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Resume Advice
Boost Your Resume to Get More Interviews!
Your resume is your first touch point with your potential Employer, and thus it is crucial to make an excellent first impression. The good news is you do not need to be William Shakespeare – all you need is to be able to express yourself in proper English, and have an understanding of what a resume should entail.
Following are five simple writing principles that apply specifically to resumes. All of them should come in handy when you begin to string words together in your resume.
1. Use Plain English
Keep things simple. Go easy on the adjectives, and be wary of those grammatical constructions known as nominalizations — that is, nouns that are built around verbs and become part of a bulky phrase that can just as easily be expressed in a single word. For example, instead of saying “engaged in the operation of”, just say “operated”.
2. Customise Your Resume
It’s imperative that you cater your resume to each position you apply for. And I mean taking each line on the job description and writing a line on your resume to reflect your experience with regard to that line.
Yes, it takes more time than sending the same resume to 100’s of jobs, but you’re far better off applying to a fraction of those jobs with a customised resume. Put yourself in the interviewer’s shoes. Their job is to hire the most qualified candidate. They’ve been given a set of qualifications to look for: aka the job description, and that’s exactly what they’re after, so give it to them!
