How to Make Your Resume Stronger at a Glance

When you send a resume to a recruiter, you have only a few seconds to make a good impression. A strong resume will increase your chances of being invited for an interview, so building a resume that captures attention should be one of your top priorities. Fortunately, there are several things you can do to make sure your resume has a strong impact on recruiters, even if they only glance at it for a few seconds. Follow these tips for building a resume that gets noticed.

First, remove irrelevant and outdated information from your resume. Wilson Campbell, a human resources expert, tells tech blogger Melissa Shaw that many job seekers have difficulty removing outdated information from their resumes. They want to include every job they have ever held, but this is unnecessary. If you've worked as a Web programmer for ten years, there is no need to list your college help desk job on your resume. When building a resume, make sure every position you list is relevant or recent. If one of your past jobs has nothing to do with the job you have now, remove it from your resume.

If you're building a resume from scratch, a few formatting tricks will help you make it stronger. Recruiters don't want to read large chunks of text, so use bold headings and bullet points to make your resume easier to read. Format your resume with one-inch margins so there is plenty of white space. Avoid using too many fonts, especially if you are applying for a job in a conservative field such as law or medicine. Check your resume carefully to make sure there are no formatting errors. Sending out a resume with a glaring error will hurt your chances of being invited to interview for a job.

When building a resume, pay close attention to the top third of the page. This is what recruiters see when they look at the document for the first time. If you don't make this section as strong as possible, there's a good chance recruiters won't read the rest of your resume. One way to make the most of this section is to include a career summary instead of the traditional resume objective. Including a career summary leads to a stronger resume because it highlights your most relevant skills and tells recruiters why you make a good candidate.

Recruiters receive hundreds—or even thousands—of resumes per week. You must give them a reason to take the time to read your entire resume and move you into the next stage of the hiring process. Removing irrelevant information, capturing attention with bulleted lists and bold text, and strengthening the first third of the document are all good ways to create a strong resume. Keep these tips in mind when building a resume for any type of job.

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