Best Resume Advice to Boost Your Job Search
Are you looking for the best resume advice and tips to boost your job search? Learn how to make your resume stand out, the importance of networking, and how to craft a compelling cover letter.
How The Perfect Resume Team Can Help You Get a Job
Are you aimlessly sitting in front of your TV scrolling through pages and pages of job listings and wondering how you can compete with hundreds of other people? If you finally see a job listing that catches your eye, your resume needs to be equally as eye-catching and ready to send!
What happens if you keep reading through best resume advice articles, the job description and you start to feel more excited because you know that you are THE PERFECT CANDIDATE?
You know deep down the employer needs you on their team! You are the candidate that is perfectly matched for this role! Ask yourself, is your resume eye-catching and ready to send? No? STOP!!!!
You simply cannot send a resume you created two or more years ago.
Recruitment and the best resume advice has changed so much since then! Mobile technology may have only exploded in the last decade or so, but its impact on our lives has added a level of convenience and ease that we now take for granted.
While you are considering best resume advice and applying for a job, hundreds of other applicants are searching and applying for the exact same role. To make matters worse, the same role is being applied across various media channels:
- Seek
- CareerOne
- Gumtree
- Jora
- Facebook Groups
- Company Websites
- Recruitment Agencies
- Word of Mouth
- Company communications to attract internal applicants.
The list goes on and on and on!
Back in the day, you would hand your physical resume into a company and if you were not interviewed on the spot, they would take down your details on a clipboard and tell you they would give you a call. Perhaps you applied to a newspaper advertisement. A company may get a dozen applications for the role, the chances of you getting the job was quite high.
Now mobile technology is being used to make the job-hunting process less daunting and labour intensive. With digital recruitment, you could be sitting on the toilet, lounging on the couch naked, sipping your morning coffee, waiting in line at Coles while you are rapidly firing off hundreds of job applications in minutes using the Quick Apply button in Seek.
From the palm of your hand, you could be applying for CEO positions, a lead role at the World Health Organisation, a position at McDonald's all without really reading the job description, tailoring your resume or cover letter or having any clue what position you actually applied for! Simplicity has created a job-lotto. Click here for a minimalist cover letter template.
Often when a recruiter calls for a phone interview, the candidate can't recall applying for the job! Deploying this job-lotto method might bring you some luck however, this tactic has made the hiring decision so much more complex for recruiters and ridiculously competitive!
Instead of a dozen applications for a role (back in the olden days!). Recruiters are faced with up to 500 applications in some instances. Sifting through an average of 250 resumes for one job opening is not easy, it's actually quite a boring task!
So how did companies combat the high-volume of obviously generic applications?
They introduced the Applicant Tracking System (ATS), giving them the best resume advice for shortlisting - a robotic software platform that searches your resume for keywords in the hope that you are someone who actually feels you are the perfect match for the position!
Unfortunately, the robot is VERY RIGID! Unlike a human who can take note of your nice design and cursive writing, the ATS requires strict formatting, specific styles of titles, dates, company names and keywords. For those of you who have scanned a printed copy of your resume, you are 100% invisible to the ATS. You will be rejected immediately.
As much as some people try to avoid it, technology is a critical part of our lives today and yet in recruitment, the human element has been removed. Let's face it, applying for a job SUCKS!!!! but getting rejected sucks even more! You need a resume writing service who provides the best resume advice.
Who honestly wants to spend their precious time applying for jobs when you only have a 2% chance of getting an interview? So what can you do to increase your chances?
Take the time to submit a perfectly tailored application.
Taking the time to tailor your cover letter and resume takes a professional resume writer between two and five hours from reading your existing resume, the position advertisement, company website etc. then editing/enhancing your resume.
You can create your own tailored resume and cover letter too, it will just take you longer, but once you have a well-formatted, modern and concise resume at your disposal which includes the correct keywords and best resume advice, ready to laugh Mr Robot ATS down. You can start tweaking your cover letter and resume each time you apply, instead of overhauling it!
You may not be able to apply for hundreds of jobs in a minute, but what if... you do find the perfect job for you? What if... you find the job that is going to give you a fulfilling career? You can be confident that you will at least get through the Applicant Tracking Systems and be presented in front of a human with a heartbeat!
This is where you can shine! This is where your contemporary resume can stand out from the sea of black and white and boring! This is where your skills, talents, achievements and expertise can grab the recruiters attention and demand you to be added to the shortlist pile.
How The Perfect Resume will get you the job!
Start by tailoring your resume and cover letter then update your LinkedIn profile. 90% of recruiters use LinkedIn now as a core recruitment tool. Ensure your specific skills and experience make you interesting! It’s important to remember however that despite the rapidly changing technology, many of the old rules still apply. There’s no substitute for a perfectly crafted CV that clearly demonstrates your suitability for a role.
As recruiters today have so many applications to sort through you have approximately six seconds to catch their attention in order to be shortlisted. Your resume needs to highlight quality, not quantity. Gone are the days where the number of pages showed how skilled you are. Recruiters appreciate when you demonstrate your suitability for a role in 1-3 pages.
Once you have The Perfect Resume, upload it to the cloud. By using Google Docs, OneDrive, iCloud etc. you can tailor your resume and cover letter on the go! This means as soon as you see your perfect job while you are looking far from unprofessional, you can fill out the application, attach a resume you are proud of, upload your freshly tailored cover letter, hold your breath and hit “Apply!”
Are you someone who hits apply, then waits. And wonders. And waits for what seems like a lifetime before giving up hope on the job that seemed to be a match made in heaven?
You are not alone! On average there are 250 resumes submitted for every job opening, generally, only 10 interviews are held per position, that means 99.6% of applicants will walk away from the job application with either an unsuccessful email or some quality interview practice to boast about.
To get the job you want, A good resume won't cut it! You need The Perfect Resume! You need a resume that puts you in the top 10 shortlisted candidates so you can showcase your skills in person at an interview!
At The Perfect Resume, we pride ourselves on increasing your chances of getting shortlisted by 96% within six months. This means, instead of being lucky to get one of the 2 applicants out of 100 that get shortlisted, you have a 96 out of 100 chance of getting shortlisted! That's a high distinction to our academics!
Melissa Peacock, the Founder of The Perfect Resume has spent over a decade reviewing thousands of resumes, interviewing and hiring hundreds of entry-level to senior leadership roles. She knows crafting The Perfect Resume is your guaranteed way to create a halo effect!
Melissa and her team offer practical, real-world experience gained from applying for and getting job offers through to sitting on interview panels and deciding which candidate gets the position.
If you are looking at your resume and believe it needs an uplift. Contact us and we can provide you with a free review.
If you would like to tackle your resume re-write on your own, we are still here to support you from the sideline. We offer a proofreading service and ATS friendly DIY resume design templates you can choose from. If you are starting to go through your resume and feel yourself struggling on any of the following:
- Reducing your resume down to 1-3 pages.
- Covering career gaps
- Making your accomplishments sound dramatically more impressive
- Tailoring your cover letter and resume to suit ATS systems
- Balancing content, white space, page length and design.
- Reducing recruiter bias
- Telling a powerfully engaging story
- Standing out without sounding cheesy or like a know-it-all!
Contact The Perfect Resume! We are here to help!
Creating The Perfect Resume that will get you noticed and land you interviews can be challenging for Professional Resume Writers at times, let alone if you try and tackle it on your own. There are some resumes that land on our desk and we struggle to know what the candidate is trying to say! We have to read the CV multiple times, ask colleagues and eventually go back to the client to ask them. The scary part is when the client says, "To be honest, I don't remember what I meant!"
Keep it short and sweet! K.I.S.S
Whether you’re unemployed, a new graduate looking for a foot in the door, an indecisive professional who is still looking for that perfect job, a long-standing employee who is looking for a career change, a recent victim of redundancy or someone ready to launch themselves back into the workforce after some time off, the team at The Perfect Resume can help! Click here to meet the team!
What are you waiting for? Send your existing resume to info@theperfectresume.com.au with some perfectly matched job links and we can get you started on your journey with a free review! Contact The Perfect Resume! We are here to help!
