Your resume is the very first thing that potential employers see when considering your job application, and it can be daunting to sit down to write out short explanations of your campus involvement and work experience in a way that best highlights your skills. In fact, it takes time and patience to draft a great resume to ensure that it’s digestible and properly tells your story as a student and a new entrant to the workforce. But the work doesn’t end there.
Once you’ve got the basics on paper, here are 3 tips to help you tweak your resume so it turns heads and gets you invited for interviews.
Your resume should be a living document. In other words, while you shouldn’t have to rewrite your resume for every job you apply to, you should be prepared to adjust the language in your bullet points to match job descriptions. You can do so by carefully reading through the qualifications listed on a job posting and imitating the language used by the company. For example, if a job posting mentions project management skills, it would be wise to frame an experience you’ve had either on campus or via an internship or job to show that you managed a project in some way. That could be as simple as replacing key words such as “lead” or “supervised” with “managed”, an “assignment” with “project”. Of course, it’s still extremely important to be honest about your experiences, and you should not present yourself to a company as having skills that you do not.
Not every student will graduate from college with a plethora of internship or job experiences, but that doesn’t mean that your resume can’t showcase the professional and in-demand skills you can bring to a future employer. In fact, you can highlight many skills by detailing your campus involvement, in addition to any real work experience. For example, let’s say you are an active member of a student group dedicated to local charity work, and have helped organize a food drive on campus for homeless shelters surrounding your school. That most likely means you have strong project management skills to bring ideas to fruition. You likely work well as a member of a team (as you collaborated with other volunteers), have strong communication skills (that shone through as you discussed collection and delivery logistics), and are extremely organized and detail-oriented (which led to the success of the drive). Plus, these are great talking points for interviews!
Some positions will allow you to submit your LinkedIn profile in lieu of a formal resume and cover letter, or in addition to those documents. It would also be wise to assume that even if you don’t formally direct a recruiter or employers to your LinkedIn as you apply for roles, they might take a peek anyway by searching your name. That being said, you’ll want to make sure your account is fully updated before you begin applying for internships or jobs. Plus, unlike a one-page resume, on LinkedIn you’ll have endless space to list all of the clubs, classes, and job experiences that you have, and to link to any documents or reports you think will help showcase your skills. However, you won’t be able to tailor your LinkedIn account in the same way that you can with a resume, so make sure that it is universally appealing to all recruiters.
You’ve worked hard throughout college to pad your resume with experiences that will make you competitive in the workforce — from your involvement in campus organizations to formal internship roles — but it’s a whole other story to make that shine for recruiters and future employers. These three tweaks to elevate your resume will help you stand out in a sea of applicants this year. For more resume tips, see here.