The keywords and action verbs that you should use depend on your specialisation. Adding details and statistics to your resume can also help contextualise your achievements. If you need some assistance, you can always reach out to our recruiters for more personalised advice.

4. avoid focusing on tasks over achievements

Too often job seekers get caught up in listing everything they’ve worked on, instead of highlighting how their contributions have made a positive impact on the company. Your resume will start looking like a laundry list of all the work you need to do, and quite frankly, not all of them matter as much.

Hiring managers don’t need to know the nitty-gritty details of how you spend your time at work or whether you are writing emails or churning out reports. We are more interested in the projects you have successfully launched, the number of deals closed, revenue generated, growth achieved - any evidence to demonstrate the impact your work had on the companies that you used to work for.

elaborate on the impact of your contributions instead of the details of your tasks

Quantify the impact of how your work contributed to the team or organisation you work for. Instead of just saying that you were responsible for implementing a social media campaign, you should highlight the results of the campaign. Were you able to increase the number of followers for the account? How did the engagement rate change before and after the campaign?

If you work in cybersecurity, were you able to minimise the organisation’s risk levels or uncover more threats, and by how much?

The great results that you’ve achieved at work are something that you should be proud of and can help differentiate you from other applicants.

5. don’t include too much irrelevant information

We are all guilty of this. We always feel the need to include as much information as we possibly can in our CV to impress everyone with how much we have done.

Sometimes, people may include so much that they end up with a CV that is 10 pages long. If you are a recent graduate or don’t have much relevant work experience for the job you're applying for, it is certainly not encouraged to have a long resume. Having to go through so many applicants, the chances that the recruiter would actually look through all of the details is very low.

Sharing too much information, especially irrelevant ones, means that it’s harder for us to find out what you’re really good at or if you possess the qualities or competencies our clients are looking for. Unfortunately, when it is difficult for us to read your resume, it’s quite likely we’ll put your application in the reject pile.

only include relevant information

Reference the job description of the role you are applying for, and tell us why you are the best fit for the job. Your resume should look like a greatest hits album - where you only include your proudest achievements from your entire career. You should also use:

A clean font like Tahoma or Arial
Bullet points to come across as clear and concise
Short sentences for easy reading

Resist the urge to shrink the font size or margins to fit in more information. It's always best to keep your CV or resume to two pages. Depending on your work experience, a two-page CV should be able to capture the information that recruiters look for. It is also acceptable for technical workers may have a list of certifications and technical qualifications to extend beyond 2 pages.

Take time to review your CV and include only information that matters to your future employer.

6. try not to be too modest

We have been taught from a young age that we should not talk about our achievements because bragging is bad. As a result, many of us have the tendency to downplay our successes for fear that expounding on them will come across as arrogance.

However, highlighting your achievements is exactly what you need to do to impress your future employers. For all you know, they are looking for someone who has experience in what you’ve accomplished or worked on so far.

back your accomplishments up with evidence

The key to striking a good balance between being humble and arrogant is to remain factual by quantifying your work accomplishments.

If you claim to be an expert in your field, make sure you back that up with actual data, statistics and results. Instead of just saying that you’re “a highly-efficient project manager”, talk about how you were able to complete the project before the deadline or how much resources you were able to save for the company. The more specific and detailed you are, the more impressed we’ll be by your accomplishments.

Always remind yourself that it's about the 'how' that hiring managers are interested in and not just the 'what'. A clear description of your accomplishments and stated evidence can help strengthen your resume to leave a positive impression on the recruiter.

Say you want to impress the recruiter with good leadership skills, you’ll need to elaborate, with examples, the factors that exemplify and prove the quality. An example of your leading accomplishments would be "Led an award-winning project with a team of three through effective work delegation; using 85% of the allocated budget.”

7. refrain from using only one resume for all your job applications

Some statistics revealed that less than 2% of online job applicants are contacted, and even fewer make it to job interviews. Many job seekers use only one CV to apply for several jobs. However, these resumes tend to include only general information that you can find on almost all other CVs.

Using just one standard CV could reduce your chances of securing a job interview because it can be quite forgettable in the eyes of a recruiter who has to go through hundreds a day.

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