Wise Startup Blog

It seems like life is a continual run of job after job, with the majority of us never being truly happy in their respective jobs.

If you are in this boat, and are looking for a new job, the first place is to start is by breaking out your old resume and fixing everything that’s wrong with it or writing a new resume to get that dream job you’ve always wanted.

Personally I am extremely thankful for my job at Grooveshark, but I’m one of the rare people that actually wants to go into work everyday, and night, and morning

For those of you not in this privileged majority, here are a couple of pointers to help you construct your resume:

1. Always quantify your resume — use real life numbers to bring meaning to the document

When giving your resume to employers, they want to see something tangible. Reading about how you “were responsible for various tasks and helped complete many ad proposals” sounds pretty vague, and honestly sounds like you could have made it up.

If you were to change the original phrase, adding in quantitative data, it’ll sound something like this:

“organized all 6 tasks associated with the completion of over $50k in ad projects”

Right now we can see that you participated in all of the 6 tasks, so we can tell you have no problem assuming a lot of responsibility, and helped to create value for the company in producing this $50k in revenue. It really doesn’t matter if you were the leader in your group (if you were, be sure to mention it), and it doesn’t matter if all of your typical projects are over $200k.

The point is, you did provide valuable help for all 6 of your tasks, and provided a real amount of value for the company. Everything beyond this is up to you to sell yourself in the interview

2. Use the correct formatting — take advantage of tables in word

If you’re editing your resume in Word, be sure to take advantage of tables. Using tables, you can ensure that all of your formatting is preserved, and you can easily create a fixed right wall and fixed left wall. Personally I find this most useful for pushing all of my dates to the right hand side of the page without going over into another line.

Once you have all of the tables aligned how you want, go into the table borders, and make the borders white so that they don’t show up.

3. Put yourself in your employer’s shoes — what are they looking for in an employee?

Think about what your employer wants to see; they want to know that if they invest money in you that you will be competent, reliable, and generate more money for the business.

Whether you are applying for HR or Sales, you still can generated money for the business, either by creating more efficient employees or generating more sales contracts.

So with this thinking, create all of the elements in your resume catered to this goal in mind. For HR positions, instead of writing, “created activities and manged employee health-care benefits for the betterment of the company”.

Say, “by creating activities that bettered the company, reduced employee turnover by 10%.”

Sales positions it’s a lot easier to phrase things, but always be sure to be along the lines of, “generated $50k more sales per quarter than 75% of other salesman, etc.” something that shows you will be reliable and produce constant-results.

Hopefully this will be of some help next time you’re out on the job market.

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