In the recruiting and employment world, your resume is your very first impression to a potential employer. When hiring managers are receiving dozens and possibly hundreds of resumes for the same job posting, you need to know how to make yours stand out. Whether you’ve held a dozen jobs, or none at all, you’ll still want to make sure the tips below are kept in mind for building an effective resume.

Be Mindful Of Layout: Layout and format are important elements of your resume. Some take it upon themselves to make the most stylish and modern resume with bright colors or even a photo to help them stand out, but truthfully you want to try to keep this to a minimum. Think instead, clear and easy to read. Feel free to add a bit of color or design element, especially if you’re entering a creative field, but be sure that it doesn’t take away from the content. After all, your resume should speak for itself and shouldn’t need flashy colors to make you stand out.

Listing Your Past Experiences: Speaking of layout, many resume writers will agree that keeping your past experiences to reverse chronological order, starting with your most recent experience is best. This allows the hiring manager to quickly see how your current positions can relate to the available ones. You’ll also want to be sure to include the employer name, your title, a timeline for which you’ve worked there, as well as a quantifiable summation of your performance within that position. Be mindful of any lapses of employment as these often stick out as red flags to hiring managers, so consider organizing positions by relevance rather than time.

Keep Their Attention: As we mentioned before, hiring managers are seeing tons of resumes for their available positions and may only have 10 or so seconds to dedicate to yours before they move on, so be sure to include a brief summary of who you are and what you bring to the table. You want to avoid cliche terms, and instead, check out the job description and include some relatable keywords right from there.

Quantifiable Job Summaries: It’s easy to list what you’ve done at a position and what job duties you were tasked with, but employers want to know what you’ve accomplished in your role and what you brought to the table that you can do similarly for them. With this being said, rather than listing out various job functions you did, list out your measurable accomplishments, such as, “enacting a new marketing campaign and increasing leads by 35%” or “simplified the workload for all team members by introducing new technologies and saving the company 50% overall.” This helps the hiring manager assess how valuable you can be to their team.

Keep It Custom: When applying to each position, tailor your resume and cover letter specifically for that position. Change a few keywords or add in experiences that better relate to each position you apply to.

You want your resume to appear clean and well thought out in order to keep the attention of the hiring manager to better increase your chances of scheduling an interview. Once you update your resume and are ready to apply, check out our available positions across the Southeast at condustrial.com/job-listings.

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