If you’re in the market for a new job, you know the importance of a great resume. Resumes are a recruiter’s first look into your experiences, goals, and skills. Without a good first impression, your chances of getting an interview are much lower than that of your competition.
With this information in mind, you may feel overwhelmed when creating a resume, especially if you have never written one before. Today, however, there are many tools and tricks that can help you create the perfect resume for your dream job.
These five tools will help you organize, track, and craft a resume that will not only impress your recruiter but build your momentum towards the next step: getting the job.
1. Accomplishment Tracking
To begin any resume, you need to have a good idea of your experience, accomplishments, and relevant skills. Without having a full picture of your skillset, you can’t accurately portray yourself to a potential employer.
A great way to keep track of your accomplishments is by keeping a tally as you work. Continually keep up with big projects, promotions, or achievements that you may obtain during work, on Excel or Google Sheets. Sort the achievements by the date to accurately portray on your resume.
If you’re currently looking for a job and don’t have a track record of your accomplishments, take an hour or two to brainstorm. Sit down and think about every relevant job that pertains to your application, and write down any major milestones or strides that you took in that job. Break down every accomplishment by project, then break that project down into your daily work tasks that led you to complete the project.
2. Organizational Tools
Once you have the information, you now need to focus on organizing the heap of achievements you likely have. There are a couple of tools you can use to do this. Google Drive, Evernote, and One Note are all great note-taking tools that can organize your projects and jobs into folders, then your daily tasks and job information into subfolders.
By organizing your previous work experience into project folders, you can easily craft a resume for each job application by picking relevant folders and placing your job description into your resume, instead of recalling all of your experience again and again for every new application.
3. Resume Builders
With your information organized, you can now finally begin crafting the perfect resume. You can either create your own resume with a custom format, or you can use a resume formatting service.
A resume formatting service will take your information and insert it into a tried and true resume template proven to impress recruiters. For example, you can visit https://resumebuild.com/ and find a resume template that will work for your job application, and ResumeBuild will provide a template that showcases your information in a format relevant and accessible to recruiters.
Make sure the format you do choose is relevant to the job you want. For example, if you’re applying to become a teacher, you will need a professional, reliable resume that speaks towards your competency and trustworthiness. In contrast, if you’re applying for a job in a creative field of work, you’ll want a template that speaks towards your style and creative aptitude.
4. Resume Tracking
Your resume has been created, you’ve applied for a job, and now you’re waiting for a response. Unfortunately, your work does not end here.
If you are applying to a multitude of jobs with different crafted resumes, then you need to keep careful track of when you applied, what resumes you used, and the responses/interviews that you received from each application. There is nothing more embarrassing than responding to a recruiter or interviewee with confusion because you didn’t track the resumes you sent. Avoid the confusion by organizing your resumes by the job applied and the time applied.
There are several tools you can use for this. Excel and Google Sheets are good for tracking and sorting. You simply place a link to your resume in one field, then the date in the next, the company that received the application, and whether or not they have responded. Using this technique, you can see exactly what progress each of your resumes is making.
5. Bot Checks
Finally, let’s discuss robots. When you submit your job application, you may expect a human to open and read your resume line by line, but sometimes, this is not the case.
An ATS, or applicant tracking system, is a new form of recruiting in which a machine reads your resume and determines if you are a good fit or not. Remember that these bots are looking for words specific to the job description for the job ad, so crafting a resume specific to a position is essential. In addition, you can use a tool that prescreens your resume to see if it will pass the ATS test. Make sure you don’t get thrown out of the applicant pool because of a bot.
With these tools in mind, be confident in creating the perfect resume to impress recruiters and land that dream job.
