As the weather in Virginia warms up and spring cleaning ensues, don’t forget to dust of your resume.
Whether you’re on the hunt for employment, a part-time gig or are scheduled to complete your FastForward training and enter a new career, it’s important to keep your resume up to date. Here are four tips for spring cleaning your resume.
One-page for the win
If your resume is more than a couple pages long, it’s time to trim down the excess. Get rid of fluffy language and get straight to the point with bulleted lists and easy to skim copy. Be sure also to cut out any outdated information like extracurriculars you participated in during high school and any experience from 15+ years ago that might not be relevant to the type of positions you’re applying for now.
Update your design
You don’t have to be savvy with InDesign to have a resume that stands out. There are free templates you can use directly in Word or sites like Live Career provide several templates to choose from so you can find one that best fits your personality. Indeed also offers dozens of resources, tips and templates that share the best fonts, font size and other best practices when building a resume.
Many of these templates and tools also help to arrange your experience so your qualifications are clearly demonstrated and important skillsets stand out first.
Proof and proof again
There is nothing worse to an employer than reading a resume riddled with errors. Before proofreading repeatedly, plan out your approach. If you’ve spent a long-time re-writing and editing down your resume, consider taking a break and revisiting it in a few hours or even the next day. It can be easy to miss a mistake when you’ve been staring the same thing for hours.
Assign yourself three to four rounds of edits and tie them to a goal. For example, the first round of edits can be tied to grammar only and the next round of edits can be spent focusing on adding keywords for the job you’re applying to or fixing misspellings.
Tap into experts in your life
If you need some additional support with your resume, share it with friends or family who might work in HR or handle hiring. Or keep an eye out for resume workshops and similar events or resources within your community. There are paid services like RVA Resume and Recruiting and our career coaches are also a great resource for our students.
Resume support is just one of the things our career coaches help with – in addition to getting you enrolled and finding funding to cover your costs. Reach out to your local coach here.