Writing a resume is not an easy task, especially as you get further into your career and have more content to add, more experiences that you have to include, and more skills to flesh out. However, while a resume depends a lot on the specific situation, industry, and career path of the writer, there are some commonalities that are important across nearly all resumes. Here are five crucial and easy tips for improving your resume both for Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and human audiences.
Add a Professional Summary
There used to be conflicting information about whether to add a professional summary at the top of the resume. But now, in 2023, it is absolutely essential to have one. This summary should be 2-5 sentences long, and should focus on broad experience, skills, and personality traits that you offer for the roles you’re targeting. The summary is critical in two ways. First, it’s a great place to put keywords and key phrases for the roles you’re looking at, as most ATS scan resumes from top to bottom, and will therefore hit the summary first. This will cause your resume to rank more highly, and therefore be more likely to pass to a hiring manager. Second, it provides the actual reader with a quick high-level look at what you bring to the table – hiring managers and recruiters don’t have time to sit through and read resumes from top to bottom, so the summary is a great tool to distill your key traits and abilities.
Use Action Verbs to Start Each Bullet Point
Another easy step to improving your resume is to utilize action verbs at the start of every bullet point. This gives your bullets an extra level of emphasis and helps drive an active instead of passive voice, demonstrating what you have done and how. These should be varied as much as possible, so not every bullet starts with “Led”, “Managed”, “Oversaw”, “Provided”, “Assisted”, etc. Some other good action verbs/phrases are “Spearheaded”, “Guided”, “Coordinated”, “Aided”, “Contributed to”, and “Served on”. You should avoid passive starts such as “Responsible for” as much as possible – there are ways to rewrite the bullet to say the same thing, but in a more active tone.
Keep the Resume at One or Two Full Pages
In terms of formatting, one mistake a lot of people make is having a resume that doesn’t fill up a page. This usually occurs on a second page that is only half full, but sometimes occurs on the first or third page as well. There are a couple of components here. First of all, resumes should rarely be longer than two pages – the exceptions are for senior executives, federal resumes, or those in research, scientific, and medical fields who have a CV. Even if you’re a senior professional with a long job history, your resume should not be longer than two pages, as it’s very unlikely anyone will read past the second page. Second, whether you have a one- or two-page resume, your document should fill all of its pages. Having a lot of white space at the bottom of the page makes the resume look half written, especially those that are 1.5 pages. If you don’t have enough content to get to 2 pages, try to minimize and get to one, or expand the formatting to fill out more of the second page – if you can get it to even 80% of the second page, that’s a lot better.
Remove Superfluous Information
This is almost a sub-section of the previous tip, but is also a bit different. One way to trim your resume down is to remove information that does not directly pertain to your career and professional experience. This might include volunteering, extracurricular activities, personal information, or even non-professional organizations. Such information is not usually a huge negative, but it can be very subjective, and might have a negative effect on readers (though it could have a positive impact as well). More critically, it takes up room that would be better utilized on fleshing out your education, experience, or skills. The two times such “other” information might be useful is for very entry-level candidates or for those with major job gaps that need something to fill the time between employment.
Make a Straightforward, Top-Down, Black and White Format
You may have been told that your resume needs to “stand out” to “differentiate yourself” from peers. This is mostly not true, or at least does not mean what most take it to mean, which is to use creative, colorful, and busy designs to stand out visually. In fact, a top-down resume in black and white with no graphics or images is your best bet to do well, as this format not only performs best in ATS, but is also the clearest to read, which is the most important thing for hiring managers. If you clearly show and explain your experience, you will do better than someone who does all sorts of fancy design work but obscures their own experience or creates a highly subjective visual experience. A black-and-white resume will help keep subjective bias to a minimum and clearly show where you worked, for how long, what your position titles were, and what your skills are.