When did the last time you did a full review of your resume? If you’re like most people, this document only gets an update when you switch jobs or apply for a new one. Even if your work experience and skills have stayed the same, there are still ways to write your resume for the latest recruiting process and job landscape. Continue the read below to discover 10 impactful and powerful ways to update your resume in 2021.
1. Update your resume’s design
Update the design to give your resume a modern lift. The old design or templates tend to be clunky and poorly laid out. Today, thousands of free resume templates available online. Find the apps or website that provides a pleasant reading experience, modern looks, and is compatible with applicant tracking systems. One of the most used apps or websites is Canva.
Tips:
Apply consistent style: If one job title is in bold, all job titles need to be bolded. Make sure all your small formatting choices are consistent from top to bottom.
Make sure there’s enough white space: In order to get all information on your resume, you may have sacrificed white space by decreasing the space between lines, shrinking your margins, or reducing your font size. Print it out, and make sure these adjustments haven’t made your resume hard to read and scan through.
2. Remove old positions
Remove all outdated positions in your resume. For instance, if you have been at a company for five years and still have information about high school in your education section. So, you should remove it and only list your most recent academic experience such as your associate's or bachelor’s degree. Read your resume from the bottom up, and consider removing older positions that might not be so relevant anymore. Other sections you should pay attention to for out-of-date information include:
Volunteer positions
Clubs and organizations from school
Awards and achievements
Internships
Jobs you held early on in your career
You should keep your professional experiences section to jobs from the last 10–15 years. If you have little to no professional experience, it is okay to keep less relevant positions to show that you are reliable and able to hold a job.
3. Update your skills
Have you taken a class? Mastered a new program? Started giving presentations regularly? Look again at your resume’s skills section and make sure you have listed all of your professional skills, both soft and hard. Your skills section should be updated to count any new skills or certifications you may have acquired and any development in previous skills you have listed. For example, if you had “intermediate-level experience” with a software application before this stated that you have since grown your skill in that area, update your resume to state that you now have “expert-level proficiency”. You might also put in the years of experience you have using the most valuable tools for your industry. When updating your resume, you should also carefully review the job description. Pay attention to keywords they include that range with skills you have and add those to your skills section.
4. Add your remote work skills
Remote work skills refer to a set of tangible and intangible skills that are essential to achieving maximum productivity in remote work models. Some important skills required for remote work include being a self-starter who is accountable, disciplined, and an organized problem-solver. In March of 2020 when COVID forced offices nationwide to close, remote working skills became at once desirable. Now that many employers are involved in remote work, it’s a great point to put any work-from-home skills on your resume. Look closely at the job description to see if the company mentions any remote work collaboration tools like Google Docs, Asana, Trello, etc. Include these keywords on your resume where applicable.
5. Highlight efforts during the pandemic
As we all know, 2020 was difficult, especially for job seekers. Make sure to highlight how you worked through COVID-19, especially how flexible you were. Include how did you persist in building on your experience? Or how did you help your business stay stable? What new skills and tools did you learn? Don’t skip this challenging time. The fact you pass through it, and especially your accomplishments during it, sheds light on the type of worker you are.
6. Make your experience section easy to skim
The numbers of information that needs to compromise with making it easy to skim are one of the most difficult parts of writing your resume. For example, you've been in sales and marketing for a while, but you also have IT experience. In this case, it is perfectly acceptable to have two sections of professional history. In fact, this works very well if you're specifically targeting only one of those areas. This means, if you want to focus on sales and marketing in your job, then your sales and marketing experience belongs at the top of your modern resume's work history section. If you want to pursue a career in IT, then that information should be presented first in this section. This allows you to adjust the resume as needed for future opportunities.
7. Replace your objective statement with a resume summary
The other older resume templates make you write an objective at the top of your resume. This was once a usual practice, and if your resume is more than five years old, there are the changes that you still have an objective statement remaining about. Try substituting it with an impactful summary statement. This is a brief overview of your top skills and experience that can quickly illustrate to a recruiter who you are as an employee.
8. Make sure saved your resume correctly
You should not name your file “resume” because you may only have one document on your computer with that name, but recruiters and hiring managers could have hundreds of documents with that filename. Instead, include your first and last name, along with the word “resume.” And, unless otherwise requested, it’s generally a good idea to send over resumes as a PDF which is that way, all your careful formatting will be preserved.
9. Review the top half of your resume
A resume is a brief document (often, just a single page in length). That means every bullet point and the word should be purposeful, keep up your candidacy. But it's normal for people to pay more concentration to the beginning of the document than the end.
To that end, make sure the top portion of your resume reflects your best, most relevant experience. That means in some cases, moving sections around. Once you’ve had several jobs, for example, your education likely belongs at the bottom of the page, not the top. If your most latest role doesn’t show your most noteworthy skills and accomplishments, you may need to change from a chronological to a functional resume.
***Read more about resume type format HERE!
10. Proofread (Yes, Again)
The limited-time can make it easier to catch typos, grammar mistakes, and other small errors. Give your resume another proofread. This is a particularly good idea if you’ve just made many tweaks. Try reading it aloud and follow a proofreading checklist. Or, ask a friend or family member to review your resume.
On average recruiters and hiring managers spend only seven seconds reading your resume before signing you up for an interview or tossing that precious piece of paper in the trash? so, keep updating your resume from time to time is a good practice to make sure our resume follows the latest format, avoid misinformation, and capture the heart of the recruiters or hiring managers. At Recruit Hero, our quick registering process enables you to stand out from the crowd by highlighting critical soft skills in your profile and we'll match you with relevant jobs based on your profile. For more info, follow our social media accounts, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube Channel, and Twitter!