10 Quick Tips to Improve Your Resume in 5 Minutes

A resume is someone’s reflection in a single page. That one page ought to contain a person’s story of achievements, accolades and job profile such that a recruiter can fetch the exact words they want in a professional.

Creating and editing the resume is very crucial as, a professional, need to figure out the keywords that a recruiter is looking for. The resume must be customized in a way that will help recruiter differ you from thousands of applications.

Let us have a quick look at those 15 important tips that all of us must follow in a time-constrained situation.

1. Avoid bulking up your resume with high school related information unless you are a year out of college. If you still need to include you data points of college make sure either you have extremely relevant information with respect to the job description.
   
   
2. Another key point which will help you in reducing the pages of the resume is to mention only last 10 years of your profession. Keeping only the relevant points that apply to current the job profile you are planning to apply for.
   
   
3. Look for all the acronyms in the resume and write out full job titles. You don’t need the recruiter guessing you are Certified Public Accountant when you mentioned about you CPA certification, but make sure you include industry lingos like HTML, but not Hypertext Markup language.
   
   
4. To further increase the readability of your resume you should separate your sections accordingly using dividers, for objective statements, educational background, skills, achievements, etc.
   
   
5. If you have any hyperlinks, always check they are not broken and spelled correctly, as you don't need a wrong impression to lay on your recruiter.
   
   
6. Never use unprofessional fonts like comic sans or cursive fonts. Times New Roman, Georgia, Calibri and Arial are some of the professional fonts that make your resume look mature.
   
   
7. If your professional work history has a gap avoid using start and end dates rather just describe your position in terms of years i.e. 2016-2017
   
   
8. Several elements can clutter up your resume and impede readability like unnecessary dates, the line “References: Available upon request.”, articles (Those little words “a,” “an,” and “the.”), etc. Keep your resume clean and readable.
   
   
9. Unless you are a designer or submitting your resume for a creative job make sure you are; not using any visuals, pictures, etc. These will not help you, rather will make recruiter not pay attention to the resume highlights.
   
   
10. Always do a spell check before uploading the resume.

Apart from the above dos and don’ts there are various resume editors available online that can make your work easier, provide tips and help you creating a professional resume that will leave an impact on the recruiter. Also, the resume builders contribute in building your CV in such a way that it contains all the key words that are picked up by automatic systems, i.e. ATS.

Keep resume-ing and all the best!