Every professional has to write a resume at one point or the other. It may be because you’re looking for new employment, or you’re changing your career path, or you may be updating your resume with further important details. Whatever the reason is, you must come up with a strong resume. However, since you don’t get to write a resume every day, you may not know how to create a resume that beats candidate screening tools, and you surely wouldn’t be aware of some of the new trends in writing solid resumes. This is why you should consider working with professional resume writers.

The truth is, your resume is more important than you most likely think it is. It is the first impression an employer has of you and can determine your employability for a role before they meet you in person. Therefore, you must ensure that your resume not only stands out but it gives the right impression of you and entices a potential employer into reaching out to you for an interview. Professional writers can help you write a resume that gives you an edge with employers. 

This article discusses five of the best tips to write a strong resume. 

1. Highlight the Most Relevant Experiences First

The first thing you should know about resume writing is that you need to target your resume towards the job you’re applying for. So when you have to list the job responsibilities of the previous roles you had, you must start with the roles and experiences most relevant to the job you’re applying for. This means that you have to think about the different parts of your current role that are transferable to the new position you’re aiming for, even if it is in a new career, and prioritize these roles on your resume. Make sure to highlight your biggest and most relevant accomplishments in the first few lines of a paragraph or the first two bullet points. 

2. Learn to Beat the Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)

The primary role of the ATS is scanning a large volume of resumes to seek out candidates whose skills match the keywords that the hiring manager inputs in the system. So, you need to learn the appropriate keywords for the employment you’re seeking and use them so you can beat the ATS. However, it doesn’t stop there, unfortunately. You must also ensure that you’re not using a complicated formatting system that makes it hard for the ATS program to read your skills. 

With over 200 programs available, it’s hard to pick out points that are consistently effective, but a few tricks are:

• Avoid fancy bullets and fonts.
• Don’t use pictures, graphics, headers or footers, tables, or text boxes.
• When applying for jobs online, make sure your resume is ATS-friendly. 

3. Use Statistics When it’s Appropriate.

Your resume should include the results you achieved in past roles, and you should back this up with statistics. Statistics help your resume stand out from the rest and put you in the recruiter’s good grace. Those numbers will ensure they slow down and read your resume more keenly rather than glance through like the others, which can make the difference. Of course, there’s no new or catchy information in saying that you increased sales. Still, if you say you were able to boost your company’s sales by 40% within six months by training staff to communicate with customers and prospects better, then you are highlighting your ability, and this will interest them. 

4. Spice Up Your Resume With a Variety of Experiences

You can add many other experiences to your resume to attract employers apart from paid employment. For example, different past experiences such as leadership positions outside paid work, philanthropy, freelancing, volunteering, and other projects can be added to your resume to spice it up and add more to your personality and skills. 

5. Proofread

Proofreading is more important in resume writing than you can imagine. You want to ensure no inconsistencies in your resume, especially when you’re telling the employer that you’re “detail-oriented.” Take the time to go through your resume again and ensure it is perfect. It may help if you ask a friend to help you read through it with their fresh pair of eyes to pick up common errors and inconsistencies that may dampen your chances of getting employed. 

Common errors to look out for are:

• Inconsistent date format
• Inconsistency with a full stop after bullet points
• Verb tense inconsistency
• Spelling errors
• Fonts, numbers, and text alignment

Check for these errors and have someone else do the same to be safe. 

Conclusion 

The more relevant details you can add to your resume, the stronger the resume is. You must ensure you get your resume right. Otherwise, your chances of getting a job are dim. 

What do you write in the “Personal qualities” section of your resume, and how seriously do you approach the filling of this particular section? It is possible that the qualities you point to are indeed your key benefits. But before you send your resume next time to your employer, make sure it doesn’t list the same as hundreds of other resumes.

Finding out what others are writing is very easy. On the job site, look in the “Resume” section, and not in the usual “Vacancies”. According to the observations of employees of HR services, about 90% of applicants write the same thing about personal qualities – based on what the employer wants to see in the applicant for the position. In addition, when many people say that they are executive, proactive, have excellent communication skills, a kind of devaluation occurs, and employers stop taking this section of the resume seriously. You can trust resume writing services to do this.

So What Should You Write?

The main thing is not to try to excel just to get attention. The list of personal qualities-advantages should:

a) reflect the characteristics of your character and style of work, which you consider to be your strengths;

b) take into account the specifics of the vacancy. For example, honesty is important for the cashier, attentiveness for the air traffic controller, and for the sales manager the ability to tell about the product so that there is a line for it.

What Qualities can be Noted as Strengths in the Resume?

Systems thinking

We mean by this the ability to see the situation as a whole, to understand what link you, as a specialist, occupy in the general process of production or sale of goods and services. And this is important not only for people applying for leadership positions. It is also useful for the seller to understand what customer demand is and why promotions are held. Systems thinking allows you to make more informed decisions, see the future, be able to determine priorities when making decisions.

Ability to maintain high productivity throughout the working day

It is important for an employer to understand that you radiate energy not only in the morning after a cup of coffee, and not only when you have a brilliant idea. Much more important is consistently high labor productivity, which does not fall after stressful situations or too nourishing lunch.

Ability to adequately perceive criticism and respond to it

This is actually an important quality, and the employer will appreciate if you really have it. The workflow is much more productive if you can listen to criticism and learn from it.

High concentration of attention and the ability not to be distracted by personal affairs during the working day

The employer is unlikely to make the employee happy with the bonus, who now and then speaks with family members on a cell phone or tweets and posts on social networks. Emphasize that at work you are only doing work – and you will benefit.

Ability to provide information (proposals, reports, results of analytical work) in an accessible and visual form.

The leader has to look through many sources of information, and how much information is presented in them determines how much time the leader will spend to study the material and see the “grain” in it. Therefore, the ability to present information, to present it in a structured manner, without “water”, using diagrams, pictures is an absolute advantage.

Summary

Do a little self-analysis and look for the answer to the question: «How do I compare favorably with the specialists of my profile? What special qualities do I have?» Writing a resume, and let it work for a successful job search!