The Advanced Resume Checklist
You filled out your resume, shared it with a friend or perhaps your college’s career center.
What next?
How can you get past the computers, past the first round of judgements, and make it into the first round of interviews?
Here’s Our Advanced Resume Checklist:
1. Create A Master Resume
First things first — if you’re going to make a first impression it’s incredibly important to create a master resume with everything that could be relevant to any sort of job opportunity. From your first job working at McDonalds in high school to all of the classes you’ve taken to every extra-curricular you’ve ever been apart of.
This might be a pain to create but start with copying and pasting your Linkedin and old resumes into a single master resume.
Why?
Because each time you send out your resume you want to handpick from your master list and craft the strory that shows your the best fit for that particular position. Every single time.
2. Spinning Your Content — A Targeted Resume
Which brings us to our second point — spin your resume every time you apply for a new job.
What’s spinning, you ask?
It’s taking your master resume and selecting and changing your content in a way that better matches the job description you’re applying to. Copy your master resume and begin removing irrelevant experiences.
When you find yourself saying “well, all of these could be relevant but I’m still over 1 page, what now?
We’re glad you asked.
3. Optimize for Keywords
Use a tool like Jobscan that compares your resume to the job description you’re applying to can really help you optimize for keywords that they’re looking for. The frustrating thing about many jobs today is that the first step is getting past a computer.
This tool (they have a free tier) can help. Another approach is using a word cloud tool like TagCloud to get a visual analyzation of your resume — and you can do the same thing to compare against a job description.
They key here, is to make sure that you’re spinning your experiences to match the types of things that they’re looking for.
4. It’s All About The Numbers
This is something that is said over and over again.
Saying: “Utilized leadership skills to lead a team of 12 others to plan key events for the dance marathon” does nothing to help your future employers know what you accomplished.
All that tells them is that you worked with 12 other people — how does that help? Let’s figure out how we could improve this particular line.
Saying: “Lead a team of 12 students to coordinate 3 fundraising events that directly raised over $50,000 for charity” is a much stronger statement. Being able to quantify what you did allows future employers know that you can communicate your results clearly and better showcases your accomplishments at the same time.
5. Removing Generic Action Words & Narrowing In
In that last example you might have also noticed that we changed the word “utilized” to “lead”. Utilized is a nightmare word to use on your resume.
What does Utilize actually even mean in that context?
It’s important to use specific action words that are relevant to the opportunity you’re applying to.
There are a number of action word lists to pull from all over the internet. Regardless of what resource you check out — it’s incredibly important to make sure you’re making your content, you guessed it, targeted.
If you follow this advanced checklist closely, you’ll be in a much better position to land your next big opportunity.
