Spring Clean Your Resume

Spring is the perfect time to “clean up” your resume and significantly improve it so you can start seeing better results. After all, just like our closets, resumes need a good yearly cleaning and/or organizing to determine what to keep, what to toss and what to emphasize to put your best foot forward. 

Here are few questions to ask yourself as you freshen-up your resume so it’s current and appealing to prospective employers.  

• Is your experience still relevant? A good rule of thumb: You should only show the most recent 10 to 15 years of your career history. Take a look at your resume and determine what’s ancient history and what needs to be highlighted to meet the criteria of the positions to which you’re applying. For example, if you’re focused on a career in accounting, you no longer need to include your past job in a pet store.  
• Are you grabbing the reader’s attention? Take a look at the “career summary” section of your resume and make sure that you’ve highlighted your experiences, skills and contributions in a succinct manner. The goal is to showcase your skill sets with no more than five or six lines of text, say resume experts. 
• Are you using the right language? The best resumes often use strong action verbs — managed, launched, built, lead — at the beginning of each section. Read over your resume and edit any passive phrases like “responsible for” or “handled.” 
• Are you being specific? Do your best to quantify your experience — for instance, can you attach a measurement to a past job task or accomplishment like an increase in profit or level of customer satisfaction? 
• Are you being honest? Lying or “stretching the truth” on a resume is never okay. 
• Is anything missing? Take a look at the specific requirements of your target job — do you possess these skills and are they coming across clearly on your resume? And if you find that you're missing any of these skill sets, why not use this time to start a plan to learn them. 

Employment Help at HAUS 

Finding and keeping a job, and making a contribution to society, is a pillar of recovery. After all, accountability and being self-supporting are vital steps to the reintegration process. Our staff will assist you with resume building and more. To learn about our sober living services, call today: 888-551-4715.