So you’ve been to a couple resume workshops, experimented and created various different templates for your resume, and you’re pretty confident your resume is decent. What other steps can you take now to turn your resume from good to great?
The difference between a good resume and a great resume often comes down to the attention to detail you take when organizing the different components of your resume and organizing your bullet points. Your resume may be formatted well, looks great, and fits nice and neatly into one page, but do not forget that your resume is one of the first impressions an employer will have on you. And when there are hundreds of resumes that can be potentially turned in for one position, how can you make your resume stand out?
The first step is to tailor your resume specifically to the position you are applying for. It is great to have a general resume for career fairs and for your own personal records, but tailoring your resume to the specific position you desire will make your resume stand out. Make sure to constantly refer to the job description and qualifications for the position and match it with your resume. Do they want someone who is good at public speaking and presentation skills? Then make sure to highlight that in your description of your experience! Remember, while you may have tons of experience and have accomplished so much in every position you ever held, your resume is only one page. So pick selectively on what to highlight, and make sure what you are highlighting directly corresponds with what the employer wants!
The second step is to organize your resume in a way that prioritizes the most relevant experience to the position first! Rather than organizing your resume in terms of “work experience” and “volunteer experience” or “extracurriculars,” experiment with how you categorize your experiences. Perhaps another general way to categorize is placing “relevant experience” as the first category and “additional experience” as the next. Another option is to be more specific with how you categorize your experiences. Perhaps you want to have a separate category for research if the position specifically entails research. Or maybe you want to have a separate category of technical experience if the position requires technical skills. Be strategic in how you categorize your work, and remember that this is your resume, so there is no single, unchanging set of rules to abide by.
And last but not least, do not neglect to include your result or context in the description of each experience that you have! Do not think of your resume as just highlighting or listing the duties that you did for every experience, but rather utilize your resume as a venue for highlighting the skills that you have and the accomplishments that you have.
The Career Center’s Magic Bullet Point Formula:
Action Verb + Brief Description of role + RESULT/CONTEXT
If you can quantify and illustrate that you have produced tangible results in a job (i.e. improve a student’s SAT test scores by 18 points), then that looks much more impressive than just describing what you did in that position. However, since not everything a job entails produces a tangible result, it is still important to include relevant context to what you are doing – answering the purpose of what you did or what came out of it. You can provide a context to a tutoring position by describing how you increased the awareness and knowledge of a student on format and guidelines of the SAT, rather than just stating that you described and helped the student with their SAT preparation. This attention to detail can work wonders for transforming your resume from good to great!
Above all, remember that your resume is a marketing tool and constant work in progress. This one page will open many doors of opportunity for you, and you want to give the best first impression you can give!
Post by Lilibeth Clelo, 2nd Year Political Science Major, Education Minor
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