A job resume is an experienced applicant’s silent yet wordy ambassador to a new professional frontier. It can lionize your strengths and experience to show how fit you are for what you’re trying to join, but it can just as easily mislead the reader or misrepresent you to them. You didn’t mean for that to happen. You could be the best candidate for the job, but your credentials just failed to impress.
Here are some resume tips on what your job resume might like and what it might have too much of.
1. Passive Tone
Whatever new role you apply for is a vacancy in a firm or employer’s organization. There is an undercurrent of urgency in any job posting you come across no matter how professional and calm it may appear in its structure. When a recruiter looks at a job resume, they scrutinize it for accomplishments, qualifications, and clues that might hint to the applicant’s character; a passive tone does not give off the impression of a person who gets things done or that they’d actually done anything.
Passivity can be implied through phrases that seem harmless like “was responsible for” or “my duties consisted of”. Even benign verbs akin to “worked”, “served”, or “completed” can imply passivity. It’s recommended that you begin each of your sentences or bullet points with strong verbs that convey your actions in an energetic yet accurate light. This is important from the resume summary at the top to the details in the main body.
For instance, you can use “Arranged” or “Aligned” rather than “Scheduled”, “Detect” rather than “Scan”, and even “Improved” or “Catapulted” instead of “Increased”. Pair these verbs with what you’ve done over the months and years, and your deeds will stand out more noticeably in the mind of a recruiter. This leads quite handily into the next resume tip on this list.
2. Vague Results
Quantify your accomplishments. If you leave how much you did in your previous positions to the imagination of the recruiter, they’re liable to assume that you did very little. Vague results on a bad job resume diminish the integrity of the document.
List the outcomes of your duties, projects, and challenges with measurable outcomes. This might shorten certain sections of your resume, but this will in turn provide you more space to separate your past actions into sharp, individual bullet points that will better communicate your qualifications to the reader.
3. Missing Dates
A simple year or a period of years on a job resume really sticks out to a reader when the conventional practice is to pair them with months. Omitting dates does not, as one might hope, vaccinate a resume against accusations of ageism or job hopping. Doing so can accomplish the opposite effect of inclining the one reading the document to see resume gaps where none might exist.
Staying in one job for a number of years isn’t shameful, nor is taking short-term contract work. Honesty, with a sprinkle of pride, is a fundamental tip for any resume.
4. Poor Formatting and Grammar
Making sure that everything is consistently aligned and organized is crucial to a good job resume. You should take care that if you update or shift word processors that the formatting of your resume hasn’t gone askew due to the change. Zoom out and reassess, then double check just to make sure. If there are any discrepancies, take time to learn how to use the program to fix them.
Once your resume is put in order and you have a firm grasp on the technology, you might feel inclined to add columns or graphics to add more flavor to your curriculum vitae (CV). Regrettably, this resume tip must also caution against that as some firms use applicant tracking systems to filter resumes, which currently can’t register that sort of content very well.
5. Filler and Jargon
This is a coda to the previous resume tips. A job resume is one-to-two pages and is meant to be occupied by vital academic and professional information. There’s no room for fluff or vagueness. The agents who look through these documents can spot superfluous, airy filler quite easily, and they don’t regard such excess kindly.
Focus on writing down impactful, detailed statements that portray you clearly and favorably. In this way, you’ll craft a textual ambassador that will make you easier to see, recommend, and even hire.
Once you feel that you and your CV are ready, you can start applying for jobs in earnest. You can even submit it to John Clements’ own Careers page after completing these easy steps.
