A Comprehensive Step-by-Step Guide to Writing the Perfect Resume
A Comprehensive Step-by-Step Guide to Writing the Perfect Resume
Yes, you have a resume. But how many interviews or job offers have you gotten with that resume in the last year? If your answer is less than five, it’s a pointer that your resume may require a tweak here and there or even a revamp to make it more effective. And even if you got more interviews, there are probably things that can be improved and make your job search more effective. While getting the perfect resume is not always a walk in the park, it is an achievable feat. In the end, you’d thank yourself for putting in the work to take your job hunting game a notch higher. (Plus, there’s a link to resume samples at the end of the article. Feel free to click the link to explore the different samples available).
What is a Resume?
A resume is that one-paged or two-paged document that sells your educational and professional qualifications to employers in the best way possible. If you’re just starting your career and your resume is more than two pages, you’ve likely reached the point where you’re adding details that aren’t relevant and make the overall experience of reading your resume less convincing to a potential employer. It’s a sort of movie trailer or a marketing pitch that whets the appetite of your audience and leaves them wanting more. In short, your resume should be that one document that makes a hiring manager, recruiter, or employer wants to talk to you and even offer you a job. It has to be brief, concise, professional in outlook, and rich in content.
How do you Write the Perfect Resume?
To write the perfect resume, you must understand that there is not just one right way to create a resume, but there are definitely many ways to get it wrong. Your resume should be dependent on your background, experiences, and the job you are applying for. While most of the content of your resume will stem from your unique experiences and qualifications as an individual, there are golden rules that will help you write a resume that helps you stand out from the crowd.
Start with a Professional Structure (and ensure completeness): In writing the perfect resume, there are certain sections that must be present and adequately completed. These sections bear a semblance to your LinkedIn Profile. If you have been able to complete your LinkedIn Profile, it means you have an idea of what sections are relevant for a standard resume. Key sections that should be included in your resume include;
Contact Information*: This is and should always be the very first section of your resume. You want the recruiter or employer to know who you are (your name) and how you can be contacted. Important information to have here includes your name (boldly written at the top), your email address, phone number, LinkedIn Profile Url (make sure to get a customized url consisting of your name, you can set this up in LinkedIn), and maybe your physical address if necessary. For your physical address, only the city and country are important (Eg: Accra, Ghana). However, if you live far away from where the job is, there is no point putting your physical address as it might be a basis for you not getting a chance to interview or even the job.
Professional Summary*: This section comes right after the contact information section. Consider it your 30-second elevator pitch on why the recruiter or employer should hire you. This section should contain three to four sentences of what you bring to the table that is unique from what every other candidate has to offer. It should also have a sub-section where you list key skills and core competencies you have that relates directly to the job you are applying to (check the job description to know what skills and competencies are important to the employer and for the role and write them down).
Work Experience*: Under this section, you are to summarize your experiences. You could lump all your experiences as one and refer to them as ‘Work Experience’ or you could distinguish between different types of experiences you have by creating subsections for each. So you could have ‘Relevant Experience’, ‘Other Experience’, ‘Volunteer Experience’, ‘Side-gigs and Personal Projects’, and several other headlines to differentiate your work experience.
As you are starting out your career, you probably don’t have too much relevant work experience yet. If that’s the case, a volunteer position or school project could be more relevant to the job you are applying for than a paid job cleaning the university cafeteria for example. If so, don’t differentiate between sections! Because if you do list different sections, the result will be that your irrelevant cafeteria job will be on the front page, and the recruiter never makes it to the second page of your resume where the amazing and relevant project you did is listed. Always try to see your resume from the employer’s perspective, what would convince them that you would be a great hire for their job? That information should be presented most clearly.
Under this section, be sure to let the recruiter or employer know the name of the company you worked with, how long you worked there, what key responsibilities you had in the role and (this is the most important even though many people skip this:) what quantifiable results you have to show for your time in that position. Again, think about it from the employer’s perspective: they are not hiring someone because they want another employee. They are hoping to hire someone because they have a job that needs doing or a problem that needs solving. You as an employee aren’t the goal, but merely the means to an end. What better proof that you will do the job and solve the problem they have than the fact that you have done the job and solved a problem before in a different job, project or volunteer position?
Education*: Under this section, highlight the name of the institution, the educational qualifications you attained there, and the year you graduated. If there was anything unique, interesting or noteworthy you did while at a given educational institution, state it using bullet points. Examples are specific courses that are especially helpful in the job you are applying to, graduating at the top of your class, unique projects that are relevant, etc.
Skills Section: This section is all about unique technical skills you possess that are relevant for the position. What hard/technical skills do you have? Are they relevant for the position you are applying to? If yes, state these skills under a skills section. Please note that it is not ideal to state soft skills. Anyone can claim to have soft skills so listing it only takes space without adding value to your resume. For soft skills like teamwork, leadership, communication and a result-driven attitude, show that you have them through your accomplishment-centered bullet points under experience and education. Show employers there how you have used these soft skills to accomplish results in the past.
Special Certifications: Here’s an optional section you create to showcase professional certifications you may have that may be related to a particular role. If you are a certified project manager, a chartered accountant, or a certified networking professional, this is where you should list them.
Accomplishments and Awards: If you have any special awards or accomplishments that are relevant to the position you are applying to and cannot be used as bullet points, you can create an optional section titled accomplishments and awards and put all these awards and accomplishments under this section. However if at all possible, skip this section! If you’ve received awards in a certain job, list it clearly under that job in the work experience section.
NB: All sections with an asterisk are compulsory sections of your resume. Every other section is an add-on. Feel free to add more sections as is relevant to the role and your skill-set. By all means, use different sections to sell yourself the best way you can. But do keep in mind, a resume that lists 5 strong reasons why you are a perfect fit for the job opening is a stronger sell than a resume that lists 2 strong reasons followed by 3 weak reasons followed by 3 more strong reasons. Many recruiters will not read past the weak reasons and never get to the last strong arguments to invite you for an interview!
Create a Professional Summary that Stands Out: After determining the structure that your resume will take, the next step is to create a professional summary that helps you stand out from the competition. This section will tell the hiring manager who you are and the value you have to offer. This aspect of your resume needs to communicate a sort of value proposition to the employer/hiring manager. It may include such things as your academic and professional qualifications in one sentence, problems you have solved in a previous role and the skills that you bring to the table among others.
This summary has to be unique to you and your experiences and it has to be tailored to the position you are applying for. If there is nothing unique about your professional journey, think harder, because there is always something. So by all means, take some time to think about what makes you a better candidate than every other person, ask your best friend and favorite previous boss or colleague if you have to, and write that in your summary. Consider the professional summary section of your 30-second elevator pitch that will determine whether or not you get invited for an interview. Everything that comes after is just more detailed evidence to support this opening argument why they should want to hire you. So, pay attention to it and make it the best that you can.
To achieve a professional summary that stands out, make sure your summary has these four components;
Your Title/ Identifier: This is the job title you held previously. However, it is ideal to make the Job Title here the role you are applying for. For example, if you are applying to a company to be a software developer, the title part of your professional summary should read; ‘Software Developer’.
Your Skills/ Tagline: Just beneath your title, write three key skills that you possess and that are most relevant to the job role you are applying for. To determine what skills to put here, read the job description carefully and pick the skills that are emphasized and write them here.
A Summary of your Professional Journey: This paragraph comes beneath the tagline and should contain between three to five sentences that go into greater detail about what it is that you do and how you can create value for the company you are applying to.
A Core Competency Section: This section contains keywords or keyword phrases that give an insight into the key hard/technical skills you possess that are relevant for the role. You can pick these keywords from the job description provided.
Include a Professional Experience Section (that sells you as the best candidate for the role): This is the section of your resume that sheds light on the experiences you have amassed in your professional journey. Usually, it is required that this is done chronologically except you are trying to distinguish work experience that is most relevant for the role and other experience. Filling out the professional experience section also entails three key steps. These steps are;
Professional Experience Identifier: This is the headline for each experience you have. Usually, it contains such things as the name of the organization and where it is located as well as the job title you held at the organization and the duration of employment with the organization.
Responsibility/ Company Description: In this section, include one to two sentences either about what the organization does (if it is not popularly known) or about your role and responsibilities in the organization. This gives the hiring manager a sort of background gist about the organization you worked with or the role you worked in.
Accomplishment-Driven Bullet Points: After telling hiring managers where you worked, it’s time to let them know what you accomplished and learned in previous roles. Put two to four bullet points of accomplishments under each experience. To write an accomplishment-driven bullet point, start with an action verb (like led, supervised, collaborated, created, implemented, etc) followed by a task you performed and then by the result you achieved from performing that task. Also, note that hiring managers love quantifiable results. They want to be able to determine how much you contributed or how much you accomplished. So, do your best to include numbers in your bullet points. You may use monetary amounts, percentages, ranges, etc.
To give you an example: writing about your work experience that you “prepared weekly risk management reports” isn’t good enough. Instead, write “prepared weekly risk management reports that led to a reduction in accidents by 12%”.
Tailor your Resume (for human and machine readers): In today’s fast-paced world, hiring managers to determine whether or not a resume is worth paying attention to by just glancing at it. Likewise, the fate of many humans is now in the hands of machines. Now, a machine will determine whether you get an interview or not and a glance will determine whether your resume gets trashed or not. This simply means that by all means, you must optimize your resume to stand the human and machine test of relevance every time.
The key to optimizing your resume for human attention and ATS- systems is to tailor your resume to the job you are applying to by using relevant keywords. Before writing (or updating) your resume for a new application, read the job description thoroughly. It holds hints about what keywords to include to make your resume stand out. It will also help you feature only the experiences, qualifications and skills that are most relevant to the role. Additionally, you should research the lingo of the organization, role and industry you are applying to and use this lingo in your resume to give an impression that you are conversant with the industry and will thrive in the role.
Properly Format your Resume (for greater visibility): To make your resume stand out, it has to look professional. This means that there are no distracting columns, tables, and graphics and that there are no grammatical errors. Briefly explained below are five ways to format your resume for greater visibility;
Focus on the Right Use of Fonts: Make sure to use easy-to-read fonts such as Times New Roman, Arial, Cambria, Verdana and Gill Sans among others. The font size you use in your resume should also be between 10 and 12. Using a font size less than 10 will send a message that you are cramping too much information in one document while a font larger than 12 may simply communicate to the hiring manager that you do not have much to offer and so had to use big fonts to fill space. While a 14-point font should be great for headings, keeping the main content between a 10-point and 12-point font size is a great idea.
Make Use Headings to Draw Attention: One great and professional way to make your resume draw more attention and be more attractive is to use headings. These headings must align with your chosen resume structure. Headings may include such things as ‘professional summary’, ‘core competencies’, ‘Professional Experience’, ‘Education’, and ‘Skills’ among others. To make these headings stand out, you can make them bold and possibly increase the font size to 14.
Make Use Bold and Italics for Emphasis: Make use of bold and italics to emphasize key things within the resume like headings, job titles, and dates among others.
Make Use of Bullet Points Wisely: Bullet points are a great way to draw emphasis to key areas of your resume. However, you do not want to fill the entire resume with bullet points. Hence, it is important to use bullet points wisely. It is recommended that bullet points be used solely for emphasizing your most important achievements under your work experience and possibly awards and degrees if and where necessary.
Make Use of White Space Effectively: To make your resume have the look and feel of professionalism, you should utilize white space effectively in your resume. The white space is the unused space on your resume that makes it look less crowded. It is recommended that you have a margin of an ¾ inches to 1 inch on all sides of the resume. You should also ensure that all text is aligned to the left for easy readability and that there is adequate space between each item.
Make use of color sparingly: A bit of color is a great way to make your resume stand out from the grey masses. However, too much color quickly turns your resume into a circus act and is to be avoided (unless you’re applying for a job at the circus). Don’t use colored letters and limit yourself to one, or max two complementary colors in your format.
Avoid Typographical and Grammatical Errors: Your resume should be error-free. Do well to proofread it and to give other people like mentors and friends to proofread your resume as well. It will also help to use Grammarly when typing so you can easily find and rectify grammatical errors.
Keep your Resume Updated and Relevant: It is important that you show recruiters and employers that you are relevant and can adapt to the changing business environment. One way to do this is to ensure that your resume is updated and always relevant. If for any reason, you have an employment gap (a time where you are not employed formally) you want to be able to show recruiters through your resume that you are proactive and was able to use the time to do side-gigs, volunteer, learn a skill or take a course. Hiring managers like people who can show that in spite of the availability of opportunities that they are able to create opportunities for themselves to either learn or earn.
It will not be great if you have employment gaps in your resume for which period you could not improvise or do something worthwhile with your time. However, if you make every free time you have an opportunity to learn or earn, you tell recruiters that you are proactive, self-motivated, and committed to whatever you do. By all means, this should be included in your resume where necessary.
Resume checklist: At Brighter Investment, we’ve reviewed many resumes over the years and the truth is, we see the same mistakes made over and over again. So here is our checklist for your resume, don’t send it to any employer until you can confidently answer yes to each of the following questions:
Is your resume free of mistakes? Our CEO immediately bins a resume that has a single spelling error. “If they can’t even get their resume right, they can’t be trusted to deliver quality work”. Also make sure the formatting is correct and consistent, no changing fonts or misaligned sections.
Is your professional summary unique to you and to the job you are applying for? Your summary shouldn’t be anything generic like: “ambitious young professional looking for a job opportunity at a respectable company to grow and learn….” If the summary could be used by somebody else for the same job, and/or by you for a different job, it is not going to convince anyone to invite you for an interview.
Have you used keywords and company/industry lingo throughout your resume? List the main keywords and slogans from the job description and company website ‘about’ page and make sure you’ve used them in your resume.
Does EVERY experience/job/education/position/hobby listed on your resume clearly state what you accomplished there and what you learned that is relevant to the job you are applying for? Instead of writing what you did, write what you accomplished or learned. E.g. instead of “prepared weekly management reports”, write “changed the format of management reports to improve management decision making” or “reduced time to prepare weekly management reports by 50% through use of templates” or “preparing weekly management reports taught me to effectively communicate project progress to senior management”.
Important to note is that if this resume gets you invited to an interview, be ready to discuss what you wrote on your resume. In case of the examples above, be ready to talk about how exactly you improved decision-making or what exactly you learned about effective communication.Is the most relevant and convincing information on page 1 of your resume and clear at first glance? Hand the job description you are applying for to a friend, let them read it carefully, then give them 30 seconds to look at your resume and take it away again. If immediately after looking at your resume for 30 seconds, they can’t give you 2-4 GOOD reasons from your resume why you should get the job, your resume isn’t clear enough. If they give you two good reasons, two weak reasons, and miss out on two more good reasons you listed in your resume, consider removing the weak reasons altogether!
Does your resume look attractive and professional at first glance? Squint your eyes to the point you can’t read any text but can still see the layout of your resume. Does it look “clean” and is the structure clear? Is there color to make it stand out but not so much that it looks unprofessional?
And most importantly, does your resume convincingly make the case why you are the right person for the job? Reread the job description and try to understand what the problem is that the company wants their new hire to solve. Put yourself in the shoes of the hiring manager and ask yourself, does your resume make a convincing case that you would be able to solve that problem? (there is always a problem that needs solving, it may be hidden a bit. Can’t figure it out? It’s okay to contact the hiring manager and ask them a couple of questions!)
Check out sample resume templates here.