With New Year’s Eve just around the corner and millions of Americans making resolutions to drop some of that holiday weight they’ve been packing on since the cookie swap, the career experts at Aced My Interview thought it would be appropriate to share some hacks on how to lose weight in your resume to help you get ahead in the job search.
Eliminate Irrelevant Positions
Though this may seem obvious, you’d be surprised at how many people include their entire work histories on their resumes. Ideally, you want to keep your resume a lean and mean one page. Including every single job you’ve had since your first internship eats up tons of space and often does not paint a clear picture of the job you want to have. Think of your work history as a story about the career you want to have and leave off that one summer where your cousin hooked you up with that job at the Dairy Queen.
Tailor Your Job Responsibilities to the Job Posting
Another thing that clogs up the works is a resume that’s basically a wall of text. Employers get hundreds of resumes every day. They don’t need to know every single thing you did on the job. While it’s super cool of you to replace the jug on the water cooler, it’s probably not particularly relevant. Pare down your job responsibilities to the most important and impressive stuff. Make sure that you use the exact language that appears in the job posting, as these are the things that hiring managers are looking for.
Keep Your Skills Relevant
Yes, you’ve got more special skills than Liam Neeson, but your resume doesn’t need to reflect that. Some things are best left unsaid. While it’s super impressive that you can burp the alphabet backward while juggling chainsaws, you should probably leave that off the resume unless, of course, you’re applying to be a burping-alphabet-reciting-chainsaw juggler, then that would be super relevant.
Of course, this is just a limited set of hacks on how to lose weight in your resume. Nobody particularly likes building a resume and it’s pretty tempting to put one boilerplate version together and send it out over and over again, but there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the job search. You need to keep your resume in fighting shape by cherry-picking every part of it to be relevant to the job posting you’re applying to.
