This is a guest post by Jennifer Paxton, VP of People Talent at Privy. Jennifer is one of the predominant Talent leaders in the startup community, leading initiatives at one of Boston’s hottest tech companies. As someone in the seat reviewing resumes on a daily basis, I felt some tactical advice for job seekers would be valuable for everyone––whether you're on the market, passively looking, or reviewing resumes at your organization.
Enjoy!
I talk a ton about networking and proactively reaching out with personalized messages to the hiring manager or recruiter for a role you are interested in. And this will always be my go-to method when looking for a new role.
However, if you are applying for roles right now, something else you should be aware of is how your resume looks to the receiver of your application.
We have been fortunate to open up a new role on our marketing team and have gotten a ton of interest, which means a ton of resumes- yea!
But something that can disqualify a candidate fast is a super sloppy resume.
Here are three simple tips to make sure you don’t miss the mark:
Spell check and Grammarly are your friends! I am not the best at spelling or use of grammar so I use spell check and Grammarly RELIGIOUSLY!
Make sure that you are showcasing your work in your resume. Not just a laundry list of the tasks that you accomplished but what those tasks did for the company.
Try to apply directly on the company’s career site, not through indeed- 8 times out of 10 the resume parses funny with spacing issues or doesn’t upload at all.
Hopefully, this is helpful for all the job seekers out there :)
As someone who reviews hundreds of resumes, I know just how important a clean, well-contextualized resume is.