Working in management has allowed me to view my fair share of resumes. You begin to look at them differently when you are on the employer side of the table. When you are writing your own resume, you want to highlight what makes you stand out from the competition. The tendency is to make it all about yourself and what you can do. This is not wrong in itself, but this should be taken one step further to be what you can do for the company. Each job listing is posted to fill a specific need. Look at your resume from a potential employer’s perspective, they are telling you exactly what they are looking for in their job listing.

You should have a master resume, which is never submitted to apply for a position, but rather is used to build a custom resume for each job. The master resume will be much too long to use by itself, but if you look at each potential job and tailor a new resume to highlight the talent you have which correlates to the position for which you are applying you greatly increase your chances of landing an interview. It is amazing how many resumes you will receive after posting an open position within your company that are nowhere near a match. You will look at some resumes and swear that the person never even read the job posting. I am certain that some applicants do simply “blast” their resume to every open position they find online whether they are a good fit or not, but this is not always the case. Some people are just not very good at writing a resume. There is nothing wrong with being a poor resume writer. If you are not a skilled resume writer, please get some help. There are many services available to help in this area.

Some of the best resumes I have received have at least one thing in common. The author made the resume about what they have done, not what they were responsible for. Listing accomplishments in a resume tell the potential employer that you actually accomplished something. If you want your resume to stand out, list specifically what you have done in your career, not what you were responsible for.

What are things that you look for in a resume?