5 Tips To Make Your Resume Stand Out To The HR

One question freshers often want an answer to is how they should prevent their resumes from landing up in trash. You have used the right font, highlighted your skills and formatted your resume but are still not getting a call from the recruiting manager.

A recruiter spends only six to seven seconds looking at your resume. The more applications a recruiter receives for a position, the less time they are likely to spend on your resume. This means you need to make those seconds count to land up in the shortlisted pile.

There are proven principles to follow if you want an incredible resume, whether you are a fresher or a working professional. Let us take a look at a few of those.

Mention LinkedIn

Resumes with a LinkedIn profile mentioned get higher interview rates, meaning the chances of getting a call back from a recruiter is higher if you have included your LinkedIn profile URL to the resume.

Hack

Points to keep in mind before including your LinkedIn profile to your resume are:-

• Keep your profile updated
• Write about your work experience - job duties and responsibilities
• Have a professional picture, a banner
• Have meaningful connections
• A clickable link to your profile

Candidates with a robust LinkedIn profile have a higher chance of getting a call for an interview, especially for entry-level jobs.

Use The Right Keywords

Include relevant keywords and skills of your domain to the resume, such that a quick scan could help the recruiter understand that your profile is relevant to the role.

Your resume is most likely to go in an Applicant Tracking System, the AI-based system will weed out resumes that do not match with the job description (JD) and requirements. The AI system seeks for certain skills and keywords in your resume that match the JD, and filters out some of the low-potential candidates.

To increase the possibility of selection from the shortlisted candidates follow the below trick:

Hack

Copy and paste the job duties section to a free online word cloud tool. This will generate a word cloud, highlighting the most-used keywords which are also the most desirable skills required in the job. Incorporate these skills to your resume and, voila!

This hack would help you to counter the AI and increase your shot at a job possibility of your choice.

Mention Soft Skills

The softer aspects of each and any job are salient, often ignored from the JD, the candidates and their resume. Even if it’s not mentioned in the job profile, you must highlight the soft skills.

It is also seen that while candidates alter their resume for the hard skills, they often ignore mentioning having the soft skills needed for the job.

Hack

Do a little research of the latest, in-demand soft skills for an intern. For instance, ‘ability to work in a team and collaborate’ places higher value than just writing ‘hardworking’ in your skills section.

To make your resume stand out, it’s necessary to include a glimpse of who you are.

Give Metrics

Metrics, numbers and data make any information look more credible. Quantifying all your big and small achievements till date will make you stand out among other resumes. Companies prefer resumes with metrics because values make it easier to understand, quantify and verify the skills.

For instance,there are 20 candidates that have applied for the same content writing internship. One candidate writes – Responsible for writing blogs for college magazine that increased the visits to the website by 45% from 30% last year.

If all the 20 candidates were responsible for their respective college magazines, surely, the one who mentions his work in more quantifiable terms has a higher chance of getting a call back from the recruiter.

Hack

X – Y – Z Resume Bullet Point Formula

Accomplished (X), as measure by (Y) by doing (Z)

For e.g. Accomplished 30% increase in organic social media followers’ growth by engaging local influencers for content creation.

Keep It Precise

Ideal resume length is 475 to 600 words. If you give out too much information, there’s a chance the most important skills you want to highlight are lost in communication. Hence, keep your resume short and to the point.

Any recruiter will typically glance at your resume for so much time. Even if as a fresher you have a lot to add and say about yourself and your experience, remember how much of it is actually relevant to the recruiter for this particular role.

Hack

Use the word count tool on your word doc to ensure you are within the range.

Google the resume clichés and buzzwords, and find the ones you have used in your resume. Remove these words to give your resume an instant upgrade.

Don’t just fill the space for the sake of it. These are some of the clichés and buzzwords that freshers mistakenly, unknowingly, and naively put in their resumes, which really make no difference. Some of these are:-

• Creative
• Detail-Oriented
• Mindset
• Motivated
• Team Player
• Passionate

A recruiter will typically see probably 100+ resumes for one role, and all these resumes will have these same words repeat themselves in different order. These clichés are unnecessary and take away from the main message you want to give.

Your resume should be about selling your experience, story and what you’ve accomplished. To make your resume stand out, it’s necessary to include a glimpse of who you are and not demonstrate the typical goody pants from the book.

Your focus as a working professional should be to continually work on those aspects of the resume that are typically reviewed and give the recruiter what they are looking for in the process.

Parisraja Bajpai is an Organisational Psychologist, with extensive hand-on experience in talent acquisition, talent management, employee counselling, employee engagement, training and development. She is currently heading HR department at Nexstgo. Views represented in the article are solely of the author and do not represent those of the organisation they are associated with.