9 Easy Ways to Improve Your Resume in 5 Minutes

In a time crunch and want to get your CV out the door? Assuming that you’ve been updating your resume with relevant experience as you acquire it, these quick tips will help you spruce up your resume in a hurry.

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1. Get rid of the Career Objective: If you’re not convinced, check out our earlier post on the topic, here.

2. Use a consistent font: Many career sites recommend Sans Serif, but if you are not a fan, make sure the font you use is pleasing to the eye, easy to read, and available on most computers. Just keep it clean and simple and use the same font style throughout your resume. The font size should be consistent. With the exception of the resume title (which can be larger), the font size of the body text should ideally be between 10 and 12.

3. Think crisp: Don’t belabor on the details of your work. If you have paragraphs outlining your achievements, try summarizing in bullets to give your resume a clean and crisp look.

4. Avoid acronyms: Especially if they are not easily understandable to recruiters from a different industry or the acronym is company-specific. You can expand the acronym on the first usage and shift back later to save space. Example: Technical Product Manager (TPM). This also helps the applicant tracking system used by most companies pick up the keywords.

5. Test your hyperlinks: If you are using hyperlinks directing recruiters to your LinkedIn profile, website, or online portfolio make sure the links work and go to the right page.

6. Get rid of your high school achievements: Unless you are a fresh graduate with no experience, get rid of your achievements from school; chances are, they’re in no way related to the job for which you’re applying. It is also a good idea to arrange your education details after your work experience.

7. Clearly delineate sections: Make them stand out, so the recruiter can see the flow and understand when she’s looking at a different section. Use bold fonts or a divider or underline each section head, depending on the way you want to present your resume.

8. Use spell-check: Find any spelling or grammatical errors. If you are applying to a job in a different country, make sure that your spell-check is set to the default language of that country. If not, change it accordingly. In other words, if you’re living in the U.S. and applying to a job in the U.K., make sure your spell-check knows that you’ll be spelling “behavior” as “behaviour,” etc.

9. Preserve the format: Save your resume in whatever format the recruiter has asked you to send it in. Open and close your document a couple of times to make sure that the format is not compromised. Sometimes, a single line sneakily spills over to the next page, making the resume look awkward! Send yourself the resume over email and open it from your browser, etc., and see how it appears.

Got more time? See how to make the most out of the six seconds recruiters spend on your resume, here.

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