Ever wondered why you’re constantly getting rejection emails for your job applications?
Hiring managers typically wade through hundreds of resumes for each position. Studies indicate that recruiters look at each resume for approximately 7.4 seconds. It’s imperative to draft a resume that’s easy to read and effectively highlights your accomplishments, skills, and experience.
Here are a few key elements to investigate while drafting your resume:
1. Check for Typos and Spelling Mistakes
“Helped create a socail media marketing campaign for 5 websites, resulting in a 20% increase CTR”
The above sentence describes a rather impressive achievement, but the fact that ‘social’ is spelt as ‘socail’ here could be a dealbreaker for the recruiter. Typos are shockingly common and a big no-no! It’s important that you review your resume multiple times—maybe even read it out aloud if it helps—to make sure there are no typos or grammatical errors. It is recommended to use software like Grammarly while drafting your resume. If you don’t want to download a plugin, the built-in spell-check tool in Microsoft Word is effective, too.
2. Make Sure It’s Organized
While looking at a resume, a hiring manager expects the most relevant and significant content to be at the top. It’s important to place the section that is most relevant to the job first. For a student resume, the ideal order would be education, followed by work experience, skills and achievements, and then campus involvement and volunteer experience. You shouldn’t put a skills section before your work experience unless you are looking for a freelance or extremely technical role.
3. Structure Your Work Experience Section
A chronologically ordered work experience section is highly encouraged. Also, be consistent with the format you use for your dates of employment. This helps the recruiter understand your milestones quickly and clearly.
4. Add Your GPA
Adding a GPA is optional, but it certainly gives an edge. Many applicant tracking systems (ATS) use ‘GPA’ as a keyword while parsing resumes. In such a situation, if your resume does not include your GPA, chances are that it won’t be filtered out from the rest.
5. Keep it to One Page
Again, we reiterate the fact that it takes only about 7 seconds to make an impression. A student’s resume should never be longer than one page. Everything that a recruiter or hiring manager needs to know about you should appear in the first half of your resume. Everything else is just icing on the cake. A resume longer than one page may cause the recruiter to lose interest.
6. Do Not Leave White Space
We’ve seen this over and over with student resumes. You may be a fresher with no prior work experience, but you can still expand upon other interesting things that you may have done. It is possible to have a complete resume with only education, activities, skills, and volunteer work. Do not leave precious space at the bottom blank. It leaves the impression that you do not have much of a story to tell.
- Get Those Numbers In!
Lastly, the most important point to take away: you need numbers on your resume. Quantifying your work displays your capabilities and helps the recruiter frame and understand any impact you’ve had. If you aren’t using numbers to quantify your accomplishments, you’re drastically decreasing your chances of being selected.
Now, go and show that hiring manager just how impactful you can be!