By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
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How do you make your resume stand out to hiring managers?
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How do you make your resume stand out to hiring managers? The easiest way is to make sure that it fits the role as it was written. Uh, so don’t make them read between the lines. Don’t make them engage in a big effort in order to move things forward. Instead, make it obvious, as though a six-year-old was reading the resume, that you’re qualified to do the job that they asked for you to do. And that becomes a great way to stand out.
Now, if we’re talking about applying for a job through an applicant tracking system as part of this, the way you would do this is make page one of your resume your actual cover letter. Why would I do that? Easy. Page one would read: “I’m forwarding my resume to you for such and such position that I saw advertised on LinkedIn, for example. This is how my background meshes with the role.”.
Flush left, what you do is you list all the requirements of the position and all the functionality that they ask you to do that you’ve actually done. Flush right is how long and how recently you’ve done that. So let’s say it was uh accounting of a specific type. Let’s say it was hedge fund accounting. Four years is the way it would read in the right-hand column, and you say four years current, and thus they could see that you’d actually had experience with it.
Now the fun thing is, by making it page one of your resume, if you’re submitting it through an applicant tracking system, what you’re doing is keyword stuffing page one of the resume. And then in the actual resume that begins on page two, the system is going to see terms that it’s looking for. And again, we’re working with the reference of hedge fund accounting. So the idea is you want to give it repetition, and it wants to look frequent. Putting it on page one makes it look current, and by having it repeat itself in the body of the resume, it gives it recency and currency, and you’re more likely to get asked.
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