Keeping a good resume can be both difficult and mundane, and like most things in your career, it requires regular maintenance and updating. If you feel like your resume needs some sprucing up, keep reading to learn about the five best resume tips from HR we have to offer, especially if you’re a professional searching for further or novel work in your particular field.
Top Resume Tips From HR Managers
Highlight Key/Buzz Words
Including important terms or common buzz words unique to your industry will help to distinguish your resume. Clearly highlight specific words and phrases, depending on the skills and experiences that are considered assets to your field. You can seamlessly integrate these words into all of your achievement bullets, so that employers can easily detect obvious and compelling evidence of your activities, expertise and value. Further, if you want to bolden these words, it definitely makes your resume more “skimmable” and draws positive attention to the right places.
Omit Surplus Words
While there are certain words you definitely want to incorporate into your resume, conversely, there are likely words and phrases you could do without as well. In the professional world, your resume is only supposed to be about one page. Regardless, you want to ensure your grammar, syntax, and word economy are concise and clean. If you need a second pair of eyes, grab a peer or family member with excellent writing skills and ask them to help you touch up and potentially condense the writing in your resume to keep it sharp.
Specify Your Skills
You likely know that any good resume includes a “skills” section. This encompasses basic office and professional skills you may have, for instance, Microsoft Office and foreign language proficiency. What skills do you have beyond that, and which ones are particularly relevant to HR? Human development, management, organizational behavior? Think about pertinent skills and experiences you have that you could add to your resume when it’s time to polish it up.
Keep It Short & Sweet
Again, your resume should only be one page. This means you only need to include what you deem the most relevant and valuable. Remind yourself that you’ll often hear “Walk me through your resume” in an interview. Save the lengthy explanations for the cover letters and interviews. Furthermore, make sure your resume is short, sweet, and to the point. Your resume should convey what you’ve done and what you’ve accomplished; the face-to-face meetings are the place to show how you think and the type of employee you’re likely to be.
Timeline
Time your resume appropriately depending on your most recent experience, both professionally and educationally. If you’re not a recent grad, it’s okay to move your education section to the bottom (as opposed to the top, where many people often format it to precede their work experience.) Make sure your timeline is accurate in terms of all the jobs you’ve worked at. Place the most recent ones at the top, and make sure your bullet points clearly convey, in an attractive way, the duties for which you were responsible at each role. This isn’t a groundbreaking tip. But shifting things around and making sure your timeline is clear and linear when it comes to resume editing is a great way to do some spring cleaning.
Resume upkeep isn’t fun, but there’s no reason it needs to be difficult or frustrating. Just keep these resume tips from HR handy when it’s time to give your resume some polishing, and you’ll be looking great!
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