Your 5-Point Resume Review Checklist
Although it may go without saying, I’ll say it anyways — your resume is one of your most important job search tools in your arsenal. That means, having a great resume that’s agile that you can adapt quickly, while consistently sharing your story in a way you feel good about is essential to your job search and career advancement goals.
Most people can put together a pretty good resume. And with a little feedback and support, anyone can level up their resume from good to great quickly and with minimal effort. Critical feedback can offer additional perspective and valuable insights that you may have overlooked or second-guessed.
But before you reach out to someone, be sure to go through these 5 points to do a thorough self-review to get your resume in shape and ready for a review by a mentor, trusted advisor or career coach.
- Run Spell and Grammar Check. This point on the review checklist is first because it’s still the most obvious, and yet sometimes overlooked. But don’t forget to run spell and grammar check to find those mistakes that you can easily read over because you know what “it’s supposed to say.”
- Ensure your links are live, functional, informative and well placed. Utilizing live links to your work or results of your work are a great way to further demonstrate what you do in context. However, when applicant tracking systems come into the mix, links can really trash the translation of your resume when the bots run through your document. To try and get around this, avoid linking any keywords, your position titles, or position description bullets. Additionally, you want to only add links that can provide additional context by further demonstrating your work process or output. So, if the content on the other side of that link doesn’t enhance your position as a job candidate for this role, save it.
- Utilize an organizational structure and use it throughout. (Chronological, functional, or thematic). There are a couple key ways that people typically utilize to organize their resume. The thee most common are:
Chronological where you organize your positions in order of time, typically starting with your most recent position and work backwards from there. Chronological resumes can be good to highlight career longevity and career advancement at a specific company, in a field or industry sector.
Functional prioritizes grouping previous positions based on the function or type of work. You should try to identify some specific headings and group your similar work experiences under those headings. This approach makes good sense if you held roles across discrete industries For further internal organization with the functional approach, be sure to organize your positions under each grouping chronologically.
Thematic approach works well for job seekers that have been industry agnostic, have a diverse work history and have held many positions over shorter periods of time. This organizational approach prioritizes the content or type of work. When identifying headings, consider the common themes to the type of work you have done which likely spans diverse industries and may be cross-functional or multi-disciplinary in nature. So, if you find yourself drawn to roles that position you to do social justice work, community building, or culture change, this may be a organizational approach to consider.
4. Review position descriptions to demonstrate your work activity and results of your contributions. I find people are really good at identifying the 3 or 4 key things they did in a role pretty easily, it’s identifying the results or impacts of that work which become a challenge. However, taking the next step of identifying how or in what ways your contributions were impactful or lead to achieving company goals helps “connect the dots” for a hiring manager between what you do and what results you’ve had.
5. Separate transferrable skills from technology competencies. Although you can apply your fluid utilization of technology or specific softwares to a number of work contexts, that is not a transferrable skill. Do yourself and the hiring manager the favor, and create two lists. One list identifying your transferrable skills (think soft skills or emotional intelligence aspects) and one identifying your technology competencies (think Salesforce, network administration, Python, SQL, Photoshop, A/B Testing, or Adobe Creative). Tech skills is also a place where you may want to indicate the extent to which you are competent, with labels such as fluent or intermediate. I say skip beginner.
Now that you’ve done a thorough self-review, reach out to a trusted mentor, advisor or career coach for real, honest feedback.
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Dr. Erika Pryor is a creative technologist, diversity and inclusion advocate, and startup cheerleader. She is founder and chief community builder of EPiC Career Network, a career advancement community empowering professionals to find and do their most authentic work. Sign up here to join an online community offering relevant job search and career advancement support.
