Jessica Marcotte, Employment consultant with Build ON
Welcome to this month’s blog: Tips on Writing a Canadian Resume. As you most likely realized by now, there is a lot of information about resume writing floating around on the internet. Resume writing is a challenge in the best of times! This is why it is important to have a good and strong foundation to work with before you start writing your resume. Build ON wants to help by offering you some tips and tricks to help make your efforts successful!
The first thing is to ensure that you include your updated contact information so that employers can easily reach out to you. However, you do not want to include too much information, using one personal phone number and email is sufficient. Hiring managers do not want to see work phone numbers and emails being used on resumes or application forms as it gives a negative impression of how you use your current work tools to look for other jobs. You should always create a professional email address for your job search and customize your LinkedIn URL to make it more manageable, ensuring they are both live hyperlinks in your document. Your contact information should ideally be at the top of the page where it is easy for hiring managers or potential employers to locate. Directly below your contact information should be a summary of qualifications section where employers can get a quick idea of your skills relevant to the job posting. This is a bulleted list that showcases your experience, hard skills, soft skills and languages specific to the job you are applying for.
One thing to always remember is that your resume is a marketing tool to show hiring managers that you fit the profile they are trying to fill. You want to ensure you are using the job posting to customize your resume as this will ensure that you are selling yourself in a way that is reflective of the position you want. A great tip is to highlight key words and requirements from the job posting, making sure to include these in your resume. Jobscan is a highly recommended tool that can help with this. It can help verify whether you have successfully customized your resume with the proper key words by comparing your resume to the job posting. Do not forget to write acronyms out in full with the acronym in parenthesis the first time they are mentioned. You can then use the acronym on its own throughout the rest of your resume.
Personal information should be kept off a resume to protect your privacy. As indicated in the last Build ON blog post Equal Opportunity for All, you are protected against discrimination during the hiring and employment process. However, to avoid any possibility of it occurring, it is always good practice to keep any personal information out of your resume. You want to focus only on professional information like your work experience, education, certifications, technical skills, or anything else related to your professional profile. This also means no photographs of yourself and avoid including information about your immigration status!
Now that you have an idea of what to exclude in your resume, here are some key points on how to make your resume stand out. Besides key words, another very important element is to use measurable details. Not only do numbers draw attention to important achievements, it also outlines the impact you’ve made in your previous roles. Use numbers and percentages to quantify your work, including any specifics. Please keep in mind that you need to still be able to roughly prove these numbers, even if estimated. Do not forget to write all numbers in numerical form to save room in your resume and to draw the reader’s eye.
Once you have finished writing the content of your resume, pay careful attention to the format. The most important element to your formatting will be to keep everything simple and consistent. You want to have a font that is easily legible. Keep any fancy fonts, tables or graphs out of your resume so it is not overlooked by Applicant Tracking System (ATS) software, which helps hiring managers scan and process resumes. Using bullet points, white space, and bold font style in your section headers will help keep your resume easy-to-read. Most importantly, you should make sure that your formatting is consistent throughout your resume.
The final, but most important point, of resume writing is to avoid typographical errors (typos). When you finish writing or editing your resume, give your eyes a break. You are bound to miss some typos if you’ve been staring at your resume for too long. An interesting way of reviewing your resume for any typos is to change the format temporarily or to read it from the bottom up. Another way of catching typos is to ask a family member or friend to review it for you. Either way, pay close attention to the small typos that could affect your chances of going further in the hiring process.
If you need assistance with resume writing, do not hesitate to ask your Employment Consultant or to register for Build ON services as our employment consultants are here to help you with the process.