6 Practical tips to optimize your Resume/CV

Unsplash (Joao ferrao)

6 Practical tips to optimize your CV and stand out

A lot’s going on in the job-hunting journey. A never-ending process of applying and optimizing your CV (Resume), and portfolio.

And maybe networking and improving your online presence.

If you’re applying a lot and never get any response. It means either you’re not qualified for those roles or your CV isn’t working.

Source: resumegenius.com

Your CV’s job is only to get you the interviews. and if it’s not working, then you need to optimize it to make it work.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll be sharing 6 practical tips on how to improve your CV to stand out in recruiters’ eyes and get an interview.

1. Design simple

No one likes to read a messy and cluttered CV. It’s a huge red flag. Especially for designers.

Once a recruiter told me:
“If I see a CV with a bad design, I’ll reject him/her immediately. No matter if it’s a good match for the role or not.”

Here are a few tips to improve your CV template:

• Design with simplicity approach
• Use limited colors and visuals to highlight the content
• Don’t make it too artistic
• Use regular fonts
• Add proper spacing and page padding

💡 Tip: You can find some good free CV templates in Canva and use them.

2. Show your unique personality

If you’re just listing your skills in your CV, then you’re nothing just a bunch of skills to the companies. Someone with more skills is going to beat you.

Companies don’t hire skills, they hire characters.

What is it in your character that makes you unique? I’m talking about your unique personality, your ambition, your soft skills.

Add them to your CV.

Source: hiration.com

I know, the CV has to be a very simple and short description of you — there isn’t a lot of room to show off. But this is the tricky part.

In the Summary paragraph, you need to tell a good story that highlights some of your important (valuable) characteristics. In maximum 2–3 lines.

💡 That’s how you position yourself more than just a bunch of skills.

3. Optimize for scannability

Recruiters are so busy. They usually get bombarded with hundreds of CVs when they post a job. So they don’t have a lot of time and energy parsing every single CV they receive.

Recruiters only spend 30 seconds up to 1 minute scanning a CV.

That means you need to optimize your CV for easy scannability.

• Keep things brief
• Remove clutters and every redundant info
• Use bullet points more
• The summary shouldn’t be more than 2–3 lines
• Optimize the hierarchy with the right content structure
• Use proper font, font size, and contrasts

4. Articulate your values

Your CV should clearly articulate the values you can bring to the company.

Value = Every skill you have that could be impactful in that role.

Every skill, including all of your design skills, non-design skills, and soft skills that matter for that company should get listed. The job description can give you a lot of hints for that.

I know — it’s a bit tricky since companies’ needs and skill gaps are different. and Since you’re building a one-fit-all CV — that could lower the quality of your value articulation.

• Study the job description and extract the keywords and skills
• Try to tell a good story that clearly shows your skills that match what they’re looking for (in summary + experiences)
• Use those related keywords across your CV
• List down all of your important hard and soft skills (in separate sections)

5. Show your impact

You need to make the company (recruiter) trust in you that you could be potentially a good match for that role. So you can get an interview chance to prove it.

Building trust is possible by showing the related impact you had created before in your past experiences. It proves you’re capable of doing it.

Source: Intercom

• Under each of your past experiences, talk about your impact
• Make it short, concise and use bullet points
• Prioritize those impacts that uncover something relative to job requirements or skills
• Use metrics and numbers for measurable impacts (recruiters love numbers)

Here’s a simple framework to write your impacts:
[What you did] + [How you did] + [Outcome]
In the shortest formatting. If it’s going to be too long, then you can skip the “How” part.

Useful resource:
How to have impact as a designer (by Intercom) ↗

6. Optimize for ATS

Almost every company uses an ATS software (Application Tracking System) to organize and keep track of each application they receive.

ATS systems can read CVs and scan for specific keywords recruiters define. And sort them. If ATS can’t read your CV it may get filtered out or ranked below the list. Don’t matter how qualified you could be.

Usually, CVs get rejected by humans (recruiters). However, some recruiters may filter out CVs that don’t include those keywords.

Optimizing your CV to be ATS-friendly can prevent those horrible scenarios from being filtered out without anyone being noticed.

Few tips to make sure your CV is ATS-friendly:

• Avoid graphics
• Make at least a 1-inch margin on all sides
• Use proper spacing between sections and texts
• Clear hierarchy
• Use proper font (Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Georgia, and Times New Roman)
• Test your CV ATS-friendliness with some online tools
• Optimize file size (max 2MB)
• Make sure it’s a text-based PDF

Useful Tool

• Teal is a resume builder you can use to build or optimize your CV. It also has an AI feature to take a look at the job description you’re applying to and give you recommendations to optimize based on qualifications.
• ResumeWorded scans and analyzes your CV and helps to optimize for ATS and scannability.

This originally has been posted on the DesignFrens Newsletter on Substack.

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