Resume Enhancement Tips That Will Drastically Improve Your CV

Writing a powerful resume is always a challenge for many job seekers. With today’s tech-driven employment landscape, it’s becoming increasingly important to learn how to optimize your resume for both human readers and electronic scanning systems. While there is no magic methodology for creating a perfect document that grabs the attention of potential employers, there are basic ground rules for resume enhancement. Check them out!

Punch Up the Design

Spice up your resume with color, charts, boxes, shades, tables, and images. Lovely designs will make your CV stand out. Just ensure that the tweaking matches industry norms for your specific field. For example, a graphic designer can express his/her creativity with more graphics than an accountant. Additionally, present your resume in a crisp, professional folder to make it stand out and leave a positive, lasting impression.

Highlight Quantifiable Achievements

A resume that doesn’t highlight any achievements is set to fail. Sell yourself on your best achievements by making sure that what you talk about is quantifiable. Don’t just stop at your past or present position but rather speak about what you accomplished in those positions. No recruiter wants to waste time on a resume with lists of job duties without real achievements.

Improve your Resume’s Skimmability

People skim more than they read, and you can grab the attention of recruiters by writing short paragraphs of about three or four lines. If you have a lot to express, break up the content into multiple paragraphs and bullet points. Additionally, create white spaces between paragraphs to create some breathing space.

Avoid the words “responsible for” in your resume

Drop the words “responsible for” in your resume to quickly improve your presentation. Responsibilities come with every job, and they won’t add much value to your new appointment. You need to focus on your skills and accomplishments. Recruiters always look for the results of your work as opposed to a boring list of tasks you performed.

Eliminate clutter

Avoid anything that takes up valuable space on your resume without adding real value that promotes your candidature. Non-standard fonts, excessive graphics, and articles (the, a, an) just make your resume bulky and boring. In other words, make your resume concise, straight to the point, and accomplishment-driven.

Focus on Recent Accomplishments

It’s advisable to go back 15-20 years’ maximum on your experience. Although the job you did 30 years ago played an important role in your career growth, it probably doesn’t offer any relevance to the position you’re applying for today. Again, you don’t have to highlight every single job you ever did. Being a promotional document, fill up your resume with only relevant and relatable experiences.

Replace Objectives Statement with Summary

Many employers no longer care about career objectives. Improve your resume by removing the objective section and starting off with a personal summary. A well-articulated summary is considered the modern gem to this dated segment.

Understand your Prospective Employers

One of the most uncomfortable truths in job seeking is that the resume has very little to do with the candidate. It’s all about the hiring company and the specific business needs of the hiring manager. Craft your resume to appeal to your target audience: recruiters and hiring managers. The best way to go about this is to tailor your resume to address the business problems of your target audience and illustrate how you can be the solution.

Customize

There is massively conflicting advice on how to improve a resume, but one area where everyone seems to agree on is the need for customization. Recruiters are only concerned about the business problems they currently face. Your resume should indicate that you clearly understand the pain points of their business and that you have the skills and experience to solve it. Customization is aimed at accomplishing two things. Firstly, it conveys your understanding of the business challenges, and secondly, it emphasizes your individual strengths and how they relate to the task at hand.

Move the Most Relevant Accomplishments to the Top

Even as you spend time to customize your resume for specific employers, it’s often a tedious task that takes time and effort. The quickest way to grab the attention of potential employers is to start with the most relevant information on top of the page. Move the experiences that closely match the requirements of the job you’re applying for to the top. You can break up the content into “Most Relevant Experience” and “Additional Experience” to make it more presentable and easy to skim through.

Crafting an excellent resume requires significant efforts and is often a continuous learning process. Every word on your resume must count. So, make sure you make it lean and mean.  Learn how to optimize your resume.  Also, quantify your accomplishments by using numbers. Numbers speak a lot about your performance, so whenever possible, use percentages, dollars, and other figures that add credibility to your resume.