The resume is the first step toward a new career. In most cases, this is the first thing of yours that hiring managers will see. If they are impressed right away, they’ll more likely give you a chance. Unfortunately, this means that a poorly created resume can ruin your chances of getting employed even if you have the best skills and qualifications.
Because of this, you need to apply with visually appealing resumes that will impress and grab the attention of employers. In today’s busy hiring market, this will give you the edge you need to beat the competition and get the position you want.
But, how do you create the perfect resume?
In this article, you’ll learn what makes a great resume as well as get some useful tips on how to make it happen.
What Makes a Great Resume
Long gone are the days when you could submit a typewritten, simple piece of paper and get accepted to work at most companies. Today, companies are pickier and the competition for great positions is quite big. At this point, employers expect the applicants to invest their time and effort into creating a unique resume with an accurate CV format, impressive qualifications, and perfect design.
The Best 5 Tips to Design a Successful Resume Today
Even though most resumes are a page or two long, creating them is not that easy. There are many things to consider and choose when you’re designing this document. You need to think of resume readability, the perfect format, what fonts you’ll use, what information you’ll include, and more.
That being said, we’d like to present you with 5 amazing resume design tips.
- Tailor It to the Job in Question
It can be tempting to send out the same resume to all companies. This would save you tons of trouble and time. Many applicants think this way, so they create resumes that are general, including all the qualifications and skills of the applicant, and are basically, generic.
This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.
Hiring managers are exhausted from seeing generic resumes that are obviously sent to many companies. If you want to attract their attention, you need to tailor your resume to the company and job position in question.
Yes, this will take a lot more time but once you have the visual structure and format ready, you can tweak and edit the resumes to fit the position you are applying for.
To achieve this, you need to perform some research first. Let’s say that a company you’d like to work at has an ad for a job you are perfect for. Your first task is to learn a bit about the company, learn everything there is to know about the job position, and only then create a resume that shows the employer that you are a perfect fit for that position.
- Make It Visually Appealing
A great resume has visually appealing elements, looks professional, and leaves an excellent first impression. When we talk of visual elements in resumes, we talk about everything from the fonts you use to the style and colors you add to it.
Since creating numerous resumes with amazing design and style can be time-consuming and hard to do, you can always seek inspiration and use resume designs created as a template. With a quality template ready to be customized, this will not only take shorter to be done, but you’ll know exactly what your resume will look like without having to test endless fonts, colors, formats, etc.
Think of designing resumes as designing your website. You want it to catch the eye of the visitor as soon as they land on your pages, so you focus a lot on making it look impressive in addition to the content you add to it. It’s the same with resumes.
- Make Sure to Share a Summary and an Objective
Most recruiters have to go through hundreds of applications to find the perfect person for a single job. This is exhausting, so they mostly wait for an application to impress them to give the applicant more of their time. Most recruiters spend seconds deciding if they’ll read an entire resume or throw it in the no-pile.
This gives you little room to impress them. While the design is a great way to get their attention, you also need something else to boost your chances. That’s your objective.
If you have space in your resume, add a header where you’ll share a summary of your resume or your objective. This should sit right below your contact information so that if recruiters love your application, they don’t have to look further to reach out to you.
A summary should be 1 to 3 sentences long and share your most important skills and experiences. In the next sentence, tell the reader about your career goal and what you can bring to their company.
- Ensure Readability
Short resumes are more attractive to busy recruiters. They are to the point, share the information without taking too much of their time, and look cleaner and clearer. However, this doesn’t mean that you should try to put as much information as you can on a single page, so much that the content becomes hard to read.
To ensure readability, you should apply good formatting. Things like columns, headings, and subheadings make the content more skimmable and show the recruiter the most important information about the applicant.
Also, you should make sure to leave tons of white space and use legible and readable fonts. In most cases, the fonts used in resumes are Serif and Sans Serif but don’t be afraid to pick your favorite as long as it is clear and looks professional.
- Keep It Short and Concise
Great resumes are one or two pages long. They don’t take forever to be read and include only skills and qualifications pertinent to the job in question. There’s no sense in listing your painting skills and awards when you apply to work as an accountant, right? Even if you are proud of your accomplishments, know that employers look for someone that has the skills to do that particular job, and everything else is simply irrelevant.
Are you ready to create a great resume? Just follow these tips and put a lot of effort into it. When you land that important interview, it will all pay off!