McLean Mills — April 23, 2020 
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For every job opening, hiring managers and recruiters are bombarded with hundreds of resumes to review. Since they simply don’t have the time to go through and carefully read each one, they are always looking for reasons to toss aside any application they feel is subpar at first glance. In fact, as a long-time hiring manager myself, I too am guilty of this type of decision-making. This is why it is so imperative that your resume gives off a winning image right off the bat. Here are 7 tips to do just that.
1. Include your LinkedIn profile
If you use LinkedIn, which you should – include a hyperlink to your LinkedIn profile at the top of your resume. Trust me, this matters a lot to hiring managers. Part of having LinkedIn isn’t just about building business connections and using it to apply to jobs. It’s also about showing hiring managers that you take the job search process seriously. Hiring managers want to see that you’re in the loop and that you’ve been able to incorporate LinkedIn as part as your overall career strategy.
2. Use a resume builder
Take advantage of what’s available to you online. A mistake many job seekers make is starting their resume from scratch on a blank Word document. It’s just unnecessary work, and formatting your resume yourself will often just lead to margin and spacing errors that are job costly. There are plenty of online resume builders such as Enhancv and Cultivated Culture that can not only ease the writing process, but give you a multitude of resume design options to choose from.
3. Don’t be choosy with listing out hard skills
When it comes to writing your resume, the fundamental issue of what to include and what not to is always at play. However, you really can’t go too wrong with listing out as many hard skills as you possibly can as long as they are somewhat related to the job position you’re applying to. Even if the skill isn’t going to likely come in handy, a job seeker with knowledge in a plethora of skills and software such as SAP, QuickBooks, various coding languages, and whatever hard skill you can think of, is a sign to hiring managers that you are resourceful at the very least.
4. List things in order of importance
Remember, hiring managers are only going to skim your resume the first time around. This means it’s crucial to include your most important and impressive achievements first, with the hope that hiring managers won’t miss these important aspects of what you’ve done. While the most standard way of ordering your job experiences is chronologically, the bullet points within each job experience should be ordered by importance. On top of that, the order of your skills, education, and job experience sections should also be dependent on which one will likely impress the hiring managers the most.
5. Hire a professional resume writer
If you aren’t a writing savant, then perhaps it’s simply best to leave things to the pros. There are a lot of resume writing service online whose sole purpose is to help you write the best resume possible. If you’re able to find a reliable company that employs knowledgeable resume writers, then this can be an easy ticket to really taking your resume up a notch. Of course, not every resume writing service will do a good job, so it’ll be important to do your research and find one that will prove worthy of your time and money.
6. Include keywords
Remember, it’s not just the hiring manager who will be reading your resume. Applicant tracking systems will also be scanning your resume too and throwing out the ones that score poorly. In order for your resume to impress these tracking systems, it’s important to include important keywords associated with the job position. One way to do that is to use similar rhetoric as what’s used in the job description and be sure to include the usual jargon used in your industry.
7. Take your time
If you’re going to succeed in your job search, you’ve got to plan ahead, and part of planning ahead means allotting enough time to produce quality work. Writing a solid resume is hard to do. It takes a lot of revisions and proofreading – and not just by you, but by your peers and family members too. This all requires time, so don’t rush it.
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