In a market where it is highly competitive, fewer jobs and more candidates, it’s so important that your resume stands out from the crowd. Recruiting in the market for 13 years and in constant collaboration with hiring managers, here are my recommendations to help elevate your resume to the shortlist.
Summary of your experience
A good summary page that shows the depth and breadth of your experience. This is where it is so easy to go wrong. You are focused on highlighting key responsibility or if you are in the delivery space – what were you delivering. You are looking for 10 words or less to give context on the role you performed or the project you were working on. So what do you include on the summary of your career?
Date Job title Organisation Role/Project
For example,
July 2019 – Jan 2020 Project Manager Aspirante Microsoft Office 360
Aug 2018 – June 2019 Project Manager Ambitor Cloud migration – Azure
The other benefit of this means that on the first page the hiring manager has essentially read your entire work history by simply glancing at the first page – they now have a sense for what you have done. More importantly, a client may have additional requirements they have not advertised at this point in time (due to the phase of the project or confidential nature of the project), and now you have become the favoured candidate for the role. This summary is not where you copy and paste your entire resume – this is a common downfall. The description of your role and/or project is no more than 10 words. Less is more – trust me.
Dates on resume:
It is important to include Month and Years on your resume, to give the client context of how long you worked in an organisation. A lack of transparency will start to create questions. Questions lead to an unfavourable outcome. If you have gaps on your resume then talk about it. Bring the white elephant to the table and tell the client why or where you were. Giving a hiring manager context about gaps creates trust. You will not be viewed unfavourably for taking a gap year to study or to look after a loved one or to have a child etc. Have faith that hiring managers are diverse and embracing, after all if they are not do you really want to work for that type of hiring manager if they are not?
What did you do in roles?
Ensure you give context about what you did not just an overview of what the organisation was trying to achieve or what the project was. This resume is about you and your role within the business. Ensure you describe the complexity of the role. When talking about stakeholders give context around who these people were by including their job titles – this will identify the levels of stakeholders you can talk to and collaborate with and how you did this. Were you working with a technical team? If yes, then include their job titles too. This will demonstrate an ability to traverse the technical platform back to an end-user who may not understand technical jargon.
Did you deliver the project using a specific project methodology or a hybrid? Yes? Then include them in – clients want to know what projects you worked on with a particular methodology – this will then give them context as to what, where and when you worked in that project methodology. Should you include achievements – absolutely! What was the benefit that this organisation realised due to your contribution to the project? What was the impact? Was it long lasting?
How to organise the content?
It is important to ensure that you keep key “themes” in your resume together. For example you want to keep “stakeholder engagement” points together instead of jumping around from theme to theme. Examples of this could be communication, stakeholder engagement, technical experience, change communication etc. Once you have your “themes’ identified in your resume and grouped you then need to put the most senior responsibility within the theme as the first bullet point and make the last bullet point the more junior – so order it by complexity and seniority. Common design errors
Take the graphics away. Pretty pictures or large margins that reduce the space in your resume, reduce the ability to align your skills to the current job opening. This often leads to long resumes or worse – people making their resumes shorter because they have less space. Keep the description about your key responsibilities and achievements to bullet points. Long winded sentences will lead to an audience who disengages and does not read your resume.
Always send your resume in word – Some statistics in the market say that a role receives an average of 5 to 7 applications, my personal experience and most of my colleagues will say it depends on the role – however, we all agree this number is significantly higher. In fact some roles will see the number rise upwards of 150 applications (Human Resource Manager for a Global Firm). Recruiters regularly edit your resume before submitting to clients as we often have to attach client templates / cover sheets etc, so having to request a word version, or convert ourselves wastes valuable time that could cost you the role.
Fonts – the most readable font will mean that a client reads more of your resume than a competitor. Along with Georgia, Helvetica, Sans Serif and Arial there are countless articles and research that suggests these fonts are considered to be one of the most easily read and legible fonts. Attention to detail. Make sure you have no spelling errors and are consistent in the layout and using full stops throughout your resume. This is a common error.
Connect with me via Linkedin as I will be posting more top tips to help candidates secure their preferred role, not just any role in the near future.