A resume is essentially a summary of your experiences which showcases the jobs you’ve held, the extracurriculars you’ve taken on, the skills you’ve developed, and the qualities you bring to the table. It’s the most looked at, and arguably most important piece of paper as you apply for internships and jobs.
Here’s some tips and tricks to finesse every detail of your resume before internship application season comes along:
- Nothing More Than a Page
Anything more than a page (except for highly experienced hires) is avoided in most industries. Make sure to keep to the one-page limit since recruiters take little time—usually mere seconds—to look through each resume and decide whether to pass it through to the next round.
- Buzzwords
In some firms, the preliminary screening is done by AI softwares instead of humans. An ATS, or Applicant Tracking System can scan an entire database of resumes from keywords and criteria all at once, handing over to recruiters only the “top-ranking candidates”. However, this is based mostly on whether certain buzzwords and key terms from the job descriptions are present in those resumes. While it is unfair, it’s easily hackable. Just sprinkle those buzzwords in your skills or experiences, and voila!
Can’t find a place for the buzzwords in any of the sections in your resume? The last option could be adding those buzzwords to the footer of your page, in white, so that a computer spots it but it’s not legible to the human eye.
- From Job Description to Resume
Have a particular role you’re gunning for? Use paraphrasing tools to convert the job description (JD) into the perfect bullet points for the role! I personally recommend Quillbot as a paraphrasing tool since it not just changes out words for their synonyms but also transforms grammatical structures.
If you don’t have enough time to pick out keywords from JDs, just copy and paste the job descriptions of a bunch of similar roles, create a word cloud (here’s a word cloud builder) and add the most common words to your resume.
- Action Words
To shine apart from the applicant pool, you should use powerful action verbs and phrases that catch the attention of a recruiter or hiring manager. Here is an extensive list of power phrases to boost your work experience section. You can also use tools (like Wordtune) which will make your writing clear and compelling if you’re not the best with your words.
- Quantifying the Work You’ve Done
Numbers are usually more impactful than words so you should try to quantify whatever work you’ve done and the impact it had. For example, which sounds more impressive:
- Edited articles for online publication
Or,
- Reviewed 20-30 topical articles a month and made the decision to either pass articles to the editorial team or send articles back for further revisions
Hopefully, this article helps you hone your resume. But, while these tips and tricks might take you into the interview round, it’s all about your passion and demonstrated interest from there!