If you know how to print a LinkedIn profile, we bet you’re fully relying on the PDF export feature using the convenient format with all necessary blocks as a resume. It’s great to keep your networking in sync with your job hunting. But how many responses have you got? The greatest mistake is the one-size-fits-all way of thinking.
Trying to personalize your resume each time before applying for a job will be the best solution. This sound advice and common practice will let you stay ahead of candidates’ flood with generic resumes. Let’s see in what way a personalized resume reflects you are the ideal fit for a role.
What a Personalized Resume Means
Job openings usually include a particular skill set, which the right candidate should possess to cope with specific work. Few applicants can boast of meeting all qualifications or skills and fewer of those who use ready-made patterns will pass the filters.
Generic resumes leave it up to a recruiter to nail down whether the candidates are capable to perform this work. They are all about an individual, while a personalized resume makes it about the employer who wants to read about the benefits for the company.
The personalized resume should look like a persuasive roadmap with the highlighted pit-stops of must-have skills and qualifications.
Customizing Resume for HRs
The aim of a combination of keywords, power words, and data is to persuade a recruiter you can perform the work better than other candidates. A customized resume means a candidate recognizes and demonstrates competencies, declared by the employer.
Showcase that your experience completely corresponds to the job description context by demonstrating how and why you used your skills. If you shift your career, point out transferable skills from the previous experience, providing context and translating phrases.
Customizing Resume for ATS
Technologies are great to narrow the stack of resumes on a hiring manager’s desk down. The keywords that don’t exactly match will hide your resume from the search results on LinkedIn or job boards. A resume without essential terms won’t pass through the applicant tracking system filters, preventing recruiters from reading it.
Mind that scoring and ranking AT system is based on matching the job posting, dooming generic resumes without required skills or specific experience to failure. It’s necessary to work on the document to make it recognizable by ATS with keeping in mind that the job posting keywords allow selecting yours from a few on a recruiter’s desk.
What to Include to Catch Recruiter’s Attention
A personalized resume takes in the keywords with critical job-related and optional information as follows:
- technical skills
- training/certifications
- industry jargon
- soft & transferable skills
- impressive terms
- company names
- location
Guidelines for Personalizing the Resume
Matching the job description is not so difficult. Just find and rank your technical skills and keywords employers are looking for, then put them in critical places as follows:
- Read the job posting carefully and make a copy of the keywords.
- Compare line by line the skills included in your resume to those from the job ad.
- Check how quickly you can point to a particular skill from the job posting.
- Ensure that your ability to do all required duties and responsibilities is clearly expressed by each section.
- Paste in all missing or different skills to match the posting.
- Mirror the language from the job ad in the resume.
- List your job titles in Work History or include them in Summary if you have no experience.
- Start each job entry in Work History with qualifications to emphasize relevant experience.
- Prove your efficient work, describing your accomplishments with measurables.
- Use bullet lines avoiding paragraphs to make qualifications affinity fairly visible.
- Cut out unnecessary information to emphasize the required.
- Upload your resume on any of the free resume checkers to get detailed feedback.
So if you’ve ever asked yourself why there are no responses or the recruiters never call to interviews, it’s time to put up sending your old generic resume time after time. If you put time and effort to customize your resume and then do a resume critique before you send an application to a role, your job hunting will be more effective, resulting in frequent calls from recruiters to pick a winner.
Author’s Bio: Karen Hampton Career Coach on LPWS, who knows everything about career exposure on LinkedIn. Excellent at building your skills into a seductive LinkedIn profile and school you in self-marketing.