How to Match your Resume with the Job Application

Your resume is a gist of your professional merits that proves your candidacy for the job application. To ensure that your resume makes a good impression on the hiring manager, you must strategically find the right skills sought by the employer. All you need to do then is match your resume with the job application to outsmart other candidates.

Why Match your Resume with the job application

The resume is the first interaction a candidate has with the recruiter. To captivate the attention of the hiring manager, your resume must be honed to match the repertoire of the employer carefully.

The benefits of matching your resume with the job application include a winning resume that impresses the hiring manager. It is not easy to impress the recruiter with an attractive resume as you need to pass multiple screening prior to the hiring manager. Moreover, a resume should pass a multiple series of tests including evaluations from ATS to junior or assistant hiring coordinators to meet the eyes of the hiring manager.

Best Tips to Match your Resume with the job application

Hiring managers take but a split second to judge the qualification of a candidate using their resume. If you customize the resume to fit the job application with accuracy, the employer will await your interview than trash your profile.

To get noticed by the recruiter, candidates must highlight skills that are exceptional, precise and relevant to the job, in addition to many more markers such as the below.

1. Assess the Job Description

Matching your resume with a job application requires careful analysis and assessment of the employment advertisement. Typically, job applications contain numerous foreground and hidden qualifications for evaluating applicants. To qualify your resume must match with the job description.

As most jobs specify important roles and technical requirements to qualify as a candidate, it is best to collect the relevant matches and write it down on a piece of paper.

2. Shortlist Applicable Qualifications

The next step is to intricately observe your resume for matching credentials. After finding matching qualifications, include your technical accolades that are not on the present resume, yet. You can also use the PAR method to exemplify your result-oriented resume qualifications that benefitted the past employers.

3. Research about the Recruiter

Most job applications do not list the candidate requirements in profundity. One must always research the employer extensively by consulting the official website of the business or the people who worked for the company, before penning the resume.

You can also scrutinize similar job applications and sample resumes after collecting valuable information necessary to draft the resume on your own.

4. Match your Skills and Customizing it

Hiring managers search for resumes with a precise-skill-set that matches with the job role. Resume skills are divided into hard skills and soft skills, of which, hard skills refer to technical skills and soft skills are your interpersonal skills.

It is important to make different sections to assimilate technical skills that make you good professional skills as well as interpersonal skills that make you a good employee. In addition, specific technical skills such as computer skills are essential to job applications.

5. Prioritizing Skills in a Job Application

After marking technical skills that match the job application, you must prioritize your resume entries based on how well it establishes your candidacy. In addition, you must customize your credentials in the resume in the order of importance with respect to the job application, to highlight the best parts of it.

6. Add Relevant Buzzwords

An indispensable resume checklist item, the addition of relevant keywords specific to the job application is necessary to boost your chances of getting a fair chance for the interview. Nowadays, over 70% of hiring managers use resume and applicant scanning software such as ATS to filter the resume prior to evaluation by the hiring manager.

It is wise to round up all the relevant keywords from the job application and add up to 50% to pass applicant screening tests. Moreover, avoid adding more than 90% of the keywords from the job description to prevent rejections or red flags.

7. Use a Summary of Qualifications

Yet another clever option to project your relevancy for the job, the summary statement in a resume refers to a concise statement that lists the best achievements and technical skills that prove your candidacy for the job. Candidates can also use bulleted points to create a gist of professional qualifications relevant during scanning.

In short, you must match the best professional accomplishments of the resume after assessing the job description. For example, if the job ad requests, “Need Team Players with Leadership and HSE Skills”, you must add keywords that elaborate on your teamwork skills. You can do so with the use of real0life examples where you applied Leadership, Management or HSE Skills to attain quantifiable achievements for the past employers.

8. Apply the Right Format

It is important to choose a consistent and suitable format that highlights your resume skills and achievements with respect to the job description. If the employer hasn’t specified in a particular format to choose, pick one that suits your professional credentials.

Experienced candidates must choose the reverse-chronological resume format where work experience and education are listed in bullet points with the employment record ort degree earned. Considered best for experienced candidates, a chronological resume also passes ATS evaluations. On the contrary, candidates with red flags such as employment gaps in their resume history must use a functional format that focuses on skills than job history.

9. Proofread

An important suggestion to upgrade the quality of your resume is by proofreading it for typographical, grammatical and even semantic errors. In short, it is necessary to keep your credentials in a resume as real as possible to prevent sudden termination or rejections.

Moreover, typos in a resume prove your lack of dedication to ensure the accuracy of your submissions. To avoid this, ask a friend or colleague to scan your resume once or twice prior to submission.

Conclusion

A good resume must reflect the precise attributes sought by the employer in the job description. In order to do so, you must convince the employer that you’re the best fit for the job role and the only way to do so is by matching your resume with the job application!