A resume stands out not just because of the skills portrayed or other punctuation accuracies; it’s about what you present and how you present it. A resume can be simple yet stand out among the competition, and a plain, boring resume is what you’ll end up with if you’re not careful about your approach.
What makes a resume stand out?
You might wonder if it’s the extra attention to punctuation or the exceptional certificates you include to showcase superiority. Ultimately, it’s a matter of what you present and how you present it. Therefore, learning how to craft a standout resume while keeping it surprisingly simple is crucial.
Key Pointers for an Appealing Resume:
- Understanding Your Skills: The key to crafting a standout resume lies in how well you understand your skills. Be selective, ensuring your skills align with the job you’re applying for and meet the recruiter’s requirements.
- Not Too Wordy: While a recruiter might appreciate a lengthy resume, it should be kept brief, professional, and strictly to the point. A long resume only looks good if it’s laden with diverse skill sets, not with long texts highlighting irrelevant skills that don’t even add value to the initial resume.
- Goal Centricity: To grasp the attention of the recruiter, it’s best to target the right skill set, the one that will get the recruiter hooked, and later build around it. To make sure that the recruiter doesn’t lump it with those generic resumes lying around, get them hooked right from the get-go.
- Tailor-made Resume: It’s always best to alter the resume according to the position you are applying for. Why would an Analyst-based resume bode well with a Tech-based role? Just like it is important to identify the recruiter’s requirements, it is equally crucial to work around the job profile, what it demands from you, and how well can you justify the role.
- Visual Outlook: Your resume isn’t just another office presentation, where you can add colors, play around with fonts, and get creative. A resume needs to be professional, follow a proper color scheme, a standard font throughout, and extra attention to the font size as well. It’s better to wind it up on a single page, with extra focus on the most crucial skills only.
- Headers and Highlighters: While it might be easy for the recruiter to just skim through a CV after working with the same for so long, it is important to understand that it just might be the reason your resume gets skipped as well. When you draft a resume, you don’t want the recruiter to just skip through; you want them to individually assess each point and take note. The best way to do that is to put headings for each crucial point you put in. So, even if the HR is short on time, they still don’t short out on your resume.
Just as important it is to dress well for an interview, it is equally important how you dress up your skills and offer them up to the HR through your resume. While hundreds of tools online can guide you through the same, unless you have an idea about what you are working on, what you want to present, and who you want to woo with it, it will all go down the drain. Start light on the resume, but work around a format that suits your style, highlights your skills, and above all might tap into the correct industry for you.
There is no right or wrong when it comes to drafting a resume; it’s all about the perspective you draft it with, whether your vision aligns with that of the recruiter, if he is able to identify the same potential you see in yourself. That is all it takes to build a standout resume.
FAQs:
- How do you make a standout resume?
Ans: The trick is simple, understand what the recruiter is looking for, what the job demands for, and put it across in a way that overlaps both the above mentioned requirements, without sounding too generic or indirect.
- How do you write a standout CV?
Ans: Start off with the skills that will differentiate your CV from the crowd and frame the entire thing around your strong points, making it hard to find errors with the whole thing.
- What all is included in a catchy resume?
Ans: No catchy phrase, no creativity, just the skills recruiter might be actively searching for, served directly to him.
- How to shortlist the right skills for a catchy resume?
Ans: The right skills can be weighed according to the intensity of the job. The more aligned a skill stands to the job, it definitely goes in first, and other skills follow on in the same chronological order.
- How to make your resume powerful?
Ans: The answer to this question can be answered through technology. Nowadays, there are plenty of tools to help test the strength of your resume. ATS checker for one can help screen your resume, whether it is strong enough to get past the recruiter checks or not.