It’s much easier for those into creative professions to add a dash of colour, play with font style, use idiomatic forms of language expressions to make the resume look appealing, intriguing and attractive to catch the recruiter’s eye. What if your job role is mechanical or technical in nature, with norms to stick to the mundane old school ways of crafting the CV? Then, how do you make your resume look interesting and appealing to the reader?
Opting for an uncommon resume format is definitely not an advisable approach here to be used to attract recruiter’s interest. But you can definitely grab eyeballs by embedding relevant industry keywords and technical jargons in your resume to better position your personal brand in the competitive marketplace.
Herein, we elucidate some tips and tricks to make your candidature stand out from the competition by making mundane jobs sound interesting to the recruiter:
- Stay off the fluff, bring in substance
Most times job seekers resort to easy techniques to bring in value addition to their candidature, by stuffing it with irrelevant industry keywords for a resume to pass through the ATS, but also by faking their abilities, skills, and experiences with make-believe statements to impress the recruiter.
While pushing limits to get the job you really want is great, but you do not have to lie to get the recruiter’s attention by being an idealist.
- Narrate your past work experiences with genuinity of intents
Talking about your past work experience should not sound complaining or frustrated. You need to bring in a good vibe by staying positive throughout your resume, and detailing about work expertise in a lucid manner.
While you might enlist your strengths and weaknesses; talking about how you worked on your weaknesses to make significant improvements in your career can speak volumes about you, and this is the information that recruiter rightly seeks. It also showcases a continuous learner mindset.
- Use bullets instead of a narrative paragraph
Bullet points help talk about work in a clear concise form, rather than going on a narrative journey. You should always bear in the mind the ultimate objective of your resume is to get the job you desire, so speak to the point and keep it brief.
Do not make your resumes lengthy, even if you have a decade-long experience stick to encapsulating your vast career journey into maximum 2 pages.
- Include testimonials, references and recommendations
Testimonials, past employer references and positive recommendation letters does help. They offer prospective future employers a sneak preview into your past achievements and recognitions earned. These documents speak a whole lot about you as a person, your nature, passion, and commitment to fulfil your dreams.
Most times, we tend to ignore and choose to not mention positive testimonials from colleagues and superiors either on LinkedIn or a casual praise from the boss during one of the occasions, assuming perhaps this has nothing to do with job and may come across as self-loathing or over exaggeration. This is not the case as always, unless you add in irrelevant bits of pride and ego.
The next time you are rethinking if to include testimonials or not, we advise you to make a brief mention of the moment that made you happy in your career and offer a link to your LinkedIn portfolio. This should help grab attention and ease the recruiter’s talent hunt process.
- Market your skills in the right light
The most common skills are those least noticed and underlying beneath is the competitive edge to scale up. Talent acquisition professionals are acutely aware that passive talent could be the best fit for certain job roles, but if you do not market your CV well your candidacy will might eventually find its way to the trash. You need to add if not much, a touch of drama and informative bits to articulately portray your personality and confidence.
Remember, you are making these efforts to be noticed and get the job you really want. While you might proudly own the self-belief that you’re the best fit for a job role, the recruiter however doesn’t know you. They receive thousands of applications each day from many passionate candidates and after reviewing many applications, if your resume comes across as one among them you lose out. Your resume should be designed to express and impress both, at the same point in time to win over the competition. There are no second chances if you fall out.
Your resume should convince the recruiter in those few microseconds of glancing through your CV that you are “the talent” perfect fit for the job role. If your candidacy fails to achieve this powerful state of self-introduction, then it has every chance to fall out from the cracks and crevices.
In a gist, your resume should exude confidence, genuinity and pique curiosity of the recruiter to call you for a personal meet. Spice up your resume now to grab the most coveted job opportunity!
Read: Why Do You Need Services of a Recruitment Agency in A Digital Age?
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