5 Tips to Fill Out a Short Resume

5 Tips to Fill Out a Short Resume 5 Tips to Fill Out a Short Resume Modern resumes are best presented in a clean, concise, and uniform style that clearly represents a candidate’s key skills, capabilities, and achievements. Sometimes, though, you come up a little short. The tips below will help you fill out a short resume into something more polished and well rounded. Here are five tips on how to fill out a short resume! Watch your formatting. This is the key component to making your resume look visually appealing and uniform. Keep a sharp eye on things like font, size, spacing, placement, etc., to make sure everything is consistent. To fill out your resume, use fonts such as Palatino Linotype or Arial with a size of 10.5 to 12 depending on how much content is in your resume. You can also expand the spaces between lines as much as 1.15, but don’t go any higher than that otherwise the resume looks too juvenile. Choose the right content layout. Combine a good layout of your content with precise formatting and you have a winning resume. From top to bottom you will want a clear value statement that highlights your strongest attributes, followed by a core competencies section, which often includes a few columns of buzzwords that reflect your key strengths. Adding to that, you can incorporate your key achievements section and then the rest of your resume is dedicated to your task-based information and designations. Use achievements to give your resume value. Depending on your experience, the layout can be presented in a few different ways. However, what is often most successful is creating a section dedicated solely to your “Key Achievements” or “Career Highlights.” If you’re entry-level in your career, you will likely have a key achievements headline that outlines your major project work from school, internships, or any great achievements if you’ve already broken into the field. Normally four or five bullet points for that section is appropriate as you don’t want your resume to look like just a list of bullets. Achievements can be anything from relevant projects you have done in school, to assisting in developments at your internships or your current position. Be sure to illustrate the value in the achievement. Make sure you have your five Ws, Hows, and So Whats. Part of the reason your resume may come up short is because you have too many soft skills in your resume. What we mean by soft skills are phrases or words such as: I have great software skills or I have a hard work ethic. These qualities are certainly valuable, but you need proof or examples to truly show the employer you are capable of what you say. If you have great customer service skills, provide examples of how you have helped customers get what they need. If you are mechanically inclined, provide examples of tricky projects you worked on where you were able to successfully resolve the problem. Use buzzwords. Since most job applications are done online, your resume will likely be processed through an Application Tracking System (ATS), which will scan your document for keywords and phrases it has incorporated into the job post in order to determine if you match the qualifications. Comb through these job posts carefully to catch any important keywords you can incorporate into your resume, which will also contribute to filling up the document. But don’t make anything up just to match the job post. Make sure you are familiar with the qualifications and key terms. If employers don’t find out you’re lying about your resume at first hand, they certainly will during the interview when they ask you about it. You’d be surprise how these little tricks can work to your advantage in creating a resume that looks like it’s chock full of substantial content. Don’t get too crazy with the formatting, but tweaking the spacing and font here and there will help expand things a bit. Also make sure the layout is clean and uniform so that the achievement-based content is easy for the eyes to follow, while still including those five Ws. Finally, keywords make all the difference when your resume goes through the ATS system- possibly the determining factor between you and another candidate for an interview. Readers, what do you do to make a short resume more robust? Share your tips with us in the comment section below! ResumeTarget.com provides professional resume writing services for clients of all career levels across North America. We are the only resume writing company that offers a professionally written resume- coupled with the guidance of a recruiter- to guarantee that your resume will get results. Tweet us with any resume questions you have at www.twitter.com/ResumeTarget â€" we’re here to help!