Landed an exciting job opportunity? Pulled off a sales target in your current job? Experts and recruiters urge employees and job seekers for a resume refresh at least 2 times every year. ‘Whether or not you are searching for a job’, you must vitalize your resume with the latest accomplishments, awards, experiences, and target achievements!
Moreover, your resume calls for some deletions from time to time. This may include your, somewhat irrelevant, internships from the graduation times or the first job of your career. This space can be restored with your lately acquired skills or a to-the-purpose training you took this year!
The job market has always been zealous, isn’t it? Every candidate is expected to be whole-nine-yards literate to land a job or an interview initially. Therefore, it is unfailingly critical to give a little relevant touch up to your resume. At a glance, general resume refresh upgrading incorporates transfiguration to:
- ATS-friendly and outwardly engaging format
- Newest held positions
- Re-purposing existing resume data
Benefits of Refreshing Resume
Let’s go through some morale-boosting benefits of refreshing your resume – this might help you make more sense spending 1-2 hours of your life in a year to re-look into your resume!
Eager Beaver Job Candidate
First and foremost, a touched-up resume makes you more relevant and ‘helps you stand out in a crowd.
Side Hustles
Second, sometimes you might need or get interested in some freelance work or short-term projects. You know you are a good fit and possess relevant experience in your bag. Time is everything when opportunities like these present themselves. An updated resume can put you in a good spot!
Clearer Career Picture
The third good benefit is a clear view of your career path. Updating and proofreading your application multiple times in a year assists you go-through your career decisions, patterns of success and challenging times, pieces of training, and skills you acquired already. This aids you in analyzing and deciding your future efforts and succeeding professional direction.
Time-Saver
Forth mileage it lends is convenience and time-saving. We always understand the gravity of resume refresh when we have not upgraded our resume and need it at its earliest. Often do we forget the small and specific details of our experiences nick of time. So, a regular resume-refreshing habit benefits you including all important information beforehand and evades your memory and speed test!
Unsought Professional Situations
Fifth, we all are familiar and quite chilling towards the layoffs side of employment. Furthermore, the past COVID year has made us quite aware of how life, in general, can take unplanned twists. An updated resume/ CV helps you pay more heed towards networking and submitting proposals.
6 Quick Tips to Update your Resume
A: Refresh your resume regarding the target job
Before making edits/ additions to your resume, ‘it’s wise to research words related to occupation and skills relevant to your target job field’! On the off chance that you have more than one professional interest, you’ll be greatly improved creating various renditions of your resume as opposed to attempting ‘to develop a one-size-fits-all application.
Go through the job ads thoroughly – explore target occupational skills/ aptitudes on the web or through your colleagues in the ‘target industry’ – skim and add job-related skills and credentials. Include jobs-related keywords, for successful passing of your resume through ATS and human check and unlock your initial interviewing chance!
Besides web and job post data, job seekers must also brainstorm the requirements a recruiter/ business owner would desire ‘in his ideal candidate for the available position,’ this would help you set a targeted tone in your resume from start till end. Furthermore, research on modern resume screening and enter pertinent keywords/ job words to let your resume pass the keyword filters well!
B. Craft Your Professional Career Profile
Your resume is undoubtedly you exhibiting your professional career profile in the most ideal way possible. A complete and strong job profile has a decent format and font – it is more objective-centered and incorporates target-job-related triumphs, skills, and professional experiences.
Contemporary resumes avoid resume opening like ‘Career Objectives’ nowadays. Instead, job candidates initiate applications docs with ‘executive profile/ summary statement’, as a display of value-adders in the target organizations! A good career story is a mindful and conscious division of information into sections eliminating kindred facts and avoiding overstating your expertise!
While listing your past professional experiences, utilize action verbs – rather than stating responsibilities – with numbers! This highlights you as a doer in the eyes of the reader. Muse on staying away from over-boosting since you’ll be anticipated to describe your claims in the interview setting!
C. Include your Career Accomplishments
If your resume passes the Automated Scanning Systems, a reader spares only 6-8 seconds to decide on whether he wants to pile up your resume or keep reading. He/ she is highly beady-eyed on your resume’s skills, core competencies, and accomplishments sections. A hiring manager wants to ensure whether or not you’ve keenly read the job ad, and embraced job-related career outcomes in the document! Â
In today’s competitive environment, where the candidate pool is more than available job openings, it’s smart and objective to insert numbers and outcomes instead of those dull and monotonous job duties in the ‘career achievements resume section’ to acquire a job!
Emphasize your/ your team’s contribution! For instance, read a good and a bad IT Security Manager’s resume entry in the career outcomes portion:
Bad: Responsible for ensuring that my association’s PCs, organizations, and information is safe from hacker attacks.
Good: Incorporated Linux, Python, Cisco alike modern programs in network architecture for IT Infrastructure’s protection against breaches in compliance with the organization’s external and internal policies.
D. Design your resume
In addition to a piece of relevant career information, your resume should also be visually appealing and modern-looking. You can research, learn, and design by yourself – as everything regarding formatting features: bold, italics, headings, sub-headings, white space, margins, icons, fonts, spacing; is on the web!Â
You can also take help from a formatting/ resume expert or friend to ease this task for you! But remember checking up on a file format as mentioned in the job advertisement.
- Keep it concise, 1-2 pages.
- Use the first-person tone and eliminate pronouns
- Use bullets and avoid graphs/ collages to keep your resume ATS friendly
- A good resume bears a consistent layout: fonts, alignment, text size
- ‘Your resume should be relevant to the industry and field you are applying to’
E. Proofread your resume
Ensure an error-free resume’. Cautiously edit your resume to guarantee legitimate sentence structure, accentuation, and word use. Aren’t good with grammar or spelling? Double-check your document with grammar tools available online. Be conscious of the consistency of your career profile.Â
You can ask an expert or a friend to re-read your resume for you and make up for any deficiencies to win this chance.
F. Social Presence
Deliver More! Modern recruiter now takes time to view and know more of you from the social handles you may share in your resume! You may add your website, blog, or LinkedIn profile if thus created and updated regularly. Obviously, this optimizing activity consumes your extra efforts, but standing out from the crowd – remember? A routinely and professionally carried out social presence always yields you positive and fruitful opportunities and adds to your credibility and authenticity!
