How to Write a Stand out Resume – Part 2

Not long ago, I was read­ing a CNN arti­cle, where it said that one out of two human resource man­ager spend less than two min­utes review­ing a new job-application, while fur­ther 17 % spend less than a minute. That means you have around 60 sec­onds to impress an employer.

That is not much of a time and if you read my pre­vi­ous post about this topic, I wrote about the impor­tance of writ­ing an eye-catching resume in order to increase the oppor­tu­ni­ties to be invited for an interview. In this post I will try to high­light exactly what these impor­tant points are. So let’s go straight to the point. How should your mas­ter­piece of a resume look like before you send it away?

Clean and professional

This is the first step to mak­ing your resume stand out. Start­ing from the top till the bot­tom, your resume should have a pro­fes­sional look.  Use sim­ple for­mat­ting tools on word or other text pro­grams and make sure you give your resume a good look­ing style. One good tip is to use tables– it will give you a bet­ter con­trol of your doc­u­ment, and when you print or fin­ish the tables will not be vis­i­ble anymore.

Max­i­mum one page

As you know a resume is dis­play­ing your career and life expe­ri­ences, but no mat­ter how long you have been in the job mar­ket or how many job and other inter­est­ing expe­ri­ences you have, the resume should never exceed one page. Every­thing you want to dis­close should be on that page. There­fore it’s impor­tant that you care­fully select what you should include and what you shouldn’t.

A resume is unique

A resume should always be unique. Do not bother your­self (or oth­ers) with mass-sending a resume to dif­fer­ent employ­ers. Always think qual­ity, instead of quan­tity when­ever you write a resume. With that in mind, a resume will always have a spe­cific aim and tar­get. A spe­cific job, in other words. It should only con­tain suit­able con­tent for the spe­cific posi­tion you are apply­ing for. Include your expe­ri­ences that you feel will be appre­ci­ated by the resume-readers. As an exam­ple do not include a point­less job you had ten years ago, but rather empha­size a recent inter­nal climb you did in your work duties.