Standing out from the crowd with your resume

- If you've been on the job market in the past decade, you've probably dealt with the same frustration as most other candidates. You put in all this work to find job openings, but when you apply, it seems like you've just sent your resume into the void. There's no response, no interview request, nothing. How do you get your resume to stay out of the void and stand out from the crowd enough to get noticed? To learn how to do this, you need to look at the crowd that you're trying to stand out from. For a typical publicly posted job opening today, you're likely to be competing with over 500 other candidates if you're in a major city, depending on your market. Now, if we're talking about a position at a top company in a major market, that number could be well over 1,000. And if you're applying for a remote gig, the applicant pool could be even larger because you're competing with qualified people all over the country, the region, or even the globe, not just in your area. To find a way to stand out, let's think about what the average resume looks like for most of those hundreds of other applicants. It usually has a fairly generic profile or summary statement at the beginning, and it's primarily task-oriented. In other words, it focuses on listing the applicant's duties and tasks at their previous job. Many resumes today are also forcibly short because candidates often fear going beyond one page, worrying that any resume over one page will be tossed aside. So with all this in mind then, what can you do to be different in a positive way? Now, one of the best ways to make your resume stand out is to steer clear from a task-oriented mindset and focus more on your skills and accomplishments. After all, recruiters already have a good idea of what you did at your last job based on your title alone. What they don't know is the impact that you made in that role. Highlight your abilities by listing your concrete accomplishments instead, results you achieved, new programs you started, successful projects you led, and so on. Now, not only does this highlight your actual skills and abilities, but it does this by showing recruiters how skilled you are, not just telling them. Second, make sure your profile or summary is truly custom and personalized. Get rid of anything generic. So for example, instead of writing that you're an experienced negotiator, write that you've negotiated multimillion-dollar deals with a number of Fortune 500 partners. Finally, don't sell yourself short literally by limiting your resume to one page. One-page resumes were the norm back when people were handing physical copies of their resumes to hiring managers. But now that most of the hiring is done digitally, there's no need to worry. Most circumstances, a two-page resume is perfect because it gives you enough space to truly explain your skills and qualifications without being so long that it overwhelms the recruiter. Standing out from the crowd comes down to taking a different approach, but not one that's different just to be different, an approach that finds newer and more effective ways to impress a recruiter. A skills-focused resume that incorporates your personality could do the trick.