TL;DR
- Employers spend an average of 7 seconds reading a resume and increasingly use automated systems to do a first pass on resumes
- Make sure your resume is concise, clear, and only includes relevant positions and experiences
- Use action words and words included in job postings
- Where possible, quantify achievements
- Use cover letters to show genuine excitement about a position and better stand out
- Develop your qualifications with free (or low cost) trainings
- Harness (or develop) your network
- Stay positive! If you are rejected, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t have enjoyed that position or team anyway, learn from the experience and keep moving!
Getting My Start In a Career Center
As an undergraduate, I spent four years reviewing and editing resumes and cover letters in my college’s career center, confusingly named The Student Engagement Center.
Quick sidenote, one time we actually had a parent call our office asking if we could help plan her daughter’s wedding (the “Engagement” part of Student Engagement Center was, understandably, confusing). I explained that while I wished I could help (truly, that would have been way more exciting than my real job), that was not actually what we did there. My actual job was to read students’ resumes and cover letters and provide feedback—anything from correcting grammatical mistakes to explaining that lime green was not an ideal color choice for font to figuring out how to frame their limited job experiences as relevant to the post-grad jobs they were applying for.
While I haven’t worked at that career center in almost 10 years, there are a number of things I learned that I continue to reference whenever I find myself applying to jobs or helping friends and family apply to jobs.
Why You Need a Top Resume and Cover Letter
Perhaps the most important thing I learned is that employers spend an average of 7 seconds reviewing each resume they receive. As a researcher, I feel inclined to note that I have no idea how that statistic was arrived at so I really can’t verify its accuracy. However, the point is, employers are super busy and do not have much time to search resumes for key details. Applicants have a brief window where they have employers’ attention and need to make sure that the important facts get through quickly.
If anything, this has become even more true in the 10 years since I worked at that career center. Employers increasingly use automated systems to scan resumes for key words and screen out resumes that don’t make that key word cut. You may not have the benefit of a sympathetic human reviewing your resume and so it is extra key to be clear in your resume.
On top of that, the job market is hella competitive. It’s important that your accomplishments stand out, especially when your resume may be pitted against someone with more experience or more elite credentials.
Guidelines for Improving Your Resume
What does all this mean for writing your resume?
- First, your resume should be 1-2 pages for most jobs, with 1 page being appropriate for the vast majority of cases. Longer resumes largely just mean a higher likelihood that employers will miss important parts of your experience or get annoyed at the tediousness of reviewing your resume (to be brutally honest).
- Use a simple and clear template to format your resume. Very few employers will be impressed by crazy fonts, graphics, or overly elaborate templates that force them to search for key information.
- Only relevant positions and experience should be included in your resume. For example, if you are 10 years into your career, you should not include jobs you had in high school, volunteer positions, or interests unless they are directly relevant to the position you are applying for. If that means your resume only has a couple of bullet points because you’ve spent a long time in a relevant position or two, that’s okay! Use that space to highlight your experience and accomplishments in that position.
- That being said, if you are switching industries you may not have a lot of experience that is directly related to the position you are applying for. However, leadership, communication skills, problem-solving, and teamwork, to name a few skills, generally transcend any particular job or industry. In your position descriptions, highlight experiences and skills that are relevant to the job you are applying for, even if they are applied in a different context.
- When describing your duties for each position, use action words and scan job postings for the words they use when describing job responsibilities and qualifications. Incorporate those words into your resume. This is especially key if you think the employer may use an automated system to scan resumes. See this helpfully organized resource from MIT on action words for resumes.
- Avoid using vague, generic descriptions of your job responsibilities and try to emphasize clearly and concretely how you contributed to your workplace and/or colleagues. For example, in describing my experience as an Acting Assistant Professor, I note that I “led multiple research projects from end-to-end, including obtaining, cleaning, and quantitatively analyzing large-scale survey data sources and disseminating the findings in 6 first-authored research papers in peer-reviewed journals.” I’m not holding that forth as a perfect description. “Large-scale” and “multiple” are both vague descriptors, but overall it’s far more meaningful than describing how I spent 1 year as a professor doing original research.
Beyond the Resume: Additional Steps for Improving Your Application
Aside from writing a clear and compelling resume, what can you do to improve your chances of getting an interview and, even better, getting a job offer?
- Write a cover letter and use that space to articulate your genuine interest in the position. If you are changing fields or are new to the job market this space is especially important for clarifying why you are interested in the role specifically and how your qualifications and experiences apply to the position. Most people waste the cover letter opportunity by either not writing one or writing a really bad one, this can be a good opportunity to set yourself apart for a job you really care about.
- If there are qualifications an employer desires or even requires that you do not have, look for free or low cost ways to meet those qualifications. See if there are LinkedIn Learning courses or Khan academy courses that could allow you to at least claim an introductory understanding of what they are asking for. I taught myself SQL over the course of a couple of months using solely LinkedIn Learning courses and blew my employers away with how good I was at it when I started (thank you LinkedIn Learning!)
- Try to connect with a real person who works for that employer. The majority of people get hired through referrals, including at large corporations places like Google or Facebook (I know it’s Meta now, but I’m only calling it something else if they come up with a less dumb name). Your resume has a much higher chance of being reviewed and acted on if it is referred.
- However, do not reach out to someone you’ve never met or interacted with on LinkedIn and immediately expect them to refer your resume. If you do not know anyone who works at the company you want to apply for, find someone in a related position, ask if you could set up a meeting with them to discuss their job and the work environment, and after that meeting ask if they can refer your resume. This has the added benefit of establishing a genuine connection, improving your sense of whether the job and company are a good fit for you, and preparing you for a potential interview with the company by better understanding the role and the company.
- If you get asked to do an interview, prepare! Research commonly asked interview questions and jot down notes for how you would respond and then practice responding—alone, to your dog, to your partner, however you want! Pretty much every time I interview people it blows my mind how often candidates stumble on the most obvious questions—like “why do you want to work here?” or “Tell us about yourself.” Being prepared shows that you care about the job, are likely to put in effort in other areas of your life (including if you get that job!), communicate well, and, surprisingly, it often comes off as more natural than a non-practiced response.
- Finally, do not get discouraged!
I have a PhD, have published a lot of research, have lots of training in research and statistics, and applied for literally dozens of jobs before getting a job offer after I decided to leave academia. When I told people I was looking for a job, many people told me how easy it must be for me to get job offers. It’s not! At all! (Also, please don’t tell people how easy it must be for them to get a job, it doesn’t feel great when it ends up being sups hard.) If you’re interested in learning more about my journey from academia or specific job-search tips for former academics, check out my post on leaving academia.
There are so many incredibly talented people that I am one of many, many great choices employers often have and, for many of the positions I applied for, I probably wasn’t among the great choices to begin with. Plus, you can be very qualified for a job but not be a good fit for a variety of reasons that are not super clear to you as a candidate.
So stay positive and see every application rejection as an opportunity. If you are rejected for a job you desperately wanted, why did you want that job so badly? What qualities did that job have that you should look for in subsequent jobs? And can you ask the employer for feedback that will improve your chances for subsequent applications?
I applied for the job I currently have in 2019. I was one of two final candidates and ended up getting rejected. But I loved the people I interviewed with so much that I checked whether they were hiring every few months. Finally they posted another job opening in 2021, I applied, and got the job.
Very few people succeed at anything worthwhile on their first, fifth, or even twentieth try, so pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and make sure you didn’t use lime green anywhere in your resume.
Any other tips you think should be here? Let me know in the comments! If you enjoyed this post or think it would be helpful for others, please consider liking, subscribing (in the left sidebar), or sharing with others.