10 Resume Tips From Our Interns
- Before starting, make of list of your experiences. This is a good starting place for any resume because it acts as a brainstorming session before starting to format. While documenting your experiences, we also suggest writing down what you did at each of them and the skills that you gained.
- Only include relevant experience. After brainstorming, include the experience(s) that you think is/are most relevant to the specific job that you are applying for. It is better to leave out non-relevant experiences as these can serve as more of a distraction than a benefit.
- Choose a logical format. An imperative element of your resume is picking a format that is both eye-catching and lays out your information in a logical manner. You want to make sure that your most notable achievements are listed first to entice the employer to keep reading your resume.
- Include professional contact information. The contact information on your resume is one of the most important sections if you would like to hear back from your potential employer. Include an easy to reach phone number and email address. Make sure that if you’re using a personal email it is professional in nature. Lastly, consider including the link to your LinkedIn profile so that your potential employer can read more about your experiences.
- Use action words and associative results. For example: If you worked as a manager in a retail setting, instead of writing “worked with corporate”, you could write “consulted and collaborated with the corporate office to implement new policies and improve company standards”.
- Include relevant skills. When writing the skills section of a resume, many people include things such as effective communicator, strong leader, or creative thinker. While these are great skills to have, they are things that almost everyone has on their resume. Instead, we suggest including specific “hard” skills such as Microsoft Excel proficiency, knowledge of Shopify, certified bilingual, etc. These skills are more detail oriented and unique to you which will help you stand out from other candidates.
- Proofread. Resumes with spelling, grammatical, and formatting errors are often thrown away. Not having a proofread resume signifies a lack of effort and professionalism. We highly recommend having peers, family, or school faculty check over your resume for any potential errors that you may have missed.
- One page. Recruiters don’t like to scroll! With the exception of some specialized fields such as engineering, it is always better to keep your resume short and concise; one full page is ideal.
- Use key words from the job listing and industry. Many larger companies use algorithmic filtering mechanisms that will auto-reject any resumes lacking certain keywords before a human is even able to review it. To avoid falling into this pile, be sure to use keywords that are relevant to the specific job and industry to which you are applying.
- Quantify your achievements. Adding quantitative values to your achievements is a great way to make your resume eye-catching and add value to your experiences. For example: If you ran a business’s Instagram account, it would be much better to say “grew their Instagram following by 2,000 for a 72% growth rate over the course of 3 months” than “grew their Instagram”.
Comments
Love this! Rock N Rags is amazing!!
So helpful!! Excited for more posts!
So proud of you girls and all of your hard work this Spring! Looking forward to many more future successes and growing this amazing team.
So excited for this blog!! These tips are so helpful!
It’s about time Rock N Rags launched their blog – love to see the valuable content!