Five resume tips to help you land an interview
When one job seeker came to Gateway, she had never written a resume in her life, and she was sure she had nothing to put on one. She had spent 25 years running nearly every part of her sister’s restaurant, including ordering, inventory management, cooking, serving customers, and handling online orders, all for $15 an hour. After a workplace injury and a difficult year, she had come to believe what she’d been told: that no one would ever hire her.
Writing that first resume was emotional. She struggled to see a single strength worth listing. So her Career Inclusion Consultant (CIC) at Gateway helped her look at her experience from an outside perspective. Together, they identified what those 25 years had actually built: leadership, customer service, inventory management, problem-solving, and the ability to run a busy operation every day. The skills had been hers all along. She had just never seen them as valuable.
She went on to receive two job offers. Her experience is a reminder that a resume isn’t a record of everything you’ve done; it’s an argument for why you’re right for one specific job. And most people are carrying far more than they can see.
Here are the tips her CIC at Gateway used to help her tailor her resume, the same ones you can use on yours.
1. Tailor your resume to every job
Copy the job posting into a separate document and read it slowly. Highlight the words that repeat, the skills named more than once, the industry terms. Those are the words the employer is thinking in.
Many companies use an applicant tracking system, software that scans your resume for those words before a person ever sees it. So work the important terms into your resume wherever they honestly describe your experience. Do not paste the posting in word for word. Show how what you have done matches what they are asking for.
Applying for a digital marketing assistant role? Terms like SEO, copywriting, or lead generation belong there, if you have done that work. That same resume will not serve you for a customer service position.
2. Put your strongest skills at the top
The top third of the page is the most valuable space you have. It is what gets read first, and sometimes all that gets read.
Do not just list skills. Give each one a short proof. Instead of “organizational skills,” write: organized more than 500 digital files, cutting the time the team spent looking for documents. Where you can, include an action verb, a number, and a result. Numbers tell an employer the size of what you did.
3. Focus on what this employer is looking for
Your resume answers one question: why should we hire you for this job? Skills that have nothing to do with the role take up space without helping you. A focused resume beats a complete one every time.
4. Keep it clean and easy to read
Use a font size between 11 and 12. Keep your spacing consistent. Skip bright colours and decorative designs. Build your own simple layout rather than using a Word template, templates often confuse the scanning software. Two pages or less. Start your bullet points with action verbs, and leave out I, me, my, and we.
5. The first few seconds decide
In one widely cited study, recruiters spent an average of 7.4 seconds on a first pass through a resume before deciding whether to keep reading (Ladders, 2018 eye-tracking study). Other recruiters say the real number varies with the role and the pile in front of them. Either way, the first pass is fast. Put your most relevant skills and achievements where they will be seen, at the top.
One more thing
Hobbies and volunteer work can be worth including when they connect to the employer. If you volunteer with an organization the company supports, or you share an interest that matters to them, that is a real point of connection. Only include it if it adds something.
A good resume will not hand you a job. It gets you in the room, and that is the part you are working toward right now. Like the job seeker mentioned earlier, you may be carrying more than you can see.
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