How to Create a Resume that Gets Attention

Building a winning resume requires the right planning. Although the bottom line is listing your skills and competencies, you need to thoroughly research the corporate climate and the type of candidates that are being hired. In that way, you will be able to create a resume that will meet the market requirements and you will possibly increase your chances of obtaining an interview with a view to a future hiring.

HR managers go over hundreds of resumes on a daily basis. Therefore, you need to put together a resume that will get the attention of HR by conveying the message of who you really are behind your skills and competencies, behind your education and achievements. What HR managers are mostly interested in is not your past experience, but how your accomplishments can really fit the job description and organizational culture.

In particular:

a) Focusing on your career goals

If you are interested in following a particular career, you increase your chances of creating a winning resume if you know exactly what you're looking for. You can include details of your job descriptions and you can relate them to your life experiences. In doing so, you show to your potential employers that if they choose you you are more likely to have a higher level of job satisfaction than your fellow candidates.

b) Using your resume to obtain an interview

Some people use color paper to print out their resume, yet white paper can attract as much attention. The point is to use clear fonts so that the HR manager or anyone in the HR department who reads your resume doesn't get confused. What really matters is using your resume to obtain an interview. Therefore, you don't have to go into details about every achievement. You just have to be clear and concise as to create enough interest in your resume so that employers contact you for an interview. Then, during the interview you can provide a more detailed explanation of your achievements and to land a job offer.

c) Highlighting work experience

Many candidates emphasize equally on their recent and their older jobs. However, it is more efficient to highlight your most recent work experience than to describe in details all the jobs you have worked at during your entire career. Employers are interested in your work experience, yet a sales job from eight years ago is not as important as the sales job you were doing two years ago. Besides, when highlighting your work experience, make sure to include enough information, such as past employer's names, addresses and phone numbers. The less information you disclose, the less reliable your resume will look like.

d) Grammar & Editing

Before sending out your resume to a potential employer, you have to make sure that it doesn't contain any misspelled word or any grammatical error. There is nothing that can land you resume in the trash bin faster than misspellings or grammar errors. Besides, your resume needs to be well-structured, with bullet points, bold or italic fonts and section where required. Remember that the primary goal of your resume is to help potential employers to scan the document and get a good idea of who you are and what you can do for a company. Therefore, well-structured resumes with bullets help towards that direction. Moreover, it helps if you use action words to describe your skills. Your resume will appear dynamic and you will avoid repeating similar phrases.

Overall, when sending out a resume you goal is to limit the knock out factors of the HR person that will review your resume. Typically, the knock-out factors include: work experience that is irrelevant to the job posting; a career objective that is irrelevant to the job posting; a resume with poor grammar. Therefore, make sure you use clear language and include the most important aspects of your job description in the first sentences of each job description. This valuable information will attract the interest of the HR staff because, typically, HR people identify key words in a resume and keep it aside to review it again. You want to be in there!