Thinking of updating your résumé but finding it too painful? We’re here to make things easy for you. After all, resumes are designed to be a fast description of abilities and experience—YOU are the star who will shine in your interview with a portfolio at your side. Let’s make your resume impenetrable, shall we? Here are the top five elements to concentrate on:
Begin with your abilities (a) because you’re likely to have a big list that you’ll need to pare down, and (b) since basking in all your talents will keep you in great spirits. Sort your talents into categories and generate bulleted lists like this:
Within each bullet point, list around 3-5 of the most critical and relevant talents. But, for the love of God, do not “rate” your abilities. Everyone is better at certain things than others, but doing so will just call attention to the abilities you haven’t mastered yet.
Gone are the days when you had to put all you could onto your resume in order to get noticed. It’s far better to let your resume breathe these days while adapting it to the job you’re looking for. You already know that odd numbers are great for design, so choose three or five jobs that are closely connected to the one you’re looking for.
Include your title, the month and years you worked, and the firm for which you worked. While career gaps are no longer the death sentence that they once were, you should nevertheless indicate what you were doing in between each of these responsibilities. Just keep each mention brief and focused on roles you’re really pleased of. However, within those highlighted positions.
Resumes used to be about your roles and responsibilities. Responsibilities are the norm these days. Of course, if you work as a digital designer for a fashion company, you’ll be in charge of creating emails and maintaining their website (see what we mean? Listing tasks is redundant). Hiring managers are searching for evidence of your effect on previous employment.
Rather than listing tasks, talk about how your work influenced customer engagement, UX, follower count, reach, SEO, and so on. Numbers and percentages are really useful. If you did not receive them, contact your previous marketing and analytics partners to obtain them. Include at least three of these strong remarks for each role held.
There are just four items that need to be listed here: Your name, title, email address, and portfolio. Keep your title relevant to your degree of experience (Senior Copywriter, Creative Design Director, etc.). Avoid names that are offensive or gendered (Design Guru, UX Ninja). Include your location but not your entire address (for privacy reasons) (i.e. Chicago, IL; Brooklyn, NY).
But, Conscious Foundation, what if I wear several professional hats? I’m a writer as well as an illustrator! Then you’ll probably need a résumé for each one, my buddy. Otherwise, be extremely clear about the sort of work you want and adapt your resume to that position.
Because you’ll already have your Skills, Positions, Impacts, and Contact Information, we kept this for last. All that remains is to create a layout. Never underestimate the significance of negative space! Consider your resume an 8.5″x11″ version of a business card. You have limited space, but that’s the goal. The CV is only an introduction to get you in the door for the interview; it is not what will land you the job. Use only 1-2 basic typefaces and, if necessary, alter the style and weights within the same typeface. The use of a lot of color or graphics will distract the eye.
Now, the creation of a resume is done, but you cannot use one single resume for a very long time because of changing jobs or upskilling skills. During the summer, updating your resume is usually the last thing on your mind. But if you’re searching for a new job or even changing fields, it might feel much more overwhelming. That’s where we can help! We’ve compiled a list of terms to eliminate from your resume so you can get to the exciting stuff, like interviewing.
To be clear, we are not supporting the abolition of past-tense verbs. We’re talking about using ambiguous, passive, and inactive language that may be stronger. Instead of ticking off things you were “responsible for” or “helped teams with,” use active terms like “streamlined,” “achieved,” and “spearheaded” that may be followed by specific actions you individually did to better the organizations and teams you worked for.
There are terms that are common in your sector, and then there are words that might alienate readers because of their obscurity or nicheness. We’re talking about specialized acronyms that aren’t utilized across the business or dig too deep into your duties. You may be a fantastic developer, but your CV will be read by more than just other engineers. You must be considerate while still keeping those folks in mind as possible readers. If anything technical is critical, use parentheses to describe it succinctly. Otherwise, leave it to one-on-one interviews where explanation is natural and enables your personality to shine.
While deleting the aforementioned phrases and keywords from your resume will not ensure that it is suddenly excellent, it will enhance your resume. Your next step should be to submit it to your network and ask individuals you trust for feedback on how to improve your resume. If you’d like to speak with a recruiter once your resume is complete, we can assist you in finding your next job.