How to Highlight your Resume Accomplishments

Ever wondered why despite having just the right skill set for the job, you don’t get the call for an interview? Why is that? Well, the leading evaluator of your candidature in is your resume. Your resume is a piece of paper based on which the potential employer judges you. It decides your fate as to whether you get hired or not. So, how exactly can you make sure that this paper helps you get noticed?

So often people try to cram in a lot of information and end up making it a paper full of gibberish. Remember, any employer has almost hundreds of resumes to go through. And it is simply not an easy task to make him put yours in the call pile instead of the discard pile. But your accomplishments can do the trick. You can present your resume accomplishments to get noticed for the job you are applying to.

How to Mention Achievements

It’s time to give your resume an entire makeover, and this is how you can do it. Here are the top tricks to mention accomplishments to your resume to get you noticed:

Fix the Font :

Select a font for your resume which is easy and clear to read. For instance, Arial or Times New Roman. The more twisted curvy fonts you choose, the less likely you are to get picked by an employee. This happens because by adding such fonts, you are just obscuring the primary purpose of your resume. Such fonts make it hard to read in the first place, leading to potential employer’s disinterest in your candidature. Employers don’t have enough time to pay particular attention to detail and thus, they are most likely to reject it without giving it another look.

No Objective :

Adding objective to a resume is an old-fashioned trick now. You need not state the reason as to why you are applying for that particular job. The hiring managers, of course, know which job you have applied for. This information looks much better in the cover letter and is enough for it to be there. There is no need to add an objective inside the resume; all it does now is take up space!

Your LinkedIn Profile and Hyperlinks :

Since most of the times you send your resume through e-mails, it is always good to follow up and make sure all the links mentioned in your resume are active. For instance, your e-mail address and your LinkedIn profile link. Do you know that you can now customize your LinkedIn profile link? Yes, you need not add the cumbersome long link of your profile now. Exercise the option to edit your profile URL and switch it to your name or a variation of it, if your name link is not available. Having clickable links make you more readily accessible to the employer.

Notable Stuff Comes First :

The resume can be usually more than a page long or at times, restricted to a single page. In either case, it is best to put all the vital information at the top. The potential employer will access it at a glance and will have a good expression even before he scrolls down to see more. In case he doesn’t find good stuff at the top, the chances are that he moves ahead without even scrolling down to see the rest of it. Thus, avoid large headers that occupy a lot of space and include your most notable details at the top.

Soft Skills with Examples :

Using redundant phrases like “problem-solving,” “decision-making” or “leadership” may make the employers want to throw your best resume in the discard pile. The simple reason is that they are not here to assess if you know these terms or not. What they are looking forward to is how and where you exhibited them. It is best to give examples of each soft skill to make a more concrete point. For example, instead of writing leadership, you can say you led a team of 4 people for a research-based project.

Fill up or bring it Down a Notch :

A lot of white spaces in your resume reflects that you need to use properly use your spaces and fill them correctly. If you are short on skills or experience to add up to it, there is no reason to worry. Include any volunteer work or freelancing or blogging that you ever did. ‘Bringing the gaps down a notch’ is another term that refers to fixing any large headers that are taking up too much space or empty lines left over for no reason. It’s high time to cut them all off.

Stay Updated :

Update all your roles and skills on the resume. Make sure to add up the relevant positions as per the job you are applying for. Learn new skills and as you master them, add them up to the resume and keep the cycle going. There is none who doesn’t want to hire an active learner.

Break Down the Skills :

If you have multiple skills, it is always better to split them up into distinct sections to accommodate each skill style. This will not only highlight them but will also give a nicely arranged look to your resume.

Ask for a Friend to Help :

You can request a friend or someone who doesn’t know you that well, to assist you with the resume. Ask him to read it through and narrate what things he was able to pick out and remember from your resume. This serves as a self-check to what your resume accurately represents. You can then tweak it accordingly.

Remove Abbreviations and Recheck Formatting :

Make sure you don’t include any abbreviations or acronyms in the resume as they can be misleading. As a rule, always include full forms in your resume and check the formatting. Make sure that the format is consistent throughout the document. Formatting, grammar, and spelling make a key impression on the employer, and if you mess these things up, you are already on your way to the discard pile.

Qualification Section on Top :

Since you removed the ‘career objective‘ section, it is advisable to add a qualification section that is made up of either bullet points or six to eight lines paragraph dictating all the impressive details and highlights of you as a person and of your career regarding experience. This gives a small summary of who you are and makes it easier for the employer to set an initial judgment about you.