For years as a Recruiting leader, when talking to candidates with suboptimal resumes not ready to be formally submitted to a Hiring Manager, they would ask me, “Can’t you just send me a resume template and I’d just tweak it?”
Actually, not really.
Resume templates are a great start for format but you have to do the hard work of doing the deep dive on content. Some of you may be saying, “Content? What is she talking about?” Your resume is full of customized content that will be deployed across print and web, and that means social media and job sites. It’s not a document. It’s your career content and online career brand.
My recommendation to job seekers is to upgrade both:
- Resume template – Pick the best way to organize your content for your industry but always keeping mind that ATS parsing is critically important. That means no wild formatting, symbols, colors or coding.
- Resume content – It’s essential to comprehensively present your most relevant go forward toolkit of experience, skills, software and knowledge.
Many people tell me they have no idea how much info to put under each job, how long their resume should be and don’t understand the vital importance of including a keyword rich detailed career summary at the top of their resume. This bio also will be your content for the Summary section of your LinkedIn profile as well as on Indeed and Glassdoor. It’s what I refer to as the Park Avenue resume real estate. Turns out that when it comes to resumes, location, location, location is also important. Why bury all of your military service, certifications and software down at the bottom of your resume in what I call the resume no man’s land.
Resume template guidelines:
- Include a Career Summary of 1-3 paragraphs directly under your name and contact info. Include title, functional area, industries, software, span of control, supervisory, leadership and team experience. Stats and metrics not fluff words like visionary, dynamic or innovative.
- List each job as TITLE, COMPANY, CITY, STATE and finally DATES. Never put dates first. Studies show readers always go to title first.
- Add one line about your company such as size, revenue, number of employees, etc….because your reader may not have context.
- Try to do around 5 bullets per job and ensure that those 5 bullets capture your mission critical, transferrable skills toolkit.
- Don’t have a dumping ground of random stuff at the bottom. Unless you are a college grad or a new grad, you should put the Education section after Professional Experience.
- Don’t include lame faux skills like jogging. First, either run or don’t do it at all. Second, only include sports if you are truly competing at a high level.
- If you are in a creative field, include a section with your links to your portfolio. I still would not embed images or graphics in a resume since it will cause errors when you parse your resume into online applications in applicant tracking systems.
- Always have a chronological resume. Functional resumes are dinosaurs from the past and readers want to know where you did something….it’s a huge red flag.
Final points on resume templates:
Avoid any weird blocks, side bars or design elements. They will disrupt resume parsing by most applicant tracking systems.
If you want to get fancy with your design and content, that’s what your social media pages are for and your online career brand.
Studies have shown that a resume reader, if you even get a human looking at your resume, which only happens 25% of the time, only spend an average of 6 seconds on your resume. They are looking for: job title, level, industry, scope, span of control, software, company size and location. They need to see all of that in the first third of your resume. The Park Avenue resume real estate. Remember that.