RESUME SPECIAL ....How to power up your resume

How to power up your resume

If you looking for employment, learn how to upsell your CV for that coveted job without lying in it.

Your resume has a single taskcatch the eye of the recruiter and get you shortlisted from a bunch of qualified candidates. It is not an autobiography, but a sales pitch telling a story in a visually appealing manner, while highlighting key elements to get a favourable decision. It is not based on lies or fiction that can destroy your career. Here’s how you can spruce up your resume.

Telling a story

The recruiter is interested in what you can achieve and not in the job description of your previous role. So, choose to speak about how you cracked a ₹2 crore client rather than saying you were responsible for sales. Talk about reducing costs by 10% instead of being responsible for budgeting. Use a common XYZ format to share your story—in situation X, I did Y to achieve Z. For example, established the first overseas office, contributing 10% to the company’s revenue in Year 1.

What will you include?

Make your story relevant and not comprehensive. Tailor your resume to the job description provided. Talk about latest job first —in reverse chronological order and keep education below work experience. Include your hobbies only if you are a fresher and can showcase your extracurricular achievements instead of professional experience. If you have 15 to 30 years of work experience, club the first 10-20 years under a single heading. To share additional details, include your LinkedIn profile, your website containing your design portfolio or your finance blog that demonstrates your market expertise and reputation.

Framing a job

Use no more than six bullet points in each section to bring out the wow factor you bring to the table. The biggest achievement is the first point and then onwards in decreasing order of importance. Use an action word to begin a sentence. “Wrote all press releases” works better than “responsible for press releases”. Remove meaningless adjectives like “passionate”, “dedicated”, “cross-functional” etc. Showcase yourself by quantifying each point with a number and a benchmark. For example, Best Salesman award for 2017 in a team of 15 for achieving 140% target vs most passionate, dedicated professional in sales team. Use numbers instead of words towards the beginning of sentence. Say supervised 35 people directly instead of directly supervised a team of 35. Finally, use key words from the job description in your bullet points to make it searchable by the Applicant Tracking System used by the employer.

First impression matters

A recruiter on an average spends 6 seconds to figure out whether a CV is worth pursuing. Your job is to make those seconds count. Make the CV easily readable. Use a uniform font no smaller than 11 points in size. Preferred fonts are Georgia, Ariel, Bell MT, Garamond, Calibri, Tahoma and Times New Roman. Sans serif fonts work better because they are easier to read. Georgia is preferred if your CV is going to be read on a screen. Make sure your name stands out. Below your name, use a separate line to share your cell number and email id. Do not include your address. Use a standard page margin between 0.5” to 1”. Use a line spacing of around 20% more than your font size to give a clean look.

Go above the field

Someone who is reading your resume on a computer is focused on what is presented in the first screen before scrolling down. Organise your story such that the most important parts are in the top one-third of your resume where it has 90% impact on the decision to shortlist. Your contact details, primary achievements, work summary and latest job elements are best highlighted at the beginning.

Make recruiter’s life easy

Your name should be the filename of your resume so that the recruiter can search for it on her laptop. Submit a pdf instead of a word document so that the recruiter does not face formatting issues. Do not use acronyms in your resume, unless you are 100% sure that the recruiter understands technical jargon. Thus, FCA may be meaningless but Fellow Chartered Accountant makes sense. Make sure the resume is skimmable so that the recruiter can capture highlights in a single glance. Convert each job experience headline into bold format and divide your resume into visually separate sections. When you put in a job headline use the sequence – Job title, company name, location followed by date at the end. If your resume is more than one page, at least a third of the new page should be covered with information.

Display due diligence

Avoid careless mistakes on your CV as it conveys either a lack of seriousness about the job or worse – an inability to do a job well. Use a spell checker for errors. Read each sentence backwards to weed out similar sounding words and typos. Read it aloud to see if the sentences make sense. Click on each link on the pdf to see if they work. Finally, have at least two other pairs of eyes rechecking your hard work.

ETW 15JAN18