Tips from a Recruiter – Before You Submit Your Resume
Ready To Submit Your Resume and Apply for A Job? Not So Fast.
You should take a few more minutes to make sure you make the right first impression and get all the points possible for your past education, skills, and experience. Here’s a quick checklist you can use to make sure you put your best foot forward!
Make a Great First Impression
The same way we naturally make inferences about someone we meet when we first see them. The visual appearance of your resume will create the first impression before anyone even reads a word.
Here are some important recommendations:
- Use a format that is not too busy
- Keep fonts and formatting consistent
- Don’t create paragraphs or sentences that run on – use bullets
- Don’t worry about a fancy formatting
- No photos
Describe Your Prior Experience
The reason it is so important to do this well is because the hiring team must SHOW that you have all the required skills and experience, or the operations manager will never get to see your resume.
Here’s what you can do to increase your odds of an interview:
- Use a past tense verb to start each bullet point to describe what you did and be specific
- Consider bullets that describe what you accomplished, achieved, or improved
- Be accurate and don’t take credit for someone else’s work such as a team or embellish your contributions
- Don’t use subjective words or phrases like, “I was amazing.”
- Don’t copy and paste your duties and achievements in multiple places for different jobs
- Don’t use I, me, he, she – start your bullet points with a verb
- Include volunteer work and educational assignments only if relevant to the position
Double Check Everything. Double Check Everything
Think about it. Any indication that you show a lack of attention to detail is a bad sign right from the beginning and a good reason for potential disqualification. Who would want to hire someone to work 8 hours every day if they can’t produce a simple resume that’s only a couple pages?
So, here’s what you should do:
- Check every word and don’t trust spellcheck which does not catch incorrect words spelled correctly
- Don’t make things confusing, such as providing multiple phone numbers, multiple email addresses, etc.
- Ensure there is no conflicting information that is not explained clearly
Address the Deal Killers Head On
The following things are often the kiss of death for your resume: frequent job changes, multiple jobs lasting less than one year, jobs lasting less than 90 days, gaps in employment, positions inconsistent with your career path or entrepreneurial ventures – especially recent ones. You cannot lie; and, you cannot hide or misrepresent something like an employment gap. So, what do you do?
If any of these are on your resume, do this:
- Provide a comment or explanation on the resume to address the potential concerns – not in a cover letter.
- Include the explanation in your resume; because, cover letters are often not stored with the resume and if separated, you will not be given the benefit of the doubt.
Open Opportunities
How to Apply
- Review the entire opportunity description for which you want to apply.
- If a Candidate Questionnaire is required for the position, complete and submit your answers to the questionnaire.
- Remember to also submit an up-to-date, complete, and accurate version of your resume.
- All submissions are reviewed. Please be patient until we reply to you with possible next steps.
- Required Qualifications are listed separately from Preferred Qualifications. Please consider them carefully.
- Also discover more about Our Company, Our Culture and Working at Mister Sweeper here.
- If you have not yet checked out our Tips for Candidates, check out our Careers Help page!
- Next Steps… Click the button to see Our Opportunities.