These days, you don’t have time or money to waste on a subpar resume. If you’ve been furloughed or laid off, you probably are working on polishing up your interview skills and searching for possible job opportunities, and you need great resumes guaranteed to attract the attention of hiring managers in a difficult job market.
At Top 5 Resume Writers, we don’t actually write resumes. We simply review resumes written by other companies and select the companies that provide the best overall services. Let’s talk for a minute about what makes a resume great, and why we chose one company as our top pick over dozens of other top resume sites.
5 Tips For Great Resumes – Guaranteed
1. Make Sure The Resume Is Error-Free
This should be obvious, but it’s worth talking about for a minute. A single spelling error can cost you a great job opportunity. Even if you hire a professional service, give the resume a quick read to ensure that there are no errors.
This is especially important when it comes to contact information. If your phone number or email aren’t correct, it’s impossible for hiring managers to get in touch with you, and a professional resume writer won’t know if your contact information is correct or not.
2. Keep A Consistent Style
If you use bullet points in one section of the resume, don’t use dashes in another. If you boldface type for the name of one company, don’t use bold-italic for another. Keep the style consistent and simple. Consider using just one typeface instead of multiple typefaces. You might put your name in one font and everything else in a different font, but the main body of your resume should be in one single, easy-to-read typeface.
In general, a simple straightforward design is best. Don’t mess around with clever design elements, especially for a resume that you are sending electronically. A funky, cool resume might be ok to hand out directly to a hiring manager or potential boss, but if you email or upload a resume, just use a basic plain design. Chances are, this resume will be run through applicant-tracking software, and this software often cannot process resumes with odd design elements, strange margins and unique typefaces.
3. Include Dynamic Content & Quantify Your Skills
Hiring managers don’t just need to see that you have work experience; they need to quickly understand what you accomplished during each of these work experiences. This can be the most difficult part of writing a resume, and it’s one of the best reasons to use a professional resume writer.
If you want resumes guaranteed to attract a hiring manager’s attention, you need to express your skills with quantifiable examples. For instance, it’s not enough to simply state you were “tasked with many managerial responsibilities,” or “managed the sales team.” You need to state something like, “Managed 20-person sales staff, exceeded sales goals by 25%-40% per year, boosted company revenues by 120%.”
The hiring manager can look at the latter snippet and understand how many people you managed and how effective you were at managing that team. Obviously, not everyone reading this is a sales manager, but whether you are a nurse, a teacher, an IT specialist, a graphic designer or something else entirely, you have skills that will benefit an employer, and these skills need to be highlighted to your best advantage.
4. ATS-Compliance Is Important
Earlier, we talked about the importance of having a resume that can be read easily by applicant-tracking software. While the design is important, the content also needs to be suitable for this type of software. This means you need to include specific keywords that the software might target.
How do you find these keywords? Typically most of the keywords are listed in the job description. For instance, if you are an IT professional, there might be certain types of software with which you need to be familiar. If you are looking at a nursing job, there might be certain certifications that need to appear. Make sure that you list these keywords somewhere in your resume so that the software will find these words during a scan.
The real trick with an ATS-compliant resume is to create a resume that includes crucial keywords and avoid an awkward resume that just seems like a bunch of keywords were stuffed into it. You need a resume that appeals to humans and software, and hiring a professional resume writer can be a great way to ensure that you have an ATS-compliant resume that also appeals to hiring managers.
5. Keep It Short
Hiring managers only have a minute or two at most to look over your resume, and if it runs for several pages, they likely won’t make it past the first page. Unless you are applying for a higher-level executive position, it’s smart to keep that resume to a single page in length.
Resume Writing Group: Great Resumes Guaranteed
To select the top resume writing companies, we created a “mystery client” and sent identical information about this client to dozens of top-rated resume companies. Once we received the resumes, we provide copies of these resumes to an independent panel of people that are or have been in the position to make hiring decisions.
The panel unanimously selected Resume Writing Group as their top pick. Their resume was error-free, which is crucial, but it also was well-articulated with an obvious strategy in mind. The writer clearly knew how to highlight the “mystery client’s” skills and didn’t simply rehash the information we gave them. Resume Writing Group’s writer also was the only one that contacting the client to gather additional information and the results were clear.
Resume Writing Group didn’t just provide us with a great finished product; they also offer an amazing guarantee, even during these difficult economic times. Their guarantee states that if you use their resume and follow their advice, but are not hired in 45 days (or less); they will refund the cost of your resume, and pay you an additional $100. If you’ve been searching for resumes guaranteed to help you land a job, we highly recommend that you consider using Resume Writing Group’s services.
