job title, location, dates of employment) on one line of text before it gets unwieldy. To help separate out your information, make a separate column for dates and locations that is right adjusted. On most word processors, you should be able to just create a right-tab.

3. Don’t Justify Your Resume

Overall, using a justified setting for your bullets may make your resume look tidier, but it does nothing for readability. This setting leaves uneven gaps between words that ultimately make text harder to read, so for your bullets and resume overall, stick with regular ol’ left alignment.

4. Keep Everything the Same Size Font

Aside from your name, which should be a little bigger, the font size throughout your resume should be the same size to ensure readability. Rather than using font size for emphasis throughout your resume, use bolding, italics, and all-caps—sparingly, of course.

5. Pick Either Your Roles or Your Companies to Bold

Bolding of select words and phrases helps with scanning, but you don’t want to go overboard. So choose what to bold wisely, depending on the message you want to send. If your job titles effectively illustrate your path to management-level roles, bolding those might make the most sense. On the other hand, if you’re a new grad and most of your experiences are internships, you might benefit more from emphasizing the companies on your resume.

6. Use ALL-CAPS Very Sparingly

While it is an option for creating emphasis, all-caps is a lot harder to read and therefore harder to skim than text that isn’t capitalized. Save your all-caps option for section headings or your name.

7. Maximize the First 5 Words of Your Bullets

When skimming a resume, a recruiter is very likely going to be reading the first few words of a bullet, then moving on to the next line unless his or her interest is piqued. This means those first few words of your bullets are much more important than the rest. Make sure the first five words of each line make the reader want to keep reading. (Need help? These power verbs will make your resume awesome.)

8. Keep Bullets Under 2 Lines

Even if your first few words are the most interesting thing your recruiter has ever read, going over two lines per bullet is pushing it a bit. Try to keep your bullets short and sweet. (And yes, you should always use bullets, not paragraphs, to describe your experiences.)

9. Use Digits When Writing About Numbers

Using numbers in your bullet points quantifies results and helps recruiters better understand the scope of your work. (Here’s how to do it well.) Make these numbers easy to read by using digits (i.e., 30% versus thirty percent). It improves readability and—bonus—saves space.

10. Have a Separate “Skills” Section

Just to really drive the point home, piling up all your relevant skills into one section helps ensure that the recruiter sees them. You should still highlight your skills in the context of your work, but pulling them out into their own section doesn’t hurt.

11. Keep Your Resume Formatting Consistent

People can get pretty creative when they’re trying to fit all their relevant work experience into one page. That’s fine, but make sure that however you decide to do it, you keep your formatting the same throughout the document. Consistency helps with skimming, and if the recruiter wants to refer back to something, he or she will know where to look.

12. Try to Have Some White Space Left Over

Lastly, having some breathing room on your resume also helps with skimming. Different amounts of white space can signal to the reader that this is a different section or help emphasize the importance of something, such as your name or skills. And overall, it just makes the whole document less overwhelming.

Having your resume skimmed is a fact of life as you apply for jobs. So, make sure you maximize the experience and make it as easy as possible for the recruiter to find the right information—and send you along to the next step of the process.

Keywords Matter

If you are wondering what recruiters see when they glance through your resume,

Here is a quick and easy way to see which keywords are most present on your resume—using a word cloud app. It’s simple: You paste your resume into a word cloud generator like TagCrowd, and the app will create an image representing the most common words, with more common ones showing up larger and darker. With a quick glance, you’ll be able to see what terms the employer will most associate with you—and whether you need to do some adjusting to your resume to have the right terms stand out more.

http://www.tagcrowd.com

How to add Education to your resume

Experience First, Education Second

Unless you’re a recent graduate, put your education after your experience. Chances are, your last couple of jobs are more important and relevant to you getting the job than where you went to college.

Also Keep it Reverse Chronological…

Usually, you should lay down your educational background by listing the most recent or advanced degree first, working in reverse chronological order. But if older coursework is more specific to the job, list that first to grab the reviewer’s attention.

But Skip the Dates

Don’t list your graduation dates. The reviewer cares more about whether or not you have the degree than when you earned it.

Highlight Honors, Not GPA

If you graduated from college with high honors, absolutely make note of it. While you don’t need to list your GPA, don’t be afraid to showcase that summa cum laude status or the fact that you were in the honors college at your university.

Include Continuing or Online Education

Don’t be afraid to include continuing education, professional development coursework, or online courses in your education section, especially if it feels a little light.  “Online courses are a more-than-accepted norm nowadays, and your participation in them can actually show your determination and motivation to get the skills you need for your career.”

Miscellaneous Resume Tip’s

Ditch “References Available Upon Request”

If a hiring manager is interested in you, he or she will ask you for references—and will assume that you have them. There’s no need to address the obvious (and doing so might even make you look a little presumptuous!).

Proofread, Proofread, Proofread

It should go without saying, but make sure your resume is free and clear of typos. And don’t rely on spell check and grammar check alone—ask family or friends to take a look at it for you, or come to Career Paths NW and our experienced recruiters can help you with your resume.

Save it as a PDF

If emailing your resume, make sure to always send a PDF rather than a .doc. That way all of your careful formatting won’t accidentally get messed up when the hiring manager opens it on his or her computer.

Name Your File Smartly

Ready to save your resume and send it off? Save it as “Jane Doe Resume” instead of “Resume.” It’s one less step the hiring manager has to take.

Constantly Refresh It

Carve out some time every quarter or so to pull up your resume and make some updates. Have you taken on new responsibilities? Learned new skills? Add them in. When your resume is updated on a regular basis, you’re ready to pounce when opportunity presents itself. And, even if you’re not job searching, there are plenty of good reasons to keep this document in tip-top shape.

Pointers to improve your resume in Bellevue

It’s deceptively easy to make mistakes on your resume and exceptionally difficult to repair the damage once an employer gets it. So prevention is critical, whether you’re writing your first resume or revising it for a mid-career job search. Check out this resume guide to the most common pitfalls and how you can avoid them.

1. Typos and Grammatical Errors

Your resume needs to be grammatically perfect. If it isn’t, employers will read between the lines and draw not-so-flattering conclusions about you, like: “This person can’t write,” or “This person obviously doesn’t care.”

2. Lack of Specifics

Employers need to understand what you’ve done and accomplished. For example:

A. Worked with employees in a restaurant setting.
B. Recruited, hired, trained and supervised more than 20 employees in a restaurant with $2 million in annual sales.

Both of these phrases could describe the same person, but the details and specifics in example B will more likely grab an employer’s attention.

3. Attempting One Size Fits All

Whenever you try to develop a one-size-fits-all resume to send to all employers, you almost always end up with something employers will toss in the recycle bin. Employers want you to write a resume specifically for them. They expect you to clearly show how and why you fit the position in a specific organization.

4. Highlighting Duties Instead of Accomplishments

It’s easy to slip into a mode where you simply start listing job duties on your resume. For example:

  • Attended group meetings and recorded minutes.
  • Worked with children in a day-care setting.
  • Updated departmental files.

Employers, however, don’t care so much about what you’ve done as what you’ve accomplished in your various activities. They’re looking for statements more like these:

  • Used laptop computer to record weekly meeting minutes and compiled them in a Microsoft Word-based file for future organizational reference.
  • Developed three daily activities for preschool-age children and prepared them for a 10-minute holiday program performance.
  • Reorganized 10 years worth of unwieldy files, making them easily accessible to department members.

5. Going on Too Long or Cutting Things Too Short

Despite what you may read or hear, there are no real rules governing resume length. Why? Because human beings, who have different preferences and expectations where resumes are concerned, will be reading it.

That doesn’t mean you should start sending out five-page resumes, of course. Generally speaking, you usually need to limit yourself to a maximum of two pages. But don’t feel you have to use two pages if one will do. Conversely, don’t cut the meat out of your resume simply to make it conform to an arbitrary one-page standard.

6. A Bad Objective

Employers do read your resume objective, but too often they plow through vague pufferies like, “Seeking a challenging position that offers professional growth.” Give employers something specific and, more importantly, something that focuses on their needs as well as your own. Example: “A challenging entry-level marketing position that allows me to contribute my skills and experience in fund-raising for nonprofits.”

7. No Action Verbs

Avoid using phrases like “responsible for.” Instead, use action verbs: “Resolved user questions as part of an IT help desk serving 4,000 students and staff.”

8. Leaving Off Important Information

You may be tempted, for example, to eliminate mention of the jobs you’ve taken to earn extra money for school. Typically, however, the soft skills you’ve gained from these experiences (e.g., work ethic, time management) are more important to employers than you might think.

9. Visually Too Busy

If your resume is wall-to-wall text featuring five different fonts, it will most likely give the employer a headache. So show your resume to several other people before sending it out. Do they find it visually attractive? If what you have is hard on the eyes, revise.

10. Incorrect Contact Information

I once worked with a student whose resume seemed incredibly strong, but he wasn’t getting any bites from employers. So one day, I jokingly asked him if the phone number he’d listed on his resume was correct. It wasn’t. Once he changed it, he started getting the calls he’d been expecting. Moral of the story: Double-check even the most minute, taken-for-granted details — sooner rather than later.

 

Simple Formula to great cover letters for jobs in Seattle

1. Identify the Problem

55% of hiring managers don’t read cover letters. Why should they, when we write like modern-day Oliver Twists, begging them to please, sir, give us the job?

News flash: The hiring manager isn’t here to make your dreams come true. They’re in it for themselves. OK, that’s harsh, but the truth is that they’re looking for an awesome candidate to come in and do a kick-ass job that’ll help them run their department (or company) more efficiently and successfully.

When you’re writing your own cover letter, start with the list of responsibilities and ask yourself, Why? Why is this task important to this company? Keep digging until you can’t go any further. The true need is usually the one at the end of a chain of whys.

2. Agitate the Problem

Now that you’ve identified the problem, here comes the fun part.

Because no hiring manager has ever said, “I just love paying employees thousands of dollars every year!” your challenge now is to remind him or her how painful the problem is, and by default, how valuable a solution could be. Don’t be afraid to twist the knife a bit, like I did in my second paragraph:

If you’re looking for someone who can not only keep up, but also deliver that SEO-friendly, 75-page street style slideshow five minutes ago…

Notice I didn’t say, “If you’re looking for someone who can turn around projects quickly…” I was specific, and I made sure to use an example I knew would resonate with a stressed-out web editor.

And if you’re new to the industry or the role? Just ask. This is exactly what informational interviews are for. Find someone on the team you’re applying to, let your interviewer do most of the talking, and pay close attention to how he or she discusses the company’s challenges.

In conversation, we instinctively trust people who mirror our body language. On your application, you won’t get the chance—but you can do the next best thing: Pick up on your interviewer’s subtle cues and phrases and then mirror their speaking language in your cover letter.

3. Offer the Solution

By this point, you’ve got the hiring manager squirming at the table. Now, deliver the solution. Hint: It’s you.

Think about what makes you incredibly qualified to solve the problem. In my case, I knew I wanted the hiring manager to think of me and say, “Lisa? Oh, she’s the one who knows our backend systems and seems like a real go-getter.”

4. Close With Confidence

After all that work, you aren’t going to dash off a breathless “Hope to hear from you soon!” right? Instead, seal the deal with a sentence that displays confidence, competence, and a genuine interest in the company:

“I’d love to learn more about your production needs and how I can help!”

Boom. That’s it.