Your resume acts as your first impression to a potential employer, and it can make or break your chances of landing an interview. By mastering the art of resume-making, you will significantly enhance your chances of landing your dream job. It serves as a tool to showcase an individual’s skills, qualifications and experiences to the employers.
This comprehensive guide provides valuable insights and practical tips to refine your resume, transforming it into a powerful tool that will help you get noticed in the job market.
Step 1: Create a ‘Back-Office’ Resume
Write an unedited list of your complete work history, including the work history along with strengths and talents.
Work history: Start by writing an unedited list that includes your complete history. This will help you get clarity on your unique values, like skills, experiences, knowledge areas, accomplishments, values, passions and interests. It will allow you to reflect on your vulnerabilities: difficult emotions, triggers and limiting beliefs.
Strengths and talents: Mention your personal and professional strengths and talents. Include everything here, like building teams, playing the flute really well, travelling on a budget, volunteer work, etc.
Step 2: Unpack … everything
Use your back-office resume to choose what information you want to include on your actual resume. Consider what work has caused you to have significant negative or positive emotions that help you describe your accomplishments and identify what you want in your next role.
Step 3: Rework Your Resume
Employers are open to longer resume formats than they used to be. However, try to mention everything in two pages and start with the following sections:
Summary of expertise: This section includes unique values, motivations and how you hope to impact the world. You can also highlight your top skills, along with the successes under each skill that will provide insight into your work.
Professional experience detailed chronologically: This section includes detailed and nuanced descriptions.
Volunteer experience: Write about your volunteer experience similar to your professional experience so that you may discuss the job you’ve done and the impact you’ve made.
Education: This section is frequently clear, as you list the institutions or programs you have attended. You may also include additional extracurricular activities.
Step 4: Add Creative Sections
You can add a few creative sections to take your resume to the next level, reflecting the uniqueness of what you bring. You can include sections like international work and living experience, artistic experience or practice, self-education, and more.
Step 5: Emotional Litmus Test
After your resume is totally prepared, ask yourself some questions to gauge if the resume makes you feel positive emotions. Refine until you feel energised and proud of your resume.
The list of questions includes:
– Does this feel true to me?
– Does it reflect my strengths and gifts?
– Am I proud of my work and myself?
– Is there an alignment between what I’m saying and how I’m feeling?
