Not sure how to get your resume noticed?
Hi, I’m Jeri with Your Best Designed Career and in this video I’m going to share with
you what you need to be doing to get your resume noticed by employers.
And for the best career and job search advice, subscribe to my channel and hit the bell to
be notified when I post a new video every Tuesday
One of the questions I receive a lot is “How do I get my resume noticed when I apply for
a job?”
This can be a challenge when you consider the large number of resumes that recruiters
have to sort through and the fact that they give it just a quick glance and if their interest
is piqued, then they’ll keep it.
If not, it’s going to get tossed in the NO pile.
Then there’s the online process that scans your resume and if you don’t have the correct
formatting or enough keywords, that gets sucked into the black hole, and it’s never even
going to be seen by a recruiter.
So let’s talk about both of these challenges and how you can address them.
Keep in mind as you are putting together your resume that you only have about 6 seconds
to make an impression on your reader you need to get their attention quickly so they will
keep reading to the end of the resume.
Given that you have such limited time, don’t bury your good stuff.
When I prepare resumes for my clients, I make them top heavy.
Now what I mean by that is I take all of the valuable skills and achievements and place
those on the top half of the resume.
Now remember, you have 6 seconds don’t make your reader have to search for what they need
to see because they may not have time to.
Make their job easy by placing your best and most relevant stuff on the top of your resume.
Also, be sure to always consider the needs of the person who is reading your resume and
write it accordingly.
The first way you can do this is don't start your resume out with an Objective statement.
I think most people know not to use Objective statements anymore but I do still see them
so I wanted to bring that to your attention.
You don’t want to use one because they tend to be self-centered and focused more on what
you want.
But the reality is the reader doesn’t care about that, they want to know that you can
do this job and make their life easier.
So ditch the Objective statement and instead, use a Professional Summary.
Now a Professional Summary is a short paragraph maybe 3 to 4 sentences that incorporates the
skills that you have that are relevant and important to a particular position.
You’ll want to look at the job posting and just kind of reverse engineer your professional
summary so that you address the needs of the employer and describe your expertise to the
necessary skills to this position.
Okay, next If I’m looking to fill a position, I want to know what your results have been.
How have you impacted the bottom line of your past employers?
Now you can address this question with a section right below your professional summary that
demonstrates your quantifiable achievements.
Don’t bury this in your job experience section put it up on the top half of your resume where
it’ll be seen quickly.
Now achievements can be difficult for people to come up with because they feel like they
are bragging about themselves and they’re not comfortable with it, but it’s really
important for your reader to know how you can solve problems.
And achievements can be measured in many ways...it's not just about increasing sales.
It can be how you’ve decreased costs, or increased efficiencies, maybe you’ve improved
some processes, or you’ve surpassed deadlines, maybe you’ve saved a client account, get
creative and put some thought into the various achievements you have made that are relevant
to this position and list 3 or 4 of them in bullet form at the top of your resume.
Also, once you’ve come up with the most important achievements and have placed them
at the top of your resume, go ahead and sprinkle all the rest of them throughout your job experience
section as well.
Because seeing achievements on a resume is much more compelling and meaningful than just
bullet points of your job duties.
And with respect to your job duties you don't want to just list a bunch of tasks that you've
done in your experience section.
You have limited real estate on your resume so use that space wisely.
And only include the job duties that pertain specifically to the position that you are
applying for.
Next, after the achievement section you should incorporate a list of your skills.
I like to reserve 2 to 3 lines, again up on the top fold of the resume.
This list can be quickly scanned by your reader and will also help you get through the online
application process because these skills are considered keywords.
So let’s talk about submitting your resume online.
There are a ton of Applicant Tracking Systems, or ATS systems as they’re called, so it’s
impossible to know exactly which one you’re going to be dealing with, but for the most
part, ATS systems prefer simplicity—many of them can’t read certain types of documents
or formatting.
And if they can’t read them, guess where your resume goes right into the black hole.
Now my suggestion is to keep your resume simple.
It may not be the prettiest, but you will increase your chances of it getting through
the ATS and into a human hand if you keep your formatting basic and follow these rules:
Number 1 Unless specifically requested to do so, don’t submit a pdf, or jpeg version
of your resume, send it in a Word format instead.
Number 2 Don’t use headers, footers, tables, graphs, charts, borders, text boxes, shading,
all that good stuff that makes it look pretty, complicated fonts, or images.
And don’t use special characters for your bullet points, keep them simple.
Number 3 Avoid italicized text.
If you want to bring attention to certain words, just use bold text instead.
And then number 4 is use a tool like Jobscan to scan your resume and see where you have
gaps and areas of improvement.
Jobscan does offer free accounts with limited scans.
So, you really have nothing to lose by trying it.
Now that said, I AM an affiliate of Jobscan and should you decide to purchase a subscription,
I will receive a small commission.
This is at no extra cost to you.
But that’s not why I’m recommending Jobscan.
I recommend it because it really is a good tool for job searchers so let me show you
real quick how it can help you.
So here’s how Job scan works what you do is you copy the contents of your résumé
over here on the left and the contents of the job description on the right and you’ll
click the scan button and within just a few seconds you’ll get your results.
And I’m going to share just a couple of the screen shots that you will get.
There actually is much more than this.
This first one gives you your match rate and the match rate tells you how closely the content
of your resume matches the job posting.
Your goal is to have a match rate of at least 80% so you can see in this instance there
is still some work to do and you can tell a little bit on the right hand side where
we’re falling short on this one.
Now another report is this one that really tells you exactly where your problems are.
Jobscan analyzes each of these components.
This particular resume looks good except for obviously this red x in the skills and keywords
and you’ve got a detailed report with respect to your skills.
You’ve got one that shows your hard skills and then there’s another one I don’t have
that screen shot but there’s another one that actually incorporates soft skills as
well.
So what you’re going to want to do is review this list.
It tells you how many times this particular skill is on your resume and how many times
it’s on the job description.
So any place where you see an x is an area that if you have this skill you want to go
ahead and incorporate it into your resume where you can.
And note please my key phrase there is if you have these skills.
So make the revisions where you can and then you rescan and see what your score is now.
You may need to actually repeat this process a couple of times but once you are at 80 or
above then you are ready to submit your resume to the job posting.
I’ll go ahead and drop a link for Jobscan down in the description, I really encourage
you to try it out if you’re applying for jobs online.
I hope this information has been helpful, go make the revisions that you need on your
resume and remember, all of your good stuff goes up top!
If you like this video, please let me know by liking it below, and share it with someone
you know who needs to watch it.
And comment below with the word HELPFUL if this video helped you.
Thanks for watching, I’ll see you next time.