[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hi, everyone.
I'm Bethany from Indeed.
Today I'm going to show you how to edit your resume
to increase your chances of being contacted by an employer.
I am currently editing in Google Docs.
You can do that too, or you can also
use Microsoft Word or another software of your choice.
What we're looking at here is just
an example resume that has some common mistakes
I've encountered in the past.
To start off, it's important to remember
that the goal of a resume is to quickly communicate
your professional story and key skills to possible employers.
This resume already has all the sections
that a great resume needs--
name and contact info, summary, education, work experience,
and skills.
Starting at the top, I want to begin
with the contact information.
On this resume, they've included a full physical address.
Today, because most communication during the hiring
process takes place online, it's really not
necessary to include this.
All you need at the top is your name, email, and phone number.
So I'm going to go ahead and remove his address from here,
and also add a little bit of formatting to the header
by bringing it onto one line and building his name,
as well as centering everything.
Next, this person has included a summary on their resume.
This is optional, but it can be a really good way
to sum up your professional background and aspirations.
It can be helpful to think about a resume summary as an answer
to the question, how would you describe your work
experience in one sentence.
And this person has done that really well here.
The next section of a resume is typically
the education section.
You do have the option of moving this towards the bottom,
after your work experience.
I recommend you keep it at the top
if you are early on in your career,
or your degree is an absolute requirement for the job.
Otherwise, move it to the bottom if you
have more work experience.
The general rule with the education section
is that you should include the highest level of education
only, as well as any licenses or certifications that
are relevant to the jobs you're seeking.
Because this person does have a bachelor's degree,
I'm going to recommend they go ahead
and remove their high school here.
And then remove that space.
It's optional to include your GPA if it's higher than a 3.5.
So this person is fine to include it here.
But it's only necessary for jobs where the employer has
specifically asked for it, or if this is
your first job out of college.
The next section is your work experience.
This is typically the longest section of your resume,
and it's where you'll demonstrate
that your past employment has qualified you
for your next job.
Here, beginning with your most recent job,
you should list your most relevant work experience
from the last 10 to 15 years.
Include the name of the employer, your job title,
years of employment, and a few bullet
points with your strongest, most relevant accomplishments.
In general, you'll want to have the most detail for your most
recent job and can have a less detailed description
of older jobs.
Also, lead with strong action verbs
and follow with an accomplishment rather than
a task.
Employers are interested in what you've achieved
and not just tasks you've done.
When possible, also use numbers to measure your success.
There are at least three different ways
to measure your work.
Number one is people.
Did you lead a group of people of a certain size,
or make it possible for a task to be done by fewer people?
Number two is time.
Did you speed up a process, or get to a result quickly?
If so, how quickly?
And number three is money.
Did your work leads to sales, revenue, or cost savings?
For example, here this person has said,
answers customer complaints, and effectively
de-escalates altercations over the phone.
We can take the advice from above both
by including a strong action verb
and quantifying their contribution with, responds--
[TYPING]
--to customer complaints and effectively escalates
altercations over the phone, resulting--
[TYPING]
--in customer satisfaction--
[TYPING]
-- improvement of 17%.
Of course, you need to be honest about the numbers you're
including.
So I'd want this person to check to see if they could measure
the increase in customer satisfaction
rating they achieved.
Also, if you don't have much work experience,
or if you're hoping to transition careers,
you may want to include volunteer positions
in this section.
These can follow the same format and the same best practices
as your regular work experience.
Next, it's important to add skills to your resume
because it's a place to highlight keywords
that employers are looking for.
Depending on how relevant certain skills are to the job
description, you can play skills below or above work experience.
In general, there are two types of skills--
hard skills and soft skills.
Hard skills are abilities specific to the job and/or
industry like specific software, speaking a foreign language,
or operating certain equipment.
Soft skills, on the other hand, are abilities
that can be applied in any job.
Sometimes, people call these people skills or social skills,
and they include proficiency in things like communication
or customer service.
Read the job description to learn which skills the employer
values most, and include those skills
as they're relevant to your skills on your resume.
On this resume, there is already a skills section,
but it's short and doesn't contain
details of how proficient this person is in a specific skill.
For instance, sales doesn't really tell me anything.
And PowerPoint is something we generally
expect people have skills with PowerPoint in Microsoft Word.
So I'm going to go ahead and remove both of these.
And let's say this person speaks Spanish,
and they're applying for a bilingual customer service job.
So we can put here fluent in Spanish.
[TYPING]
And because of their experience in customer service,
I would imagine they have effective communication skills.
So we can include that.
As well as conflict resolution.
[TYPING]
Like everything else on your resume,
only include the skills that are an honest reflection
of the things how to do.
Those are all the main pieces of a resume.
The final step of resume writing is to carefully proofread
to catch any mistakes.
So make sure you do a careful reading or two
before you submit it.
I also highly encourage you to have at least one other person
read your resume as they will inevitably catch something
that you missed on that first or final proof.
Consider also putting your resume away for a day or two
and coming back to it with fresh eyes before you begin applying.
Once you're happy with it, you want
to save it as a doc or a PDF file
so that it's compatible with most employer systems.
And we can do that by going to File
and then Print so that you can save it as a PDF.
And the way you do that is by changing
the destination to PDF, save as PDF,
which is already done here.
And then you also want to name your resume something
professional and with your name in it.
So this could be Codie Fredrickson [TYPING] resume.
And then save it.
If you're attending an interview,
be sure to print it off and bring three to five copies
for your interviewers so that they can easily reference it
during that interview.
I also recommend uploading your resume to Indeed
at myindeed.com, right here.
Upload resume now that you already have one.
This will increase your chances of being contacted about a job
and enables you to apply for jobs quickly.
At Indeed, we're here to help you during your job search.
And if there were any questions that
weren't answered in this video, please reach out
to us on social media at Indeed Support.
Thanks for watching.