5 Resume Fixes That Take 10 Minutes

Most resumes get skipped for small, fixable reasons. Here are the five fixes that make the biggest difference, in the order to do them. Open your resume next to this page and work down the list.

1. Make it one page, one column

Recruiters often decide in seconds, and many companies run resumes through software (an applicant tracking system) before a person sees them. Plain layouts read best for both.

• Keep it to one page if you have less than about 5 years of experience.
• Use one column. Remove text boxes, icons, photos and skill-rating bars.
• Use standard headings: Education, Experience, Projects, Skills.
• Use a plain font (Calibri, Arial, Garamond or Georgia) at 10-11 pt.

2. Turn duties into results

Weak bullets describe your job. Strong bullets show what happened because you did it. Rewrite each bullet with this formula:

Action verb + what you did + how + result

Start every bullet with a strong verb: led, built, organized, trained, improved, reduced, created, managed.

3. Add a number to half your bullets

Numbers make a bullet concrete and easy to believe. You don't need exact data. Use a fair estimate you could explain in an interview.

• How many: customers per day, people trained, events organized
• How much: money handled, budget managed, sales generated
• How often: weekly, every shift, for a full semester
• How much better: time saved, errors reduced, growth in followers

4. Copy the job posting's keywords

Read the posting and highlight the skills and tools that appear more than once. Where they're true for you, use those exact words in your bullets and Skills section. If the posting says "customer relationship management," don't just write "helped clients."

Do this for every application. Five tailored applications usually beat fifty generic ones.

5. Fix the small things that look careless

• Use a professional email address (firstname.lastname@...), not a nickname.
• Add your LinkedIn URL and your city and state. A full street address isn't needed.
• Save as a PDF named FirstName-LastName-Resume.pdf.
• Remove "References available upon request" and any use of "I" or "my."
• Read it out loud once. You'll catch the typos spell-check misses.

Want the rest done for you?

These five fixes come from The Job Search Toolkit. The full toolkit gives you two ready-to-edit resume templates, a finished example resume, cover letter templates, answers to 25 common interview questions, salary negotiation scripts and a job tracker, so you're not starting from a blank page.

See The Job Search Toolkit