How to write a crisp resume that saves recruiters time

Resume is very important to you. It is understandable you spend hours, even days, on perfecting it. 

When you shift from your personal perspective to the recruiters’ perspective, your beautifully crafted, information-ridden resume is one of the several hundreds they need to go through. Their challenge is to know about you enough from the pages in order to decide whether to move you forward in the hiring process. 

Plus, at any given time a recruiter could be working on a dozen or more open roles, very likely in different functional areas. That’d be several thousands resumes to review and make decisions upon. How much time do you think a recruiter spends on each one? 

To make your resume “easy” for the recruiters, here are some tips from my experience of reading through tens of thousands resumes and making hiring decisions. 

1. Unless you have over 10 years' experiences, or many publications to quote, keep your resume within one or two pages. 
2. Your most recent work experience is the most relevant. You should order your accomplishments to match the job requirements. There is a reason why job requirements are ordered in certain ways. 
3. Once your work experience passes the initial check, the recruiter looks at your education to see if it supports the stories. So don’t let other sections occupy too much space on the first page, forcing the recruiter to scroll down the page to search for your work experiences. 
4. Your summary at the top of your resume is nice, but keep it short and to the point. I look at the work experiences first, then the education, and last the summary. If the summary lists skill sets that are not supported by either the work experience or the education, I choose to believe the work experience. 
5. For a technical role, don’t start your accomplishment with the impact. Give that valuable real estate to first describe what your accomplishment is, then some key technical details to explain how you did it, finished by the impact. 
6. Don’t list everything you did. Group them into themes (that match the job requirements). Under each theme list your accomplishments. They support your statement of qualification. 
7. Don’t be afraid of adding personal interests to the end of the resume. And don’t feel you must include something. Your resume represents who you are. You should be comfortable being who you are. 

Happy job searching!