Through time, career experts have emphasised on the need to trim down content in your resume to fit-a-page. While we abide by the need to get noticed, but somewhere we do feel lack of justice done to our relevant work experiences acquired during the years. Trimming down content in a resume becomes more difficult when you have more than a decade experience under your belt or you are a senior veteran in the industry.
We are not quite sure on the content that makes sense and is relevant to the job role. So we end up squeezing detail workings during the years with complex vocabulary usage in an attempt to sound prolific. But this attempt is a sheer waste of time and efforts, only if you could realize much earlier that complex words confuse the recruiter, who doesn’t have the luxury of more than 20 seconds to invest in skimming through a CV.
Here are some tips to help you trim down content in your resume to fit a page:
- Do not include an extensively long list of experiences right from the beginning of our career to diverse job profiles handled during a decade-long stint. While penning down these on paper, can help you feel better to revel with pride gauging your career growth graph during the years, the recruiter doesn’t want to know these extra bits on paper.
- Stay off using lots of adjectives and weak words to emphasize on your talking points in the resume. Stick to simple vocabulary and bulleted points. Avoid long-winding sentences as a rule.
- Do not share a goofy email address that doesn’t say your name, but a pet or a quality that defines you. Recruiters do want to be certain about the candidate they are connecting with, and your email should ideally spell out your name without abbreviations. Use personal email address and not the one associated with your current place of employment.
- Try combining sections in your resume. While you may like content to be neatly categorized, it needs more space. When space is a constraint, try combining say “skills and accomplishments” or “Achievements and Interests” under an “Additional Information” section.
- Use tables and columns as required to enlist all GPA scores and the year achieved, in a neat tabular format for clear presentation of your qualifications.
- Since your address, contact number and email address can consume more lines in your resume, encapsulate the contact information as a whole in vertical bars.
- Adjust margins and spacing to be able to accommodate more crisp information.
- Avoid repeating information, emphasizing details and stuffing keywords to make it through the ATS. Today’s recruitment technology systems are smart enough to detect excessive keyword usage, so stick to simplicity and relevancy.
- Erase unnecessary section headers and mentioning soft skills in your resume, because this can increase its length. Keep it snappy, short and precise for an engaging read.
- Leave references for later. When the recruiter is closer to presenting you with an offer and asks for references to verify your past experiences and workings, then provide name and contact details of references. Until then, do not crowd your resume with unwanted details.
If you are still unsure of what aspects of content should be included and excluded from your resume to make it concise and to fit a page, then ask the experts for help.
Read: Questions to Ask Before You Engage With an External Recruiter
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