Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2017 with 2018 in its title; it refers to “this 2017” and to a woman who had recently become famous for a perfect resume.
Companies receive thousands of résumés, so simply getting yours into a recruiter’s hands already takes some luck. And if that happens, nobody wants to waste the chance to spark enough interest in the HR director that they want to meet you for an interview.
On average, you have six seconds to catch their attention: according to several studies, that’s how long a person spends on each résumé. In those six seconds you need to grab their attention quickly and make sure they find what they’re looking for. So even though there’s no such thing as a perfect résumé, yours should be direct and concise, get straight to the point and leave out things nobody cares about.
In a previous article we published the résumé that recruiters considered perfect. Quite recently, in 2017, a woman became well known in the media for creating what was hailed as the perfect résumé, but in my personal opinion it’s just an adaptation of the one the recruiting experts at TheLadders created a few years ago, which experts still regard as the best résumé format. I still think TheLadders’ résumé is more useful, more concise and more effective at quickly catching a recruiter’s attention, and certainly more adaptable to different fields and industries.
The most important piece of advice, and the main mistake most job seekers make: tailor your résumé to the company where you’re applying for the job. Using a generic résumé is a serious mistake.
The ideal résumé format is still the following, and here we go over again why it works so well.
1. It includes a URL to the candidate’s online profile.
Today it’s important for professionals to have an online profile. According to the experts, 86% of HR professionals already search for candidates and their profiles online. Don’t make them waste time, and avoid being confused with someone else. One extra tip: if you’re looking for a job and plan to list your Facebook account, YouTube channel or Instagram account, start looking after what you post and any pictures that might give a bad impression of you.
If necessary, create an account just for professional purposes.
2. It has no objective statement.
“Seeking opportunities that allow me to develop and make the most of my skills,” say these experts, isn’t useful. It’s too generic. Replace it with an explanation of who you are, what you’re looking for and the exact value you can bring as a professional.
3. Reverse chronological order.
It’s more useful for recruiters to see at a glance what you’ve been doing in recent years. Reverse chronological order is almost always recommended, except when you want to make a complete career change.
4. It uses keywords.
Most people don’t know that many HR departments already use some kind of software to search résumés for certain keywords. In this example, the highlighted keywords are “forecasting” and “strategic planning”. This means that if a company is looking for a strategic planning specialist and uses such software, out of 1,000 résumés only the five that include those words might come up. Look into the keywords used in your industry: although in Spain fewer than 10% of companies are estimated to use this kind of software for now, its use will keep growing.
5. It describes the company (when that helps you).
Being the manager of a five-person company is not the same as having run a company with 350 employees. If it’s the latter, make sure it stands out on your résumé. The same goes for team leaders or important roles within a specialty.
6. It quantifies achievements.
One of the most common mistakes in the résumés people send is listing achievements in dense blocks of text. However many achievements you have, try to include only three to five, and quantify them. You didn’t sell €300,000 during the year you worked there; you increased sales by 20% compared with the year before you joined.
7. It uses white space.
White space points the recruiter to the important parts, so use it, and don’t bury your key information in dense blocks.
8. Simple formatting.
The experts advise against colours or unusual fonts. The résumé has a minimalist, traditional look, which already says a lot about us.
9. It doesn’t say “references available on request”.
Avoid including anything unnecessary. If the recruiter wants references, they won’t ask you for them; they’ll look for them themselves. That said, if you have a reference who could open the door for you right away, you can mention it in your cover letter.
10. It uses no images.
The profile photo tends to be controversial: it’s true that asking for a photo on a résumé is even illegal, but it’s even more true that many companies list it as a main requirement in their job ads. The recruiting experts who designed this résumé wanted to keep it free of distractions. No photo, no graphics, just what matters.
See also: 40 skills you should include on your résumé
Featured image: Ann Rosener, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
