as a recruiter and a career coach I look at a lot of résumés and I do a lot of resumé reviews and one thing is perfectly clear some of y'all need some help and in this video I'm going to share some resumé writing tips that will help your resume not [Music] suck hey everybody it's Brian from Life After layoff and today I want to share with you some resume writing tips so that you can put your best foot forward and hopefully start Landing more job interviews now I want to preface this by stating that there's
no singular right way to write a resume there's lots of different approaches and a lot of them are very valid and the litmus test here is is your resume getting the results that you want if it is then stick with what works best for you my Approach comes from a corporate recruiter perspective how I screen and look at resumés very quickly we usually give you a 5-second glance but also how hiring managers have given me feedback on how they screen resumes themselves and so the feedback and the tips that I teach are from that perspective
but I'm not saying that my way is the only way that you can approach it however I do want to give you some tips that can help you improve your presentation because ultimately you have a very short amount of time to capture the attention of the person who is screening the resume and making sure ours is the one that gets called for that first round interview and I also want to point out that the tips that I'm sharing today come directly from my resume Rocket Field course which teaches you exactly how to write a resume
from a recruiter's perspective so if you need a little bit more assistance in developing and crafting the right resume for you you may want to consider that option so the first thing we want to do is stop using outdated templates designed by graphic designers I see these templates very frequently on places like canva.com but also a lot of these Big Industry resumé hubs where you can go in pay some money to download a resume that has a bunch of Graphics charts a bunch of cute presentation and those are generally a bad idea because they end
up distracting from the initial purpose which is for us to find what it is that we're looking for in a very quick and concise manner so honestly I just recommend going on to Microsoft Word downloading a very simple template and working with that if you want a battle tested recruiter approved resumé template I also provide one with ré Rocket Fuel and I've also made it available as a standalone so you can find that on my website when you're choosing a template go with one that has one column avoid any of the bright and flashy colors
and Graphics make sure that the fonts are very clean and easy to read I would think the basic colors maybe blue blacks dark green Etc but wouldn't go very flashy here for most of us a resume should be relatively boring in that regard The Only Exception here is if you're a graphic designer or somebody in a creative field where you might want to opt for a more creative approach to your resume because that's probably expected in that role but if you're a graphic designer you probably don't want to be using a template design by another
graphic designer it's probably not the best look for you and the reason why templates designed by graphic designers often aren't very effective is because they're designed by people who don't know how app applicant tracking systems work and how they parse resumés to that end here's another tip stop making your contact information horizontal you want to make it vertical because the ATS systems typically do not read horizontal and parse it very well you want to go vertical because it finds the information more cleanly and puts it into the right fields and here's a little litmus test
there if you find when you're applying for jobs that the applicant tracking system is not parsing your name your phone number your address things like that and clean and concise way and you have to do a lot of manual data entry you probably don't have an ATS compliant resume now your contact information isn't the reason why you aren't going to get contacted in most cases but it's just a little quality of life hack if you want to speed up your applications the next thing I would implore you to do is to stop writing your resume
as a summary of everything that you've ever accomplished in your career start thinking about profiling and I know that we look at profiling with a negative context but the idea of profiling here is that in instead of summarizing and hoping that the employer see something that they like that we're profiling for a specific role and we're delivering exactly what the employer is looking for it's a much more effective approach to writing resumés so stop focusing on all the stuff that you've accomplished in your career that probably isn't relevant to the hiring teams and start focusing
on what it is that they actually care about the next thing is is going to be something that's going to trigger some people but it's to stop being so lazy about your customization C customization of your resume is a very crucially important step especially in today's job market and in particular those coveted remote roles because you may be looking for them but so is everybody else and the competition is fierce so you have to do something to stand out and customizing while it might seem uncomfortable is something that you will have to get in the
habit of doing you can't keep on approaching your job search like it's 2018 the market is completely different today and listen because everybody else is going going to be lazy and not customize a resume this is your opportunity to use that as a competitive advantage and get that edge to get the phone call while they're all waiting and wondering why they're getting rejected and while you're at it stop being so damn wordy with your resumés some of the resumés that I see are blocks of text that are so long that your eyes just start to
glaze over as you're trying to scan through it think of when you go onto a forum or a Facebook post or something and people leave a huge block of text in a comment how how many of you actually get through it and read it whereas when people format it and make it look nice and concise and short it's much more easy to scan recruiters and hiring managers are probably going to skip over your resume if you hit them with a massive block of text so try to be more concise try to be very selective with
the words that you choose and how it lays out on the page and one way you can get rid of some of these extra words is to stop using proprietary language that the only people who know what it is are you and maybe your boss and your current co-workers often times we feel the need to put in all this proprietary information titles project names division names product types Etc that are only unique and only known by the company that you work for everybody else in the open market has no clue what they are and you're
spending all this time trying to basically word salad your way into I don't know if it's to try to impress us or what it is but you want to try to be concise here so I always recommend to try to boil down the concepts that you're trying to convey in as clear a language and as common a language as possible for the industry that you're applying to another thing that you can do to try to declutter your resume is to remove the generic fluffy terminology this stuff makes just about every recruiter and hiring manager roll
their eyes when you say things like I'm a team player or I have great organizational skills because listen if that's a really important competency to the hiring teams we're going to assess that in an interview anyway your resume is probably not going to show it in a way that we would need to to assess your fit instead I would focus on more actionable terms and Concepts in your resum as they relate to the job that you're doing because again the goal here is not to have the most words on your resume or try to impress
people with an elaborate vocabulary it's to convey a clear and concise fit for the job that you're applying to with again the end goal of trying to get your name called so that you can get into the interview process and the final tip that I'd like to convey in this video is to stop being so stubborn if if your resume isn't working redo it but as the say goes doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity but if you're getting frustrated in your job search and
you're getting rejected repeatedly at the application Level something tells me that your resume is not working for you and this is especially true if you're somebody that has a very clear fit for the job that you're applying to and I would be remiss without saying that we probably need to be realistic here about our fit for the jobs that we're applying to while we may feel we're a good fit we have to take a very close look at the job posting and say do I truly stack up because when they have a thousand other candidates
they probably are so make sure that your resume is clearly conveying the fit so that you can give yourself the best chance of getting into that interview process anyway hopefully you found these tips to be helpful the next time you're writing a resume and remember plan do check and adjust if your resume is not getting you the results that you want make some changes mix it up a little bit try a different version if you're still having some struggles I highly encourage you tock check out resume Rocket Fuel anyway happy job hunting appreciate you watching
we'll see you on the next one
