How to Escape the Waste Basket

Inexorable statistics show that only three persons out of ten job applicants who send their CVs get shortlisted and interviewed. The other seven resumes end up being tossed into a wastebasket, the necropolis of high hopes and aspirations.

Any job seeker would confirm that creating a CV is an exhausting endeavor, and I personally cringe at the very thought that the effort put into this work could go to waste. That is why when writing a resume you have to do absolutely everything to make sure it stands out. Here are some useful tips on how to do it.

Make Your Personal Statement a Bestseller

A personal statement, otherwise called a career objective, is probably the most essential part of your resume. It is only 4-5 sentences length, but it requires the same amount of time and effort as the rest of the CV altogether. In those five sentences, you have to summarize your career, explain why are you the best choice the employer could ever make and what are your professional aspirations. Oh, one more thing, you’d better not make it boring.

You know how they say that the opening line is the most important one for the whole book in terms of capturing readers’ attention. ‘Fahrenheit 451′ by Ray Bradbury opens with the simple but powerful phrase: ‘It was a pleasure to burn’. This phrase instantly gets us hooked, does not it? Leo Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’ starts with the well-known and often quoted sentence: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ While it is perfectly obvious that resume is not one of the literary genres, the important thing is that when writing it you should pay special attention to the top part where you make your personal statement. You don’t have to compete with Tolstoy and the beginning of your statement will probably NOT be quoted later on, but try your best to invent something that will instantly grasp the attention of your future employer.

Do Not Even Bother Describing Duties

When writing about your previous professional experience, do not go into the trouble of putting job description alongside with every position you had. I mean we all know that accountants count money, secretaries take calls and sales managers, surprise-surprise, sell stuff. Instead of stating the obvious and wasting CV’s space on unnecessary information, focus on the things you achieved in the previous positions. Describe your initiatives, mention the accomplishments, maybe even throw in some numbers and statistical data to impress your future employer.

Make it Personal

I’ve already mentioned that creating a resume is very exhausting, but the most horrible part is that you actually have to suffer this torture every time when applying for a new position. Yes, the bitter truth is that targeted CVs yield prompt feedback from employers whereas mindless resume distributing is lazy and just not effective. Your CV has to correspond to the job offer in all aspects, from personalized career objectives to the enlisted set of required skills – all this must be tailored to the specific employer. All unnecessary information should be excluded.

Another vivid example is that you can move the entire blocks of the CV in order to customize it. For instance, for some jobs, the education of an applicant is more important, whereas for other jobs professional experience is much more valuable.

Use the Right Words

Your CV is not SEO content, so there is no need to include relevant keywords in every sentence. Nevertheless, make sure to use some buzzwords in your CV to testify you are sophisticated, tech-savvy and overall know your onions when it comes to your professional domain.

Do not shun using power words. Power words are such units that make an employer who is quickly scanning your resume along with dozens of other similar ones stop, look closer and read more attentively. On the Internet, there are myriads of lists with power words that have proved their efficiency, find one and look for words that you can relate to your personality and career.

Consider the Readability

Returning to our literary analogies, I’d like you to understand the following. By all means, you can and should emulate Leo Tolstoy when inventing an opening line either for a CV or a cover letter, but God forbid you will try emulating him when actually writing any coherent text. The thing is your CV has to be easy to read, so try to avoid long overcomplicated sentences and do not make paragraphs too long as well. Also, make sure to use bullet points when listing something and do not forget the spell check.

Find Great CV Builders

It is essential to not only choose relevant information for your CV and write a decent personal statement, but it is also just as important to present everything visually correct. That is why you have to pay attention to the template and formatting of your resume. There are two ways you can go, either make everything from scratch or use some online resume builders like, for instance, the one we have here on applyya.com.

Personally, I prefer the second option. However, there is a perception among some job seekers that employers tend to look down on CVs that use pre-made templates. I think that this could possibly be true only for designers whose job is directly associated with the creation of visual material. In this case, a CV would be also a part of their portfolio.

Job-hunting is stressful enough and I would not want to add a dozen more things to worry about by trying to create my own template. Those color schemes, the scope and composition of elements, the right alignment and margins – you have to consider so many little nuances in order to design a proper template! Moreover, let us not forget that we would have to do it every time when rewriting a CV for a specific job opening. Using an online resume builder saves time and that is where we can actually afford to be a little bit lazy.

Give Them More

A standard resume length is one or two pages. That is an immutable rule here; do NOT make your CV longer than two pages. However, in the case when an employer is intrigued by your CV but not yet sure if he wants to call you personally he would appreciate a little bonus like LinkedIn profile, a professional-oriented blog you write for, even social media accounts, anything that could help him know more about you and make the right choice.

Do not leave things to chance, follow these simple tips to make your CV stand out and be noticed by an employer! Happy job hunting!