Recruiters spend at most a few minutes, possibly seconds scanning your application. This means that making your resume & cover letter easy to skim should be one of your top priorities.
Here are a few tips for designing a simple but effective resume:
🌠Use the most common & traditional format – the reverse chronological resume format
By now, hiring managers have seen every trick in the book, including the functional & hybrid resume fad. A resume that leaves out important information like dates or job titles is going to look, shady to recruiters. Instead, list your jobs in reverse chronological order, with your current or most recent job at the top and, if you have a compelling reason for it, separate your work history into two buckets, relevant and other experience, but make sure you list your titles, companies, and dates of employment for every job.
🌠Keep a logical flow to your sections
In other words, if you have experience then your work experience section should be the first section after your skills and if you are a fresher then your education and academic projects take precedence. If you’re changing careers, you can prioritize relevant experience and transferable skills or more recent upskilling
🌠Cut out the irrelevant information
The only things that belong on your resume beyond basic contact information are things that are relevant to the job you’re applying for and skills that strengthen your candidacy. What doesn’t belong? older roles, or roles from a different career path, your parent’s name, date of birth, gender, street address, photo, logos etc.
🌠Use your document real estate wisely
Apply less is more to your resume, too. Don’t use wall-to-wall text and leave some white space, leaving space between different sections of your resume will make your resume easier for recruiters to skim and help the most important information stand out.
🌠Refine your resume
With so many online & offline tools for spell-checking & grammar for your resume, there’s no excuse for typos. Always thoroughly proofread your resume, rightly or not, even a single mistake could cause a recruiter to move on to other candidates. You don’t want to leave anything to chance.
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