I have seen a lot of bad resumes in my time. I may even have written a few. But no matter whether you are writing a resume for a social media role or any other type of job, there are a few things you need to consider:
- Keep your eyes on the prize: What is your overall career goal? Think about it. How will you explain this through your resume. How can you show the consistent story between jobs? Where did you make a change in your career path and why. Use your resume to show how all your previous work builds towards the role you are applying for.
- Scan the market: This is a basic one, but many people fail at the first step. If you are applying for a new role, scan the market and find out what other jobs are being advertised in your category. Check what is required for similar roles and match this against your experience. Explain in your resume where the strengths coincide and where there are gaps that you are working on either via education, training or on-the-job experience.
- Use the same language: When employers are scanning your resume, they are looking for a good match. They already have a certain style of language in their head and they will use this to evaluate your resume. Make sure you are hitting the keywords from the job advertisement in your resume.
- Don’t lie: People have a tendency to “overstate” their skills and experience when applying for new jobs. Don’t. In an increasingly connected world, your “footprints” can be easily followed and if you are stretching the truth you will eventually be found out. Remember, reputation is your calling card. Guard it carefully.
- Explain the KPIs: Explain how your past duties and responsibilities were measured. Show how your outcomes matched or exceeded those key performance indicators. After all, we all want to hire people who DELIVER on the promises they make.
on Oct 31st, 2008 at 3:01 pm
This is useful advice, although not as applicable to me as I don’t have a resume. At least, not the traditional black font on white paper kind. I used to have one of those, but as I now play and work in social media, Google is my blackboard and VisualCV is my resume.
Check out http://visualcv.com and tinker around. That’s where I send people if they want to see my background and outlook on life. I also have it linked from my blog and my LinkedIn profile.
on Jan 8th, 2009 at 9:56 am
This article is very concise and useful information. We find, that in most of the resumes we work on have the simplest of errors; dates, spelling, grammar, format. The biggest one of all is the repetition of the key phrases that describe the demonstrated abilities and tasks you have performed for each job. You need to mix it up so it does not appear as if you have done the same thing in each role even if the tasks were similar or identical.